Community participation in the programmes of social centres in Jordan: The experience of Queen Alia Fund

Abstract

Both community development and community participation are dealt with as two faces to one coin. However, Community participation in Jordan is seen as a secondary element to be affiliated with the community development. This understanding is clearly apparent throughout the absence of meaningful role for local people in the planning, implementation and the evaluation of the social centres' programmes. Local administration committees and women committees, which are formed in each centre to help in administering the centres are not effective enough to achieve their stated goals. The reasons may be referred to the unrealization of the importance of their participation, besides the centres' managements intention to marginalize their role. The aforesaid are resulted in the absence of their role in participating in planning, implementation and evaluation of the centres’ programmes. Therefore, there is a clear absence for effective planning, implementation and evaluation of any programme provided by the social services centres, while planning, implementation and evaluation if they do exist are always carried out in unsystematic manner. Overall, community participation in the programmes of the social centres in Jordan is unplanned and suffers of many obstacles. Some of these obstacles are related to the sponsor agency (i.e. QAF). Whereas others related to the beneficiaries themselves and largely represented in the weakness of their motivation to have voice in planning, implementation and evaluation of any programme.