The Movement for Community-led Development

LIFE is a 2.5 year United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded program dedicated to creating a better understanding of locally led development in non-permissive and fragile environments. The LIFE Project is the outcome of a co-creation with USAID, the MCLD Global Secretariat, The Hunger Project, World Vision, and a specialized research team (led by Dr. Jennifer Leavy and Dr. Catherine Shutt). 

LIFE’s Purpose: To identify and understand how community dynamics in Non-Permissive Environments may affect how leadership is developed, whom it is developed with, and how this in turn may affect development outcomes. The proposed research will examine how facilitation and leadership improve resilience at sites in Bangladesh and Ethiopia. It will also explore how NPEs and a program’s operational contexts impact facilitation and leadership and the extent to which outcomes are achieved.

Our Research Questions:

• ^{Which outcomes (intended or unintended; for whom, and at what levels of systems) do key aspects of CLD, specifically community-level leadership and facilitation, contribute to?} 
• ^{How do community-level leadership and facilitation contribute to the above outcomes, particularly those relating to increased resilience capacities?} 
• ^{How are community-level leadership and facilitation initiated and implemented in CLD in different types of NPEs? How does this influence whether they contribute to outcomes?} 
• ^{How are community-level leadership and facilitation sustained in CLD programming in different types of NPEs? (for whom, in what contexts?)}
• ^{Why do certain factors impact the effectiveness of community-level leadership and facilitation in CLD in NPEs and their ability to ultimately contribute to increased resilience capacities (or not)?}
• ^{What are the implications for CLD programming and theories of action and change in NPEs?}

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