The Kellogg Foundation Guidelines on Community Development

Abstract

The Kellogg Foundation Guidelines on community development are based on the assumption that development is essentially about building the capacity of communities to make their own economic, social and spiritual decisions. The process is targeted at selected sites and communities, where careful experimentations of change processes can be undertaken and documented, in order to generate new insights and knowledge that can be shared with other sites and communities across the sub-region. The aim of the approach is to help build local capacity for self-drive, particularly in youth, women and families. The capacity to self-drive is developed through supporting rural communities to learn to self-start, self-assess, and self-correct. The approach further aims to build the leadership systems and the capabilities needed to provide local people with a favourable environment, as well as the confidence and resources to lead their own social and economic transformation. The emphasis is thus on local communities’ ability to initiate, implement and assess programs and initiatives that serve their own needs and thereby reinforce their self-drive mindset. This chapter further provides the Ba- Isago and Kellogg Foundation partnership and guidelines and how these were applied to the ITMUA case study project since 2009 when Kellogg started working with the community. Community development poses challenges of understanding the demographic characteristics of the poor and making an input to the betterment of their lives. In practice, the third mission of universities—community service for development—provided the space to address such challenges of developing the D’Kar community in a way that refocussed its research and teaching missions to transform and revitalize the relationship between higher education and national development needs through the Ba Isago University College and the Kellogg Foundation.