People First: A Guide to Self-Reliant, Participatory Rural Development

This down-to-earth book is aimed at Third World development staff involved in working with the rural poor and draws on the author's own field experience in Africa and Asia. The book is also relevant to non-field staff and, indeed, students of development generally, who want to understand what participatory development is, how it differs from the more conservative process of simply trying to involve people in already decided development projects, and the practicalities of how a non-government organisation (NGO) can go about its work without taking over and manipulating the local people.

People First presents a coherent methodology for achieving development based on principles of conscientisation, local control, co-operation and self-reliance. It emphasises the importance of women participating fully, and of getting the economics of a project right, if it is to be of real benefit to local people and successfully sustained. The author also believed that field experience and theoretical understanding must be integrated so that change agents and development workers can situate their work in an awareness of both the nature of poverty and competing views of the development process.

Conscious of the frequent co-option of the idea of participation by official development agencies, and of the other pitfalls that participatory development can run into, the author provides a hard-headed and practical education about the role of change agents; their recruitment training and support; how to get started; working with groups; handling relations with government officials and local power holders; and a full range of other relevant issues.

Stan Burkey started university life at Pennsylvanian State University where he studied Forestry for two years before winning a scholarship to Yale University where he took a degree in Engineering. He subsequently did post-graduate studies at Oxford University in Development Economics and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Business Administration.

His interest in the Third World began during a three-year teaching stint in Nigeria in the early 1960's. Afterwards he moves for personal reasons to Norway where he first worked at the national Computer Centre and later for the Norwegian Scout Movement. in 1977 he joined Redd Barna as a programme co-ordinator which work took him to countries as diverse as India, Thailand, the Maldives, Guatemala and Kenya. In 1981 he was poster for three years to Sri Lanka as Redd Barna's Country Representative. After a short period as a development consultant, he went to Uganda in 1986 to set up and run self-reliant participatory development programmes there for the development consortium ACORD. Since 1990 he has been employed by Quaker Service Norway training change agents throughout Uganda.