Rural Development in Practice

Evolving Challenges and Opportunities

Willem van Eekelen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351271981
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Rural Development in Practice focuses on the evolving nature of rural development in the Global South. It outlines how we got to where we are today, checks what we can learn from history, and explores the development drivers, facilitators, and obstacles most likely to shape the years ahead.

The book covers the management of fishing grounds, forests, grazing lands, water sources and soil, and looks at the effects of infrastructure, trade mechanisms, and new crop varieties on farming. The author discusses the opportunities and challenges of microfinance, social safety nets and migration, and assesses the way ICT and climate change are changing everything, rapidly. Real-life examples, exercises, role-plays, textboxes, anecdotes, and illustrative artwork are used to bring concepts and theories to life, and every chapter concludes with a section that explores how best to tackle the tough and complex dilemmas of our time.

Rural Development in Practice is essential reading for students at all levels and may be of benefit for programme and policy staff in rural-focused government departments, multilateral agencies, and non-government organisations.

1
The development drivers, facilitators and obstacles of the last 50 years

Don’t be discouraged if you find this first chapter long and difficult. This is probably because it’s very densely written, as it covers such vast ground. The other chapters are shorter and easier to digest!

Prologue: we’re doing really well

If you study anything development-related, you’re being taught to see problems everywhere. People are poor, ill, illiterate, abused or abusive, and they’re destroying the natural environment. They are living through a civil war or have lost their loved ones in an earthquake. They face suppression and discrimination – perhaps because they are girls, elderly, migrants, or drug users, or because they have disabilities or belong to an ethnic minority. Corrupt officials, climate change, periodic flooding and cyclones, pollution, trade policies, and unnecessary bureaucracy all add to the misery.

You are educating yourself for the purpose of solving these and many other problems. After graduation, this focus on problems continues. You will find that some of them appear unsolvable and that this has turned some of your colleagues in the development sector into cynics. I recently bumped into a friend I once studied with. She was leaving the sector, she said, after coming to the conclusion that “everything always only gets worse”.

This is not true.

Yes, the natural world is facing unprecedented challenges. But most people are doing well. The Sustainable Development Goals¹ point at issues that require further progress, but most of their predecessor goals – the Millennium Development Goals – have been achieved in large parts of the world. In the next few pages, we will see that the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has fallen, uninterruptedly, for decades. We will also see that life expectancy and literacy rates are higher and infant mortality is lower than ever before. To a lesser degree, gender gaps² are narrowing and, while inequality within many countries is increasing, the world in its entirety is slowly getting less unequal.

Rapid economic development in Asia in particular is shifting global power patterns. Jaguar, that British icon, is now the property of Tata, of India. When the euro faced a crisis, politicians suggested that perhaps China could help out, by buying billions of Europe’s currency. China! Fifty years ago, this was one of the poorest countries in the world and a country that had only just overcome the world’s largest-ever famine. And now Europe wants China’s help to stabilise the euro!

So we’re doing really well, but some parts of the world are developing faster than others. The average Indonesian village now has electricity, running water, a school, and basic health facilities, while in the 20th century it did not. However, life in the average village in Malawi has not improved all that much over the last 50 years.

In this chapter, we will look at overall development patterns in developing countries, and discuss the main drivers, facilitators and impediments of the last half-century. Some key patterns will emerge; they are relevant today and will remain relevant in the years ahead. In the rest of the book, we will zoom in on some of them, but we will also cover other issues that have become increasingly important in recent times, and that are likely to shape the future much more than they shaped the past. This book is about rural development, but we live in a highly interconnected world, and the issues we discuss, in this chapter and later, shape rural life but are not always exclusively rural issues.

What are we talking about?

The internet is full of interactive maps and charts that show development trends for countries, continents, and the world. These maps and charts are often more up to date than anything you could find in printed books, including this one – so go there, not here, if you’re looking for the latest facts and figures. Try gapminder.org, for example. Select the countries and development indicators that interest you, and let the graphs move from the 1960s to the present. For most development indicators, you will see progress over time, but you’ll also see how life expectancy drops during a country’s years of war and famine, and it will be obvious just how much your prospects still depend on the continent in which you were born. Almost irrespective of the criteria you use, you will see that Europe and the Americas score better than Asia and Africa, but that many of the gaps are steadily narrowing.

Here are a few bottom-line facts. Read the bold-printed bits only if figures bore you.

