This is one of the key strategies that ASE will need to consider as it tries to transform itself from a service-providing development organisation to a development organisation committed primarily to empowering communities. This paradigm shift will, therefore, make it necessary for ASE to focus on enhancing the capacities of local institutions—in particular those of community-based institutions. Enhancing their capacities in turn requires that ASE give them all the support they need to rise to the challenge of effectively providing the poor of these communities with the basic services they need in a sustainable manner.  CBIs are membership, self-help organisations that spearhead the socio-economic development of their communities, with a particular focus on supporting those members who are very poor and marginalised. To do that, the CBIs could, of course, design a number of activities that may help them to ensure food security within their communities, introduce a sustainable utilisation of their communities’ natural resources and to meet their basic social needs—including education, health and water supply.  The following are the particular areas that ASE will give priority to as part of its support to CBIs in their effort to bring about desirable socio-economic changes within their communities.

Education

The CBI should shoulder the responsibility of managing and running the adult literacy and children’s education programmes, which, in most cases, are exactly what the local community groups in the remote, food-insecure woredas of the country need, as they have little or no access to formal education. ASE and the CBIs may work together in running the CoLFs, the functional adult literacy activity, which is considered to be the most important aspect of the programme. Moreover, ASE will continue to support the CBIs’ education programmes as follows:

Health

The health sector is one of the few sectors that are high on the development agenda of both the Ethiopian Government and donors. It is so to donors because it is encompassed by their new framework of "protecting basic social services".  

ASE, therefore, has no choice but to follow suit, given the preponderance that the sector is accorded by its partners in development. The information that ASE has in this regard is that the Government’s health extension workers will be providing health education, family planning services and preventive treatment. The only way ASE can support the Government, without any duplication of efforts, is, therefore, by extending to it capacity-enhancing support. In addition to that, ASE will throw its weight behind such initiatives of the CBIs as follows:

Rural Water Supply

ASE will support CBIs’ efforts towards ensuring the supply of safe and adequate drinking water to their communities. It will do so with the aim of improving the health conditions of the communities and reducing the heavy workload of women and children. The following strategic elements will be used under this sector:

Food Security

From the outset, whatever ASE plans to do by way of ensuring food security seems to inevitably entail a conflict of approaches. As stated earlier, ASE has now transformed itself from a development organisation that provides services to communities to one that is committed to empowering communities. Yet ensuring food security is a tricky venture, in that it requires some form of intervention. Moreover, ASE has a rich experience in such interventions. So how should ASE go about ensuring food security without giving the impression that it is travelling in reverse gear? Isn’t its capacity-enhancing support a form of service delivery, anyway? And aren’t two of its core capacity-enhancing functions—CoLF and participatory research—actually service-delivery functions?

ASE will have to come up with appropriate answers to these and similar questions, so as to forestall the creation of any space for exercising some form of service delivery in its name. In other words, this is something that ASE will have to carefully watch and manage. The best way to avoid any confusion in this regard is, of course, by making it clear to all concerned that ASE’s role in the effort to ensure food security will be limited to facilitation. To ASE, facilitation is a methodological process by which the local community will be enabled to appreciate and use the resources (knowledge, material, funds, the intangibles, etc.) available to it in and outside the system effectively. The following will, therefore, be ASE’s major strategic directions as it plays the role of facilitator in all food-security-related activities. 

CoLF: This consists of ASE’s major intervention, in terms of testing new technologies, identifying and developing local innovations, trying to come up with solutions to some of the problems that constrain productivity and utilisation of food, and providing special skills training. In short, this component envisages the "research and extension" activities that help to improve the food security status.

Linking the CBIs with service providers: The logical and immediate result of the research, training and extension activities under CoLF is the creation of new demands for inputs, technologies and services. ASE should make some resources available through the community-innovation and development fund to help the community members explore more opportunity for food security. For example, the CBI may lodge a request for small grants from the community development fund to introduce new technologies through the revolving fund. Free handouts of inputs and technologies, under the pretext of "demonstration" must, however, be shunned altogether, during the new strategic period—with the exception of the research inputs that should be used by the CoLF as a group. The CBIs should also undertake innovative activities to sustain the introduction of the new technologies or to extend local innovations. They can do so, for example, by initiating local-level seed schemes, cereal banks, supporting small-scale irrigation activities, establishing own technology multiplication centres (e.g., poultry, highland fruit, vegetable seeds, etc.) etc.  In the early development phase of the CBI, ASE will do everything in its power to link the farmers with providers of inputs, technology and certain vital services. ASE would like to, nonetheless, stress that it will do so only to eventually enable the CBIs to stand on their feet—that is, to eventually be in a position where they will need no one’s help.

