Moving away from conventional prescriptive development approaches, development today calls for a lot of creativity, innovative and practical ideas. I believe our role (for those in the rural development) should be to advise the rural population how to get their best from the natural resources they own. For example Sudan is blessed with abundant natural resources that can easily be harnessed and harvested for the benefit of the rural communities. Yet sometimes, these same natural resources turn to become the major cause of conflicts among and between tribes. To justify our claim of working to make poverty history, development practioners should strive to help communities to sustainably harness the readily available natural resources; apply tribal conflicts mitigation skills. We need to train, mentor and coache producer groups on management of natural resources and value addition to their products; provide market information in terms of quality, quantity and prices requirements.
In order to have impact, there is need to position onceself as a development worker in a strategic link between the local community, Local NGOs; the local government and Federal Governments. For those of you with experiences in private sector development, you will probably agree or disagree with me that issues relating to policy, regulations etc constitute an environment that affects private sector and enterprise development. This calls for continued Private-Public consultation processes, if development workers are to harness the power of private sector for poverty eradication.
True...Private sector led development is the key, but to what extend does it trickle down to the indeginous people in Africa? i think that a policy for foreign investors partnering with the indegionous locals should be adopted in Africa so that the benefits are spread accross the regions. and Gov'ts should support the local investors too.
ReplyDelete