Despite the ever mounting pressure on the international community for increased aid and debt cancellation by the third world countries, it is worth noting that this welfarist approach to development has continued to perpetuate high levels of dependency and apathy among our local communities. Welfarist or relief based development paradigm largely focused on the immediate and short term needs of the communities. In effect, most community members have continually relied on handouts and have resigned to states of helplessness where they believe that nothing good can ever come out of their lives. High dependency levels have in turn given rise to a state of mental alienation making it difficult for the peoples’ inherent potential to be tapped.

In addition, this has limited any form of creativity and innovation of our people to think of their destinies beyond ‘the new bore hole sank by a local NGO’ Parents in rural communities depend on their sons and daughters in the cities to send monthly stipends as a stop gap measure to poverty levels at household level. However, it is fast emerging that all development agencies and change agents should review their strategies to adopt alternative approaches that embrace and build critical awareness and collective participation and responsibility among communities on their rights. A rights based approach requires critical consciousness among the community making them understand how internal and external factors interact thereby perpetuating poverty levels. A rights based approach to development enhances genuine participation by the locals in conceiving, designing, implementing, monitoring as well as evaluating their own priorities within their own contexts using their own natural resources.