During this Writeshop, we were struck by the topics being incorporated into the book such as the redefinition of the seemingly basic concepts of development and modernization. They even began challenging the already established alternatives such as needs-based planning and community consultation to ensure that they are truly sustainable and empowering for those involved.

Needs-based planning and Strengths-based planning

Needs-based planning involves conducting a needs assessment of a community before planning any sort of development strategy as opposed to a strength-based planning, which places more responsibility on the participant community to address their own needs. It examinees the strengths of a specific community and analyzes how they can be utilized in the most efficient and effective manner. Instead of using outside resources to attend to the needs of a community, the facilitator helps the community realize that the solutions to many of their problems lie within their capacity. It focuses more on strategic resourcefulness than outside intervention.

For us, it was a very humbling experience to be surrounded by well informed and experienced individuals who have taken on community empowerment as their life’s work. The participants in the Writeshop came from a variety of backgrounds, positions, and perspectives but were still able to produce comprehensive solutions to problems they are being faced with. Coming from the outside and having little knowledge of the social constructs that they are a part of made it difficult for us to make contributions because the participants were so knowledgeable about the situation on the ground that does not just affect the outcome of development but dictates it. This really drove home the importance of the work being done during the Writeshop: that their knowledge should be at the forefront because of their expertise. Though they valued our input but it was not as substantive or applicable in this context as it would in a setting we are more familiar with.

As students of the ‘Global College’, we’ve learned that initiatives in such fields as community development need to be locally initiated and appropriate in order to be effective. In relation to this, the Writeshop proved to be a very useful tool to study community development in Africa, where we saw firsthand the initiative taken towards offering effective solutions to building sustainable livelihoods.