Community development approaches, activities, and issues

By recognizing the increasing focus on community development projects and programs, this chapter discusses the concept and changing nature of communities and various agents (people and communities, faith-based organizations and charities, government and nongovernment organization, corporates and philanthropies/foundations) engaged in and approaches used for community development activities. Further, in a summary form, the chapter looks at important strategies for and a range of community development activities. Finally, it points out some of the important challenges such as enhancing participation, dealing with top-down approaches, a lack of consultation, incongruence between needs and programs, low uptake of or dependency on services, a lack of coordination, elite capture, and reaching out to rural and remote areas in community development work with a hope that these challenges can be proactively overcome to sustain community development activities.