Appreciation criteria and schedule

Activity and resource scheduling

• Human Resources. In a project with 4 workers (plus the Project Coordinator), we will try to hire 2 local workers and 2 "North" workers (we don't specify their country due to our multinational vocation). Salaries will be adequate to local standards, plus a complement (about 20%) to improve life-quality of local workers and facilitate the recruitment of more qualified staff coming from the "North".
  
  

• Material Resources. Most of the equipment we will provide local media with will come from the "North", since it's more difficult to buy these hi-tech goods in the countries where we will carry out our projects. We will focus our efforts to get an active involvement of "North" media, either directly - with their "Corporate Social Responsibility" funds-, either indirectly - through associations or foundations linked to them-, so we can often get these equipment for free from them (sometimes they will be goods that "North" media own but don't use any more). The objectives of this strategy are to reduce costs and to lessen the project's ecological footprint. 
  However, in order to contribute to the development of the local industry and commerce, we will buy to local producers and retailers as much as possible of our needs in: furniture, office supplies, building supplies and materials, maintenance and cleaning goods.

Appreciation criteria

• Project feasibility. The project looks for a lasting impact on intercultural relations (based on ethnic group, religion, social class or gender) in societies with a low community development or in a post-conflict situation. Likewise, we will work for a permanent improvement of community development.
  The feasibility of our actions requires a previous validation and integration of the Logical Framework Matrix model.
  We will work to reinforce existing actions related to our goals and consolidate alliances between public and private organizations on this topics. More specifically, to assure their feasibility, for the actions "Foundation of education centres for underprivileged people" and "organization of activities with participants from different social and ethnic groups", we will build strategic synergies with other NGDO or local associations with experience implementing social and educational activities.

• Strengthening of local capacities. The whole project will be focused to strength local capacities, both in the public and private sectors. This will be done through a mixed intervention process, with participation of native and "North" workers and volunteers, allowing the necessary "know-how" transmission to assure the implemented initiatives live on after the end of the project. We will also provide local organizations with some hi-tech equipment, difficult to be bought in the country.
  

  Furthermore, we will reinforce public and private actions whose goals are pacific coexistence and communication at all levels.
  

  
  

• Participation. So far we couldn't open participation to other people, but we are strongly committed to obtain ideas, suggestions or even corrections and viewpoint changes, from as many sources as possible. This includes the local counterpart, public institutions (from the "North" and local) and other NGDO with experience on the topic or the territory of implementation.
  The participation of other NGDO will be considered as a priority goal, in order to improve the project's plan and optimize resources.
  
  

• Coherence. The selection of the countries where we will carry out our projects will be based on their own inner conditions, giving priority, as we said, to those ones where an armed conflict finished recently. 
  At a regional level, the project comes to lessen the gap in life conditions between urban areas and other centres of population (generally rural or outlying districts).
  At an international level, the project is coherent with international laws and priorities fixed by several international organizations, included UN.
  Finally, we can highlight that the project is coherent at an institutional level, considering that it  is based on the working strategy of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID, by its acronym in Spanish).
  
  

• Expected impacts. We expect to raise people's awareness of communication as a way to overpass previous stereotypes and attain effective reconciliation after a conflict. We will design specific awareness campaigns for teaching staff collaborating with the project to get these values embraced by them, so they can continue transmitting them after the end of the project.
  We also expect that local inhabitants develop their own initiatives (with our support, if required). The project has the cross-curricular condition of establishing a sustainable, self-sufficient, inclusive and multicultural model.
  
  

• Gender approach. The project keeps the goal of gender balance at all levels, looking for involvement of a similar amount of men an women, not only as participants, but also as workers or project partners.
  Some specific activities will be organized to overpass gender stereotypes in patriarchal societies.

• Net approach. We want to facilitate the creation and strengthening of synergies between all the stakeholders: local counterpart, local associations, partner NGDO, local institutions, "North" institutions and local endogamous groups without previous stable relations. 

• Project cycle management. This project respects every step of the project cycle included in the manual elaborated by the European Commission.
  The project started in November 2011, with an analysis to define the situation in post-conflict countries and countries with low community development.
  We will evaluate the project at different levels, including, at least, one mid-term evaluation, several evaluations of the most relevant actions and one final evaluation. We will also try to do one evaluation a posteriori, between 2 and 5 years after the end of the project, to measure the permanence of the impacts initially attained.

Example schedule:

Logical Framework Matrix

Analysis of goals and strategies

After the problem tree, we define now the goals and strategies of our intervention, for what we will use, again, a graph, that we will complement with a subsequent analysis. 

Strategy out of the project

After elaborating the goal tree, we used economical, technical and human criteria to choose which ones will be in the project and which one will be out of it.

Since it is an incipient project and we don't have a precise inventory of the resources we will have, we decided to keep wide our field of intervention, rejecting only those goals or results that we can't attain on our own, due to technical issues or functional handicaps.

Thus, we gathered some of the elements on the graph in the "Institutional strategy". Although, in a long-term vision, we would be in a target situation where we would have some capacity to lobby public institutions in order to foster their intervention in specific initiatives, currently this is impossible for us. Therefore, even though we will resort to all the means in our hands to achieve them, we don't consider these results and objectives attributable to our project:

• Limitation of external interference in local groups and institutions.
• Fostering of dialogue to establish new regional and national borders.
• Governmental practices become more democratic.
• Situation of public safety (post-conflict reconciliation is not enough to assure it).
• Investment in civil infrastructures.

Strategies inside the project

Next, we linked all the other results of the project to 2 different strategies. This decision is due to the possibility of applying both strategies, either conjointly, either separately. 

