Community Economic Development Facilitator

About the project

Fiji is a small island nation steeped in rich culture and tradition. Despite a century of colonization, the country has maintained strong indigenous identities and practices. Fijians are born into communal systems that guide and support them throughout their lives, with family relationships and kin networks at the center.

Fiji is a lower middle-income country whose economy is largely supported by tourism and agriculture. However, Fijians’ overall economic wellbeing is multidimensional. For example, a family without income but access to land is often better off than a family with income but no land access. This is where Peace Corps Volunteers can offer support. Fiji is rich with resources beyond the white beaches that fuel tourism. The country boasts a year-round growing season, access to an ocean full of fish, and an enabling environment for business. However, to see an economic growth that is shared broadly, there are a variety of enabling skills that our government partners would like to see strengthened within the indigenous context: financial literacy and money management, recordkeeping, project design, risk management, monitoring and evaluation, and business development, to name a few. Volunteers are uniquely positioned to support the bolstering of these skills.

All two-year Volunteers are placed in rural, and often remote, villages. Their goal is to support community-based groups—such as women’s and youth groups—to improve their project design and management skills, and to support individuals and families as they build income-generating activities and related money management skills. Volunteers must be comfortable with ambiguity, very entrepreneurial, and committed to working with communities to identify opportunities. To accomplish this, Volunteers generally follow this sequence:

Upon arrival to their villages, Volunteers spend three months proactively learning about and integrating into their communities. In an intentional way, they settle into local rhythms, joining their neighbors’ daily activities, such as farming, fishing, washing, cooking, and drinking kava. With village counterparts (i.e., the mayor and leaders of women’s and youth groups), they also co-lead participatory activities focused on developing relationships.

In time, the objective of those collaborative participatory activities shifts toward uncovering village assets, needs and development priorities. With counterparts, Volunteers co-plan and co-facilitate community trainings, workshops and focus-group discussions on topics such as project management, income-generating activities, and financial literacy.

As needed and appropriate, Volunteers support their communities’ efforts to find and solicit support from the many Government Ministries, international donors and NGOs that provide relevant funding.

Finally, Volunteers and counterparts use coaching skills to support community members as they deepen and leverage their new abilities, cheerleading and celebrating successes along the way. Activities may include the development of cooperatives, communal projects, community savings groups, and an array of income-generating activities. Volunteers work within existing communal systems, and they are not assigned to a specific business or local project in their village.

The focus of this approach is mutual learning and sustainable growth, where Volunteers do not take the lead in identifying priorities or implementing projects, but support the discussion and prioritization of community needs. The Peace Corps defines Volunteer success by the quality of community learning and initiatives that they support, rather than the number or size of the projects they complete. For Volunteers who arrive to Fiji fresh out of the achievement-driven pulse of many U.S. colleges and jobs, the quiet pace and hands-off approach of Peace Corps’ development model can take some adjustment. Rather than managing much themselves, Volunteers support the bolstering of a suite of foundational economic and organizational skills that, when understood deeply and wielded with diligence over time, can be transformational.

This job begins and ends with heartfelt integration into rural, conservative, unhurried villages. Volunteers’ first priority is to be engaged neighbors and friends, building genuine connections with the people around them. Along the way, there are vibrant opportunities for Volunteers to leverage their business skills and passions, catalyzing the economic advancement of the community they come to call home.

Learn more about what Volunteers do in country by visiting our Fiji project page.