Community Development and Mother Values (Published)
Values as principles about what is right and wrong, or ideas about what is important in life can never be divorced from community development and even the whole life. Because values are those factors upon which balance is struck, equilibrium is maintained and the circumstance and context are made peaceful. Values are the other main component and segment of development, particularly communal development, in addition to material component, that have to be joined together with the material. Hence if the joining together is not done, the development will be incomplete, inconsistent and weakened. Despite this status, significance and importance the values have naturally, brilliantly and elaborately, it has been observed that values have been neglected and relegated to the background in community development discourse, theory and practice. The material aspect is more pronounced, promoted, projected and protected to the detriment of the values as an inevitable key factor in the issue of development practices. This makes most of our writings in community development discourse centred around the material like poverty eradication, job creation, and infrastructural development and so on. Therefore, it is in view of this that this paper tries to present values as an important variable in community development discourse, theory and practice for it to be reflected, incorporated, promoted, protected and projected in community development project. This would help tremendously in yielding better outcomes and maintaining equilibrium.
Keywords: Community, Development, Mother, Values
Community Participation as a Tool for the Promotion of Sustainable Community Development (Published)
The paper examined community participation as a tool for the promotion of sustainable community development. The paper explored the concept of community participation and sustainable community development. The paper identified areas of community participation in sustainable community development to include community needs assessment, community development planning, community mobilization among others. The highlights of the benefits that accrue from community participation in sustainable community development are community empowerment, promotion of meaningful change, community participation as a mechanism to address community problems and provision of learning opportunities. The highlights of the recommendations based on the issues discussed are: There is an obvious need to strengthen the level of awareness creation in people for community participation in sustainable community development, relevant stakeholders in community development projects should embark on sustainable mobilization for effective community participation in community development among others.
Keywords: Community, Community and Development, Participation, Promotion, Sustainable, Tool