Definitions of Community Development

Community Development: A group of people with common characteristics or

interest living together within a larger society or body of persons or nations
having a common history or common social, economic, and political interests.

Community must be defined so stakeholders can be identified and

appropriately involved in the various stages of the community Development
process.

Community Development is the participation of people in a mutual learning

experience involving themselves, their local resources, external change agents,
and outside resources.

People can only develop themselves by participating in activities which affect

their wellbeing. People are not being developed when they are herded (driven)
like animals into new ventures ( Nyerere, 1968).

Background and Concept of Community Development

Community Development seeks to empower individuals and groups of people

by providing them with skills they need to effect change within their
communities. These skills are often created through the formation of large
social groups working for a common agenda.

It’s a broad term given to the practices of civil leaders, activists, involved
citizens and professionals to improve various aspects of communities, typically
aiming to build stronger and more resilient local communities.

Key terms to understand in Communities in Community Development:

Complete Communities
Community Practice
Community Engagement
Community Education
Community Building
Community Workshop
Complete Communities

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Complete communities is an urban and rural planning concept that aims to
meet the basic needs of all residents in a community, regardless of income,
culture, or political ideologies through integrated land use planning,
transportation planning, and community design. While the concept is used by
many communities as part their community plan, each plan interprets what
complete community means in their own way. The idea of complete has roots
in early planning theory, beginning with the Garden City Movement, and is a
component of contemporary planning methods including smart growth.

Defining elements
The ‘complete community’ is seen as a way to deal with issues of social
isolation, address inefficient land uses and meet the needs of diverse
households. A common definition of a complete community is one where
people live, work and play, and where the automobile is left at home in favor of
walking and public transport. This is supported by a diverse housing mix. While
each community applies the term in its own way as part of its community
plans, there are several defining elements.
Densification- A benchmark for complete communities is access to services
within a five-minute walk, which contrasts the typical sprawl associated with
the suburbs.

Diverse housing mix

In Canada, many municipalities have focused on providing a mix housing types
as the key component of creating a complete community based on directives
from provincial and regional policies.

Diverse land use mix

Complete communities advocate for densification within existing
neighborhoods to provide services to users which sometimes run in contrast to
zoning regulations currently there. Barriers to complete communities include
zoning and bylaws that don’t promote building with diverse uses and design in
mind.

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Employment options
One central goal of developing complete communities involves promoting a
concentration of employment opportunities, with a labor force both working
and living within the geographic boundaries of the community. This is believed
to be response to the negative effects associated with commuter towns.

Transportation options
As the suburbs grew, roadways that prioritized the automobile grew with them.
Especially in the U.S., widened and expanded metropolitan areas led to poor
inner-suburb communities, which worked to destroy the connection to the
neighborhoods, institutions, parks and town centers. Planning began to
advocate for a community plan where a mix of housing types and uses in
compact form would be centered on transportation nodes (enlargement) for
ease of mobility of residents.

Community Practice
Community also known as macro practice or community work is branch of
social work in the United States that focuses on larger social systems and social
change, and is tied to the historical roots of United States social work. The field
of community practice social work encompasses community organizing and
community organization, community building, social planning, human service
management, community development, policy analysis, policy advocacy,
mediation, electronic advocacy and other larger systems of interventions.

Theoretical Models of Community Practice

Due to community work’s applied nature, theory is not always considered
necessary or even utilized. Despite this, there are number of theoretical
models of community practice that guide the practitioner toward social action.
These theoretical models have evolved from proto-models utilized in the
progressive Era to the present day. Synthesized from the work of Jane Adams
and others, community practice has been crafted into eight theoretical models:
2. Organizing functional community
3. Social, economic, and sustainable development
4. Inclusive program development
5. Social planning

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7. Political and Social Action
8. Movements for Progressive Change

❖ Neighborhood and Community Organization- Direct capacity of people

to organize; direct/moderate impacts of outside development.
❖ Organizing Functional Communities- Action for social justice focus on
providing a service and simultaneously changing attitudes.
❖ Social, Economic, and sustainable development- Promote grassroots
plans that incorporate economic growth without harming resources;
open new opportunities.
❖ Inclusive Program Development- Expansion or redirection of programs
to improve service and become more participatory.
❖ Social Planning- Actions and proposals for action by neighborhoods,
planning councils, or elected bodies.
❖ Coalitions- Grassroots effort amongst populace to influence program
directions; made through partnerships.
❖ Political and Social Action- Action for social change focus toward
changing policies.
❖ Movements for Progressive Change- Action provide new paradigms for
healthy development of individuals and the earth.

Community Practice versus

Historically, social work practice has been divided between two different
categories: micro practice and macro practice. Although there is often an
overlap in skills between the two areas, micro- practitioners generally focus on
working with individuals whereas macro macro -practitioners generally work
on creating change in a larger social, political or community systems.
Macro-social work professions that typically engage in community practice
methods include: community organizers, political organizers, fundraisers,
program managers, and community educators. A third social work practice
category is sometimes referenced as ‘mezzo practice’. Mezzo practice can
define by its combination of micro and macro aspects with the focus of
interventions being smaller groups or systems. Whereas macro practice often
focuses on policy or systematic changes, some researchers and practitioners
consider mezzo practice to focus more on change at the community or

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neighborhood level. Because there is often an overlap between macro and
mezzo, some argue mezzo practice to be a sub-category within macro social
work. Although it makes up a smaller portion of social work practice, mezzo
practice represents an effective way to bridge some of the perceived distances
between micro and macro practice methods.

Community Engagement
Community engagement is involvement and participation in an organization for
the welfare of the community. Volunteer’s actions, which involve giving
personal time to projects in humanitarian NGOs religious groups, are forms of
community involvement. The engagement is generally motivated by values and
ideals of social justice. Community engagement can be volunteering at food
banks, homeless, shelters, emergency assistance programs, neighborhood
cleanup programs, etc. It’s also defined as ‘a dynamic relational process that
facilitates communication, interaction, involvement, and exchange between
organizations. Community engagement is a community-centered orientation
based in dialogue. Community engagement enables a more contextualized
understanding of community members’ perception of the topics and contexts,
and facilitates stronger relationships amongst and between community
members.

