The Community Development Efforts Of Women In The Economic Development In Nigeria

Community development has been a universal concept applied to national programmes for development.  The concept and practice of community development has never been a new phenomenon in Nigeria specifically or in the world generally.  This was reflected in Battern’s statement “I must make one preliminary point enthusiasts for community development sometime speak or write about it (community development) as if it was to irritate the very many people who feel that community development is not new, but that its principles were infact applied by a multitude of individual government offices and other to such a term as community development”.

This is true, and every real sense, community development as we recognize it today is base on and had been an indigenous mechanism and techniques employed by many rural communities in solving their problems.  Onwuamalem (1981:23) state that the history of community development in Nigeria is traceable to the days of eastern Nigeria as shown by the fact that mutual co-operation existed among families and groups.  He further revealed that it received some encouragement from Chadwick, an Administrative officer in the former Eastern Nigeria who activated communities in Udi in Enugu State to build school, roads, churches, markets etc.  During this time, the people were short in a film captioned “Day Break in Udi”.  This film was shown around in every village and town of the Eastern Region of Nigeria, which yielded positive results in that almost every community embarked on one form at self-help project or the other.  It was on this basis that community development was said to have been practiced first in Udi through West Africa Professor Jim Lots (1974:84-85) noted that if nothing else has come out at community development projects since the second world war the realization that traditional societies have self-help mechanisms that exist before the concept of community development was discovered by the western world should not be apparent.

For many decades, people have gathered themselves together to construct town halls, palaces market squares, roads and other infrastructure facilities in their community so as to make life sweet and enjoyable.  What is being said is that the concept of community development as self-help activities has been with us since time immemorial.

In Eku today noteworthy developments were brought about through self-help the general hospitals, pos office, market schools both primary and secondary, etc are all outcome of the community’s efforts.

Community development can be seen as planned and organized efforts of people to help themselves to acquire the attitude, skills and concepts required for their democratic participation in the effective solution of a wide range of community development problems continuing, the United Nations implicitly defined community development thus “the process by which the efforts of the people themselves are united with or without those of government to improve the economic social and cultural condition of communities to integrate those community into the life of national and to enable them to contribute fully to national progress” one element that runs all the above definitions is the people’s initiatives to find lasting solutions to their individual and common problems, relying on their own resources as much as possible and assistance from outside the community if any, as I said earlier, Eku town has not been left out of the wheel of community development.  Based on this the women of Eku have contributed much to the development of Eku in town of social and economic ventures, lie building of oil processing hills, market stalls, town halls etc.