• People live far longer than ever before. The global life expectancy from birth jumped from 53 years in 1960 to over 72 years today. Prospects are not so good in low-income countries, but they are catching up, with a life expectancy that jumped 24 years, from 39 back in 1960 to 63 now. This narrowed the difference with, say, the USA, where life expectancy increased by ‘only’ nine years in that same period (from 70 to 79).³
• Far fewer infants pass away before the age of five than ever before. In 1990, more than nine out of every hundred infants died before the age of five. Nowadays, all but eight African countries⁴ perform better than that, and the global average under-five mortality rate has dropped from 9% to under 4%. This is still a massive problem – but the progress is obvious.⁵ Under-five mortality is strongly associated with malnutrition: the World Health Organization estimates that “around 45% of deaths among children under five years of age are linked to undernutrition. These mostly occur in low- and middle-income countries”.⁶ This problem is slowly being tackled.
• Children are better nourished than ever before, though the figures are still distressing, and the long trend of progress seems to have come to an end in 2015.⁷ In 2017, and among the under-fives only, some 150 million children were stunted⁸ – which means that they have been chronically undernourished and may never grow to their full potential. This is grave and equates to 22% of the total number of children in that age group. But look at the progress: around the turn of the century, the figure was a third higher – almost 200 million children in this age group were stunted – nearly a third of the total. There is a relatively new and increasing problem, though: obesity has tripled since 1975,⁹ and some 38 million under-fives were overweight in 2018.
• Literacy rates are higher than ever before. Today, some 86% of the over-15s are literate, compared to only 69% in 1976. The percentages are even better among young people.¹⁰
• Many diseases affect fewer people now than they did in the past. Smallpox no longer exists, and polio is close to being eradicated. Malaria has been on a slow but steady decline (down 20 million between 2010 and 2017, to 219 million people),¹¹ and it may not be much longer before there’s a malaria vaccine.¹² Progress on AIDS has been moving faster. There is no decline in the number of people who are living with HIV yet, but this is part of the success: because medication is better and easier to access than before, HIV no longer necessarily leads to AIDS, which means that far fewer people living with HIV die because of HIV.
• Extreme poverty is declining. The percentage of people living in extreme poverty dropped from 36% in 1990 to 10% in 2015.¹³
• There is a gradual reduction in global inequality. Inequality within countries has been increasing throughout the past three decades, and there are only a few exceptions to this rule (a few countries in Latin America have become less unequal, for example). However, globally, the economic rise of China and India in particular have finally reversed, around 1990, a trend of ever-increasing inequality that started during the Industrial Revolution and lasted at least 170 years (before which there are no data).¹⁴
• The ‘gender gap’ is narrowing, though the process is painfully slow. The Global Gender Report features a Global Gender Gap Index that is a combination of (a) economic participation and opportunity; (b) educational attainment; (c) health and survival; and (d) political empowerment. Every year since the report first appeared in 2006, the gap narrowed a bit. Progress is slow (the 2018 report says that, at this speed, we need another 108 years to reach equality) but it is clear and deliberate. Dozens of countries are in the process of, for example, strengthening their legislation to address violence against women and girls.¹⁵

Apart from the impact of climate change, which makes problems worse, threats graver, and prospects bleaker (see Chapter 9), there is progress everywhere, and it is so strong that it outpaces population growth. For example, there were far fewer extremely poor people in 2018 than there were in 1980, even though the total population was 70% higher.¹⁶

In almost all dimensions of development, some Asian countries have done particularly well over the last 50 years. If you exclude the main oil-producing countries on gapminder.org, you will see that Asian and African countries were in the same ballpark for most economic development criteria in the 1960s and early 1970s – and you will also see that, after that, most Asian countries took off and African countries did not. Some Asian countries that lagged behind initially have recently jumped on the ‘fast train’ as well. Much of the rural population in Bangladesh is still poor, for example, but far less poor than it was a few decades ago.

Sub-Saharan Africa does not really have comparable success stories. Yes, it is obviously impressive that life expectancy jumped by over 20 years between 1960 and 2017.¹⁷ But sustained economic development? Not so much. In 2015, most of the extremely poor people in the world (56%) were in Sub-Saharan Africa and, if the current trend continues, it will be 90% by 2030.¹⁸ Central and South America are different from either Asia or Africa. Their level of development in the 1960s was higher, but their progress has been less impressive than that of Asia – most countries in the Americas are still very unequal,¹⁹ and political turmoil, suppression, violence, and poor policy choices have stunted economic growth and most other forms of development for much of the last 50 years.

So what explains the differences across countries and continents? There are obstacles, facilitators, and drivers, and we will cover the key ones in turn.

Obstacles that make development nearly impossible

The road out of poverty is filled with obstacles. Some of them just take a bit of effort. Little water? Use drip irrigation. Mountainous terrain? Drill tunnels. No navigable rivers? Dig a canal or build a railway. Other obstacles are more fundamental, and some of them are caused or reinforced by poverty itself – hence the term ‘poverty trap’. This section covers seven obstacles that make development very nearly impossible.

1 of 7: conflict and war

A conflict does not necessarily ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The development drivers, facilitators and obstacles of the last 50 years
• 2 Agricultural production practice
• 3 The commons
• 4 Trade
• 5 Microfinance
• 6 Information and communication technology
• 7 Migration
• 8 Social assistance
• 9 Climate change
• Conclusions
• Index