Community Education
Community education, also known as community based education or
community learning and development is an organization’s programs to
promote learning and social development work with individuals and groups in
their communities using a range of formal and informal methods. A common
defining feature is that programs and activities are developed in a dialogue
with communities and participants. The purpose of community learning and
development is to develop the capacity of individuals and groups of all ages
through their actions, the capacity of communities, to improve their quality of
life. Central to this is their ability to participate in democratic processes.
Community education encompasses all those occupations and approaches that
are concerned with running education and development programs within local
communities, rather than within educational intuitions such as schools,
colleges and universities.

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Community Building
Community Building is a field of practices directed toward the creation or
enhancement of community among individuals within regional area (such as a
neighborhood) or with a common need or interest. It’s often encompassed
under the fields of community organizing, community organization, community
work, and community development. A wide variety of practices can be utilized
for community building, ranging from simple events like potlucks (chances) and
small book clubs, to large-scale efforts such mass festivals and building
construction projects that involve local participants rather than outside
contractors.

Organization workshop
This is based on learning event where participants master new organizational
as well as social knowledge and skills through a learning-by-doing approach. It’s
aimed at large groups of unemployed and underemployed, a large number of
whom sometimes may be persons with lower levels of education. The OW
addresses locally identified problems which can only be solved by collaborating
groups. During a workshop participants form a temporary enterprise which
they themselves manage, an enterprise which contracts to do work at market
rates. Once the workshop temporary enterprise is over, organizational,
management and vocational skills gained can be used to form new business or
social enterprises.

Dimensions of Community

Place
Popularity
Political system
Social Organization
Cultural System
Economic System

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. Structural Changes in a Community, including the use of resources and the
function of institutions
- Increased Capacity of people
. Outcome
- More Community asset such as jobs, income, buildings, and city parks.
- More resources being used by people.

- A comprehensive process to manage change that involves citizens

creating a shared vision for the future.
- Citizens participation, both in purpose and function, distinguishes
community Development from other types of interventions
- Unless people buy into self-help and the decision-making is open to all
stakeholders, the process should not be designated as Community
Development.
Distinguishing Characteristics of Community Development

. Focuses on whole Community

. Emphasizes public participation as self-help
. Uses participatory democracy as a model for decision-making
. Use a holistic approach
. Often initiates the process using a paid professional

Why Practice Community Development?

- Allows people to participate in a civil dialogue

- Gives voice to ordinary citizens
- Creates a common vision for the community
-- Improves crisis response
--- It doesn’t matter where community Development is on the spectrums
of success.
- It matters how citizens are engaged in the decision-making process.
- Can sustain Community success despite minimal problems.
- Addresses a critical need, such as safety
- Can be the healing of a divided community
- Decreases feelings of hopelessness after years of neglectful community
building.
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 Framework of Community
Assumptions
Values
Principles
Practice
. Assumptions-
. People are capable of rational behavior
. Important behavior is learned behavior
. Important behavior is learned through interaction over time
. People can give purposeful direction to their behavior
. People can impact their environment toward a desired future.

. Values
- All People have basic dignity
- People have the right to make decisions on issues that impact their
wellbeing
- Participatory Democracy is the best way to conduct a community’s civil
business
- People have the right to strive to create the environment they want
- They have the right to reject an externally imposed environment
- The more purposeful interaction and dialogue within a community, the
more potential for learning and development.
. Principles
- Self-help and self-responsibility are required for successful Development
- Participation in public decision-making should be free and open to all
citizens.
- - Understanding and general agreement are the basis for community
change
- T rust is essential for effective working relationships.

. Practice
- The results that occur from the community Development process
- Outcomes can be physical environmental, or human capital; financial
resources ; or social capital

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 - An orderly set of steps lead to problem solving, program planning and
task completion
- People develop the ability to collectively help themselves and reduce
reliance on external resources.

Community development is a process where community members come

together to take collective action and generate solutions to common problems.
Community wellbeing (economic, social, environmental and cultural) often
evolves from this type of collective action being taken at a grassroots level.
Community development ranges from small initiatives within a small group to
large initiatives that involve the broader community.

Effective community development should be:

• A long-term endeavor
• Well-planned
• Inclusive equitable
• Holistic and integrated into the bigger picture
• Initiated and supported by community members
• Of benefit to the community
• Grounded in experience that leads to best practices

Community development is a grassroots process by which communities:

• Become more responsible

• Organize and plan together
• Develop healthy lifestyle options
• • Empower themselves
• Reduce poverty and suffering
• Create employment and economic opportunities
• Achieve social, economic, cultural and environmental goals

Community development seeks to improve quality of life. Effective community

development results in mutual benefit and share responsibility among
community members. Such development recognizes:

• Achieve social, economic, cultural and environmental goals

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Community development seeks to improve quality of life. Effective community
development results in mutual benefit and shared responsibility among
community members. Such development recognizes:

• The connection between social, cultural, environmental and economic

matters
• The diversity of interests within a community
• Its relationship to building capacity

Community development helps to build community capacity in order to address

issues and take advantage of opportunities, find common ground and balance
competing interests. It doesn’t just happen — capacity building requires both a
conscious and a conscientious effort to do something (or many things) to
improve the community.

Community

Often when we think of community, we think in geographic terms. Our

community is the city, two or village where we live. When community is
defined through physical location, it has precise boundaries that are readily
understood and accepted by others.’ Defining communities in terms of
geography, however, is only one way of looking at them. Communities can also
be defined by common cultural heritage, language, and beliefs or shared
interest. These are sometimes called communities of interest. Even when
community does refer to a geographical location, it doesn’t always include
everyone within the area. For example, many Aborigine! Communities are part
of a large non-Aboriginal geography. In larger urban centers, communities are
often defined in terms of particular neighborhoods.

Most of us belong to more than one community, whether we’re aware of it or

not. For example, an individual can be part of a neighborhood community, a
religious community and a community of shared interests all at the same time.
Relationships whether with people or the land, define a community for each
individual.

