USAID/Armenia’s community-led development approach

USAID/Armenia’s CLA case illustrates Mission’s experience in operationalizing the Agency’s locally-led development agenda. It explores what worked well and what could have been improved in providing the enabling space for local actors to set their own agendas, develop solutions, and bring the capacity, leadership, and resources to make those solutions a lasting reality. 

The context for our case is shaped by Armenia’s Territorial Administrative Reform and the challenges the reform presented for communities. The Reform significantly restructured traditional villages, cities and administrative local governments, resulting in the consolidation of 915 settlements to 71 communities. Although the local communities were the bearers of this paradigm-shifting reform, the decisions were  mostly driven by the central government and donors. The COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing Nagorno-Karabakh (NK) hostilities (conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia) presented additional challenges to these newly established communities. 

Considering this context, USAID/Armenia prioritized identifying new ways of giving communities more agency and decision-making power in their development trajectory. As part of its Local Works (LW) program, USAID/Armenia held a number of co-creation and co-design sessions with local partners to shape the community development approaches. After issuing awards to five local partners, the Mission conducted an after-action review to learn and inform better development outcomes. 

As a result of the CLA approach, local communities had the opportunity to voice their priority needs and get support to address them.