Akeel Hajat, a local consultant in Malawi, offers practical guidance on how to work with local counterparts to co-design RAP and LRP processes rooted in project affected people's lived realities.
The role of ‘local consultant’ to RAP and LRP processes on internationally funded projects can be challenging. You act as a bridge between local communities, governments and international investors and often have to ‘translate’ not just language, but concepts and ways of understanding. You help international investors to navigate both the explicit as well as the tacit systems and processes of resettlement and livelihood restoration, which can seem circuitous by design, while ensuring that plans and processes take into account the often challenging lived realities of project affected people.
Drawing on 12 years’ experience of implementing RAP and LRP processes in Malawi as a local specialist on internationally financed projects, Akeel Hajat shares the lessons he has learned along the way, often the hard way. Lessons such as how different conceptualisations of land ownership can result in compensations processes which don’t ‘stick’, how without a thorough understanding of hierarchies and who really holds power, well-meaning processes can be captured by elites, and how rigid approaches often don’t take account of human ambiguity.
This paper also aims to challenge the dynamic between local and international consultant, which can place the local consultant as a passive implementor of an international consultant’s approach. The paper will promote the importance of co-design of processes and plans, and provide international practitioners with guidance on how to develop positive and productive partnerships with local counterparts.
Akeel Hajat is director of C12 Consultants, a Malawi-based environmental and social consulting firm, and has implemented RAPs and LRPs for international clients in energy, mining, and agriculture.