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For example, an individual can be part of a neighborhood community, a
religious community and a community of shared interests all at the same time.
Relationships, whether with people or the land, define a community for each
individual.
Development
The term “development” often carries an assumption of growth and expansion.
During the industrial era, development was strongly connected to increased
speed, volume and size. However, many people are currently questioning the
concept of growth for numerous reasons — a realization that more isn’t always
better, or an increasing respect for reducing outside dependencies and lowering
levels of consumerism. So while the term “development: may not always mean
growth, it always imply change.

- The community development process takes charge of the conditions and

factors that influence a community and changes the quality of life of its
members. Community development is a tool for managing change but it is not:

• A quick fix or a short-term response to a specific issue within a

community;
• A process that seeks to exclude community members from participating;
or
• An initiative that occurs in isolation from other related community
activities.
• Community development is about community building as such, where
the process is as important as the results. One of the primary challenges
of community development is to balance the need for long-term
solutions with the day-to-day realities that require immediate
decision-making and short-term action.
>What are the core values of community development?
• Respect. We value the inherent worth, dignity, diversity, and abilities of
all individuals, families, groups and communities.
• Equality
• Meaningful Participation
• Meaningful Process
• Integrity
• Inclusion
• Collaboration

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What are some community values?
• Respect for the right, differences, and dignity of others
• Honesty and integrity in dealing with all members of the community
• Accountability for personal behavior

>What are the benefits of the community?

• Learning from each other’s mistakes
• Exchanging tips of the trade
• Passing on knowledge
• Making connections
• Learning new business skills

The United Nations defines community development as “a process where

community members come together to take collective action and generate
solutions to common problems.” It is a broad term given to the practices of civil
leaders, activists, involved citizens and professionals to improve various aspects
of communities, typically aiming to build stronger and more resilient local
communities.

Community development is also understood as a professional discipline, and is

defined by the International Association for Community Development
(www.iacdglobal.org), the global network of community development
practitioners and scholars, as “a practice-based profession and an academic
discipline that promotes participative democracy, sustainable development,
rights, economic opportunity, equality and social justice, through the
organization, education and empowerment of people within their communities,
whether these be of locality, identity or interest, in urban and rural settings”.

Community development seeks to empower individuals and groups of people

with the skills they need to effect change within their communities. These skills
are often created through the formation of social groups working for a common
agenda. Community developers must understand both how to work with
individuals and how to affect communities’ positions within the context of
larger social institutions.

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Community development as a term has taken off widely in Anglophone
countries i.e. the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and New
Zealand and other countries in the Commonwealth of Nations. It is also used in
some countries in Eastern Europe with active community development
associations in Hungary and Romania. The Community Development Journal,
published by Oxford University Press, since 1966 has aimed to be the major
forum for research and dissemination of international community development
theory and practice.

Community development approaches are recognized internationally. These

methods and approaches have been acknowledged as significant for local social,
economic, cultural, environmental and political development by such
organizations as the UN, WHO, OECD, World Bank, Council of Europe and
EU.

Definitions
There are complementary definitions of community development.
The United Nations defines community development broadly as “a process
where community members come together to take collective action and generate
solutions to common problems.” and the International Association for
Community Development defines it as both a practice based profession and an
academic discipline. Following the adoption of the IACD definition in 2016, the
association has gone on to produce International Standards for Community
Development Practice. The values and ethos that should underpin practice; these
can be expressed as: Commitment to rights, solidarity, democracy, equality,
environmental and social justice. The purpose of community development is
understood by IACD as being to work with communities to achieve
participative democracy, sustainable development, rights, economic opportunity,
equality and
Social justice. This practice is carried out by people in different roles and
contexts, including people explicitly called professional community workers
(and people taking on essentially the same role but with a different job title),
together with professionals in other occupations ranging from social work, adult
education, youth work, health disciplines, environmental education, local
economic development, to urban planning, regeneration, architecture and more
who seek to apply community development values and adopt community
development methods. Community development practice also encompasses a

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range of occupational settings and levels from development roles working with
communities, through to managerial and strategic community planning roles.

The Community Development Challenge report, which was produced by a

working party comprising leading UK organizations in the field (including the
(now defunct) Community Development Foundation, the (now defunct)
Community Development Exchange and the Federation for Community
Development Learning) defines community development as:

A set of values and practices which plays a special role in overcoming poverty
and disadvantage, knitting society together at the grass roots and deepening
democracy. There is a community development profession, defined by national
occupational standards and a body of theory and experience going back the best
part of a century. There are active citizens who use community development
techniques on a voluntary basis, and there are also other professions and
agencies which use a community development approach or some aspects of it.

Community Development Exchange defines community development asboth an

occupation (such as a community development worker in a local authority) and
a way of working with communities. Its key purpose is to build communities
based on justice, equality and mutual respect.

Community development involves changing the relationships between ordinary

people and people in positions of power, so that everyone can take part in the
issues that affect their lives. It starts from the principle that within any
community there is a wealth of knowledge and experience which, if used in
creative ways, can be channeled into collective action to achieve the
communities’ desired goals.

Community development practitioners work alongside people in communities to

help build relationships with key people and organizations and to identify
common concerns. They create opportunities for the community to learn new
skills and, by enabling people to act together, community development
practitioners help to foster social inclusion and equality.

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Different approaches
There are numerous overlapping approaches to community development. Some
focus on the processes, some on the outcomes and objectives include:

Women Self-help Group; focusing on the contribution of women in settlement

groups.
Community capacity building; focusing on helping communities obtain,
strengthen, and maintain the ability to set and achieve their own development
objectives.
Large Group Capacitation; an adult education and social psychology approach
grounded in the activity of the individual and the social psychology of the large
group focusing on large groups of unemployed or

Social capital formation; focusing on benefits derived from the cooperation

between individuals and groups.
Nonviolent direct action; when a group of people take action to reveal an
existing problem, highlight an alternative, or demonstrate a possible solution to
a social issue which is not being addressed through traditional societal
institutions (governments, religious organizations or established trade unions)
are not addressing to the satisfaction of the direct action participants.
Economic development, focusing on the “development” of developing
countries as measured by their economies, although it includes the processes
and policies by which a nation improves the economic, political, and social
well-being of its people.
Community economic development (CED); an alternative to conventional
economic development which encourages using local resources in a way that
enhances economic outcomes while improving social conditions. For example,
CED involves strategies which aim to improve access to affordable housing,
medical, and child care.

o A worker cooperative is a progressive CED strategy that

operates as businesses both managed and owned by their
employees. They are beneficial due to their potential to create jobs
and providing a route for grassroots political action. Some
challenges that the worker cooperative faces include, the mending
of the cooperative’s identity as both business and as a democratic
humanitarian organization. They are limited in resources and scale.

