Journal of Social Development in Africa (1987), 2, 75-85 
Rural Poverty, Social Development and 
their Implications for Fieldwork Practice* 
PATRICK J. MUZ A ALE+ 
ABSTRACT 
A most unsettling observation is that rural poverty is on the increase, despite 
decades of rural development. The blame is currently being placed on modes 
of designing and implementing development programmes, which are seen to 
have failed to take the basic needs of the poor into account. Further blame is 
placed on historical factors together with the social structures that have 
developed from them. The paper examines a selection of current ideas about 
rural poverty and their implications for the practice and teaching of fieldwork 
in social development, and points out the issues involved, giving suggestions 
on how they might be dealt with. 
Introduction 
A most unsettling current observation about poverty, particularly rural 
poverty in Africa, is that it is on the increase, both in incidence and intensity, 
despite the wide variety of national and international measures undertaken to 
eradicate it during the last two decades. The failure of these measures has been 
attributed to a multiplicity of causes, of which the following are the most 
frequently mentioned and emphasised: inadequate conceptualisations of 
development and poverty; a failure to identify and to emphasise the true 
underlying causes of the problem; wrong programmatic prescriptions; a lack of 
organisational requirements for programme implementation, and various 
combinations of these shortcomings. An excursion through the vast literature 
on poverty and development would readily reveal that current perceptions of, 
and approaches to, the problem of poverty are partial in scope and neatly 
reflect the case of the proverbial blind men and the elephant, in which men 
mistook the individual parts for the whole beast. For example, many national 
Governments in Africa have tended to treat poverty as a purely economic 
problem that could be overcome by means of carefully planned and 
* Paper presented at a Workshop on Social Development, Rural Poverty and Fieldwork 
Intervention at Harare, Zimbabwe, June 10 - 14, 1986. 
+ Department of Social Work, Makerere University, P O. Box 7062, Kampala, Uganda.
76 Patrick J. Muzaale 
implemented economic development programmes. But this approach has led 
not to a reduction in poverty but to mere increases in average incomes and 
GNP, a situation depicted by Griffin and Khan (1978) in these words: 
"in most developing countries, rising average incomes and GNP have not 
led to a visible improvement in the living standards of the masses of the 
people. Eradication of hunger and poverty, the ultimate goal, is further 
away than ever before. Close to 1,3 billion people have incomes less than 
U.S. $200 a year, and more than half that number—an estimated 750 
million people—are utterly destitute, lacking the most rudimentary 
requirements for human dignity". 
This observation indicates clearly that aggregate economic development 
does not necessarily lead to poverty reduction and that a better way to assess 
the impact of economic development programmes on the welfare of the people 
is by examining separately the benefits that have accrued to the various 
groups, particularly the socially vulnerable groups. This is how the economic 
development efforts of the last two decades have been found to have poorly 
focused on the poverty problem. 
This autopsy of past poverty programmes in the Third World suggests that 
an effective solution to the problem is very demanding in its knowledge 
requirements. It requires sound analysis, valid diagnosis, pertinent prescriptions, 
and a knowledge and availability of organisational requirements for the 
implementation of prescribed programmes. In this regard, the following 
guiding questions must be seriously considered: who are the poor? what are 
their distinguishing characteristics? why are they poor? where are they 
located? what can be done to assist them to exit from poverty? and how may 
society and the poor organise themselves for this task? 
Although the social work profession historically came into existence 
primarily to deal with the problem of poverty and its consequences, social 
workers have not seriously asked or sought to obtain carefully considered 
answers to these fundamental questions in their traditional approaches to the 
problem. In traditional social work the main emphasis has been on relief. But 
the recent failures of development programmes to reduce poverty in 
developing countries has led social workers to question their own practice 
paradigm and to redefine the purpose of development. This move has led to the 
emergence of a developmental social work perspective which is now called 
social development. But social development is a relatively new and 
revolutionary perspective on social problems and social intervention. Social 
work practitioners and educators have not yet achieved a consensus as to its
Social Development and Fieldwork Practice 77 
content or practice requirements. Therefore, a discussion of the theme "Rural 
Poverty, Social Development and their Implications for Fieldwork Practice" 
presents opportunities for examining more closely the nature of rural poverty 
in the context of a new social work perspective whose concepts and 
propositions are very much in need of assessment. 
The task of this paper, therefore, is to examine a selection of current ideas 
on poverty in general and rural poverty in particular and their implications for 
the practice and teaching of social development. The discussion divides into 
four major parts. The first part considers explanatory, diagnostic, and 
prescriptive perspectives on rural poverty, which perspectives are abstracted 
from non-social work literature. The purpose of this is to help remove 
professional blinkers and to contribute to an interprofessional understanding 
of the problem. 
