Cooperating for local sustainable rural development

Rural development is development of rural people. Sustainable rural development is possible if there is active participation of rural people in all aspects of the process from the beginning. Local government can provide an appropriate forum for facilitating this process. Through its links with regional and national governments it can secure external resources for building up infrastructure' particularly for economic development. Its leaders should receive training in the dynamics of managing local government and identifying local resources.

Sustainable rural development happens when there is local participation in all aspects from the start. Community involvement in decision making is an extremely important feature. If a village can symbolize its willingness to begin the journey toward, for example, more comprehensive health care, it can claim ownership of the proposed programme right from the start. This helps to build and sustain health care that best meets the particular needs of that village. In what way is a group of village people sitting and deciding on what to do to improve their living conditions inferior to a village plan prepared by an outside agency after spending more money than the village will ever get to develop itself? One can understand the sophistication in planning technology at the national level where facts have to generalize, but not at the grassroots and local level where it is the details which matter.

Rural development efforts have failed to deliver on their promises. One evaluation found that half of rural development projects funded by the World Bank in Africa were outright failures. A review of assistance to agricultural cooperatives reported similar results. A study by the International Labour Organisation of "poverty-oriented" projects worldwide showed that the poorest were excluded from activities and benefits. Conventional strategies have seen development primarily as a series of technical transfers aimed at boosting production and generating wealth. In practice, conventional projects usually target medium to large scale "progressive" producers, supporting them with technology, credit and extension advice in the hope that improvements will gradually extend to more "backward" strata of rural society. In many cases, however, the channeling of development assistance to the better-off has led to a concentration of land and capital, marginalization of small farmers and an alarming growth in the number of landless labourers.