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 • Sustainable development; which seeks to achieve, in a balanced manner,
economic development, social development and environmental protection
outcomes.
• Community-driven development (CDD), an economic development
model which shifts overreliance on central governments to local
communities.
• Asset-based community development (ABCD); is a methodology that
seeks to uncover and use the strengths within communities as a means for
sustainable development.
• Faith-based community development; which utilizes faith-based
organizations to bring about community development outcomes.
• Community-based participatory research (CBPR); a partnership
approach to research that equitably involves, for example, community
members, organizational representatives, and researchers in all aspects of
the research process and in which all partners contribute expertise and
share decision making and ownership, which aims to integrate this
knowledge with community development outcomes.
• Community organizing; a term used to describe an approach that
generally assumes that social change necessarily involves conflict and
social struggle in order to generate collective power for the powerless.
• Participatory planning including community-based planning (CBP);
involving the entire community in the strategic and management
processes of urban planning; or, community-level planning processes,
urban or rural.
• Language-based development; or Language revitalization focuses on
the use of a language so. That it serves the needs of a community. This
may involve the creation of books, films and other media in the language.
These actions help a small language community to preserve their
language and culture.

• Methodologies focusing on the educational component of community

development, including the community-wide empowerment that
increased educational opportunity create.
• Methodologies addressing the issues and challenges of the Digital divide,
making affordable training and access to computers and the Internet,

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 addressing the marginalization of local communities that cannot connect
and participate in the global Online community. In the United States,
nonprofit organizations such as Per Scholars seek to “break the cycle of
poverty by providing education, technology and economic opportunities
to individuals, families and communities” as a path to development for
the communities they serve.

There are a myriad of job titles for community development workers and their
employers include public authorities and voluntary or non-governmental
organizations, funded by the state and by independent grant making bodies.
Since the nineteen seventies the prefix word ‘community’ has also been adopted
by several other occupations from the police and health workers to planners and
architects, who have been influenced by community development approaches.
History

Amongst the earliest community development approaches were those developed

in Kenya and British East Africa during the 1930s. Community development
practitioners have over many years developed a range of approaches for
working within local communities and in particular with disadvantaged people.
Since the nineteen sixties and seventies through the various anti-poverty
programs in both developed and developing countries, community development
practitioners have been influenced by structural analyses as to the causes of
disadvantage and poverty.

i.e. inequalities in the distribution of wealth, income, land, etc. and especially
political power and the need to mobilize people power to affect social change.
Thus the influence of such educators as Paulo Freire and his focus upon this
work. Other key people who have influenced this field are Saul Alinsky (Rules
for Radicals) and E.F. Schumacher (Small is Beautiful). There are a number of
international organizations that support community development, 1or example,
Oxfam, UNICEF, The Hunger Project and Freedom from Hunger, run
community development programs based upon community development
initiatives for relief and prevention of malnutrition. Since 2006 the Dragon
Dreaming Project Management techniques have spread to 37 different countries
and are engaged in an estimated 3,250 projects worldwide.

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In the global North

In the 19th century, the work of the Welsh early socialist thinker Robert Owen
(1771—1851), sought to create a more perfect community. At New Lanark and
at later communities such as Oneida in the USA and the New Australia
Movement in Australia, groups of people came together to create utopian or
intentional communities, with mixed success.

United States

In the United States in the 1960s, the term “community development” began to
complement and generally replace the idea of urban renewal, which typically
focused on physical development projects often at the expense of working-class
communities. One of the earliest proponents of the term in the United States
was social scientist William W. Biddle in the late 1 960s, philanthropies such as
the Ford Foundation and government officials such as Senator Robert F.
Kennedy took an interest in local nonprofit organizations. A pioneer was the
Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation in Brooklyn, which attempted to
apply business and management skills to the social mission of uplifting
low-income residents and their neighborhoods. Eventually such groups became
known as “Community development corporations” or CDCs. Federal laws
beginning with the 1974 Housing and Community Development Act provided a
way for state and municipal governments to channel funds to CDCs and other
nonprofit organizations.

National organizations such as the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation

(founded in 1978 and flow known as Neighbor Works America), the Local
Initiatives Support Corporation (USC) (founded in 1980), and the Enterprise
Foundation (founded in 1981) have built extensive networks of affiliated local
nonprofit organizations to which they help provide financing for countless
physical and social development programs in urban and rural communities. The
CDCs and similar organizations have been credited with starting the process
that stabilized and revived seemingly hopeless inner city areas such as the South
Bronx in New York City.

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United Kingdom
In the UK, community development has had two main traditions. The first was
as an approach for preparing for the independence of countries from the former
British Empire in the 1950s and 1960s. Domestically it first came into public
prominence with the Labour Government’s anti-deprivation programmes of the
latter sixties and seventies. The main example of this being the CDP
(Community Development Programme), which piloted local area based
community development. This influenced a number of largely urban local
authorities, in particular in Scotland with Strathclyde Region’s major
community development programme (the largest at the time in Europe).

The Gulbenkian Foundation was a key funder of commissions and reports

which influenced the development of community development in the UK from
the latter sixties to the 80’s. This included recommending that there be a
national institute or centre for community development, able to support practice
and to advise government and local authorities on policy. This was formally set
up in 1991 as the Community Development Foundation. In 2004 the Carnegie
UK Trust established a Commission of Inquiry into the future of rural
community development examining such issues as land reform and climate
change. Carnegie funded over sixty rural community development action
research projects across the UK and Ireland and national and international
communities of practice to exchange experiences. This included the
International Association for Community Development.

