Most of the arable land in the lowlands of Lesotho including Maputsoe is under infrastructural development of residential settlements, large scale industries, roads and slum settlements which includes shacks and roadside spaza shops. These settlements have large human populations that derive their livelihood through wide range of activities. These activities comprised of subsistence agriculture in the form of crop production, livestock and vegetable production, formal work in both primary and secondary labour market, informal work such as niche markets in the service sector, petty commodity production and others. This thesis attempts to shed light on the impact of urban development on household livelihood strategies in the lowlands of Lesotho with specific focus to Maputsoe town. Although literature review indicates livelihood and urbanisation as two broad subjects that need special research on their own, the aim of this research focuses on impact of urbanisation on livelihood strategies. To achieve this the study looks at the activities entitled to households to generate livelihood as well as social and economic characteristics determining household livelihood strategies. To determine whether urban development has an effect to household livelihood strategies, the study compares household livelihood strategies in urban household sample (Maputsoe) to rural household sample (Fobane). The basis for choosing these two settlements was based on the understanding that household perceptions and opinions on impact of urbanisation on livelihoods will be different since Maputsoe is located in urban and Fobane in the rural area. To gather household perceptions, survey was conducted in both urban and rural area. Survey questions were formulated so as to determine factors affecting livelihood strategies as well as activities entitled to households to generate livelihood strategies. The analysis of results suggests three mam points influencing household livelihood strategies (they include household characteristics and social structure among both urban and rural households in the sample. They further include opportunities to employment among urban and rural households in a sample as well household assets among both urban and rural households. They show that both two samples are liable to less diverse livelihood strategies but due to conducieve environment favouring urban location. Maputsoe narrowly has more livelihood strategies per household than did Fobane. The results further prove the contention that urban development is likely to affect household livelihood strategies negatively or positively. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2001.

Development projects are increasingly becoming tools to support developing countries to overcome their systemic barriers to development. International and bilateral development agencies channel billions of dollars in such projects or programs every year in hope to boost local development, but until now after decades of efforts and social investments no concrete development in those countries status have been spotlighted as a consequence of these. Rwanda as a small land locked developing Country in the heart of Africa has been allocated amount of grants and supports for many years and have been benefiting from an overwhelming international attention after the genocide of 1994 and one can wonder if these development programmes and projects have been of significant usefulness to the recipients. In such a move, this dissertation aims at systematically evaluating project outcomes through assessment of beneficiaries’ expectations grasped through a case study namely the Decentralization and Community Development Project (DCD) in Rwanda. It is also intended to provide a clear idea of what the project has achieved so far and what beneficiaries’ expectations were not met. In order to achieve research objectives, a systematic research method have been followed. It is therefore, important to recall that evaluation approaches as supported by Khandker and al. (2009), have evolved significantly, making difficult for an evaluator to choose the model or approach which is particular for a specific context suggesting that there is no universal and unique evaluation approach. In this research they were no move from this statement. Actually it was found worthy the use of a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies to capture the real outcomes of the project. In fact using qualitative methods helped to understand the key players who would have influenced the project implementation and by using quantitative methods and recording the recipients’ aspirations and the effective outcomes from the project. We hypothetically assumed that DCDP did not provide enough outcomes as expected by recipients and in order to prove that, collected data from a random sample of 96 people out of a population of 256334 and 80 answers were collected back. Several unstructured interviews were conducted with project key players comprised of the project team, the local government, and the government officials in charge of the project as well as the World Bank Country Office. Excel were used to analyse collected data so as to allow a better analysis and interpretation of the data. As stated in the main argument, assumption were made that the project did not meet the stakeholder’s expectations but some salient findings of the study proved this to be wrong. In fact, more than 80% people in the project area recognised the project outcomes significance to their lives. Furthermore, the result shows that the project had an important impact on the community. For instance, the DCD project improved considerably the life conditions of the population of the district’s population; as an example, the recipients acknowledged at 100% that the DCD project increased both the employment and the revenue in the district of HUYE. This have a huge meaning, because it is ascertaining the hypothesis that DCD project participated in improving life conditions of the population, while giving a whole meaning to the project in the eyes of all the stakeholders. The main recommendation of the study was about the usefulness on involving the recipients (beneficiaries) in all the project process, including pre-identification so that the project may tackle the real problems of the beneficiaries. / Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville, 2009.

This was a study of the problems of community involvement in the Integrated Development Planning process in the Ditsobotla Local Municipality. These problems affects the manner in which the community participation should be done in the process. This exercise is the fulfilment of the provisions of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 and Municipal Systems Act which emphases community participation in the IDP process. It was found that though surveyed legislation emphasized community participation in the study area, in Ditsobotla Local Municipality this was a problem. This was due to the fact that Ditsobotla Local Municipality had a vast area consisting of urban and rural areas, as well as a diversity of races and cultures. For example, it was easy to convene mass meeting in the black communities but difficult to get similar response among the white or Asian communities. Interaction was through the media, or written messages. The following are recommendations derived from the findings: That public participation should encompass a sense that the public's contribution will influence the final outcome. That the public participation process must reflect the interests of and meet the needs of participants. The participation process should facilitate the involvement of those potentially affected. Consideration should be given to how unorganized communities or interest groups could be brought together as participants. That participants should be involved in defining the manner in which they wish to participate. Participants should be provided with the information they need to make their contribution meaningful. / Thesis (MBA) North-West University, Mafikeng Campus, 2002

No description available.

