Chief Fombin on Community-Led Development
In a candid conversation, Chief Fombin Fonkeng reflects on what it means to lead a community through crisis, and why he believes the Foundation's approach is fundamentally different.
BLF Communications
Foundation Communications Team
Chief Fombin Fonkeng has led his community through drought, displacement, and the long shadow of the Anglophone crisis. He has seen NGOs arrive with promises and leave with photographs. He has watched well-funded programmes fail because they were designed in offices far from the communities they claimed to serve.
When the Battiston Lyonga Foundation first approached his community, he was cautious.
"I told them: I have heard this before," he says. "Come back when you have listened more than you have spoken."
“Development that does not begin with listening is not development. It is imposition. And imposition, however well-intentioned, does not last.”
They came back. And they listened.
Chief Fombin is now one of the Foundation's most trusted community partners — not because he was persuaded by a presentation, but because he watched the organisation do what it said it would do, adjust when it got things wrong, and consistently put the community's priorities above its own programme targets.
"Development that does not begin with listening is not development," he says. "It is imposition. And imposition, however well-intentioned, does not last."
The conversation with Chief Fombin covers the history of development work in his community, the specific ways the Foundation's approach has differed, and his vision for what sustainable community development looks like.
"The Foundation understands something that many organisations do not: that communities are not problems to be solved. They are partners to be respected. They have knowledge, they have systems, they have leadership. The question is whether you are willing to work within those structures or whether you want to replace them with your own."
He is particularly proud of the community health volunteer network that has grown out of the Foundation's healthcare programme — twelve local residents, trained and equipped, who now serve as the first point of contact for health concerns in the community.
"Those twelve people are ours," he says. "They are not the Foundation's. They are our community's. That is the difference between a programme and a legacy."