The second part examines the essence of social development, focusing on 
its meaning, concepts, philosophy and methodology. The purpose of this part 
of the discussion is to contribute to a clarification of the content, philosophy 
and methodology of social development. 
Thirdly, the discussion attempts to delineate a social development 
approach to poverty in general and rural poverty in particular. This part of the 
discussion attempts to make use of the ideas and perspectives, that have been 
considered in an earlier part of the discussion, from the non-social work 
literature. It is hoped that doing this will induce a readiness among social work 
educators and practitioners to re-examine their existing knowledge, practice 
skills and attitudes relating to this problem. 
Finally, the paper considers the implications of a social development 
approach to poverty, as delineated here, for fieldwork practice. The emphasis 
of this part of the discussion is to identify the nature of social development 
tasks that are relevant to the reduction of rural poverty in Africa, together with 
their knowledge and skill requirements. 
Rural poverty: interdisciplinary analysis and intervention strategies 
Poverty is a muiti-dimensional concept that denotes a universally undesirable 
human condition. It describes varying kinds and degrees of human deprivation 
in society. Poverty is a complex problem because there are many human needs 
in society (Maslow has identified a hierarchy of five) which may be only 
inadequately met or remain unmet altogether, due to a multiplicity of causes.
78 Patrick J. Muzaale 
There are, therefore, many definitions of this human problem to be found in the 
interdisciplinary literature on the subject, each stressing a given kind or degree 
of deprivation. Accordingly, the present analysis of the problem is prefaced by 
a consideration of the basic definitions: 
(a) Basic definitions 
One set of definitions distinguishes between absolute and relative poverty. 
Absolute poverty is human deprivation in its extreme and most obvious form. 
It refers to a lack, or deficient supply, of the basic necessities of human life, 
such as food, safe drinking water, housing, clothing, and health care. A person 
is said to be in absolute poverty if he or his family cannot supply these basic 
needs for him. This is ^physiological definition of poverty. People in absolute 
poverty suffer from chronic malnutrition and are chronically sick;they live in 
squalor; they are poorly clothed; they lack access to health care and 
educational facilities ;they live short lives and many of them die in infancy and 
childhood. Rural poverty in Africa is largely covered by this definition. 
Relative poverty, on the other hand, refers to a state of human suffering 
which results from the inability of a person or group of persons to meet the 
needs that other people in society have come to take for granted. This is 
primarily a problem of inequality in society which intensifies as the income gap 
between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' increases. This problem exists in all 
societies, including rural Africa, but it is of the greatest significance in rich 
countries. In the rich countries of Europe and North America an acceptable 
standard of living is formally identified and anyone whose standard of living 
falls below it, whether or not he is able to satisfy his basic human needs, is 
considered poor and is assisted by the state to raise his consumption to the 
national minimum. This is a social definition of poverty. Relative poverty is 
not very useful in rural Africa where the majority of the people are subject to 
absolute poverty. 
Another set of definitions of poverty, formulated by Rowntree and his 
associates (in Brown, 1977) during the nineteenth century, is of some 
relevance to rural communities in Africa which have just been fully absorbed 
in the cash cropping economy. Rowntree distinguished between primary and 
secondary poverty. Primary poverty is actually the other name for 'absolute 
poverty' which has already been defined here. Secondary poverty, on the other 
hand, is a situation of deprivation which occurs even when the victim obtains 
income that is sufficient to purchase the basic necessities of life, but spends 
some of it on items which do not contribute directly to nutrition, health or good 
housing. As a result of this pattern of expenditure, this person and his family
Social Development and Fieldwork Practice 79 
often suffer the conditions of absolute poverty. This definition is relevant to 
analysing the situation of many rural households in Africa which are now 
devoting all of their productive assets to cash cropping. Most of these families 
lack budgeting skills, and it is not uncommon to see families in this category 
use up their cash incomes long before the next crop selling season. Often 
proceeds from cash sales are spent on such non-essential items as radios, 
bride-price to obtain a second wife, and bicycles. While these items are useful, 
they do not directly meet the nutritional and health needs of family members, 
especially the needs of young children. 
A third conceptualisation of poverty places the problem directly in a 
political context. It refers to poverty as the lack of power to make decisions on 
matters that intimately affect one's welfare, like the fixing of the prices of one's 
produce and the establishment of the laws governing the processes of acquiring 
and disposing of productive assets. This is seldom used in designing measures 
against rural poverty in Africa. 
