Abstract
This chapter draws on the experience of community development academics and practitioners from different cultural and professional traditions in Kenya and the UK. The findings highlight how values-based community development practice in different countries can be characterised in similar terms, highlighting the importance of sustaining loving relationships in work with vulnerable, marginalised and oppressed groups and individuals. Drawing from different traditions—humanism; Western feminist ethics of care; African communal ethics, or Ubuntu—the chapter presents evidence that love can underpin the best forms of practice in working with people wherever they live. Examples are drawn from work with HIV-AIDs widows and slum-dwelling children in Kenya, and newly arriving refugees and asylum seekers in communities across the UK. These cases demonstrate how global practice shaped by an ethic of love and humanity can address the needs of vulnerable, marginalised and oppressed individuals and groups—wherever they live.
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Notes
- 1.
Enduring poverty and inequality are integral to the legacy of colonialism. Furthermore, people’s experience of these ills has been exacerbated in communities across the globe by the impact of conflict, climate change, and the global COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating how oppression re-creates and extends its impact, and that the need to address these issues, as well as being historically significant, is urgent.
- 2.
All of these feature in the case studies we present in this chapter.
- 3.
Although comprised of many different tribal and ethno-cultural traditions, when considered as a whole, the ethics and moral frameworks guiding the people of the African continent—and in the sub Saharan States in particular—demonstrate considerable commonality in the areas discussed here (Gyekye, 2011).
- 4.
As exemplified by the support for community-based responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in the most impoverished and marginalised communities across the globe. For a fuller discussion of this, see Purcell (2021).
- 5.
Ubuntu is described differently among the various African communities. For instance, it is called Unhu among the Shona of Zimbabwe; Bulala among the Luhya; and Umundu among the Kikuyu of Kenya.
- 6.
Comprising 19 distinct tribes with a common origin, the Luhya are the largest ethnic group in Kenya, making up around 15% (10 million people) of Kenya’s total population and living primarily in the rural West.
- 7.
We have used a pseudonym to protect Adamu’s real identity.
- 8.
Informal settlements are residential areas where: basic services and city infrastructure are lacking or non-existent; inhabitants have no security of tenure for the dwellings they inhabit; and housing (which may not comply with planning and building regulations) is often situated in geographically and environmentally sensitive areas. Informal settlements and slums tend to be located in the most environmentally hazardous urban areas (e.g. near industries and dump sites, in swamps, flood-prone zones) (UN-Habitat, 2015).
- 9.
All names have been changed to protect individuals’ identities.
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Purcell, M.E., Muhingi, W., Akelo, J. (2023). In Search of a Global Ethic of Love and Humanity: Ubuntu and Professional Love in Community Development in Kenya and the United Kingdom. In: Muia, D., Phillips, R. (eds) Connectedness, Resilience and Empowerment. Community Quality-of-Life and Well-Being. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35744-2_4
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