Acceptance and Hope for Achievement (Aha) Syndrome As Key Resilience for Sustaining Community Based Programmes

Abstract

They are an answer to transforming communities from poverty to prosperity. However, caution should be observed because it is not every community based programme that will have the potential to transform a community positively. It depends on the approaches selected and used to empower the communities. Having worked with various communities in diverse cultures ranging from Malawi, Kenya and Tanzania among others, what has been observed is that communities respond to different initiatives differently but the principle remains the same and therefore is a common factor. The bottom line behind community based programmes is to create what is called 'community resilience'. In this write up this means that communities are empowered to depend on themselves and live within their means economically, socially, culturally, spiritually as well as psychologically with minimal or no external support at all (Quirk, R, 2001). Borrowing a leaf from an international economic order as coined by the Alma Ata Declaration of 1978 where it said that 'the rich and developed nations have the mandate to support the poor and developing nations' should not be take for granted. Should the support from rich and developed nations to the underdeveloped ones continue to make no positive impact on the nation in question then it becomes pathological, hence unacceptable. As such, the support needs not to continue but rather be revisited or another alternative should be sorted out.