1. Case Study: The Rural District Council Capacity Building Programme (RDCCBP), Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe’s Rural District Council Capacity Building Programme (RDCCBP) was supported by major donors over
a 5 year period in the late 1990’s. It provided substantialCapital, Institutional and Human Relations Development
grants and loans to RDC’s with the goal of improving rural service provision. Its objective was to increase and
develop the capacity of RDC’s to plan, implement and manage their own district development programmes on a
sustainable basis.
A Capacity Building Unit at National level and Provincial Support Teams at Provincial level worked with RDC’s at
district level with technical consultancy support provided by Development in Practice. A ‘Learning-by-Doing’
process approach was used to engenderreflection, learning and a performance enhancing change in the way RDC’s
carried out their functions.Facilitators engaged RDC’s in a critical analysis of the consequences oftheir actions and
supported the search for solutions to the problems which arose.
A key revelation was the recognition of a causallink between poorly defined functions,inconsistent
structures,non-transparent systems and budgets that lacked transparency and accountability. RDC’s lacked
clarity as to their central role as agents of local development. As a result of being unable to define their
core functions, Committees of Council had never fully defined the activities for which they should be
responsible and, were unable to relate these to the annual budget.No Committee knew which part of the
budget it was responsible for. Few development activities were actually taking place because the limited
resources were largely swallowed up by recurrent expenditures.
This analysis led to a radical restructuring of the Committees of Council based on an analysis of what their
core functions were as derived from the RDC Act. It was subsequently possible for Council Committees to
identify their terms of reference and to become clearer as to their roles. Work then began on improving the
many systems that operationalised these structures.Each Committee was able to identify the technical staff
it needed to service it, and began to pressurize the executive to service their Committees with better
quality information and advice. This heightened awareness on the part of Councillors and Committees led
them to begin to realise the crisis they faced in terms of the low calibre of their executive staff. Newly
formed HRD Committees began the process of critically examining RDC staff, and searching for solutions
as to how to deal with these problems
A critical discovery was the pivotal role of the budget.As Committees became clearer about their roles,
they began to see which parts of the plan and budget they should be responsible for implementing and
monitoring. They also began to see just how much was being swallowed on recurrent expenditures and how
few actual development activities were taking place. RDC’s began work to restructure the Budget format in
order that it correlate with the functions of each Committee, become more transparent,easier to understand,
and more orientated towards development outputs.
Crucially, work on improving the process of budgeting bought to the fore the whole issue of how the RDC’s planned
and how these plans originated. Major issues about what to do with the sub-district planning structures and how to
make the planning process more participatory are now clearly on the table. However, in the current political context,
these remain unresolved.
(Adapted from E. Bishop 2002)
Source: Published as a best practice guide and topic pack for an international workshop on Participatory Planning
approaches for Local Governance, this Zimbabwe case study was amongst those in an Institute of Development
Studies research project I produced for the IDS Participation Team in 2002.
http://www.participatorymethods.org/sites/participatorymethods.org/files/participatory%20planning%20topic%2
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