In 1999, a UK wide organization responsible for setting professional training

standards for all. Education and development practitioners working within local
communities was established and recognized by the Labour Government. This
organization was called PAULO — the National Training Organisation for
Community Learning and Development. (It was named after Paulo Freire). It
was formally recognised by David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for
Education and Employment Its first chair was Charlie McConnell, the Chief
Executive of the Scottish Community Education Council, who had played a lead
role in bringing together a range of occupational interests under a single
national training standards body, including community education, community
development and development education. The inclusion of community
development was significant as it was initially uncertain as to whether it would
join the NTO for Social Care. The Community Learning and Development NTO

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represented all the main employers, trades unions, professional associations and
national development agencies working in this area across the four nations of
the UK.
The term ‘community learning and development’ was adopted to acknowledge
all of these occupations worked primarily within local communities, and that
this work encompassed not just providing less formal learning support but also a
concern for the wider holistic development of those communities — socio
economically, environmentally, culturally and politically. By bringing together
these occupational groups this created for the first time a single recognized
employment sector of nearly 300,000 full and part-time paid staff within the
UK, approximately 1 0% of these staff being full-time. The NTO continued to
recognize the range of different occupations within it, for example specialists
who work primarily with young people, but all agreed that they shared a core set
of professional approaches to their work. In 2002 the NTO became part of a
wider Sector Skills Council for lifelong learning.

The UK currently hosts the only global network of practitioners and activities
working towards social justice through community development approach, the
International Association for Community Development (IACD). IACD was
formed in the USA in 1953, moved to Belgium in 1978 and was restructure1
relaunched in Scotland in 1999.

Canada
Community development in Canada has roots in the development of
co-operatives, credit unions and class popularities. The Antigonish Movement
which started in the 1920s in Nova Scotia, through the work of Doctor Moses
Coady and Father, James Tompkins, has been particularly influential in the
subsequent expansion of community economic development work across
Canada.

Australia
Community Development in Australia have often been focused upon Aboriginal
Australian communities, and during the period of the 1980s to the early 21st
century was funded through the Community Employment 1) development
Program where Aboriginal people could be employed in “a work for the dole’
such, which gave the chance for non-government organizations to apply for a
full or par1 time worker funded by the Department for Social Security. Dr Jim

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Ife, formerly of Curtin University, organized a ground breaking text-book on
community development

In the “Global South”

Community planning techniques drawing on the history of utopian movements

became important in the 1920s and 1930s in East Africa, where commuIi11
development proposals were seen as a way of helping local people improve
their own lives with indirect assistance from colonial authorities.

Mohandas K. Gandhi adopted African community development ideals as a basis

of his South African Ashram, and then introduced it as a part of the Indian
Swaraj movement, aiming at establishing economic interdependence at village
level throughout India. With Indian independence, despite the continuing work
of Vinoba Behave in encouraging grassroots land reform, India under its first
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru adopted a mixed-economy approach, mixing
elements
of socialism and capitalism. During the fifties and sixties, India ran a massive
community development programme with focus on rural development activities
through government support. This was later expanded in scope and was called
integrated rural development scheme [IRDP1. A large number of initiatives that
can come under the community development umbrella have come up in recent
years.

The main objective of community development in India remains to develop the

villages and to help the villagers help themselves to fight against poverty,
illiteracy, malnutrition, etc. The beauty of Indian model of community
development lies in the homogeneity of villagers and high level of
participation.

Community Development became a part of the Ujamaa Villages established in

Tanzania by Julius Nyerere, where it had some success in assisting with the
delivery of education services throughout rural areas, but has elsewhere met
with mixed success. In the 1970s and 1980s, community development became a
part of “integrated Rural Development”, a strategy promoted by United Nations
Agencies and the World Bank. Central to these policies of community
development were:

21
 • Adult literacy programs, drawing on the work of Brazilian educator Paulo
Freire and the “Each One Teach One” adult literacy teaching method
conceived by Frank Laubach.
• Youth and women’s groups, following the work of the Serowe Brigades
of Botswana, of Patrick van Renshurg
• Development of community business ventures and particularly
cooperatives, in part drawn on the examples of José Maria
Arizmendiarrieta and the Mondragon Cooperatives of the Basque region
of Spain
• Compensatory education for those missing out in the formal education
system, drawing on the work of Open Education as pioneered by Michael
Young.
• Dissemination of alternative technologies, based upon the work of E. F.
Schumacher as advocated in his book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if
people really mattered
• Village nutrition programs and permaculture projects, based upon the
Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren.
• Village water supply programs
In the 1990s, following critiques of the mixed success of “top down”
government programs and drawing on the work of Robert Putnam, in the
rediscovery of social capital, community development internationally became
concerned with social capital formation. In particular, the outstanding success of
the work of Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh with the (Irameen Bank from its
inception in 1976, has the attempts to spread microenterprise credit schemes
around the world. YUIIUS saw that social problems like poverty and disease
were not being solved by the market system on its own. Thus, he established a
banking system which lends to the poor with very little interest, allowing them
access to entrepreneurship. This work was honoured by the 2006 Nobel Peace
Prize.

Another alternative to “top down” government programs is the participatory

government institution. Participatory governance institutions are Organizations
which aim to facilitate the participation of citizens within larger decision
making and action implementing processes in society. A case study done on
municipal councils and social housing programs in Brazil found that the
presence of participatory governance institutions supports the implementation of

22
poverty alleviation programs by local governments. The “human scale
development” work of Right Livelihood Award-winning Chilean economist
Manfred Max Neef promotes the idea of development based upon fundamental
human needs, which are considered to be limited, universal and invariant to all
human beings (being a part of our human condition).

