Researching_of_Rural_Development

Why research rural development' The concept of rural development has changed over the last three decades; the paradigm shifts in economic development from growth to widely defined “development”, the notion of rural development has adopted a more holistic view. The establishment of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals reinforces this shift in development paradigm. The concept of rural development has therefore shifted focus from agricultural growth and increasing in output to assessing changes in quality of life which includes improvement in nutrition, health, education, gender and income inequality, access to resources and access to political and civil freedoms and in recent years the environmental impacts of economic activity (Fakuda-Parr, 2003). “Rural development” is defined as including: “the provision of social and physical infrastructure, the provision of financial services in non-urban areas, non-farm and small-medium enterprises activities in rural communities and market towns, that are more linked to the rural economies than they are to the economies of the larger urban cities, as well as the development of traditional rural sectors, such as agriculture and natural resource management” (Barrios, 2008:4) Moreover, rural poverty still continues to be a major concern for most developing countries (Desai and Potter, 2008) as population in the developing world are more in rural than urban areas (IFAD, 2011). Around 55% of the world’s population accounts for rural and approximately 70% of the poorest people in the world live in rural areas and out of this most of the hungry and poor are young people and children. The regions which are worst effected by hunger and poverty are South Asia with the highest number of rural poor and Sub-Saharan Africa with the greatest incidence of rural poverty. Furthermore, it is indicated that poverty varies greatly within regions, countries as well as within countries (IFAD, 2011). IFAD (2001) indicates that the people most affected by rural poverty are pastoralists, rain-fed and small holder farmers, artisanal fisherman, people who are landless/wage labourers, female headed households, people who are displaced and a recognition of women in all the above mentioned categories (IFAD, 2001).