• “Economical and technical strategy”. This is a consequence of the implication of "North" media in the project. It will consist in 2 main actions:
  • Sharing know-how. Technical assistance to members of local media.
  • Development of equipment and infrastructures. In some cases they will be new, but we will often look for cessions to reduce costs and environmental impact.

• “Educational strategy”. As it is already explained on the graph, it will include initiatives in three fields: formal, non-formal and informal. We consider education as a basic tool to reach development, both individually and for the community; even more in post-conflict situations where the people was deprived of this right. In addition, to achieve the goals of our organization it will be essential to fight illiteracy, because it would be useless to support the foundation of inclusive and participatory local media if later the inhabitants of the territory can't understand the information they get. In order to be able to develop educational programs adequate for every social group, we will get involved in the projects several professionals from different spheres: teachers, psycho-pedagogues, social educators, psychologists, etc.  

We didn't specified to which strategy would correspond every global goal (except those included in the "Institutional strategy"), because we believe they would be reached by a right combination of the "Educational strategy" and the "Economical and technical strategy".

Problem tree

In this schema we show the problems of the target groups and beneficiaries, identifying the causes and its consequences.

Stakeholders analysis

It is quite complicated to examine, very concretely, the stakeholders in the constitution of this NGDO. However, based on the aims of the organization and its priority areas of intervention (explained before), we will be able to search certain elements that, predictably, will be in common for the specific projects carried out in the future.

We will have to do new stakeholders analysis when we plan every new project, completing, reaffirming or correcting what is included in this document.

Intercultural COMmunication

    We believe that, in order to develop a successful social intervention, it will be really important to redouble our efforts for an effective intercultural communication. 

    First of all, we, as members and collaborators of the NGDO, will have to get a sufficient knowledge of the area and the social group that are going to be the object of our intervention, to minimize the possible communicative dysfunctions caused by the ignorance of local customs.

    With this purpose, it would be very interesting to organize trips to the zone before the beginning of the project, allowing us to apprehend personally the reality of the situation in that zone. Another initiative to be considered will be that every aid worker and volunteer of the NGDO participating on the project take part in a training process, with a part dedicated to communicative specificities, that is held, at least partially, on-the-spot, combining theoretical and practical learning.

    Furthermore, it'll be fundamental an adequate selection of the counterpart, so its members can guide us in situations of confusion originated by unknowledge of certain communicative behaviours or, in case of need, interpret conversations in languages and dialects we don't master. 

 Besides that, we must favour the most suitable conditions to get an effective intercultural communication between different groups of the same community. Let us remind that the main goals of reCOMciliation are promoting community development and post-conflict reconciliation, in situations where usually coincide phenomena of group exclusion based, for example, on ethnic, religious or gender criteria. Even though this cultural gaps between subgroups can sometimes seem, from our point of view, not so important, it is not convenient to minusvalorate their importance on the interpersonal relations that take place on-the-spot.

   We can work in some ways to reach this objective, such as:

- Establishing a common working language, that must not be taken as an imposition by any of the counterparts. In case it's impossible, we will value the option of incorporating mediators who also do functions of translation and interpretation (they will have to be accepted by all the participants).

- Organizing speeches, reunions and, in general, any kind of meetings where representatives of every subgroup can expose their points of view (and even their ways of life), promoting a better intercultural understanding (knowledge of both the own culture and the culture of "the others") and the gradual giving up of certain prejudices and stereotypes that determine human relations.

Presentation

Motivation

The human being is a social animal, who requires interaction with other individuals to attain its full personal development. Dialogue with other people allows us to exchange information, enriching, not only the participants in the conversation, but also the society as a whole.

Besides these direct interpersonal contacts, modern societies have a powerful tool for information transmission and exchange: the media. They are considered by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) as "key instruments to promote dialogue, mutual understanding, auto-expression, peace and reconciliation". Furthermore, they allow us to attend specific aspects of human relations, such as promotion and conservation of the local cultural and language diversity, integration of disadvantaged social and ethnic groups, incorporation of youngsters to the labour market, recognition of gender equality, etc.

To be able to perform their functions correctly, the freedom of expression of the media must be meticulously respected, because only like this it will be possible to reach the levels of objectivity and representation that the treated information needs to be accepted as valid by all the population. And this requirement is specially important in conflict and post-conflict situations, due to the necessity of understanding in a context of distortion and manipulation of information.

Unfortunately, freedom of expression is not always a reality, due to a wide range of problems. Sometimes, for example, some social or ethnic groups are banned from accessing to the media. Other times, it's the lack of resources and an insufficient or inadequate educative offer in the community what limits the capacity of the citizens to express their ideas and opinions as they would like to.

Goals

In order to try to surpass these obstacles, a group of engaged people decided to constitute reCOMciliation, that will adopt the form of Non-Gouvernamental Development Organization (NGDO), with the purpose of promoting community development and post-conflict reconciliation through the creation and support to participatory and inclusive local media.


Always in relation with the previous general goal, we will also work on other secondary and complementary goals, such as fomenting real gender equality, facilitating the incorporation of youngsters to the labour market, etc.

Localization

The headquarters of reCOMciliation will be located in Spain, but its vocation is to constitute national committees in as many nations as possible.


Social intervention projects will take place:

• In developing countries and countries where there was a recent conflict (generally an armed one). In this case, the organization will focus its projects mainly in Africa and Latin America, due to the special incidence on those territories of the aforementioned situations, and also to the existence of common historical and cultural characteristics.

• In developed countries. More specifically, on those countries where a national committee of the NGDO had been created. We will plan campaigns to raise public awareness, with adults, kids and teenagers, about the importance of the media in community development.