EVALUATION OF COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION IN RURAL DEVELOPMENT IN ANAMBRA STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

The failure of successive governments to bring development to the rural region of the country has resulted in the shift of focus from Government to community concern. In view of this, the study determined the effect of community participation in rural development in Anambra State. The essence of this study is to identify existing steps involved in community paticipation in rural development, ascertain the aproach adopted by community participation and challenges experience in adopting comunity participation in rural development.

The study adopted Descriptive Survey Research Design and purposive Random Sampling Technique was used to select community organization from each of the selected towns. Data were collected with the aid of structured questionnaire administered to 180 members of the selected community based organization.

Findings revealed that there is significant effect of community participation in rural development in Idemili North Local Government Area, Anambra State by showing that community participation has adopted steps towards rural development; studies also revealed that there are approaches adopted by community participation towards rural development.

The study concluded that the adoption of community participation towards rural development is an effective developmental approach as the community participants pull resources together towards establishing developmental projects to their taste and not depending on government for major projects in the community. The study recommended that rural communities should focus on reviewing its steps towards community projects as some of its steps are no longer effective due to recent changes.