India - Fifth Power System Development Project
Levine, Antony
Social funds directly finance small community-managed projects, helping to empower the poor and vulnerable by allowing them to become actively involved in their own development. With social fund financing and technical assistance, communities identify their own development priorities, hire contractors, manage project funds and implement and sustain the projects. Because social funds often operate outside traditional government bureaucracies, they disburse funding and implement projects more quickly than traditional development mechanisms. Initiated as a temporary measure to alleviate economic distress in Bolivia in 1987, social funds are currently active in more than 50 countries, serving at the forefront of the World Bank's community-driven development agenda. Since their inception, social funds have financed more than 100,000 small-scale community interventions, ranging from infrastructure and social services to training and micro-enterprise development. Social funds led the reconstruction effort in the wake of Hurricane Mitch in Honduras and Nicaragua. They are also helping to rebuild torn societies in Kosovo, Rwanda and East Timor and are supporting long-range decentralization strategies in Bolivia and Nicaragua. Construction and repair of schools and health facilities and the creation of water supply infrastructure constitute 80 percent of social fund projects. Social funds also initiate community training programs, establish micro-credit agencies, invest in erosion control and irrigation, and sponsor programs for vulnerable groups like the aged, people with disabilities and AIDS sufferers.
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