I have liked the article by Zaya Yeebo of UNDP's (United Nations Development Programme) Civil Society and Democratic Governance facility, aimed at helping community-based grassroots movements with the organisational skills, the expertise and the financial support to lead change from below. This approach should have been taken very long time ago. Before the election campaign, donor agencies funded big NGOs to engage in peace promotion campaigns/initiative which instead become counter productive because the real actors on the ground were never involved because they 'lacked capacity' to handle donor funds. CBOs have the skills to organize and mobile their own communities but their skills are rarely utilised or regarded by big NGOs.

While it is important to apply professionalism in working with communities; the challenges is how you bring in highly educated but inexperienced in development field to evaluate community based organisation if they qualify for the facility by UNDP?

What has made 'big civil society' organisation fail in achieving real change in Kenya is because they wasted more time in building structures in fulfilling donor requirements and conditions in the name of being efficient and accountable at the expense of working closely and genuinely with grassroots organisations for change.

The same mistakes are bound to occur if community based organisations are 'forced' to conform with requirements by donor agencies and they are assessed if they have structures similar to that of big NGOs. We might end up upgrading CBOs to ineffective organisations as agents of change.