About

Every ADAS project is a partnership with the participating communities.

ADAS designs projects with participatory appraisals. What does that mean? ADAS staff, most of whom are community members themselves, work with each community to identify what development difficulties they face and what local resources are available to achieve solutions. In addition to national and corporate leaders, we consult with traditional and religious leaders when designing projects, and we react to local feedback as projects progress. We contract local companies to carry out certain project tasks, such as the construction of a community library, so local firms earn the experience and the income.

Community Engagement is crucial to the success of any development project, and it has been an ADAS hallmark since our founding. Ninety-eight percent of ADAS field staff is African. Ultimately, we excel at partnering with communities because we are the local community.

Give someone a fish or teach someone to fish?

ADAS believes in the teaching or even joint learning of the question. Development projects are only truly successful if project participants gain knowledge in the process. Clothes get worn, food gets eaten and money gets spent. But knowledge gets passed on. If you really want to invest in Africa’s future, invest in an African community’s skills to control their own future.

From our mentorship approach to our substantial partnerships with local Civil Society Organizations, a description of practically every ADAS project includes the phrases “knowledge transfer” or “sustainability”. In practice, these phrases mean things like partnering with government agriculture extension workers on to introduce new farming techniques on demonstration plots, training local masons to maintain household latrines, educating leaders to stress the importance of continued entrepreneurial training, equipping local institutions to deliver successful vocational training, empowering women to teach their sisters and mothers improved food preparation techniques, and the list goes on. ADAS’s goal is to support communities in achieving self-reliance, because then and only then, can they achieve prosperity on their own terms.

ADAS does not decide what an African community should do. Development organizations and donors do not have that right.

ADAS supports communities in overcoming problems they identify by empowering communities to lead the change themselves. We provide access to techniques and technologies, but these are only successful if communities voluntarily adopt them. And the biggest positive impacts are achieved when community members continue to pass these skills and tools on to their families and neighbors.

ADAS’s majority African project staff knows how to marry respect for tradition with innovation, effectively demonstrating to communities what actions they can take to improve their lives. ADAS’s legacy of trust earned through over four decades of work on the continent positions us to be great communicators of new knowledge and skills, but the credit for project success should go to our community participants, because they are the ones who drive it.

Africa is rising, and one result of this growth is increased interest among companies around the world in investing on the continent. Faster and faster, the private sector is seeing that healthy, productive African communities are good for business, in addition to being important for their own sake. Partnerships between non-governmental organizations like ADAS and the business community offer long-term potential for Africa’s economic development. As the private sector grows, so too does their stake in the well-being and future of their employees and consumers.

ADAS selectively partners with the private sector to support programs strengthening local institutions and delivering positive results to communities.

ADAS’s vision for corporate social responsibility looks to create sustainable, mutually beneficial impacts with measurable returns, and ADAS has worked all over the continent with corporations to not only improve the quality of life of those we serve, but also to enhance the economic impact of industrial growth in the countries where we work.

SUSTAINABILITY

ADAS works to ensure that that the institutions supported through projects and the benefits realized are maintained and continue after the end of the project

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In order to effectively operationalize the concept of sustainability, we must move beyond  the current focus on institutions to take a number of other dimensions of sustainability into account. Consideration of each is critical, due to the fact that they not only reflect different outcomes, but they also come to the fore at different stages of the project cycle

 In order to ensure project sustainability we consider four essential dimensions:

1. Institutional sustainability functional institutions will be self-sustaining after the project ends
2. Household and community resilience – resilient communities are readily able to anticipate and adapt to change through clear decision-making processes, collaboration, and management of resources internal and external to the community.
3. Environmental sustainability – an environmentally sustainable system must maintain a stable resource base, avoid overexploitation of renewable resources and preserve biodiversity.

4. Structural change – the structural dimensions of poverty are addressed through the empowerment of poor and marginalized rural households. Most internal discussions of the sustainability of programmes have focused on institutional sustainability. The objective is to leave a legacy of functional institutions that will be self-sustaining once the project ends.