Updated: August 02, 2002

Community Development in S. Africa

To become a major competitor in the global market, S. Africa must pursue an aggressive development plan to increase its natural resources.
The most important factors that need to be targeted in S. Africa’s current situation are

- Education
- Health/Life Span
- Economic Stability

First it is important to define community development. Community development is a change that results in an aggregate higher standard of living. From an economic viewpoint, these can be measured in either avg. income per capita, or perhaps literacy rating.
Literacy may seem an unlikely standard, but a US president one said that literacy is the foundation upon which a democracy is based. He was saying that it is necessary for the people to be well informed to be able to make intelligent votes. This is why it is integral that S. Africa focus its effort on education. A more educated nation has citizens that are more able to demand fair pay, due to an increased knowledge of average benchmarks, and he is also a better employee, with more marketable skills.
Health, in particular AIDS, with economic stability both need to be targeted due to their position of Maslow’s hierarchy of need. A person who is starving does does not have a job is not worried about government policies or his own education.
Therefore we have identified our desired outputs. With the program outcome model

Inputs -> Activities -> Outputs -> Outcomes

We realize that there are many more steps to complete our needs into an actual program.
The first part, Inputs, consists of both money and an understanding of local laws. For the purposes of this pro forma outline, we will ignore the needs of staff and volunteers for now.
The best source for the necessary income would be from multinational corporate businesses. During a time of increases in ethical business awareness, firms are in a race to find projects to fund that will a) increase their corporate image and b) provide an external positive log-run source of benefit (either monetarily or with better employees.) Already BMW and Hertz have publicly announced that they find S. Africa to be rich in potential. The reason that multinational corporations are better than funds such as the IMF or World Bank is that firms require a quantitative result, and are concerned with receiving benefits from their contributions.
Also, contribution of this sort has a snowball tendency. As the situation improves in S. Africa, more contributors will want to be a part of its reformation.
There are many possibilities that can be considered to import the factors that have been previously mentioned. Ideas are... Sponsored work training for the specific industries that are contributed, low interest venture loans for qualified applicants.
These ideas are a general outline for developing inputs for community change in S. Africa. For more information on specific fields, click on the appropriate link