Abstract
Community development, especially in developing societies, has focused on mobilizing community members for collective action. Little attention has been paid to creative efforts of individuals engaged in transformative activities that improve their lives and from which other members of a community can learn. This paper examines how individuals creatively engage in activities that improve their households. The research, done in a rural area of northern Malawi, Africa, involved in-depth unstructured qualitative interviews of a number of individuals and careful observations of what was going on in their households. The analysis reveals evidence that creative individuals improved their households’ well-being through meaning-making, learning, and acting while navigating structural imperatives. Some of their actions were counter to social and cultural expectations, others were behavioral outliers, but all were driven by choices each made. Community development facilitators ought to consider identifying creative individuals (could be Christians) in a community, enhancing their agency, and organizing communities of practice around these individuals for other members of a community to learn from or for them to engage in the spreading of the Good News. I term this constructivist community development / evangelism and argue that it is particularly relevant in subsistent, substantive, and allocentric communities where group norms are a significant factor in people’s behavior. These group norms are important for collective action but can stifle individuals’ creativity.
Highlights
Community development aims at improving the lives of people in a community and the community itself
The process of community development has involved community development practitioners mobilizing community members to act collectively to deal with their common concerns
Allocentrism is good for conventional community development practice
Summary
Community development aims at improving the lives of people in a community and the community itself. I argue that creative individuals deploying their self-efficacies and negotiating socio-cultural structures in their efforts to improve their household’s well-being can be encouraged to engage in communities of practice. Garner (2007, 2) views cognitive structure as “the basic mental processes people draw upon to make any sense of information.” It inheres in knowledge, skills, talents, aptitudes, and an awareness of one’s socio-cultural environment, which dialectically influences the pattern of thought as well as the attitudes, beliefs, values, desires, dreams, and dispositions individuals attain. The human agency activities of meaning-making, learning, and acting rouses individuals to deploy their self-efficacies (a cognitive matter) in undertaking an action while taking into consideration the demands of the cultural and social structures in one’s socio-cultural environment. The case studies of four households—Hima, Samu, Remo, and Sijere (the names are pseudonyms)—reveal insights about agency in the households, that is, actions household members engaged in to improve the wellbeing of their households
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