The HDI projects have three overarching objectives.

• Helping communities to meet their basic needs
• Promoting participation and participatory processes in community activities
• Building local capacities and skills

In keeping with its objectives, the HDI projects in general go through three stages of project implementation. All of these stages are undertaken in collaboration with community members.

• Participatory needs assessments
• Collective community analysis, discussion and agreement of needs and ways of addressing them
• Capacity/skills building

Project activities begin with meetings with target communities to determine what they feel are their most pressing needs in terms of their livelihoods and well being.

Once needs have been identified and agreement reached upon the most urgent ones, project staff discuss with communities possible ways of addressing them. More value is attached by communities to those assets in which they have made a personal investment, as opposed to those which were provided without discussion with them, and in which they have had no stake. Furthermore, such community investment is more likely to be maintained by the community, to the extent that they are able.

Thus communities discuss and agree upon ways and means by which they can contribute towards collaborative activities to improve community assets, such as the renovation of a village school or the reclamation of a village pond. The experience of the HDI has been that communities are willing to play their part in such collaboration, particularly for such basic assets as a clean supply of water or for a village school, which is also a source of pride and hope for communities.