NextierIn writing Development as Freedom, one of the essential freedoms suggested by Amatya Sen is “the liberty of acting as citizens who matter and whose voices count” (1999: 288). Involving the poor in the assessment of their needs, opportunities and solutions to their challenges resolves the problem of exclusion as a dimension of poverty.
The power of democracy lies in participation. This happens largely, through compromise and consensus in a conversational process for policy input. For instance, people can indicate the type of education they want and how best they could contribute in funding it, how to distribute farm input to smallholder farmers, need for internet-enabled education for their children and wards among others.
