Community development began in Kenya under British colonial rule as a way to promote self-help projects and local participation, though it faced criticism for being inefficient and not truly participatory; after independence, community development supported initiatives like women's groups and the Harambee movement but declined as large donor projects rose; today, community development focuses on empowering marginalized groups and its approaches have been incorporated into various occupations.

1. Community development is a set of values and practices which plays a special role
in overcoming poverty and disadvantage, knitting society together at the grassroot
level and deepening democracy.
Community development seeks to empower individuals and groups of people by
providing them with the skills they need to effect change in their own
communities. These skills are often created through the formation of large social
groups working for a common agenda. Community developers must understand
both how to work with individuals and how to affect communities' positions within
the context of larger social institutions
Community development was introduced into Kenya by the British colonial
administration. I t made its first appearance in a documents into all the colonies in
November1948 by the British Colonial Secretary and subsequently referred to by his
name, as the "Creech Jones circular". The introduction of this new policy - also referred
to at times as 'mass education’ and 'social development ' represented reinterpretation of
colonial indirect rule as a d1'namicra their than static policy (shades of blueprint and
process ) responding to change and the demand for development in the colonies. It was
located within the overall stated objective of guiding colonies to eventual "self
government".
Despite its apparent novelty, it has a long pedigree dating back to the years following
the second world war, in Kenya as well as elsewhere in the developing world. The
history of community development as a development policy provides important insights
into current practice and suggests a number of lessons which contemporary
development practitioners would do well to take note of It also sets the scene for an
examination of community development in Kenya, its effectiveness to date and the
potential for the future.
At independence, the Government of Kenya identified illiteracy, disease, ignorance
and poverty as the main problems to community development. Involvement of the
community was identified as the best method of combating the vices. It entails
mobilisation and participation of communities, groups and individuals in socio-
economic activities.
The Government has helped communities through the Division of Community
Development. lt empowers communities through community mobilisation,
formation and registration of self-help groups.
So far, more than 650,000 self-help groups have been registered. The ministry
plays an important role in community mobilisation for ministries, NGO’s and
community-based organisations CBO’s.

2. Women, youth, men and special groups have been registered. They engage in
income-generation, community and social welfare projects.
In a recent review of the community-based approach to natural resource management,
Hassett ( 1994: 7) sagest that community development in general has evolved from the
merging of two distinct traditions of rural development. The first of these is the tradition
of "grassroots" development pursued by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and
churches throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America. The second is the tradition of state
management of rural development involving "penetration" by state agencies (including
the administrative apparatus and representatives of government ministries and
departments) into rural areas in order to implement national policies.
An early attempt to merge the grassroots approach with state management as the
Community Development Programme in Kenya initiated by the newly-independent state
in the early 1970s. As Hassett remarks, despite its populist rhetoric this ended up
mainly as a "top-down" programme of agricultural extension in which the views of
ordinary farmers were not well represented. Nonetheless "community development"
initiatives were started in many colonial and independent countries around this time.
The emphasis was very much on extension and training, particularly in agriculture.
Meanwhile, an alternative tradition was being developed in the NGO sector, through the
community work of radical act. This tradition was theorised and widely popularized in
the writings of Paulo Freire ( 1972). During the 1970s the Freirean thought, with its
stress upon "conscientisation " and "empowerment" had a significant impact upon the
practice of NGOs, and saw the emergence of many local NGOs with a concern to
eliminate poverty and its corollaries. Many NGOs began to use local staff and field
workers to encourage communities or groups of the rural poor to start their own small
enterprises and development activities, and to developed their own management
experience and capacities so that they would not be permanently dependent.
The quiet success of these "grassroots" initiatives contrast remarkedly with the failure of
Many large-scale state-sponsored and donor-funded projects, development
practitioners increasingly questioned the design and philosophy behind such projects.
They were criticized for their over-emphasis on technological solutions to problems ( the
quick "technical fix") and corresponding disregard for the development of human
resources for the way in which they were planned, by professional planners with little
knowledge of local conditions and with a minimum of consultation with the people
(including the "beneficiaries" ) who were likely to be most directly affected; and for the
Inflexibility of their implementation
In the course of the 1980s this led to a growing interest on the part of state
Agencies in the social dimensions of development, institutional and organisational
development and in participatory and process planning as a means to sustainable
development in other words to a renewed interest in community

