"Community-based doesn't inherently mean community-led." This insight emerged as a recurring theme during our interviews with stakeholders in the GEF Partnership while evaluating community-based approaches. During early interviews, we encountered a significant challenge: the term 'community-based approaches' was interpreted differently by various individuals. To address this issue and determine the extent to which GEF projects genuinely empowered communities, we dug deeper.
Our first step was to define 'community-based approaches.' We chose a comprehensive definition to…