Our Work

CDI employs a multidisciplinary and multi-sectoral approach to address policy and knowledge gaps within government, and civil society that account for entrenched underdevelopment, skewed beneficiary outreach and the overriding lack of beneficiary engagement to, and ownership of, development interventions.

Central to the work of CDI is our focus on replicable endogenous knowledge and skills that will lead to sustainable local development actions that empower our target groups: the poor, marginalized and voiceless majority. This supposes that we engage with stakeholders upstream and downstream, and intervene at the micro, meso and macro level.

CDI’s work is driven by a dedicated cohort of home-based and external experts drawn from the academia, liberal professions and civil society, renowned for their hands-on expertise in development training, action research, community-based interventions, advocacy, capacity building and project/programme management.

CDI focuses its research, advocacy and capacity-building initiatives on 3 programme areas which are Agriculture, Climate and Forestry, and targets community-based organisations and other communities of practice as primary beneficiaries of its interventions.

In this regard, intervention areas include the following broad nomenclatures:

• Gender and social inclusion
• Community-based natural resource management
• Urban forestry
• Agroforestry
• Ecosystem-based adaptation (for food security)