ECONET houses Human and Institutional Development Program (HID). The idea behind initiating this program came from the core value of ECONET to empower people and institutions by building capacities of individuals and groups who ‘volunteered’ to join the processes of development and Learning spaces. The purpose of this program is to create,“Progressive, empowered relationships contributing to sustainable processes”
Overview
Our work on the issues of Adivasi’s and nomads lent us many critical learning related to community building, mobilization and most importantly rooting alternatives in communities’ ethos. The most important among them are our experiences of development of these communities building content required to capacitate them to work for themselves. ECONET helped them understand their situations, issues and help them analyze it, explore alternatives and handheld them along with building skills and approach to address their issues. In this process, ECONET learned and has worked to build the capacities of the Adivasi’s and Nomads at the individual level, group level & community level and facilitate development of leaders and organization amongst them.Our work has also brought forth various capacity gaps found among the community leaders and organizations/community based organizations (CBO) working for these communities and Field Based Organizations. This is where ECONET donned the role of being facilitators by providing capacity building inputs to the leaders/organizations/CBO and general community.
Our experiences in the past 20 years as facilitators culminated in the formation of this vertical dedicated to capacity building of people and institutions.
Adivasi and Nomadic communities being its primary constituency, over years ECONET has engaged with other organizations working on health, trafficking, Dalit Rights, Water and other issues to support them on their needs of Human and Institutional Development. ECONET has pioneered many studies and researches on these two communities especially Nomadic communities for whom negligible amount of data/information exist. We have assisted in research design of other organizations.
Our Approach
Relying on our field experience and experience as trainers especially in behavioral trainings, HID have adopted a participatory and collaborative approach to capacity building. The thrust of our interventions with our partners and clients is to facilitate their growth by understanding them as an institution, their goals, context of their intervention and work. This helps in customizing each of our intervention/input with them making them contextual and practical.
Our Skills/Expertise
Our skill lay in two primary domains namely Organizational Development and Human development. The work on these two critical areas of organization leads to synergy and growth of any given organization/collective.
Organizational Development (OD)
As part of the OD process we undertake organizational analysis and thereafter strategic planning. This includes systems evaluation, development, redesigning/designing including preparation of tools, formats, reporting requirements etc, legal compliance and related aspects of organizations and systems. Further as part of strategic planning we also facilitate visioning, policy changes and positioning/repositioning of our clients for their growth as well as facilitate and orient them on internal structuring/restructuring. The latter often involves defining roles/responsibilities of the staff, divisions/units and the organization as a whole.
ECONET also works and engages with the Board/governance structure within the organization if any to strengthen them and improve their functioning.
Our experience in executing and supporting programmes, has built our knowledge on systems and organizations vis a vis individual growth. Our efforts are thus concentrated on bringing together the organizational synergy and the individual synergy together to contribute to the growth of both.
We facilitate and handhold the life and growth of the organization from its inception and place them in concurrent scenarios where they function independently. Therefore we work with registered/unregistered organizations as well as periodic institutions like networks and forums.
Human Development
Our skill in this domain lies in formulation of programmes/projects, its planning, monitoring and evaluations (PME). Especially in the planning stages, our role is of a trainer /facilitator rather than a doer to encourage ownership and thinking among our clients and help them see execution in planning.
As part of M&E, we Train and Develop skills of people as part building sustainable local resources and creation of Human Assets in Community Development. Our knowledge and experience of community participation, social structure, government policies and related ground realities, help us adapt our Handholding and M&E processes for each of our clients. Thus they are customized and looks at the programmes/projects in their local context helping us give practical and real suggestions/recommendations which are not binding on the client. Our processes are driven by the belief that M&E is not “policing” or “fault finding” assignments but facilitative processes leading to skill building and greater effectiveness, efficiency and capacity building.
We also facilitate Capacity Building Need Assessments (CBNA) for our clients which help us in modifying/adapting our interventions with them and include specific skill trainings for leadership at various levels.
Research & Studies: ECONET adopted action research as its core intervention method right from the initiation of its programmes designs. This method of implementation has not only stood the test of time but has also contributed in skill building. Our researches has been participatory in its method, which has not only led to qualitative findings and suggested interventions but also built the capacity of the communities who participated in these research. This in turn has negated the need for separate capacity building inputs for the community members on situational analysis.
Research has also build discipline of using statistical base for engaging with Government and other decision making stakeholders. It has helped communities to have better analytical approach when faced with external challenges.
In our participatory research we have derived immense learning from the communities and their way of management and decision making, which we learn to incorporate within our ways of engagement. Most ECONET research have been unique and pioneering documents in respective fields and has contributed to government taking notice of it.
Our Expertise to engage on
Geographical Coverage
We work across the country with our major engagements in Western India.