Good Governance and Rural Development in Africa: Finding the Missing Link

Good Governance and Rural Development in Africa: Finding the Missing Link

Oluwakemi Damola Adejumo-Ayibiowu
Copyright: © 2020 |Pages: 27
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-2306-3.ch004
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Abstract

This chapter presents African indigenous knowledge as the missing link in achieving good governance and rural development in Africa. The failure of rural development projects in Africa has mostly been attributed to weak institutions and bad governance. Consequently, good governance has become the cornerstone of donors' development cooperation in Africa since the 1990s. While it is true that African public institutions may be weak, the analysis shows that the West contributed to this problem through European colonization of the continent as well as the imposition of Eurocentric one-size-fit-all reforms of the World Bank on indebted African countries. The chapter argues that to improve governance and rural development in Africa, there are well-established and effective cultural indigenous governance systems in the continent from which we can learn.
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Defining Rural Development And Good Governance

Rural development can be defined as efforts to achieve the development of rural areas or the development that benefit the rural dwellers. In this regard, development refers to the progressive transformation of the social, economic, and institutional systems, which guarantee a better quality of life, self-worth, and freedom for the society and its members (Adejumo-Ayibiowu, 2018). Baah-Dwomoh (2016) defines rural development as activities and initiatives that are taken by governments, donors, non-governmental organizations, and communities with the objective of improving the standard of people living in rural areas, especially the rural poor. Rural development is thus an intervention to reduce poverty in rural areas and to improve the standard of living of people in rural areas. These includes efforts to improve agricultural productivity for rural food security and employment in rural areas as well as the provision of social infrastructures such as road, educations, health care, portable water and communications in rural areas.

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