Abstract
This study on rural communities’ access to community and social development projects in North Central Nigeria was carried out in North Central Nigeria. Multistage sampling technique and a sample size of 418 respondents was selected for the study. Data for the study were collected from primary sources. Primary data were collected through a well-structured questionnaire. 58.7% of the respondents were males whereas 41.3% were female. Descriptive statistics, such as frequency distribution, percentages and mean scores were used to analyze socioeconomic characteristic of the participants and access to CSDP project. Analysis of the educational qualification of respondents in the pooled results shows that majority of the respondents (43.3%) had Secondary School Certificates, (24.8%) had various Tertiary Certificates, while (19.5%) had Primary School Leaving Certificates, and (1.3%) had one form of formal education. This implies that about 88.9% of the respondents had formal education. It was also found that benefiting communities had high access to CSDP infrastructural provision and the respondents in the benefiting communities strongly agreed that the infrastructures provided by the CSDP had great effect in the various aspects of the community. Key words: Rural, communities, access, social, development.  
Highlights
A community can be described as all the people who live in a particular area (Hornby, 2004)
The focus of this study is to evaluate rural communities access to community and social development projects in North Central Nigeria (Figure 1)
As a project aimed at promoting development in rural areas, CSDP has fared well in the participating communities in North Central, Nigeria
Summary
A community can be described as all the people who live in a particular area (Hornby, 2004). It could be a group of people who have things in common because of their vocation, job, trade and even religion or sports. According to Nwizu (2001), a community is a group of people with socio-cultural, political or economic background who live together and do things together. Lemu (2006) defined community in the most simple and comprehensive way as a collection of definable groups of people living together in one geographical location bound by a shared set of values, expectations, aspiration, identity and destiny, pursuing common political, social, economic and related goals in a context of collaboration, cooperation and team work irrespective of observable differences.
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