Community development practice in Africa: A reflection on emerging patterns and resultant drawbacks

This paper presents community development as practiced in precolonial Africa, highlighting, in a brief manner, the nature of its practice in colonial and postcolonial periods. The paper lays bare the underpinning conceptual elements that elicited an individual’s unalloyed commitment to communal values in the precolonial era. In the precolonial context, the experienced collective wellbeing was a necessary offshoot of the individual’s well-developed self-help spirit and initiatives, which had its basis in an ethic of duty that was culturally the norm. The paper further presents some conceptual reorientations in colonial and postcolonial eras, highlighting also their drawbacks in community development practice. It argues that achieving ownership and sustainability in the community development sector in postcolonial Africa requires instituting multisectoral policies that can revitalize the traditional African self-help spirit and also prioritize an ethic of duty.