No description available.

Situated in the postcolonial modernizing discourse of development, many empowerment narratives tend to pre-identify, pre-construct and categorize community development workers/ mobilizers as empowered bodies, catalysts, and change agents. These bodies are expected to and are assumed will facilitate a transformation in oppressed peoples’ self image and belief’s about their rights and capabilities. Although feminist academics/activists have been critical of imperialist, neo-liberal and politico-religious co-optations of understandings of empowerment, limited attention seems to have been paid to the material effects of empowerment narratives on the lives of these community development workers. Nor does there appear to be sufficient analysis into how local community development workers/mobilizers who find themselves in precarious positions of employment, engage with these narratives. Provided with guidelines based on project objectives and lists of targets, many development workers/mobilizers in Pakistan tend to live with expectations of how best to ‘translate/transform’ empowerment from the abstract into the concrete while restricted in their space to critically reflect on theoretical notions that drive their practice. This thesis provides insight into the economy of empowerment narratives and the potential they have to mediate ‘encounters’ shaping ‘subject’ and ‘other’ by critically exploring how bodies of community development workers are put to work and are made to work. Drawing on feminists poststructuralist and postcolonial theory my work explores how these community workers/mobilizers located in the urban metropolis of Karachi, embedded in a web of multiple intersecting structures of oppression and power relations ‘encounter’, theorize, strategize and act upon understanding of empowerment and community development through an arts informed cooperative inquiry. Through the use of prose, creative writing, short stories, photo narratives, artwork and interactive discussions my participants and I begin to complicate these narratives. As a result empowerment narratives begin to appear as colliding discourses, multi-layered complex constructs, which may form unpredictable, messy and contradictory assemblages; as opposed to linear, universal, inevitable and easily understood outcomes and processes. I conclude that the insistence to complicate and situate such messy understandings in specific contexts is important for women’s movements if empowerment is to retain its strategic meaning and value in feminist theorizing.

The provision of urban services is one of the most important issues in the process of urbanization. However, more than half of the urban population in developing countries does not enjoy any of these services yet. The public sector has been unable to provide services to the ever-increasing urban population. This failure has been met by the involvement of the private sector in the provision of services: nevertheless, private services are only provided to those who can afford them. The urban poor, who are the majority of the population in urban centres, are not able to afford those services. In the absence of public and private services, the poor have managed themselves to provide services. However, the provision of services by the informal sector has been attacked by governments, which have rarely evaluated or understood this sector. This thesis investigates how the informal sector has created different networks to provide services. In order to find out how exactly this phenomenon has taken place in poor communities, an informal settlement was selected in Bogota, Colombia for a case study. Service networks were identified and classified according to their nature, the operational and technical aspects were described, and, finally, the accepted level of services by the members of the community was analyzed and inferences were drawn. In this way, the studies showed that the informal sector through the use of networks assembled by community-based organizations and/or assembled by different individuals with private initiative were successfully providing services to the poor.

Typescript. / Bibliography: leaves [247]-255. / Microfilm. / Photocopy. / xi, 255 leaves, bound ill. 29 cm

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 104-110). / v, 110 leaves, bound 29 cm

<p>The concept of community development is founded on the premise that changes in the living conditions of people are best effected by the people themselves. The term community evokes the idea of a homogeneous social group who can recognise their common interests and work together harmoniously for their common good. The concerns of the leading development agents and donors in the past two decades have been on empowering communities to participate in their own development by taking control of decisions and initiatives that seek to improve their living conditions. The zeal to address these concerns has in the past decade been pushed with such resounding statements that people&rsquo / s participation in development projects has not only been seen as a basic human right, but also as an imperative condition for human survival. It has been strongly argued in the UNDP reports that the overall development strategy is to enable people to gain access to a much broader range of opportunities.</p> <p><br /> From this perspective, development as a social activity seeks to ensconce economic liberalisation, freedom of association, good governance and access to free market economy as the guiding tenets of an improved life in all communities in the world. The realization of this dream posed a major challenge to many governments in the Third World and the 1980s saw the emergence of &lsquo / associational revolution&rsquo / &ndash / the proliferation of small-scale non governmental organizations (NGOs) with relative autonomy from the state. The mainstream development agencies perceived the NGOs as the best instruments to instigate changes in the living conditions of the poor and the disadvantaged people. For this reason, NGOs became increasingly instrumental in implementing development objectives in the rural and disadvantaged communities. Development in this sense consists of processes in which various groups are stimulated to improve aspects of their lives particularly by people from outside their community. This has drawn attention to how these outsider- development agents communicate development information particularly due to the sociolinguistic situation in many rural African communities. The real concern is with is that the target majority of the people in the rural areas are not speakers of the dominant languages of the development discourse, in most cases this is the official foreign languages taught in schools.</p> <p><br /> Communication is a fundamental part in community development programmes and language emerges as a key factor in effective communication and implementation of these programmes. While it is evident that social interactions are sustained by agreeable communicative principles, the role of language and the different mode of communication applied to development interventions have received very little attention from the parties concerned. This has yielded detrimental repercussions in the quality of interaction at the grassroots level. More often than not, it is assumed that once there is a common language, effective communication will take place and for this reason language use and mode of communication are never given much thought in the field of development interaction.</p>