This paper seeks to critically review the existing literature on the links or interfaces between poverty, livelihoods, institutions, and community development. This discussion gives a clear understanding of how poverty is created and gives a clue of how sustainable policy intervention could be developed. The study adopted the Sustainable Livelihood Approach as an overall theoretical framework that guides this discussion. The reviewed literature shows that there are strong and complex interfaces between poverty, livelihoods, institutions and community development and they influence each other in several ways. The interfaces between these concepts influence the choices and nature of livelihood strategies that people employ to pursue their livelihood outcomes. The livelihood outcomes may be positive or negative and it is determined by how these concepts are linked together. For instance, the existing empirical evidences shows that having access to livelihood assets, investment in infrastructure, presence of enabling policy and institution result in positive livelihood outcomes whereas lack of access to assets, increased vulnerabilities, low investment in infrastructures, lack of popular participation, poverty and weak policy and institution together result in adopting of failed livelihood strategies which in turn resulted in negative livelihood outcomes. Thus, to formulate policies, strategies and programs that can effectively address poverty and result in sustainable development, policy makers should consider and understand the connection between these concepts before the formulation of policy, strategies or programs. Without understand this it is difficult to formulate policies, programs, and strategies that can positively contribute to poverty reduction and sustainable development.
Over the past two decades, extreme poverty has been decreasing in all regions of the world except for sub-Saharan Africa. This attracted the attention of many scholars and policymakers from Africa and other continents of the world to study and understand the reason why Africa has remained so poor. As a result, many scholars have advanced many reasons for poverty and underdevelopment on the continent. However, no consensus is reached among scholars for poverty and underdevelopment of Africa. 'The shackled continent' is one of the books that has attempted to explain the reasons why Africa has remained so poor. The main of this paper was to critically review the book. The shackled continent has critically analyzed and identified many hobbles that have affected the development process in Africa. In this regard, the author assumption is that Africa has remained so poor as a result of several factors which includes failures of leadership, tribal politics, bad governance, impacts of AIDs, resource curse, lack of transparent property rights, ethnic strife, corruption, frequent military coups, and development assistance failures. Guest admits that these reasons to some extent contribute to the Africans' development challenges. However, arguably failures of leadership are the main reason for underdevelopment in Africa. The author argues that global capitalism is merely a solution to Africa's problems. This book has many strengths as well as weaknesses.
The need to more accurately conceptualize the concept of rural development has increased during recent decades. This is largely the result of the absence of universally accepted definition of rural development, the absence of universally accepted theories of rural development and the growing interest to clearly theorize it, the persistent increase of rural poverty in developing and the need to formulate effective rural development policies that could address poverty in rural areas, but also because of the multifaceted ways in which rural development could be realized. Thus, the main objective of this paper is to offer a new definition or concept of rural development in the twenty-first century. To achieve this objective the study purely used secondary data. Thus, both theoretical and empirical literature deemed necessary to better understand the concept of rural development was rigorously reviewed. The review result shows that there is no universally accepted definition of rural development. The existing definitions and concepts of rural development have some conceptual gaps that needed to be revisited and conceptualized again in twenty first century. As a result, the concept of rural development is widely recognized in the literature as a disputed notion both in practice, policy, and theory. Thus, this study approaches the task of conceptualizing rural development by providing a conceptual definition that serves both academics and practitioners. Moreover, the study also proposed different mechanisms through which rural development can be realized and interlinked with recent concepts of development. Generally, the study concludes that emphasizing the need to supplement the theory behind the new rural development hypothesis with new definitions that help us to more precisely understand what is meant by rural development and how it could be realized, this study offers a new definition of rural development as a necessary step in that direction.
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