Funded by USAID and implemented by Chemonics International, the Local Government Support Project (LGSP) worked with 32 center towns in Moldova to design policies and procedures that contributed to good governance and developed capacity to meet decentralized authorities and responsibilities for services in a transparent manner. The project also provided basic services that engendered growth of local economies and made services more cost effective and…
This week, hundreds of the world’s leading land rights scholars, practitioners, and governors will convene in our nation’s capital for the World Bank Land and Poverty Conference. The theme of this year’s conference is “Scaling up Responsible Land Governance,” and conference-goers will join forces to develop clear pathways for “working at scale, mainstreaming innovations, and…
In Rwanda, land is woven deeply into the country’s social fabric. Intertwined with discussions on marriage, power, and gender equity, local understandings of land ownership are as much cultural as they are constitutional. But this creates a gap between the land reform promised on paper and the land reform practiced on the ground. How do…
When conducting a preliminary analysis of civil society capacity in Cambodia in September 2015, there was one topic that dominated all my meetings and interviews: the new Law on Associations and Non-Governmental Organizations (also called LANGO). Everyone, from donors to international NGOs and local civil society organizations (CSOs), were sharing their concern about how LANGO…
There is a growing recognition that democracy, human rights, and governance (DRG) needs to be integrated into programs in other sectors of development. The policy community model takes a complementary approach, integrating sector policy reform objectives into DRG-focused projects. This model, which my team and I developed under USAID’s Program Representasi (ProRep) project in Indonesia,…
When the governor’s office of Antioquia first approached USAID’s Colombia Human Rights Program (HRP III) with the idea of creating the first ever official human rights school, I couldn’t help but think, “Oh no, not another school.” Unfortunately, it is often the case that students, particularly in the area of human rights, are exposed to…
USAID’s Human Rights Program III (HRP III) developed an innovative country strategy focused on regional efforts in Colombia, targeting eight departments and 40 municipalities and based on four core components: promotion of a culture of human rights, prevention of human rights violations, response to human rights violations, and a focus on gender issues. Never executed…
This post was originally published by the Alliance for Peacebuilding and is cross-posted with permission. Chemonics is honored to be an Alliance for Peacebuilding member organization. In Kosovo, one of the biggest sources of instability is inter-ethnic hostility between majority and minority populations. Although years of tensions cannot be erased overnight, helping local communities have meaningful…
HICD PLUS was designed to complement USAID/Georgia’s assistance efforts in democracy and governance, economic growth, energy and environment, and health and education through the development of individual skills and institutional capacity of select public entities, civil society organizations (CSOs), and other private institutions that play a strategic role in the implementation of the Government of…
As the old saying goes, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” But in anti-corruption programming, it can be difficult to tell whether there is political will for change in the first place. How can you tell? What should you do if you discover, as is often the case, that there is not much will…
USAID’s Strengthening Educational Performance-Up (STEP-Up) Zambia Project provided technical assistance to produce meaningful, measurable improvement in learner performance and literacy at the primary school level. At the heart of STEP-Up Zambia’s approach is the importance of one-on-one relationships at each level of the Ministry of Education, Science, Vocational Training, and Early Education (MESVTEE) leadership structure,…
Land conflicts among villages in Côte d’Ivoire have very real political and economic repercussions. In most regions, the village committee, made up of individuals selected based on family and ethnic lineage, decides land ownership. In theory, as long as this local governance structure remains stable, land disputes can be solved peacefully. However, in the western…