The Challenges of Rural Development

by May Yu

Monday November 24, 2008 at 3:04pm, EST

The November 2008 edition of McKinsey Quarterly featured an interested article on the challenges of rural development, detailing how projects we fund with SEWA nurture entrepreneurship in rural communities. The writer, Tarun Khanna, points out that rural citizens of many developing countries benefit the least from globalization and their governments are ill equipped to the task of bringing these rural citizens

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, about 70% of the poor live in rural areas. In the least developed countries about 70% of people make a living primarily from agriculture. Khanna points out that rural development is crucial to the development of a nation’s economy.  Fostering agricultural development in the villages generate surpluses that can be reinvested in secondary industries and ultimately, industrialization.

However, he writes, India’s weak government for example, is unable to enforce agricultural reforms. Therefore, the burden is on NGOs such as the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) – our field partner in India! – to empower rural women to attain economic self-sufficiency. Fundamental to assuring economic independence, is the provision of basic necessities like clean water, electricity and the like. In India, the average village is two kilometers away from an all-weather road. This means that 20% of rural families must walk for miles to obtain safe drinking water, have access to it for only a few hours a day for much of the year, or have no access at all. Building a well in a village frees up precious time needed to pursue employment.

Grassroots development, essentially, is the key of increasing the standards of living in developing countries. The easiest and most effective initiatives are ones that focus on “bottom-up” development such as the projects 1Well and SEWA have been working on; they are ones that offer the greatest impact to the lives of rural people and consequently, the economy of the country.