3. Development, as developed in intervening years by the NGOs. This, "the return to
Community development"(Shepherd 1992,citedi n Hassett1994:1 0), has, in the terms of
Hassett's analysis completed the merger of the traditions of grassroot development and
state management.
While this account of the history of community developments reasonably accurate in
outline, it does encode a significant bias. It is written from the perspective of current
orthodoxy, which offers unqualified support for the integration of a participatory,
community development respective to development and programmes.
The Community Development policy was designed in part to meet criticism of colonial
rule by liberal lobbies in the colonial centre, but without putting colonial interests in
jeopardy; in part it was also intended to defuse opposition by nationalist groups in the
colonies which were calling for political independence.
In the past decades e the concepts of community development and local participation in
the planning process have become essential components of state-(donor and recipient)-
sponsored development, and proposals in sub-Saharan Africa. This is evident, for
example, in recent (1992) proposals for the provision of British aid to strengthen
Development planning and implementation capacity in Embu, Meru and Tharaka-Nithi
Districts. The terms of referenced rawn up by the British Overseas Development
Administration ( ODA) for the consultancy to prepare the proposals specified that they
"...will be made in the context of a process-project with participatory planning as a key
objective", while a whole annex of the resulting report was devoted to the subject of
community development .
The Kenyan government also has its political agenda so to least of which are the need
to satisfy local aspirations and, like its colonial predecessor defuse political opposition. It
also has an interesting formulating policies which are consonant with the wishes of its
donors, and are more likely to attract their aid. Community development helps to
achieve all of these objectives.
.
The implementation of the new community development policy was slow and
undramatic, and hindered in many areas by the outbreak of the Mau Mau uprising and
the declaration of the State of Emergency in 1952. At first community development was
added to the tasks of District Officers, later on it became the responsibility of newly-
appointed District Community Development Officers. In some districts Africans
subsequently took over these positions from British colonial officers. They did so as
Assistant Administrative Officers, the most senior post to which Africans were admitted,
their salaries paid by District Councils rather than central government. These officers
put the new policy into practice in a number of ways. This included the
Organization of location Councils women's clubs, ex-servicemen association and sports
activities.

4. Most important was the new emphasis upon 'self-help projects', these appear to have
been largely communal labour under a new name. They were unpaid, organized by
chiefs, approved and sometimes contributed to by District or Local Councils. The work
centred on building primary schools, earth dams (water reservoirs) and water
catchments, maintaining or extending local roads, and soil
Conservation work. Several of the projects were probably inefficient in their use of
manpower owing to poor organization lack of co-ordination and deficiencies of technical
support" As a result they continued to face criticism from local and nationalist
politicians. "The reality of much community development was far from the notion of
self-help as being based on voluntarism, popular participation and local decision-
making. Community Development philosophy in the colonial world of the 1950s
appeared to allow development activity involving the community as a whole which was
judged by the authorities to be to its benefit" (1991:26-27).
District Commissioner in formed a District Development Team of
Department heads to establish a district development strategy- an early attempt at
integrated local planning. The team adopted a plan for each location to build an
elementary school and a dispensary and set a target of fifty dams a year to be built in
the district. This plan entailed aconsiderable in put of compulsory labour and was met
with demands from the Kenya African Union that the work be paid. These demands
were ignored and the work went on until the targets were largely achieved. At the same
time the colonial agthorities were able to congratulate themselves on the fact that such
projects kept their subjects busy and left them with little time to indulge in politics.
The policy and practice of community development formed the basis for many
developments after Kenya's independence in 1963. The idea of community
development and the participation of all Kanyan’s in that development was enshrined in
the new national slogan of "Harambee" ( derivedf rom a Swahili work-gang cry and
usually translated in to English as "Let's pull together!"). Since 1963 during the fast
president of Kenya, the term has been the motto on the Kenyan national crest and the
customary rallying-cry at political and other rallies and meetings. The central message
of Harambee was self-reliance and this was expressed most concretely in the rural self-
help movement. As a political slogan and the catchword for an ideology, Harambee was
explicitly meant to contrast with colonial state control and its manifestation in forced
communal labour.
The self-help movement after independence was co-ordinated and monitored by a new
Ministry of Community Development and Social Services. In the first two decades of
independence, this achieved much more than its colonial progenitors could ever have
imagined. Thousands of primary schools and hundreds of secondary schools( known as
harambee Schools') were built with substantial contributions of money and labour from
local communities. Likewise many other kinds of local amenities were constructed with
Harambee contributions and labour, health facilities, unmetalled roads, improved water
Supplies and cattle dips to name but a few. For a time in the 1970s rural development in
Kenya seemed to be synonymous with the Harambee movement mucha s 'Ujamaa" and
l0 rural socialism defined the policy and practices of development in Nyerere's Tanzania

