Development Principles

Development Principles

Development Principles

 

Strengths-based  

Problem-based
  • Identify strengths (stakeholders / assets / resources / skills) already present
  • Identify stakeholders’vision
  • Explore opportunities to use strengths to work towards vision

 
  • Identify deficits and problems
  • Focus on problems and their causes
  • Try to fix problems

 

Service delivery

 

Participation
  • Do development to people
  • Experts and passive recipients
  • Focus on finishing a project (service has been delivered)
  •  Working with people
  • Active participation in all project activities
  • Focus on local decision-making and ownership
  • Focus on building capacity of communities and people

 

 

People focused

 

Deliverables focused
  • Focus on relationship
  • Involving community in planning
  • Valuing local knowledge and assets
  • Focus on behaviour change and opportunities for people

 
  • Focus on tangible outputs (e.g. 30 toilets built / a school constructed)
  • Focus on project deliverables being achieved

 

Bottom-up

 

Top-down
  • Individual / household / village level
  • Identify locally appropriate and identified actions
  • E.g. Microfinance

 

 
  • “Trickle-down” theory
  • Policy, infrastructure, big projects!
  • National / regional level
  • E.g. World Bank

 Exercise – compare the following sentences:

 

  1. Development is about identifying community needs and meeting them.
  2. Development is about identifying needs and involving the community in meeting them.
  3. Development is about helping the community as they identify and meet their needs.
  4. Development is helping the community use their strengths and competencies to work on their own development objectives.