Community asset mapping has to be the magical key to unlocking the potential of a community and turning it into a reality. I realized this after I conducted one at Mwanika, Meru County. Underdevelopment and poverty that often roam in our communities are mostly driven by the mindset of the community members. If we manage to change the mindset of our community members from always waiting for help from external sources and embracing the power of needs rather than the power of assets and resources, we can forget about poverty and underdevelopment.

More than often when you ask any community about development, you’ll realize that they just define themselves based on their challenges, rather than resilience, creativity, and the resources that they have. They will always focus on their deficiencies rather than their strengths. We should encourage our community members to always look at the existing assets and resources and how they can be leveraged to create sustainable and lasting impacts. This will help them to thrive economically and own their future.

Community mapping exercise involves diverse groups in the community such as local leaders, youths, men and women, and sometimes even children. This helps in gathering diverse insights concerning the community. Achieving that requires asking several open-ended questions such as; where do you spend most of your time? What is the most valuable asset in this community? What is the least important asset in the community and why? By asking such questions, you can integrate completely with the community and also help in the self-discovery of the people through sharing their knowledge and perspectives, identifying assets at their disposal, and bringing new ideas about themselves and the development of the community.

Through the exercise we did with my community on 22nd November, my community is now empowered to fuel development or rather put solutions to their needs into reality, using the assets and resources they discovered. I felt encouraged by the sense of self-reliance that prevailed among them after the exercise.