He considers that poverty results from the failure to satisfy a particular human
need, it is not just an absence of money. Whilst human needs are limited, Max
Neef shows that the ways of satisfying human needs is potentially unlimited.
Satisfiers also have different characteristics: they can be violators or destroyers,
pseudo satisfiers, inhibiting satisfiers, singular satisfiers, or synergic satisfiers.
Max-Neef shows that certain satisfiers, promoted as satisfying a particular need,
in fact inhibit or destroy the possibility of satisfying other needs: e.g., the arms
race, while ostensibly satisfying the need for protection, in fact then destroys
subsistence, participation. affection and freedom; formal democracy, which is
supposed to meet the need for participation often disempowers and alienates;
commercial television, while used to satisfy the need for recreation, interferes
with understanding, creativity and identity. Synergic satisfiers, on the other
hand, not only satisfy one particular need, but also lead to satisfaction in other
areas: some examples are breastfeeding managed production; popular
education; democratic community organizations; preventative medicine;
meditation; educational games.

Vietnam

International organizations apply the term community in Vietnam to the local

administrative unit, each with a traditional identity based on traditional, cultural,
and kinship relations. Community development strategies in Vietnam aim to
organize communities in ways that increase their capacities to partner
institutions, the participation of local people, transparency and equality, and
unity within local communities.

Social and economic development planning (SDEP) in Vietnam uses top-down

centralized planning methods and decision-making processes which do not
consider local context and local participation. The plans created by SDEP are
ineffective and serve mainly for administrative purposes. Local people are in
informed of these development plans. participatory rural appraisal (PRA)

23
approach, a research methodology that allows local people to share and evaluate
their own life conditions, was introduced to Vietnam in the early I 990s to help
reform the way that government approaches local communities and
development
PRA was used as a tool for mostly outsiders to learn about the local community,
which did not affect substantial change.

The village/commune development (VDP/CDP) approach was developed as

more fitting approach than PRA to analyze local context and address the need:
Rural communities: VDP/CDP participatory planning is centered on Ho Chi
Minh’s saying that “People know, people discuss and people supervise.”
VDP/CDP is often useful in Vietnam for shifting centralized management to
more decentralization, helping develop local governance at the grassroots level
people use their knowledge to solve local issues. They create mid-term and
yearly plans that help improve existing community development plans with the
support of government organizations. Although VDP/CDP has been tested in
many regions in Vietnam, It has not been fully implemented for a couple
reasons.

The village/commune development (VDP/CDP) is human resource and capacity

building intensive, especially at the early stages. It also requires the local people
to have an “initiative- taking” attitude. People in the remote areas where
VDP/CDP has been tested have mostly passive attitudes because they already
receive assistance from outsiders. There also are no sufficient monitoring
practices to ensure effective plan implementation. Integrating VDP/CDP into
the governmental system is difficult because the Communist Party and Central
government’s policies on decentralization are not enforced in reality.

Non-governmental organizations (NGO) in Vietnam, legalized in 1991, have

claimed goals to develop civil society, which was essentially nonexistent prior
to the DM Mâi economic reforms. NGO operations in Vietnam do not exactly
live up to their claimed goals to expand civil society. This is mainly due to the
fact that NGOs in Vietnam are mostly donor-driven, urban, and elite-based
organizations that employ staff with ties to the Communist Party and Central
government. NGOs are also overlooked by the Vietnam Fatherland Front, an
umbrella organization that reports observations directly to the Party and Central

24
government. Since NGOs in Vietnam are not entirely non-governmental, they
have been coined instead as ‘VNGOs.’ Most VNGOs have originated from the
state, hospital or university groups, or individuals not previously associated with
any group. VNGOs have not yet reached those most in need, such as the rural
poor, due to the entrenched power network& opposition to lobbying for issues
such the rural poor land rights. Authoritarianism is prevalent in nearly all
Vietnamese civic organizations. Authoritarian practices are more present in
inner-organizational functions than in organization leaders’ worldviews. These
leaders often reveal both authoritarian and libertarian values in contradiction.

Representative of Vietnam’s NGO’s stated that disagreements are normal, but

conflict within an organization should be avoided, demonstrating the one-party
“sameness” mentality of authoritarian rule.

Rural development in Liberia

INTRODUCTION
You would recall that in the last unit, we treated Social Interactions in Rural
Society. In this unit we are going to look at the concept and issues of Rural
Development in Liberia.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of this unit, you should be able to:
Explain the meaning of Rural Development
⮚ understand the significance of Rural Development
⮚ identify the strategies and approaches to Rural Development
⮚ explain the stages of Rural Development
⮚ Identify the problems of Rural Development.

MAIN CONTENT
The Meaning of Rural Development
Rural Development is the transformation of the rural community into socially,
economically, politically, educationally, orderly and materially desirable
conditions, with the aim of improving the quality of life of the rural population.
The workshop on Rural Development in Africa and the workshop group on
integrated approach to Rural Development (1996) defined Rural Development
in terms of uniform distribution of national resources. It conceived of Rural
Development as a comprehensive way of social transformation which

25
recognizes that national development must involve all parts of the population.
Furthermore, it was defined as a socioeconomic process which seeks to bring
about a more equitable distribution of resources and incomes within a society. It
involves the integration of the rural poor, which constitutes the large majority of
the population of most developing countries, into the national economy. In
many developing countries, agriculture constitutes the occupation of a large
majority of rural people. Therefore, agricultural development is an important
aspect of Rural Development. Many industries also use agricultural raw
materials. For example, the textile industries use cotton; canning industries use
fruits and vegetables; beverage industries use cocoa, coffee and tea; vegetable
oil industries use vegetables; animal products industries use diary, cheese,
butter, broiler, sugar industries utilize sugarcane. Rural industrialization is thus a
significant aspect of rural development.

Goals of Rural Development

Rural Development aims at attaining some goals or objectives in the rural
community. Some of these are:

1. Improved distribution between the rural and urban areas to bridge or

narrow the differences between the two parts of the society.
2. Provision of welfare needs in forms of housing, health and infrastructural
facilities such as clean and regular water, motor roads and supply of
electricity.
3. Full and productive employment in rural area/community. This is to
change the situation in which many rural people are under-employed and
operate only at the subsistence level, so that they can apply their full
productive capacities and generate commensurate benefit from their
efforts.
4. Increased productivity via sensitization of the rural people to their
potentials for development, and acquiring education and training needed
to translate the potentials into productive efforts.
5. Increased food production. This is the primary agricultural development
dimension of rural development. It is expected to lead to a state of
improved quality and quantity of food available to the citizens.
6. Wide diffusion of literacy so as to allow rural people participate
intelligently in the political, economic and social activities of their
society.

