Building bridges in Buenaventura

By: Tatiana Forero Torres, Territorial Strategic Leader for Citizen Participation

It is March 31, 2022 and a heavy rain is pounding on the roof of the communal booth that houses the fifth “Council to the Street” on the island of “Cascajal” in the Montechino neighborhood, in the coastal district of Buenaventura.

After nine in the morning, the venue next to the park, which already houses more than 50 local leaders, continues to fill with people. The current mayor, Víctor Hugo Vidal, and some members of his cabinet are present. Everything seems ready to begin this meeting, planned to bring the community closer to the district officials and council members.

As the session progresses, the voices of community leaders speak clearly about the needs of their communities. The dialogue between council members and citizens is taking place in an unexpected yet familiar location: the streets of Buenaventura. "I've been presiding over the board for 25 years, and I've never seen anything like this. I hope this outreach process translates into concrete solutions. I've seen the commitment and interest of the council members to get things done, and I know they will," affirms Jose Herrera, leader of the Montechino neighborhood's Community Action Board, with a firm voice.

This is the fifth edition of “Council in the Streets,” a strategy spearheaded by the Buenaventura Active Alliance that aims to build public trust in institutions and combine analog and digital processes to create a space for deliberation and direct interaction between citizens and public officials. Taking council sessions to the streets of the district is a commitment to moving beyond disruptive actions and fostering constructive dialogue between citizens and public servants.

Amid the deliberation and the rain, one question seems to linger in the damp air circulating around the booth: Will these initiatives proposed by the Buenaventura Active Alliance, such as "Council in the Street," achieve concrete solutions to improve the lives of the population?

Activa Buenaventura, an initiative launched in February 2019 by a public-private partnership of ten organizations, sought to create conditions to improve the local quality of life, placing citizen participation at its core. By bringing citizens and community organizations closer to elected representatives and public servants, its aim was to strengthen trust and local collaboration, provide valuable information for decision-making, and thus benefit the district's development.

So what was Activa Buenaventura's strategy and actions during almost six years of work?

The purpose was to promote sustainable change in the territory, focusing on three main areas: strengthening local leadership, effective citizen engagement, and promoting open government in local public institutions. Its main actions centered on priority agendas identified by citizens, such as infrastructure, youth, gender, and income generation. In this sense, participation was geared towards addressing and improving these key issues through five strategic initiatives:

1. Building collectively from local assets: From the outset, priority was given to the long-term strengthening of existing conditions, actors, and leadership in Buenaventura, thus capitalizing on the city's strong collective leadership evident in the 2021 civic strike. Activa Buenaventura has empowered this leadership through tools, programs, and training processes that improved its effectiveness and local impact. More than 1,000 leaders strengthened their public and collective leadership skills, resulting in approximately one in three becoming involved in advocacy processes with the local government.

A prime example of this approach is that it has enabled organizations such as the “Bazán Bocana Women Entrepreneurs Association” to acquire tools to develop meaningful community projects, such as the successful awareness campaign on solid waste in Bazán de Bocana, selected in a competitive pool for its impact and implemented in collaboration with Asogesampa (Associations of Environmental Managers of the Pacific).

2. Strengthening institutions and their members to make them more accessible and trustworthy: Support has been given to increasingly opening up institutions to facilitate participation and collective work in the Buenaventura district, making government more transparent and effective. To achieve this, 51 public servants were trained at the School of Public Innovation , creating innovation prototypes on topics of interest to citizens, and more than five participatory budgeting processes were facilitated, resulting in 30 of the 65 approved projects currently underway.

A major achievement: designing the Public Innovation and Open Government Model for Buenaventura , which defines six key actions. Four of these actions focus on innovations to improve the internal functioning of the local government. The other two actions focus on the community, designed in citizen-led spaces to increase transparency and improve communication about municipal management, such as the progress of infrastructure projects in the city. This Model was approved by the District Council, providing a regulatory framework for the medium-term implementation of these initiatives. These commitments have been gaining traction, and proof of this is that Open Government is a central pillar of Mayor Ligia del Carmen Córdoba's government plan.

