Our work

Connecting Communities – Our Theory of Change

Citizen centered development has, as its key principle, the inversion of power away from the “experts” who seek to “save” communities, to the citizens themselves as designers and co-creators of their own future.

Local Government and Citizen Engagement Program

Purpose: To accompany citizens and communities to achieve their full human potential through creating, facilitating and fostering spaces for critical dialogue and change.

CSO Mentoring and Strengthening Program

Purpose: To contribute to the development of an effective and united voice of civil society in KwaZulu Natal, through supporting and capacitating the KZN CSO Coalition.

Community of Practice

Purpose: To support and nurture community development practitioners that DDP has trained as community facilitators, using our connecting communities approach.

Democracy, Voter & Civic Education

In 2012 the NDP ignited the national imagination with its possibility to regain the fervour and spirit of South Africa’s can-do attitude. The NDP remains a hopeful and visionary document, despite its shortcomings.

Parliamentary Program

The Democracy Development Program (DDP) exists to deepen the practice of democracy in South Africa. It seeks to build strong and active communities that can hold those in power to account. The programme seeks to promote civil society engagement with the KZN provincial legislature towards deepening accountability and promotion of good governance in the process, promote public engagement with the legislature through its various programmes.

Political Party Capacity Development

Political parties may be guided in their structure and functioning by external regulations, such as the Constitution or laws and regulations, by internal party rules, such as the Party Constitution, or by both. Practice, however, may differ from written Party Constitutions or internal rules. Given that political parties perform such important tasks in democracies today, their internal functioning becomes very important. Aspects of this include the policy-formulation and general decision-making process of the political party, the involvement of members and party groups, and the accountability of the party leadership.

Women in Politics and Leadership

Almost two decades into the 21st century, women are still not accorded a place of prominence in politics, particularly in Africa. However, South Africa has made notable progress, and has arguably one of the most gender-diverse parliaments in the world, ranking number three in Africa and tenth globally. However, it still falls short in achieving gender parity.  In response to this breaking this inertia, the program aims at mobilizing, training, and nurturing women interested in politics so that they can participate actively and confidently in the political arena to influence politics in South Africa.

Youth in Politics and Leadership

Domestic and global challenges facing young people require multidisciplinary approaches if they will be addressed satisfactorily. These challenges include unemployment, poverty inequality, HIV/AIDS and hunger to mention a few. Due to their scale, these challenges continue to disempower young people in a variety of ways. One of the ways these challenges are disempowering them is by entrenching a sense of despair about their future. As such, by nature, young people become despondent about their future where no hope is insight. Consequently, they become inactive in their communities to an extent that they abdicate their democratic rights, which if enforced, would grant them a future full of possibilities. This is the motivation underpinning DDP’s youth programmes. At the its heart is a desire to develop and nurture a cadre of young people who possess a sense of identity based on common values, a shared history and culture, who can take charge of their future as active citizens and play a significant role in promoting democratic values in their own communities. This broad-based and multi-faceted programme works with young people from all backgrounds, race, religion, gender as well as across ages of between 20 -35 years comprising of out-of-school youths including youths in tertiary institutions.

Media and Democracy

The Democracy Development Program (DDP) is dedicated to deepening the practice of democracy in South Africa. One of the key areas of their work is with community media, which plays a crucial role in promoting active citizenship and ensuring that diverse voices are heard.