The concept of development is an essentially contested one admitting to a variety of incommensurable competing interpretations. Arguably, development is not only difficult to define but also in terms of measurement. As much as development is measured by parameters such as Gross National Product per capita (GNP) or Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The truth is that people are both the means and the end of economic development as human beings are at the center of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature. Therefore, development cannot be merely economic development or GNP as important as that may be. It must necessarily include the conditions of reality that allow people to take their destiny into their own hands. If the development strategy is people-centered, then community participation must be evident in the process. A project that people/community cannot identify with will eventually collapse.
CorpsAfrica’s sector-specific initiatives (SSIs) tackle pressing issues by fostering collaborative action, centralizing development resources, and training the next generation of development practitioners such as Volunteers through CorpsAfrica Green (mainly focuses on climate), pink (mainly focuses on girls and women), Blue (mainly focuses on water solutions and sanitation), purple (mainly focuses on persons with disability), red (mainly focuses on health), black (mainly focuses on economic development), silver (mainly focuses on IT and Tech skills) and junior (children). Through these focused goals, CorpsAfrica is dedicated to creating impactful and sustainable change in diverse communities. CorpsAfrica uses Asset Based Community Development and Human Centered Design and Human Centered design for sustainable community-driven development based on the premise that communities can drive the development process themselves by strengthening communities to recognize, identify, and activate the skills, resources, experience, knowledge, connections, and passions within them to offer solutions to their problems.
To see the big picture and the full impact of her Sector Specific Initiative activities such as training in sewing reusable sanitary pads for adolescent boys and girls in her community and gender-based violence awareness campaign to strategically address critical challenges by uniting a network of development partners, community members, Volunteers and community leaders to drive positive change to build a sustainable future. The successful implementation of the two activities relied on the assets already found in a community and mobilizing them to work together to make the changes that matter most to them. The sustainability of the goal-focused projects championed by CorpsAfrica aims at combating poverty through the provision of improved basic services enhancing rights of participation, entitlements, and better income-generation opportunities through the selling of reusable sanitary pads.
In conclusion, poverty in Africa is a reality created not only by internal contradictions like conflict, war, illiteracy, bad governance, nepotism, and corruption but also more importantly, by development done to the people. Poverty in Africa is man-made as it assumes that only those from outside the community can offer solutions and resources through external foreign aid evident through foreign debts of African states accrued over some time as a result of large-scale borrowing which will require a fundamental change of behavior especially on economic, social, political, psychological, environmental, cultural and international dimensions of their environment, development efforts to free themselves from the all-pervasive problems of poverty, violence, environmental degradation are bound to fail.
