Community participation takes different forms in different situations.
It includes, but is not limited to, receiving information and services and providing labour for the construction of the infrastructure required for carrying out development programmes. Experience shows that active participation in programmes can solve many of these problems. There is increasing evidence of the inappropriate and often harmful effects of large-scale, centralized planning of nutrition interventions on local communities when such planning does not take into account the needs and resources of these communities . If an intervention is not designed to meet the felt needs of a community, it is unlikely to have much effect. For example, in the Bolivian government-sponsored Project for the Incorporation of Women in Development, in Chiquisaca, Bolivia, in which local women did not participate in identifying priority needs, government health workers trained them in environmental, sanitation, and health practices.