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The foregoing goals can be achieved through coordinated planning and
implementation of rural development programs at the local, state and national
levels. National integrated philosophies, policies and procedures for rural
development will help facilitate the efforts.

Strategies for Rural Development

A rural development strategy is a systematic, comprehensive and reliable tool
aimed at bringing about desirable rural transformation. A strategy for rural
development is expected to produce results therefore it is tested and found
effective under certain circumstances before being introduced under similar
circumstances in another setting. Its expected effectiveness could be due to the
fact that it is developed from tested variables. It could also be because it is
developed on the basis of experience which had worked. The strategies which
have been adopted for rural development by many developing countries,
according to Williams (1998) include:

1. Community development
2. Agricultural extension, and
3. Integrated rural development.

Community Development
Community development aims at using the rural people to develop themselves
through self- initiative and motivation, with minimum assistance from
government. It aims at social development such as prevention and control of
juvenile delinquency, and community development through self-help projects,
health and nutritional improvement projects and similar projects. It involves
community members in planning and implementing programs for their own
development. It stimulates or encourages government and other development
agencies to provide technical advice and materials in planning and
implementing the projects.

The multi-purpose community development agent who is trained in many

aspects of community life such as health, agriculture, education, cooperatives, is
stationed at the local level where he Works with local people. To achieve this,
the community development worker needs to make use of the services of
specialized agencies of government in the rural areas. This is because it is not

27
easy for an agent to be skilled in different areas calling for development
attention in the rural sector. The problems in utilizing this approach include
these:

a) There is often no formal coordination between the agencies working at the

local level, thus the community development agent has no power to enforce
cooperation by other development agencies;
b) It is not very easy for one person to be effectively trained in all sectors of
rural development; hence the community development agent may become
ineffective. Education which is the cornerstone of all forms of development
should be provided. Therefore, it is advisable that rural people are educated on
how to develop themselves. Even when infrastructural facilities are provided,
the rural people should still be educated on how to maintain them and even
introduce others to them.

Agricultural Extension
Agricultural extension aims at helping rural farmers to bring about agricultural
development. It achieves this by facilitating education of farmers to improve
their skills, knowledge and attitude as related to agricultural development. It
passes the results of research on how to solve the problems of agriculture to
farmers and encourages the application of these as well as other improved
technical knowledge in agriculture by farmers. It takes the problems of farmers
to the research institutions for solutions. It uses demonstration farms, farm visit,
audiovisual aids and methods in teaching farmers. Agricultural extension
concentrates on agricultural development and encourages related development
agencies to extend their services to the rural areas; community development
tries to provide some of the services. The trainings received by the village level
agricultural extension worker and community development agents are thus
aimed at equipping them to perform their various roles. Ineffectiveness in
promoting agricultural development is a glaring deficiency of the agricultural
extension strategy. The main reasons for this include.

a) Inadequate number of extension agents who are to teach farmers

improved farm practices; b) Inadequate credit facilities to buy farm
inputs;
b) Lack of proper use of local leaders to assist extension agents in teaching
farmers;

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 c) Lack of adequate planning of extension programs;
d) Inadequate motivation of extension agents. If these and similar problems
are vastly solved, extension should become an effective instrument for
agricultural development.

Integrated Rural Development

Integrated rural development strategy combines the development of the various
areas of the rural society including educational, agricultural, health nutrition,
rural electrification, rural water supply and cooperative simultaneously. The
strategy also aims at improved employment, access to production resources,
access to social services, and management of development resources. The
distinguishing feature of this strategy is that the various development sectors are
considered jointly together rather than in isolation in order to see their
relationship clearly. The utilization of this strategy involves increased
mobilization and motivation of rural people to participate actively in
decision-making process concerning their progress and in the development
activities. There should also be established institutional relationships which will
facilitate the development of the sectors. Rural development councils should be
set up at the national, state and local government levels to educate people,
clarify difficulties and mobilize moral and financial support for rural
development.

Government has set up a directorate of foods, roads and infrastructure which is

charged with the responsibilities for specially facilitating food production, road
construction and provision of other rural infrastructural facilities such as
electricity and pipe-borne water supply to the rural area. Many agencies and
institutions employ the integrated-strategy for rural development. Some church
denominations have agricultural and related rural development projects in
Liberia. Some Community based organizations have also embarked on
integrated rural development initiatives.

SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE

Discuss five objectives of rural development.
Approaches to Rural Development

Approaches to rural development are the geographical and the subject matter of
rural development. Three approaches could be identified namely:

29
 1. The sartorial approach
2. The holistic approach and
3. The regional approach
4. The Sectoral Approach

In the sectorial approach, rural development efforts are geared towards

developing the different sectors of the rural society. Efforts are made to identify
the significant sectors such as the agricultural, health, education and
infrastructural sectors of the rural society. Development efforts are then focused
on one sector. This tradition had tended to favor the development of agricultural
sector, which had been regarded as the most important sector of the rural society
in developing countries, because majority of the rural population of these
countries are engaged in it. Experience with this approach had led to some
problems such as:

a. There had been strong criticism of this approach by the

professionals from the other nonagricultural sectors.
b. The agricultural sector has not been substantially developed partly
because of its relationship with other sectors which have not been
assisted or supportive.

