Towards a Community Engagement Strategy: Co-creating with Local Stakeholders
With support from UNICEF and its partners, the communities of Gisuru and Kibogoye are joining forces to help develop a community engagement strategy grounded in their realities and aspirations.
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With community participation now recognized as a pillar of sustainable development, Burundi is taking a decisive step forward by launching, with UNICEF’s support and in close collaboration with the Directorate-General for Community Development and Decentralisation, an innovative co-creation process to develop a national community engagement strategy. This initiative reflects a political commitment to strengthening local governance, promoting community knowledge and dynamics, and empowering citizens to become full participants in their own development.
From 15 to 19 September 2025, a participatory workshop was held in Gitega, bringing together representatives of public institutions, technical and financial partners, and civil society organizations. The objective was to jointly develop a community engagement strategy based on evidence, local experiences, and open dialogue between all stakeholders.
One of the highlights of this workshop was the field visit to the commune of Giheta, in the hills of Gisuru and Kibogoye, where participants took part in a community-based co-creation activity using participatory social research methods. The aim was to listen to the communities, understand their organizational dynamics, their roles in development initiatives, and their expectations for the future strategy.
Four focus groups were organized: in Gisuru, one composed of community health workers (CHWs), mothers’ leaders, and members of health committees (COSA); the other bringing together representatives of child protection committees (CPEs), school management committees, Imboneza, persons with disabilities, foster families, fathers, and aunts. On Kibogoye Hill, discussions involved young people, adolescents, and children on the one hand, and hill development committees (CDCs), Abahuza, religious denominations, joint security committees, community listening groups, the Red Cross, and Batwa representatives on the other.
Guided by a discussion guide focusing on daily life, community values, social ties, participation, coordination, communication, and monitoring of initiatives, these discussions enabled each group to share their experiences through real-life stories — health crises, collective mobilizations, or social mobilization campaigns. These testimonials highlighted the mechanisms for accessing information, the different levels of involvement, moments of tension or solidarity, and the levers that encourage participation.
These discussions revealed a high level of trust in community health workers and other local actors, who are seen as reliable sources of information and action. However, several actors admitted that they did not always clearly understand their roles. Young people, for example, expressed frustration at often being asked to perform specific tasks without being involved in decision-making. The need to strengthen the capacities of hill development committees, the weakness of two-way communication mechanisms, and the lack of structured monitoring were also highlighted.
Recommendations include actively involving young people in consultation bodies, providing guidance on local cultural values to reduce intergenerational tensions, regularizing monthly meetings for the various community structures, establishing specific protection measures during epidemics, and clarifying the terms of reference of the structures, particularly the hill development committees, to enhance their effectiveness.
The field visit was just one milestone in an intensive five-day workshop in Gitega that brought together government officials, sector experts, civil society representatives, and technical partners around a shared ambition, to build a coherent, inclusive, and realistic community engagement strategy.
The first few days were spent laying the foundations: establishing a common understanding of community engagement, reviewing experiences from West Africa (particularly Niger and Cameroon), and presenting methods for co-creating evidence. A significant amount of time was devoted to analyzing existing initiatives in Burundi: Learning and Nutritional Rehabilitation Centres (FARN), Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), community listening groups, and child protection committees.
Each initiative was analyzed according to key criteria — participation, inclusion, planning, empowerment, two-way communication, monitoring, and evaluation. This work highlighted the strengths and limitations of existing approaches, revealing that community engagement often fell short of expectations, mainly due to a lack of structure, ownership, and appropriate communication and accountability tools.
An important methodological step was the creation of community personas, fictional but realistic profiles representing key actors such as health workers, parents, young people, and committee members. This human-centred approach provided a better understanding of the contexts, motivations, and constraints of these stakeholders, enabling the data collection tools to be adapted to local realities. These personas served as a basis for guiding field observations and discussions, reinforcing the quality and legitimacy of the data collected in Giheta.
The final day was devoted to co-creating a shared vision of community engagement, based on the data collected, the challenges identified, and the participants’ proposals. This work made it possible to define clear areas for action, including the co-creation of evidence, the development of approaches tailored to local needs, and the establishment of participatory monitoring.
The workshop concluded with a strong commitment: UNICEF reaffirmed its support for the implementation of the strategy, and the authorities called for this momentum to be maintained in all municipalities.