Developing rural entrepreneurial skills: Promoting rural entrepreneurial skills is an important intervention to improve the food security status of the rural community in particular and address the issue of rural poverty in general. This is one area that ASE did not give adequate attention to so far, despite the significant role it has played towards improving the income of the people and the services in the rural area. Through the CoLF, or otherwise, ASE will facilitate the provision of entrepreneurship skills as well as the expansion of same in the rural communities.  

Improving the marketing infrastructure: Although ASE is working in food-insecure areas where marketing is assumed not to be a "first-generation problem", it is convinced that the marketing infrastructure will have to be improved by employing various interventions. Improving the marketing information system, linking production with the market, supporting the marketing cooperatives of the local community and improving the value chain of selected commodities are crucially important inputs to that end. ASE would like to, nonetheless, note that it has to at first enhance its own capacity to make its intervention in this regard bear the desired fruit. ASE will have to also prepare implementation guidelines to intervening in this specific activity effectively.

Improving access to savings and credit services: Savings and credit services play an important role in the effort to solve food-security-related problems. ASE will continue to nurture the partnership it has forged with PEACE as long as the latter continues to provide the right service at the right time to the local community. ASE will have to, however, encourage the CBIs to establish their own savings and credit cooperatives, too, in accordance with its commitment to community empowerment. Besides making it relatively easy for the poor to access credit services, this intervention will bring in for the CBIs additional income—in the form of interest. 

Natural Resources Management

Experience has shown that the “piecemeal” approach to solving environmental problems seldom works and that the only way that they can be solved is through an integrated approach. As a unit for an integrated resource management, watershed has of late gained currency. It involves the management of not merely land, water and biomass, but also integrating such management with the efforts to ensure the self-reliance and holistic development of the poor. Accordingly, ASE’s natural resources management will adopt the integrated watershed management (IWSM) approach and take the following strategic measures:

• Define the watershed area (micro-watersheds, if necessary) and the pertinent stakeholders thereof, and discuss the stakeholders’ needs.
• Make the CBIs play the leading role in the management of the micro-watershed on behalf of their respective communities.
• Encourage the networking of CBIs, under bigger watersheds, and give them the support they need to manage the watershed, by developing among them a culture of negotiations, joint learning, management of common resources, etc.
• Make sure, as much as possible, that operational kebeles are chosen on the basis of the watershed they belong to, as this will make it easier for the apex CBI to run integrated watershed management programmes in a holistic manner. Extra care must, however, be taken not to marginalise highly food-insecure kebeles in the process. In other words, make sure that relatively better-off kebeles are not presented with this opportunity just because they are located in the domain of the watershed. Occasionally, two or more kebeles may be located on the less fertile and food-insecure side of a mountain, whereas others are located on the fertile side, where food production is not a serious challenge. In such cases, ASE has all along been showing preference for the less fertile and, therefore, more food-insecure kebeles. ASE will have to continue upholding this tradition.   
• Hold consultative meetings with local government officials who have a say in the formulation of private and community agro-forestry policies and laws as well as in participatory forest management.
• Organise and support the environmental clubs established in the schools to advocate environmental issues and mobilise communities to rehabilitate and protect natural resources.
• Incorporate into the topics of CoLF’s social learning environmental issues and the management of common resources.
• Give training to the landless youth in non-agricultural skills.
• Give training to the landless youth in agricultural skills and encourage them to start up land-intensive agricultural business. 
• Promote entrepreneurial skills and innovativeness in the rural areas of the country, with a view to reducing the number of land users.
• Give rural communities the support they need to improve on their indigenous knowledge about soil and water—focusing on promoting local innovativeness. 
• Do a study on the land tenure system. Then, based on the findings thereof, undertake advocacy work at both the national and regional levels. But be sure to do it through the pertinent networks.