The Holistic Approach

This approach attempts to develop all the sectors in a given area simultaneously.
The agricultural, health, education, and infrastructural sectors are developed at
the same time. The problems with this approach are:

a) Inadequate coordination of the development activities in the various

sectors;
b) Inadequate number of specialized and technical manpower to implement
the programs, and
c) Inadequate financial resources to implement development Programs
Regional Approach

In the regional approach to rural development, a society is summed into

development regions which are most suited for establishing certain development
projects. In Nigeria, for example, while production of potato might be
developed in the dried savanna parts of the country, cocoa, kola nut and oil palm

30
production are naturally encouraged in the rain forest areas of the country.
Infrastructural facilities are developed all over the country. The major demerits
of this approach is that it ignores the fact that scientific rural development aims
at bringing development facilities to rural areas where they do not exist
originally, apart from developing the potentials where they naturally existed.
Example of this is that water could be channeled into the desert for crop,
livestock and human consumption. Also, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides,
improved seeds and other scientific inputs are similarly introduced to boost
production. This results in establishment of human settlement, institutions, and
organization and industrial establishments. Another constraint is that some
regions might be ignored while others are developed or favored on the ground
of political advantage (Jibowo 1992).

Stages of Rural Development

The change agent should first of all clarify the concept of rural development to
be embarked upon. This must be compatible with the needs and aspirations of
the community to be helped. An adequate concept of rural development in a
democratic and developing society like Liberia should aim at permanent
development of the skill, knowledge, attitude, sensitivity, consciousness
required to improve the target system educationally, socially, economically and
psychologically along with the physical and biological features of their
environment. According to (Jibowo 1992), when this concept is clarified the
worker can then embark on five stages of rural development namely:

1. Enquiry
2. Planning
3. Implementation
4. Adjustment, and
5. Evaluation.

Enquiry
At the stage of enquiry, emphasis should be on how to obtain reliable and valid
information about the community where the program is to be implemented and
the neighboring communities. The resources available within and outside the
community in terms of number and quality of personnel, local and external
financial aid available have to be determined. The characteristics of the

31
community and its surroundings, their needs and aspirations among other
information should be determined. The information can be collected through
personal observation, survey, history and records of local events.

Planning
The planning stage should depend widely on the information collected at the
enquiry stage in formulating rural development objectives and methods of
implementing them. You should evaluate the results which the program might
generate. The planning stage should involve the administrators of the program,
the change agents, farmers’ representatives and related officials of the agency.
The planned project is kept as a flexible and modifiable document to allow
changes for improvement. Too much emphasis on agricultural development is
avoided unless the program is conceived mainly as agricultural development
project. Industrial development and non-agricultural vocations, saving and
investments, cleanliness, environmental sanitation and beautification might be
added. Adjustment program should be included in the plan.

Implementation
At this stage the plan is followed with concrete action. Infrastructural
development should be given priority at this stage. Where a substantial amount
of infrastructural facilities and natural resources existed before the statement of
the program, success would be better assumed. Rural development is a complex
assignment which requires full-time staff. The role of any part- time staff should
be supplementary to the major role needed to realize the objectives of the
program.

Adjustment
For effectiveness, the change agent has to understand the community and its
resources and start within the framework of the existing social structure. Even
when the program implementation is in progress, collection of information on
the progress of the program continues. The timing of the project along with
other areas of the plan and calendar of work have to be followed. When
modifications or adjustments are made, they have to be communicated to all
people concerned with the project. Change could be traumatic. It is thus
necessary to implement the program designed to assist the target population
adjust to the development exercise

32
Evaluation
This should in fact be a continuous exercise. The program should be at least
evaluated about half way in its implementation to make necessary in-process
modification and at the end to determine accomplishments and provide
information from which the program could benefit in future. Predicaments of
Rural Development In spite of the efforts which various institutions have made
in trying to develop the rural area, there is the general dissatisfaction that the
rural area is still generally backward in many societies, especially the less
developed countries. This state of limited development could be associated to
many constraints which have confronted rural development planning and
implementation. The following problems in the rural development planning by
African governments were stated in the report of an international workshop on
designing rural development strategies (1995).

1. Poor statistical base for effective planning

2. Wrong view of small farmers who are considered as irrational and incapable
of making progress on their own initiatives, although small farmers produce
most of the food consumed in Africa.
3. Lack of commitment to rural development as indicated by expert oriented
planning at the expense of local food production for local consumption.
4. Top-down planning in which few top administrators make decision on rural
development program planning and disseminate this down for
implementation.
5. Planning without implementation and implementation without planning of
programs.
6. Lack of plan monitoring and evaluation, thus there is no systematic way of
determining program accomplishments, facilitating effectiveness and
efficiency. In addition to the foregoing design problems, other rural
development problems are stated below:

7. Rural development programs on one hand traditionally concentrated on

agricultural development to the neglect of the other sectors and projects, a
situation which has resulted in the problem of aver-loading and consequent
ineffectiveness and inefficiency.

33
8. Rural development projects being carried out by educational and research
institutions suffer from lack of full attention of the researchers and educators
to rural development. When plans are made for delivery of these, hardly are
the plans adhered to. Resources such as land, labor, personnel, buildings,
equipment and financial capital are scarcely obtained as anticipated.
Inadequate understanding of the rural community such as its structure of
influence, communication and decision-making, patterns, existence of
functions, norms and values by the change agent. This is because they rarely
live with the rural people. However, adequate understanding is an important
foundation for collective work in rural communities.

9. Lack of follow-up. Many rural development programs have collapsed shortly

after the withdrawal of the change agent system. This is due to lack of
systematically implemented follow up after the expiration of the initial
period planned for the program. The main aim of rural development workers
is to provide and implement solutions to the above related problems. It is
then that the state of dissatisfaction can change to relative satisfaction with
advances in rural development.

4.0 CONCLUSION
This unit has revealed to us the various issues of rural development in the
country. You must have learnt from them how they are functioning in the rural
society.

5.0 SUMMARY
You should have learnt from this unit the meaning, objectives, strategies and
approaches to rural development. Stages of rural development as well as its
problems were also highlighted. It is hoped that by now, you would be able to
understand the general concept and issues in rural envelopment

ASSIGNMENT
1. Identify three approaches to rural development and discuss them.
2. List five stages of rural development and clearly explain three of them
with examples

34
UNITED METHODIST UNIVERSITY

UMU

ASHMUN STREET

MONROVIA, LIBERIA

DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

COURSE TITLE:

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

COURSE CODE: 406

SECTION: 2

PREPARED BY:

JAMES N.N. FALLAH, SR.

CERT.,BA., M.ED.

(HONS.)

35