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Grassroots CSOs: A cog in the democratisation wheel
Kamurai Mudzingwa
March 02, 2010

Grassroots civil society organisations (CSOs) are a critical component of socio-political development in Zimbabwe particularly during this crucial transitional era. It is only through grassroots CSOs that holistic citizen driven change can be realised.

Politicians, aware of the crucial importance of people at grassroots, always set up strong political structures at that level. Significantly, civil society, to effectively monitor and influence people driven change, should have a strong grassroots CSO base. Erstwhile, grassroots CSOs have been marginalised by mainstream CSOs and have been mostly confined to humanitarian work especially during crises.

"Big NGOs always marginalise us and they sideline us from national processes such as constitution making and national healing. They do not value our importance and the fact that we are more in touch with the grassroots than they are," said one director of a grassroots organisation in Masvingo recently.

This has effectively shut them out and by implication shutting out grassroots citizens who form the majority of the people, from meaningfully participating in citizen driven change. Consequently policy makers get away with the formulation of non-citizen centred policies and implementation strategies.

Grassroots CSOs generally lack capacity in policy analysis and advocacy strategies and this is worsened by very loose to non-existent networks, a weakness that militates against significant advocacy and lobby. It is important that grassroots CSOs educate citizens to be aware that policy decisions affect them and it is incumbent upon them to advocate for citizen friendly policies.

Grassroots CSOs therefore should be equipped with policy analysis and advocacy skills in the pragmatic and not in the academic sense. Hence, it is significant to capacitate the grassroots, through building capacity and coherent networking structures of grassroots CSOs.

Capacity building should be the initial step towards the setting up of solid networking structures for grassroots CSOs.

As the constitution outreach teams reach out to citizens countrywide, the value of grassroots organisations in civic education cannot be ignored and hence the value of grassroots CSOs cannot be overemphasised.

In this transitional period, it is important that the grassroots are aware of national reform processes including a thorough understanding of the Global Political Agreement if they are to hold politicians accountable in the promotion of democracy. They also need to be aware of their inalienable right to participate in national reform processes aimed at democratising the country.

If information for positive action towards democracy is to cascade to the grassroots, we can only ignore CSO grassroots at our own peril both as civil society and as a nation. It is high time that meaningful partnership between grassroots organisations and larger CSOs is enhanced for holistic development and democratisation to take place.

Large CSOs have been accused—and usually rightly so—of being elitist and consequently out of touch with the grassroots and the marginalised whom they purport to represent. Strong links with strongly networked CSOs can easily bridge the gap between elitism and people centeredness.

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