By Kamaruddin Azis, Project Officer, Sulawesi Capacity Development Project – Japan International Cooperation Agency 2008-2012
MARITIMEPOSTS.COM – For decades, the development world has wrestled with a familiar problem. A team of experts arrives in a village or district, conducts a series of workshops, distributes training materials, hands out certificates, and leaves. The participants return home carrying new knowledge and fresh enthusiasm.
For a few weeks, sometimes a few months, there is movement. Then the energy fades. The manuals gather dust on office shelves, the certificates are framed on walls, and daily life gradually returns to what it was before.
This cycle has repeated itself so often that many practitioners have come to accept it as inevitable. Training is conducted because training is expected. Reports are written because reports are required.
Success is measured by attendance lists, photographs, and the number of certificates distributed. Yet beneath these indicators lies a difficult question: if communities remain unchanged after the trainers leave, what exactly has been accomplished?
The Sulawesi Capacity Development (CD) Project began with a different understanding of change.
Working across six provinces and twenty-nine districts and municipalities, and guided by the experienced facilitators of the COMMIT Foundation, the project was never designed to produce impressive workshop statistics. Its ambition was far more difficult. It sought to create change that would remain long after the project itself had disappeared.
The people behind the initiative understood something that is often overlooked in development work: communities do not change because they receive information.
Communities change when people begin to see themselves differently, when institutions begin to work differently, and when relationships within society evolve in ways that create new possibilities. Knowledge matters, but knowledge alone rarely transforms lives.
That philosophy shaped every aspect of the project.
Unlike conventional training programs that compress learning into a few intensive days, the Community Facilitator training cycle stretched across ten to fourteen months.
The total training time amounted to thirty-five days, but those days were carefully distributed over a much longer period. At first glance, the approach seemed inefficient. Why spend more than a year on a process that could be completed in a few weeks?
The answer became clear in practice. The project was not merely teaching people how to facilitate meetings or organize community activities. It was creating opportunities for participants to test ideas in the real world, make mistakes, return with questions, and reflect on what they had learned.
The intervals between training sessions became spaces for experimentation. Participants did not simply absorb information; they lived it.
Gradually, facilitators learned that community empowerment could not be rushed. Trust took time. Confidence took time. Organizational change took time. Social systems took even longer. Yet when change emerged through this process, it tended to endure because it belonged to the people who had created it.
The project’s architects often described development as a progression from individual growth to organizational strengthening and ultimately to social system development.
The sequence was important. Sustainable institutions could not be built without capable individuals. Effective social systems could not emerge without strong organizations. Rather than attempting to impose change from above, the project allowed transformation to grow organically from the ground upward.
Another feature that distinguished the initiative was its approach to ownership. Development projects frequently speak about local ownership, but too often the phrase becomes a slogan rather than a reality.
Communities and local governments are invited to participate, yet major decisions and financial responsibilities remain concentrated in the hands of external actors.
The Sulawesi project challenged this pattern.
While the project supported core training activities, district and municipal governments that wanted additional facilitators or expanded training programs were expected to finance them using their own resources. The requirement was not intended to reduce costs. It was designed to test commitment.
The results were revealing. Over time, local governments funded eighty-four additional training programs through their own budgets. This was more than an administrative achievement. It was evidence that local institutions had begun to see the program not as a donor activity but as their own investment in the future.
The lesson was simple yet profound. People value what they are willing to sustain. Ownership becomes meaningful when communities and governments are prepared to commit their own resources, not merely their verbal support.
Equally remarkable was the project’s understanding of inclusion. Around the world, development organizations have become increasingly sophisticated in measuring participation. Reports document the number of women attending meetings, the percentage of marginalized groups represented, and the demographic composition of participants. Such data are important, but they do not always reveal whether inclusion is actually occurring.
The facilitators of the Sulawesi project focused less on statistics and more on human behavior. They believed that genuine inclusion could be observed in the atmosphere of a meeting room.
Were people speaking freely? Did they understand what was being discussed? Did they feel comfortable expressing disagreement?
One informal standard became particularly influential. Facilitators often asked themselves whether a ten-year-old child or an eighty-year-old woman could understand the language being used. If the answer was yes, communication was working. If the answer was no, the discussion needed to change.
As a result, technical jargon was replaced with everyday language. Meetings became more welcoming. Mothers were encouraged to bring their children.
Facilitators paid attention to those sitting quietly in the corners of the room rather than focusing exclusively on the most vocal participants. Inclusion was treated not as a number to be achieved but as a condition to be created.
The project also rejected the idea that training should be measured primarily by what participants know. Instead, it focused on how participants behave.
Through an experiential learning approach, facilitators guided communities through a continuous cycle of partnership building, issue analysis, action planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. Participants did not learn through hypothetical case studies. They learned by engaging with real communities and confronting real challenges.
This distinction mattered enormously. Knowledge acquired in a classroom can be forgotten. Lessons learned through direct experience become part of how people think and act.
Over time, participants discovered that facilitation was not about providing answers. It was about helping communities discover their own answers. It was not about leading from the front. It was about creating the conditions for others to lead.
That shift in perspective transformed the role of the facilitator. Rather than becoming experts who solved problems on behalf of communities, they became catalysts who helped communities solve problems for themselves.
Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the project emerged through the creation of model villages. These communities functioned as living laboratories where facilitators, local governments, planners, and community members worked together to test new approaches. Successful ideas could then be adapted and replicated elsewhere.
The significance of this strategy extended far beyond the villages themselves. By connecting grassroots experimentation with policy processes, the project created a bridge between local realities and institutional decision-making. Villages were no longer treated merely as beneficiaries of development.
They became sources of knowledge capable of shaping development policy.
The influence of the model soon spread into other sectors. Approaches pioneered through the Community Facilitator training system found applications in marine resource management, urban community empowerment, agricultural extension programs, and local governance initiatives across Sulawesi and beyond.
What began as a capacity development project gradually evolved into a broader movement for participatory and locally owned development.
At its heart, the success of the Sulawesi Capacity Development Project rested on a deceptively simple belief: people are not passive recipients of development. They are active agents of change.
Too often, development programs are built around the assumption that solutions must be delivered from outside. The Sulawesi experience suggested the opposite. Communities already possess knowledge, aspirations, and capabilities. What they frequently lack are opportunities, supportive systems, and the confidence to turn those capabilities into collective action.
The role of facilitation, therefore, is not to transfer power.
It is to help people recognize the power they already possess.
As development practitioners around the world continue searching for more effective approaches, the lessons from Sulawesi deserve careful attention. The project reminds us that transformation is rarely dramatic. It does not occur because someone receives a certificate or attends a workshop. It emerges slowly through trust, participation, ownership, and repeated practice.
Long after the final training session ends and the project offices close, what remains is not the memory of a workshop. What remains is a stronger institution, a more confident community, a local government willing to invest in its own future, and individuals who have discovered their capacity to lead.
Those outcomes are difficult to quantify. They do not fit neatly into project logframes or annual reports. Yet they are the outcomes that matter most.
In the end, the true legacy of Indonesia’s master community facilitators is not the number of people they trained. It is the social systems they helped communities build for themselves. And in a world increasingly obsessed with quick results, that may be the most important lesson of all.
Gowa, 2026