3. Innovation to Revitalize Citizen Participation: Activa Buenaventura introduced innovative mechanisms for citizen participation, adapted to the knowledge and social dynamics of the region. One example is Marea Digital, a civic technology platform that allows citizens to generate data and report local problems, as well as promote initiatives among neighbors and local community groups to improve quality of life. Created with and for the community, this platform has enabled leaders from different districts of Buenaventura to receive institutional responses to their requests, such as those submitted to the Buenaventura Water, Sewerage, and Sanitation Company. It facilitates dialogue with community leaders to develop joint work plans that address the reported problems. Thanks to this, communities like those in the Doña Ceci, María Eugenia, Colina del Norte de Turbay Ayala, and El Dorado neighborhoods now have improved water networks, which has significantly improved service delivery, resulting in longer hours of potable water supply and better water quality for residents.

   
   

4. Generating and managing reliable data for better local development decisions : In 2019, the Buenaventura Cómo Vamos program was launched , generating high-quality data through quality of life reports and citizen perception surveys. This data strengthened the capacity of leaders and public servants to use information effectively, influencing the local Development Plan and creating nationally comparable indicators that allow for understanding and monitoring the actual progress of quality of life in the Buenaventura district. With over 25,500 downloads of its products, this program has provided citizens, academia, the private sector, and the public sector with information to help close social gaps and move toward a more equitable future. One example of this has been mobilizing stakeholders to address problems such as the low recycling rate, as only 10% of citizens report recycling. The program's "¿Hacia Dónde Vamos? Reciclando Vamos" (Where Are We Going? Let's Recycle) project successfully motivated actions to recycle more than 130 kilograms of plastic bottles.

   
   

5. Facilitating spaces for dialogue and direct interaction between stakeholders and institutions: Deliberatura is a platform, both digital and in-person, that allows the community to debate important issues, acting as a bridge for dialogue and collaboration with the Buenaventura City Council. This mechanism facilitates the exchange of ideas on key district issues and has institutionalized "Council in the Street" sessions within the council. These council sessions, which go directly to the city's neighborhoods, have involved more than 700 people, solidifying Deliberatura as a crucial bridge for collaboration between the community and local government, with the support of the District Council. From these sessions, concrete results and effective responses to urgent needs have been achieved, such as the deployment of the ambulance boat in Puerto Merizalde during the COVID-19 pandemic to attend to emergencies, and advocacy to ensure a timely supply of COVID-19 vaccines.

Returning to the question of whether these 5 mechanisms achieved concrete solutions during 6 years of work with the Alliance in Buenaventura, we would venture to say yes: conditions have been established that have facilitated territorial development and collaboration.

The local talent of the implementing team, collaborative partnerships, and a systemic implementation model for improving citizen participation have brought us to this point. Cooperation, shared responsibility, and trust have been the key drivers in this process.

In closing, we highlight a key lesson that we have learned and incorporated into our mission to work towards equity and quality of life, and which will be an anchor for our future actions as the Corona Foundation: respect and recognition for local knowledge is essential to building truly horizontal and inclusive initiatives for change that generate value.

In these 6 years of working with Activa Buenaventura, we reaffirm that it is crucial to promote the local autonomy of projects and programs, avoiding imposing predefined solutions and, instead, integrating moments of design and adaptation with local actors, who are the true drivers of change.

These processes must be characterized by governance consistent with the desired transformation goals, where grassroots organizations become indispensable partners. They must also be co-designed in collaboration with the community, and actions and programs must be adjusted as they arise according to the needs of the context, so that they remain active and relevant.

Thus, citizen participation acquires real strength, overcoming the vision of "beneficiaries" and moving towards a structure rooted in the social base, where communities are the ones who determine their own course of development.

Outside the booth, the rain continues to fall on the streets of the Montechino neighborhood with the same force as the words, the hopes, and the ideas expressed by a diverse range of voices that intertwine peacefully. In the humid air that fills the space beneath the roof, a collective feeling swirls: a newfound certainty that getting involved in public affairs and participating is worthwhile.