CHALLENGE

For development to be truly sustainable, local civil society organizations must have the capacity to lead the process of development. Yet in this age of “empowerment,” the action of local organizations around the world tends to be uncoordinated, repetitive, and overly dependent on international aid institutions. The unintentional byproduct of a global philanthropic system that rewards communities proportional to their desperation is that local actors have a disincentive to fully identify and harness the resources they already have. To lead sustainable development, local civil society actors need:

- a system for organizing and visualizing the assets that exist within and across their organizations and communities

- a system for identifying resource needs that can be filled by external actors

OPPORTUNITY

All communities have skills, knowledge, and other assets that they can leverage to create change. For decades, researchers and practitioners have been developing  a method to help local civil society actors better identify and harness these assets. In urban communities across America, the “asset-based community development” framework has helped local organizations move from “recipients” to “partners” and finally to “leaders” of sustainable development. Customized to specific contexts, these tools can revolutionize the ability of local actors to leverage information and improve lives. Web technology has dramatically increased our ability to aggregate information and will enable us to scale and customize this model to local civil societies around the world.

In northern Uganda, we have the opportunity to test how web-based asset mapping can empower local civil society. Recovering from two decades of war, local actors have heroically risen to the challenge of building sustainable peace through development. But they lack the capacity to collect and share information about local assets and needs, so many of their efforts fall into familiar traps of repetition, inefficiency, and dependency

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The founders of assetmap.org/uganda lead an annual Northwestern University study abroad program, “ENGAGE Uganda”, which helps 20 students partner with Ugandan nonprofit organizations each year. The founders have been traveling to Uganda for the last four years running the ENGAGE Uganda program and also consulting around strategy and fundraising with a variety of citizen-led development projects around the country. In 2007, the ENGAGE Uganda teams worked with Uganda community organizations on projects including computer literacy for war-affected children, microcredit training, and sports and youth leaderships.
The founders of assetmap.org/uganda also have previous experience with digital organizing around nonprofit work, including advisory and staff positions with Change.org. In 2005, the founders organized a multi-member weblog to catalog youth volunteer efforts around the world called justnaiveenough.org