This document defines key terms related to participatory planning and community participation in education. It discusses empowerment, community, planning, participatory planning, and how to involve community members in the educational planning process. This includes properly briefing local leaders, conducting orientation sessions, promoting working together, forming planning committees, and creating simple manuals and plans. It also outlines who should be represented in planning, and considers potential supports and doubts around participatory planning, including issues of efficiency, conflict, localism, mediocrity, authority and control. Finally, it discusses models of beneficiary participation in planning from consultation to collaboration to enterprise.

1. PEOPL E – EMPOWERED
PL ANNING

2. DEFINITION OF TERMS:
Empowerment
– It is essentially a capacity to define
clearly one’s interests, and to develop a
strategy to achieve those interests. It’s
the ability to create a plan or program
to change one’s reality in order to
obtain those objectives or interests.

3. Community Participation
-It is a form of planning that
takes a comprehensive approach
to meeting community needs–an
approach that recognizes the
interrelationship of economic,
physical and social development.

4. Community
- a group of people with diverse
characteristics who are linked by
social ties, share common
perspectives, and engage in joint
action in geographical locations
or settings.

5. Planning
- It is a complex form of symbolic
action that consists of consciously
preconceiving a sequence of actions
that will be sufficient for achieving a
goal. It is set apart from undeliberated
action, which is not preconceived.

6. Participatory Planning
– It means the distribution of
decision – making power in such a
way that all those affected by
decisions should have a share in
making them.

7. COMMUNITY
PARTICIPATION IN
EDUCATIONAL PLANNING

8. • Proper briefing of planned activities
and events with the local leaders first,
before doing anything concrete, and
generating the environment and
feeling that they too are involved in
planning of things, not just accepting
them and being used as institutional
fronts.

9. • Conducting orientation sessions with
local leaders and local residents,
especially mothers of children, using
not only government experts but
credible local leaders as briefing agents
after proper training.

10. • Promoting the concept of working
together because whatever results are
obtained accrue to benefit of the
community and their children.
• Forming a planning committee.

11. • Preparing a very simple, 2 to 3 page
manual of instructions, using the local
language or dialect if possible with
illustrations and flow charts, on how to
make a simple budget, how to involve
people especially mothers of students
and pupils.

12. • Preparing a weekly or monthly status sheet
for each committee member on their
activities, achievements, problems and how
to solve them properly and quickly.
• Formulating a simple format of a
school or community education plan
and program.

13. • Preparing a management
implementation scheme to ensure
that the proposed plan can be
executed.
• Make a simple scheme to monitor
and evaluate of the plan.

14. PARTICIPATORY
PLANNING

15. THE PEOPLE WHO SHOULD BE REPRESENTED IN
SOME ASPECTS OF PLANNING:
• Para – professionals and Personnel of other agencies.
• Students – the clients served by school.
• Teachers – the major element of the professional staff
• School Administrators – principals, superintendent and
supervisors
• Decision – makers – chiefs, directors, ministers
• National Board of Education and other policy –making
bodies

16. SUPPORTS AND DOUBTS
IN
PARTICIPATORY
PLANNING

17. EFFICIENCY
PROS
• Technical or economic efficiency is not all in
education.
• The gains in relevance and quality, the
additional resources mobilized for education,
the enhanced employability of students; all
these benefits likely to accrue from participatory
planning would more than affect the
presumable loss in efficiency.

18. EFFICIENCY
CONS
• Distracts educational institutions from their
primary business.
• Costly because more people will have to
devote more of their time.
• Uneconomical because the competence and
special qualifications of professional planners
are not fully utilized.

19. CONFLICT
PROS
• Provides an “institutionalized mechanism” for
conflict settlement, an outlet for conflicts and
controversies.
• Conflict is present everywhere: it brings
out into the open and attempts to deal with
it in a constructive manner.

20. CONFLICT
CONS
• Involves many people with
divergent points of view, conflicting
values and rival interests; thus,
educational decision – making will
be strangled.

21. LOCALISM
PROS
• Leads education out of its
present emphasis through a
variety of innovative educational
experiments, decided upon on
different places.

22. LOCALISM
CONS
• Fosters varied whims and
ideologies true to one setting or
Locality.

23. MEDIOCRITY
PROS
• Encourages creativity,ideas and first –
hand experience of local people, rather
than an academic exercise.
• Provides competence through
technical assistance groups.

24. MEDIOCRITY
CONS
• Involves many people who are not
formally qualified, particularly the
students themselves.
• Planners’ expertise will be subjected
to majority rule and unsatisfactory
compromises

25. AUTHORITY AND CONTROL
PROS
• Holds control over the planning process by means
of the broad and general acts of directives laid down
by authorities.
• Does not aim at control over other people’s
behaviour, instead it enhances the control over a
common activity, the degree to which all parties
concerned achieve their common objective which is
making the educational process .

26. AUTHORITY AND CONTROL
CONS
• Represents a loss of teachers’
own authority.
• Dissolves necessary control in
education.

27. BENEFICIARY
PARTICIPATION

28. BENEFICIARY CONSULTATION
• Beneficiary groups are given the opportunity
to contribute information or advise to the
planning design, implementation and
management processes of the project.
Examples:
Small irrigation in the Philippines and Grameen
Bank in Bangladesh.

29. Beneficiary groups share, either physically
such as through labor and/ or financially, in
project implementation, operation and
maintenance.
Examples:
Community forestry projects and
smallholder tree-crop estate projects.
BENEFICIARY COLLABORATION

30. • Beneficiary groups take accountability for
implementation, operation and maintenance
ofthe project.
Example:
Cooperatives and supervised credit
livelihood projects.
BENEFICIARY ENTERPRISE

31. THANK YOU