5. The Ministry of Community Development and Social Services had long since become
the Ministry of Culture and Social Services with responsibility for community
development falling to one department within it, the Department of Social Services. The
term community development itself was dropped, and the Department's Community
Development Assistants working at locational level and still paid by their local district
councils, became Social Development Assistants. Harambee had become the common
name for any collective fund-raising event, for whatever purpose
The last major resort of the self-help programme was in the women's group movement,
co-ordinated by the Department of Social Services and monitored by the Women's
Bureau within the ministry. Barkan et al.(1979:23') noted, self-help was skewed towards
the provision of social services for the members of rural communities. Except among
women's groups, little emphasis was placed upon increasing rural production and the
earlier ( colonial) link between self-help and agricultural development was largely lost.
The apparent demise of self-help and community development as an aspect of
development policy was matched, however, by the rise of larger, donor-assisted
projects which required minimum local participation and, in many cases also involved a
minimum of consultation with the local beneficiaries- if indeed the beneficiaries were
meant to be local people. From the point of view of some politicians and officials, this
shift certainly paid better: there was now a lot more money to be made out of large aid
projects- the larger the better - than local communities which had
already been milked dry by local officials. Investment and experimentation in community
development initiatives were left largely to the NGOs and churches.
Today there has been a major shift in Government policy affecting local level
Development , enshrined in the District Focus for Rural Development Policy and
adopted in 1983. This policy envisages much more local participation in the
development process with local communities being largely responsible for their own
development. It is intended that the role of the Government should be to facilitate the
process of social and economic development by creating an enabling environment
where constraints to development are removed and opportunities are created
The women's group movement in Kenya traces a variety of origins, but its true history
began in the mid- 1960s with the formation of large numbers of groups by Kikuyu
women in Central Province. Many of these began as mabai groups, functioning like
rotating savings and credit associations(R OSCAs) with the aim of enabling their
members to buy mbai, iron roofing sheets, or to afford other home improvements.
The local context in which groups were formed placed a high premium upon mutual
Assistance among women: land and male labour (because of labour migration to the
towns) were becoming increasingly scarce, while women's agricultural and domestic
responsibilities had increased and their access to cash income remained restricted. This
was against a background of political support for self-help initiatives (Harambee) in
building the newly-independance state. with official encouragement similar groups
began to appear elsewhere in the country. In the late 1980s, the government intervened
to take over Maendeleo ya Wanawake (" Women's Progress') and incorporate it within

6. the women's wing of KANU, then the only political party (Maendeleo had hitherto been
an NG0, especially active in women's development during the late colonial period,
though rather less important for little women's group movement by the time it was taken
over).
Today, there are a myriad of job titles for Community Development workers and
their employers include public authorities and voluntary or non-governmental
organisations, funded by the state and by independent grant making bodies other
occupations from the police and health workers to planners and architects, who
work with more disadvantaged groups and communities and have been
influenced by Community Development approaches,
Community Development practitioners have developed a range of skills and
approaches for working within local communities and in particular with
disadvantaged people. These include less formal educational methods,
community organising and group work skills.
Community development today has helped many members of the society in
various ways, especially to those who are neglected and marginalized by the
community members such as the old, victims of hiv/aids, vulnerable children
women and youths. They come up with projects that may help then earn some
income, provide them with skills that will enable them stand on their own in
future, and alse help in educating orphans n poor students.
Women has also come up with various self help groups to help them grow on
their own and also save for the household and children, through engagement I
women organization and also self help groups, which may allow them to borrow
loans from the bank and also from the Kenya Women Finance Trust, and also to
save their money at a profit.
In conclusion, community development is of great importance to the society both
today and early in the colonial times, it has brought by it tremendous changes in
various communities in Kenya for example the food provision during the Kenyans
for Kenya when donations of feedstuff, water, clothing were made to help the
starving part of the nation. It has also survived for along time facing a lot of
challanges through out, a case that has made it to be as it is today.

7. Reference
1. Chitere O. P & Mutiso R. (1991). working with rural communities: A
Participatory Research Perspective in Kenya. Nairobi University Press,
Nairobi.
2. Midgely J. & Hall A. (1986). Community participation, Social
developmentand the state. UK; oxford university press.
3. http://www.academia.edu/710980/Community_development_in_Mbeere

8. MASENO UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
Department Of Sociology And Anthropology.
Course name: Community Development
Course code: ASO 209
Lecturer: Nyabundi Agnetta.
Name: David Omondi Oduor
Reg. No. BA/00116/011.
Task: Discuss community
development work in the
colonial era and today in Kenya.