People are always the key agents of change. Community-based group members, village health workers, volunteers, extensionists, migrant workers, teachers, women, elderly and young people – be they acting as individuals or in the form of organisations – have great potential to contribute to rural community development. At the local level, we call these key actors ‘Community Facilitators'. They live and work within their own communities and actively participate in activities for improving community life. Building up the capacity of these Community Facilitators is an integral part, or the ‘Primary Approach', of almost all PCD programmes.

PCD's Community Facilitators Training Programme aims to build up a platform for sharing of experience and mutual learning among facilitators, and between PCD and facilitators. We organise initial training workshops from time to time, for facilitators to share ideas on community development, and to enhance facilitators' knowledge and skills in facilitating collective action for community improvement.

Learning takes various means and it does not stop with the workshops. PCD employs an experiential learning process. Facilitators put learning into practice in an actual community context. We all work together to reflect on the process of community facilitation, including people's roles, skills, methodologies, and innovation. We view facilitation as an art and a science, to be analysed. Learning accumulates from such an action-reflection process and in turn will form important input into the on-going refinement of the Training Programme.

Facilitators do not only come to master different facilitation techniques, they are also enabled to analyse and articulate development issues facing local communities from perspectives that take social, cultural and ecological aspects into account.

Community facilitators' workshops take a participatory approach. They are fun, enjoyable and are conducted in a friendly environment. PCD has organised two initial Facilitation Skills Training Workshops for Rural Community Workers which were attended by 25 to 30 participants in each workshop, people from local communities, NGO workers, PCD local staff, and staff from local government counterparts.

In the long run, we want to develop a training curriculum for Community Facilitators in PCD's programmes.