PROGRAMMES
On this page you will find information on CIKOD’s programs, our mission and vision and the strategies we use to meet these aims.

CIKOD’s mission is:
To contribute to a positive change in attitudes towards Traditional Authorities and Indigenous Institutions and develop participatory processes and capacities for working with this institutions to facilitate sustainable grassroots organizational development that gives voice to the poor and vulnerable rural families.

OUR VISION
To have a vibrant grassroots civil societies providing voice to the underprivileged in society and empowering them to make legitimate demands for the resources they need for sustainable and equitable development.CIKOD’s program is aimed at contributing to poverty reduction primarily through civil society capacity support in 4 program areas namely: Traditional Governance Support Program (TGP), Community Organizational Development Innovations Support (CODIS), Community Voices Program and CIKOD Organizational Capacity Development.

Target groups
CIKOD’s primary target groups are indigenous[1] civil society, e.g: traditional leaders, nnoboa groups, asafo companies, indigenous singing and drama groups, hometown associations, etc. Key characteristics of these groups is the fact that they were internally initiated and organized to defend the interests of local communities. CIKOD however will also work with the modern civil society such as NGOs, teachers associations, and farmer groups where appropriate. In the short term CIKOD’s goal is to focus on strengthening indigenous civil society. In doing this, CIKOD would employ modern organizational development skills to strengthen these indigenous forms of organization.

Operational Areas and Current Activities
Traditional Governance Support Programme (TGP)
The first phase of CIKOD was focused on methodology and curriculum development and testing in collaboration with the Center for Development Studies of the university of Cape Coast and the University for Development Studies. From this, a curriculum for training of traditional authorities and community functionaries that lead to their transformation into proactive leaders facilitating development in their communities has been developed. The emphasis is on transformation and not strengthening traditional authorities as authoritarian overlords in their communities”.

The course is in the form of a 3-modular programme on the theme: Governance, natural resource management and development. It covers the following topics:

• Traditional institutions, Governance and development
• Traditional Institutions, leadership, gender and conflict management.
• Traditional institutions, community livelihood promotion and natural resource management

The three modules will be organized separately for the following categories:

• Traditional Leaders (Men and Women)
• Community functionaries (GCSOs)
• Development facilitators and local government agents

Community Organizational Development Innovations Support (CODIS)
The core of the work of CIKOD is to provide organizational development support that enables traditional authorities and their communities to establish organizational structures at the community and district levels (district houses/associations of chiefs and traditional women leaders). These would be for the mobilization and co-ordination of community efforts for various poverty reduction and development initiatives e.g:Preservation of bio-cultural diversity ,community-based land administration, Eco-cultural tourism , Agriculture and natural resource management, Local economic development.

Such district level structures would also serve as effective platforms from where traditional authorities can effectively collaborate with the formal local governance structures (district assemblies and decentralized departments).These would be different from the existing structures at the regional (Regional Houses of Chiefs) and national level (National House of Chiefs) in that they would include all categories of traditional leaders (divisional chiefs, odikro, queen mothers, magazia, youth leaders, etc) and would be concerned more with development and local governance issues rather than dealing with chieftaincy conflicts and succession issues (as is the case with the regional and national houses of chiefs to which membership is restricted to only paramount chiefs).

Community Voice Project (CVP)
Since 2005, Cikod has been administering the Civil Society Capacity Strengthening Facility (CSF) as well as the Community Voice Programme both of which are DIFD funded programmes won through competitive bidding. Both seek to strengthen the capacities of grass roots civil society organizations at community and district levels to be able to engage government institutions on issues of rights, accountability and transparency. Cikod is expanding these small grants programmes as well as strengthening its capacity building support for advocacy and networking among grass roots civil society groups, traditional authorities and local development agents. The emphasis is on:

• Raising awareness among grassroots civil society groups and traditional authorities on relevant policy issues and building their capacities for advocacy using locally determined forums.
• Providing small grants to community and district level grassroots civil organizations for citizen-government engagement.
• Promoting Endogenous Development
  Cikod is an active member of COMPAS. COMPAS (comparing and sharing endogenous development) is an international network with headquarters in the Netherlands that seeks to encourage development practitioners to take indigenous knowledge seriously and support endogenous development. CIKOD would continue to use this as a an international forum to share its experiences and learn from other like-minded organizations.
• Accountability Systems
  CIKOD’s accountability is owed at 4 levels
  (i) Core partners who have made financial contribution;
  (ii) Advisory Board;
  (iii) CIKOD Associates;
  (iv) Implementing communities.
  
