Self-help Education Projects

Communities, no matter they are illiterate or literate, have their own peculiar ways of banding efforts together to embark on self-help initiatives so that they achieve predetermined goals. The idea of self-help approach is intrinsically connected with development-especially rural development. The overriding assumption is to bring profound transformation in the rural environment through concerted effort of the rural people and self-help action with the minimum external intervention. It pre-supposes rational intensive use of scarce resources. Broadly considered, the major objective of self-help approach is to foster social development, and then economic improvement in the rural area by stimulating self-help actions to improve health, nutrition, education, and general community welfare by extracting all possible resources available locally. The essence of this book is to portray the significance of self-help initiatives in development in general, and local development in particular.