The Village Vision
The tool
The Village Vision is a community’s visual model of development in their geographic area, in this case a village. It puts all the community’s priorities on a model on the ground and/or on paper. This helps the community to think about what their actual needs are using specific objects likes stones, leaves, and sand to represent various 'developments' to create a vision of the future village. Information that cannot be visually presented on the map is recorded in notebooks by a literate community member or the facilitator. This tool is best applied together with the resource map. Once complete the vision can be used as a visual tool for monitoring and evaluation of the community’s efforts improving their lives.
Output
The village vision gives the community and outsiders a quick glimpse of what the villagers would like to undertake and for what purposes. It also gives a quick evaluation of what can be achieved with the resources available in the village and what external resources may be required. The information gathered during the exercise can include:-
- what villagers see as important to their lives
- where within the village a certain activity should be undertaken (geographically)
- suggestions on how the dreams and visions can be achieved including a record of the current perceived constraints (why it is not there yet)
- ways and modalities of exploiting the existing resources
- The village vision map represents a visual bench mark for continuous participatory evaluation of any plans to be undertaken.
Implementing the tool
The village vision is build upon the village resource map modelled earlier. Since the map of the village is already on the ground, the best way to start the vision is to start by asking the natural question: -
- now we can see our village the way it is today, what would we wish to it look like 10 years from today?
- how can we get to do that?
- how come it has never been tried before … and so on.
- As with other participatory tools, various objectives are selected to represent the ideas on the ground with facilitators taking notes. Once complete the map should transferred to paper - manila and notebook - for future reference. The village vision encourages people to put forward their wildest ideas on model and on paper. No opinion, suggestion, or idea should be rejected by anyone at this stage.