  CIKOD has developed procedures for financial accounting and administration. CIKOD is accountable to its Advisory Board to whom it reports on programs and budget issues. Accounting to partners and communities is done through annual reviews, participation in development fora during festivals, dissemination of information to partners and communities, making use of alternate forms of documentation to meet the needs of different target groups.
  
  STRATEGY
  The strategic principles, which underlie the programs of CIKOD reflects the aim of our mission namely to develop participatory processes and capacities for working with indigenous knowledge systems, indigenous institutions and traditional authority systems. As such the strategy and methods principally aim to be participatory and contribute to our overall development philosophy.
  
  Program implementation strategy:
  
  • Working through local NGO partners (CIKOD Associates).
  • Methodology development for partners on how to engage and work with indigenous/traditional institutions.
  • Creating awareness of the value of traditional authorities and indigenous institutions.
  • Engaging directly with indigenous institutions in order to facilitate their organizational development.
  • Action research.
  Within this implementation strategy CIKOD is committed to using a variety of methods and tools that will help facilitate our program and the individual projects we are implementing. The following will give a short description of the concepts underlying our implementation strategy.
  
  Rights Based Approach: The programme focuses on giving voice to the traditional leaders and their communities to be able to make effective demands for the resources and services they need and empowering them to take self-initiative. This is a departure from the needs based approach where the concern is to identify and supply the needs of rural communities without empowering them to make demands on power bearers like the district assembly, community leaders, etc.
  
  Organizational Development: Emphasis is on building capacities of the traditional leaders and their communities to work as organized grassroots civil societies that can lead marginalized rural communities to take self-initiated action.
  
  Community Organizational Development: CIKOD is currently developing this concept. The concept of COD seeks to expand the notion of organizational development to include the community as a whole, and as such it seeks to strengthen the links between groups and institutions in the community to work towards a common development agenda that addresses the needs and aspirations of particular groups as well as the whole community. It builds on existing structures, which means traditional institutions/groups and community based organizations, and seeks to facilitate communities to initiate and manage change. CIKOD is contemplating publishing a conceptual report on COD after initial piloting, and will post it under Publications.
  
  Community Institutional Mapping: This is a methodology developed by CIKOD to get an overview of the traditional structures in the communities. This in turn can help the community itself to understand or realize the different institutions and sub-groups in the community and give an indication of how to work with these structures as well as identifying the potential for change i.e. which groups could play an important role in future development and how and to what extend existing structures in the community could help advance sustainability and empowerment. It is a participatory process in the sense that it is carried out by the communities with guidance from CIKOD, which serves as an instrument for the community to realize their own potential for change and how the structures within the community work or indeed how they could work. CIKOD has done an extensive Community Institutional Mapping in its 15 pilot communities, the reports of which will soon be posted under Publications.
  
  Advocacy: CIKOD will facilitate linkages between the traditional leaders to be able to influence policies at the district level as well as monitor the quality of implementation of pro-poor programmes to ensure that the interest of poor rural communities are sufficiently catered for. An interesting development by CIKOD is the use of Traditional Festivals as accountability and development forums. This methodology as referred to above proves to be a very efficient advocacy tool.
  
  In addition to these strategies or concepts that CIKOD is promoting we are constantly looking for new ways to improve methodologies and are developing methodological concepts to serve this end, so we would like to encourage you to visit our site regularly for updates.
  
  The origin of a particular group is what classifies it as indigenous or not.

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