What is RODA?

RODA is a participatory community empowerment tool for helping poor communities identify and use their resources to solve their problems.

RODA is based on the fact that even in an absolutely poor community there must be resources that make life tick and that a well-meaning development approach should aim at helping unearth these resources and if possible supplement them or use them as building blocks. You will find that the resources within and around a community are so many that mere identification will go along way in solving these people's problems. There will be resources of all kinds; human, social, financial, physical, natural…etc. Other organizations working in the area also are some form of a resource the community can count on.  

RODA is promoted to replace the retrogressive Problem Oriented Development Approach (PODA).

RODA combines five important elements:

• DISCOVERY-(positive) discovery

• ELATION (filling with high spirits, energy and pride)

• PROBLEMS-Identification

• FACILITATION (Linking up problems with resources) to form a firm project base.

• PROJECT IDENTIFICATIO AND PLANNING

DISCOVERY (of resources)

There is nothing wrong in an agency telling a community that it has a poverty eradication mission. What is wrong is to tell them that you like working with the poorest of the poor, as they will want to prove to be exactly that.

After introduction the next thing to tell the community, as recommended in RODA approach, is the type of community you like working with as follows:

1. Communities with problems they are willing to address

2. Community with history of solving their own problems

3. Community with plans and aspirations

4. People with resources (spend more time on the different types of resources they have).

The next step is to ask them to give answers to questions 1 to 4 above.

After this no doubt that you will have a list of the following types of resources among other things:

• Genuine

• Discovered

• Others resulting from their creativity and innovativeness

Through the above exercise, the community will heave sigh of relief resulting from positive discovery.

ELATION

On learning they have more resources / wealth than they thought, the community is filled with high spirits (elation) pride, energy and the drive to do something with this energy. The next thing is to help the community direct this energy to something useful to them. There cannot be a better thing than identifying a problem they would like to address.

PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION

Here more often than not the community will just list down genuine /real problems.

The community should come up with a list of problems they would like to solve using as much as possible the resources they are endowed with. Let them prioritize the problems and agree on the one/s to start addressing first in order of importance, urgency or availability of resources.

FACILITATION/LINKING

With the three elements indicated above, problems, resources, and the elation you or the community should be able to link problems and resources therefore helping solve many of the problems the community is faced with.

Lastly the community should be able to say what problem they want to solve with what resources and draw project action plan. Projects that have been identified on the basis of felt needs of the poor and based on their resources have higher chances of succeeding. RODA does not rule out the use of external resources to supplement local ones.