User:Ian Siphiwe Goldman/Ian Goldman

Ian Goldman is a rural development and decentralisation specialist, who has worked in many countries focusing on improving practice in addressing sustainable livelihoods and community-driven development. He was born in South Africa of parents Gerald Goldman and Andra Goldman nee Noriskin. His parents moved to the UK when he was 8 for political reasons. He did a degree in Soil Science at Reading University, worked in Mexico as a solis/agronomist, and then did a Masters degree in Tropical Agricultural Development, also at Reading. Ian worked in Zambia from 1982-87 on a pioneering project, IRDP Mpika-Serenje-Chinsali, one of the last Integrated Rural Development Programmes which recognised the need to institutionalise capacity to address rural development in local government (1). This established a model for District Development Programmes working with local government that were reflected in many others programmes in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Tanzania amongst other countries, and lessons incorporated in later community-driven development programmes.

Ian then moved back to the UK where he worked in a rural development NGO, the National Rural Enterprise Centre of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, working on rural economic development in the UK, and also with Europe. He helped to set up a rural NGO network, VIRGIL.

After the democratic elections in South Africa in 1994, Ian returned to South Africa as a Management Advisor working with the Rural Strategy Unit, a change management unit attached to the Free State Department of Agriculture. This pioneered approaches to transforming the public sector in South Africa, which was written up in his PhD at the University of Witwatersrand called Managing Rural Change - transforming the rural sector in the Free State, South Africa. In 1998 Ian established Khanya-managing rural change with James Carnegie and Moscow (Joe) Marumo, a collectively owned company which specialised in issues around sustainable livelihoods and community-driven development, in particular looking at how to link communities with the services that are meant to serve them. They worked with partners in Uganda, Zimbabwe, Ghana and South Africa developed a methodology of participatory planning called community-based planning which was adopted in Uganda (as the Harmonised Participatory-Planning Guide), in South Africa and used widely in Zimbabwe (2). Another theme has been on community-based approaches to service delivery, which are widely practiced but little recognised or supported, and he worked with partners in Uganda. Kenya, Lesotho and South Africa on this theme (3). In 2005 Khanya-managing rural change was transformed into an NGO, Khanya-African Institute for Community-Driven Development (www.khanya-aicdd.org) and Ian became the founder CEO.

In 2009 Ian left Khanya-aicdd to join a project of South Africa's Presidency, the Programme for Support to Pro-Poor Policy Development (PSSPD), which seeks to build the capacity of policy-makers and researchers to generate and use research evidence to improve policy relating to poverty and inequality (www.psppd.org.za). The project is funded by the EU. In January 2011 Ian joined South Africa's Presidency in the Department of Performance Monitoring and Evaluation as a deputy-director general working on programme coordination.

Since 2005 Ian has also been a trustee of the Mvula Trust, a water and sanitation NGO using community-based approaches (www.mvula.org.za). He is also on the advisory board of ColaLife, an NGO working to promote the use of the CocaCola distribution infrastructure for social purposes (www.colalife.org).

References 1. 1988		'Facilitating Sustainable Rural Development: A Case Study from Zambia'. Journal of International Development 1 (2) p 217-230 2. 2004	August 2004 edition of PLA Notes on Decentralisation and Community-Based Planning, London, International Institute for Environment and Development. http://pubs.iied.org/9312IIED.html?k=community-based%20planning. 3. 2007	“Community-Based Worker Systems – a possible solution to more services, reaching many communities, and within budget”, ODI Natural Resource Perspective 110, October 2007, London, Overseas Development Institute.