November edition of Volunteers’ Connect was super loaded and interesting. Thanks to Dr. Fadairo for the insightful and interactive session. He modified the topic to “Inclusive Project Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation: requisites for effective and sustainable rural development” and carefully simplified the professional jargons, explaining them in layman’s language, so that everyone could understand and flow along the line of contemplation. The question and answer session was really insightful as well.

Basically, we learnt about profiling a community, who to target for inclusion, how to target for inclusion and the participatory tools that are needed.

Some key points include:

• It is important to include the community members in all the activities, from situation analysis/problem identification to the planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of a project in any community.
• When there is social inclusion, the people have a sense of ownership of the project which ensures the sustainability of such a project.
• Changes that are initiated from within are more sustainable.
• Abandoned projects occur because of the relegation of social inclusion to the background. So never plan a programme outside of the people.
• Importantly, beyond counting numbers, the impact of the project is important and the breath of sustainability lies in the attainment of impact.

Thanks to our Volunteers for making it a date, we appreciate your commitment to becoming a better version of yourselves. Let’s keep making effort towards building a nation and continent that we can all be proud of. We are the change we desire to see!