Mission


GENSEN's organizational structure and African solidarity

 

The GENSEN Network is built on the kinship loyalties of African solidarity. Urban or rural intellectuals with leadership roles in their villages approach GENSEN, requesting permission for their village to join the network. These intellectuals, who bridge modern and traditional sectors of Senegalese society, motivate and educate local village leaders and members in ecovillage concepts, participate in the selection of the association that will represent GENSEN in their village, channel GENSEN project opportunities through to their villages and participate in the membership of GENSEN central commissions and committees, such as the microcredit project selection committee without being paid. It is important to note that project opportunities are not awarded by patronage or nepotism in this model, which requires village representatives to initiate requests for membership, projects and other development opportunities, write their own project proposals with technical assistance from headquarters staff, and serve on democratically run committees that determine project awards.

Its advantages over other development models are many:

  • High level of commitment of the beneficiaries - beneficiaries self-select on their own initiative, via their own leadership structure
  • High levels of project supervision - projects are locally accountable to their own populations, since the local standing of the project leaders within each village depends on their performance
  • Low costs of project and program activities - the intellectuals, who link headquarters activities to their villages, are self-motivated and tend to travel frequently between their villages and the capital city for numerous reasons. Their motivation and mobility reduce to a minimum the communications and travel expenses of GENSEN projects
  • Elimination of the need to micromanage village projects from central headquarters, which is a factor that contributes to the failure of some conventional NGO development programs.

Accusations of corruption in African are linked to misplaced applications of "African solidarity" within the modern market enviornment. GENSEN's interest is in positive complementarities between modern business and other aspects of "African solidarity.". They are many, and many more to be discovered. We hope to launch a study inviting Africans and others who work in development in Africa to reflect on and experiment with hybred business models, such as our own, which incorporate African social responsibility into modern non-profit and business enterprises.

 

It should be noted that our model works best in egalitarian villages common in Africa, in which the leadership serves the interests of all village members, who tend to be related to each other. This structure is absent in much of the Indian subcontinent. GENSEN's strategy, in its early stages, tends to cover villages that have produced enterprising and loyal emigrants to the cities