Our Approach to Development

Integrated, not siloed

The barriers facing women and girls in Cameroon compound each other, so we deliver seven programme pillars as one system. A survivor of violence who receives counselling but no route to independent income frequently returns to the household she fled. A girl re-enrolled in school on a bursary drops out again if that school has no water, no latrine and no way for her to manage menstruation with dignity.

Treating these as separate sectors produces interventions that look successful on their own indicators and fail on the ground. Referral runs between our pillars by design.

Community-led, in a specific sense

Community ownership is easy to claim and harder to operationalise. For us it means three concrete things.

1. Priorities are set through participatory needs assessments conducted with communities rather than about them.
2. Selection criteria for who a programme reaches are applied openly, so that decisions are understood and trusted locally.
3. Communities see findings about themselves before external audiences do.

Designed to outlast us

The test we apply to every intervention is simple: would this still be working two years after our funding ends? A borehole is handed to a trained committee with a maintenance plan, a parts route and a funding mechanism. A savings group is given the financial literacy to continue without us. A referral pathway is built on relationships between health facilities, legal aid providers and social services that exist independently of our presence.

Do No Harm as a working method

Development work can cause harm even when well intentioned. Introducing income into a household can provoke conflict. Identifying a survivor can expose her. Building a water point in the wrong place can inflame an existing dispute. The Do No Harm principle requires us to assess those risks with participants before acting, and it is applied across all community engagement and programming rather than only where harm seems obvious.

Sequencing

Order matters as much as content. Capital given before skills tends to be consumed rather than invested. Awareness raising without reachable services raises expectations that cannot be met. Research conducted before a relationship exists produces guarded answers. We sequence deliberately, and we would rather deliver less, later, than deliver in an order that wastes a community's time.