Communities Engaged in the Social and Economic Development of Albania

With nearly one third of its citizens living on less than $2 a day, meeting the UN definition of absolute poverty, and with its per capita GNP at only $1,196, Albania remains Europe's poorest country. Albania suffers from high unemployment, corruption, and an infrastructure in disarray. Albanian infants and children bear the region's worst mortality rates, and about 14% of children under five are undernourished. Although these problems persist, the country is now beginning to achieve the stabilization and significant economic growth (6.5% in 2001) it has sought during its rough transition from 46 years of Communist rule to a market democracy.

In alliance with USAID and a private donor, World Learning is leading a two-year program in Albania whose purpose is to develop systems for participatory democracy at the grass-roots level. This program, known as Communities Engaged in the Social and Economic Development of Albania (CESEDA), will reinforce Albania's National Strategy for Social and Economic Development (NSSED), the government's own plan to foster socio-economic development by cultivating participatory democracy. Having set an extremely ambitious target of 22% real growth over the three-year period 2002-2005, Albania's NSSED relies on public participation and a well-coordinated national dialogue to include the voices of the poor. The CESEDA project intends to help Albania implement NSSED by expanding and enriching public participation with a particular focus on the rural poor as the principal NSSED stakeholders.

To carry out its overarching goal, CESEDA concentrates on two main objectives. First, the project intends to help Albania develop the mechanisms needed to motivate and support direct citizen involvement with local governments in rural, impoverished areas. Public participation achieved through these mechanisms will focus on local issues that arise out of the implementation of the NSSED. The second objective is to help develop more accountable and transparent government processes and institutions so that Albania's local and central governments may more effectively focus resources and services on the intended beneficiaries of NSSED.

CESEDA will meet its two main objectives through three components:

Community Empowerment
National Policy Feedback
Media-Based Public Awareness

CESEDA'a approach to community empowerment will hinge on "citizen report cards," which will provide Albanians with an ability to express local needs and priorities and assess public services. These report cards will make is possible for civil society organizations to assess public awareness of NSSED, which remains relatively low, and analyze baseline data on local conditions. In the implementation of the second component - national policy feedback - the report cards will play an integral role by feeding qualitative data from individual experiences into the information loop between local communities, local governments, and Albania's central government. Supporting and improving that information loop, CESEDA will better equip Albania to target the needs of the poor and marginalized sectors of its society. In the spirit of free-flowing information, the third component of the CESEDA project is to encourage media-based public awareness. Journalists and institutions of a free and independent media factor critically into CESEDA's approach to expanding participatory democracy, and CESEDA intends to nourish their role in providing information to citizens and fostering citizen oversight. To that end, CESEDA aims to improve the quality of reporting by working closely with media managers, and providing cash awards to the journalist or news outlet that produces the best political analyses.

Viewed through these components, the CESEDA project mobilizes Albania's poorest citizens to hold NSSED accountable for their needs. The expected impact of the project is to encourage the participatory democracy on which NSSED relies by empowering the most impoverished communities at the grass-roots level, increasing the accountability and transparency of democratic institutions, and cultivating a national dialogue to help the government better meet the needs of its people.

Mar	APR	May
	06
2003	2004	2005