The analytic purpose of these definitions is to specify the components of the 
undesirable social situation labelled 'poverty'. According to the definitions 
considered here, the undesirable components of poverty include the 
following: 
(i) Inability of individuals and families to satisfy such basic human needs as 
nutrition, housing, clothing, drinking water, education and health 
care; 
(ii) Greatly unequal distribution of incomes, consumption goods and 
productive assets; 
(iii) Lack of budgeting skills in the context of a cash economy, and 
(iv) Lack of opportunities to participate in, or influence, decisions that 
intimately affect one's welfare. 
The causal analysis of poverty, to which the discussion now turns, is 
organised to link these undesirable social conditions to what are considered to 
be significant causal variables. 
(b) Causes of poverty 
There is growing consensus among rural development analysts and practitioners 
in the Third World that rural poverty is worsening despite decades of rural 
development effort primarily because such effort has been founded on poorly 
conceived causal models. The guiding models of these development efforts
80 Patrick J. Muzaale 
have tended to be single-factor explanations of a highly complex problem and 
have tended to ignore such important variables as the historical, social, 
national, and international contexts in which poverty and underdevelopment 
have thrived. It is therefore proposed to start this causal analysis by examining 
briefly the historical context of the rural economies of Sub-Saharan Africa. 
This will be followed by a consideration of selected causal relationships in that 
historical context in order to illustrate what this paper proposes as being a 
better way to comprehend the underlying causes of the problem. 
Before the advent of colonial forces the rural economies operated 
independently of the pressures of the international economy and a modern 
state economy. In such independent, indigenous economies, families operated 
as autonomous, self-sufficient units. Questions concerning access to productive 
assets, of production and distribution of output and of disposal of surplus 
production were virtually entirely matters for family decision. Production 
relations were indistinguishable from family relations and were virtually free 
from tendencies of exploitation. It is true that those pre-colonial economies 
often suffered from natural disasters such as drought and floods. But local level 
mutual social support systems did provide a reliable safety-net, except where 
such disasters uniformly affected whole communities. Even then, there existed 
institutionalised inter-community voluntary exchange relationships to provide 
cover against such contingencies. It may well be true that those ancient rural 
economies were superior to modern ones in their ability to meet the basic 
needs of nutrition and self-determination. 
Then enters the colonial era and the modern state. The express purpose of 
colonial administrations was to organise the extraction of the fruits of native 
labour and natural resources for export as raw materials for the manufacturing 
industries of the metropole. For this purpose modern export sectors consisting 
of mining and agricultural production for export were established, together 
with networks of marketing boards and export taxes. This led to the emergence 
of dual economies in Africa in which subsistance economies co-existed with 
modern export enclaves in a parasitical relationship. Modern export enclaves 
developed at the expense of the traditional subsistence sectors. In Central and 
Southern Africa in particular lands of high agricultural potential were annexed 
and made available to European settlers for plantation agriculture while 
natives were pushed to geographically isolated marginal lands. Unable to 
extract an adequate livelihood from the marginal lands "and unable to produce 
enough cash income from those lands to meet their tax obligations, young men 
had no alternative but to migrate and sell their labour within the export 
enclaves. Those who remained—mainly women, elderly, and young childrenexchanged 
their produce with consumer manufactured goods on highly
Social Development and Fieldwork Practice 81 
unfavourable terms of trade. In this way the indigenous rural economy lost 
superior land, superior labour and valuable produce to the export sector. The 
extracted raw materials and repatriated profits from the import trade 
constituted significant leakages from rural Africa to metropolitan Europe. 
This, in brief, is what has been referred to in the literature of Political Economy 
as the underdevelopment of Africa by Europe (Amin, 1972). 
Post-colonial, indigenous Governments of Africa have not done much to 
alter economic relationships, either internally or externally, and the dual 
structure of African economies continues basically unchanged. Export 
enclaves continue to thrive at the expense of the rural economy in order to 
support urban consumption, and to finance urban-biased social services and 
economic infrastructures. Even where extension services are made available 
to the rural sector their design and distribution are biased in favour of the crops 
and resource profiles of progressive farmers, not the poor. 
Moreover, rural development plans and programmes, which are supposed 
to be implemented by the rural poor, supposedly for their own improvement, 
are drawn up without the participation of the poor. As a result, these 
programmes are not properly focused on the basic needs of the poor. Given 
this historical perspective on rural poverty in Africa significant causal 
explanations of the problem may now be evaluated. 
Three significant explanations of the causes of rural poverty are stressed in 
the literature by analysts of various intellectual orientations. Very briefly, 
these explanations assert that rural poverty is the result of: 
(i) unfavourable cultural attitudes towards an entrepreneurial spirit which 
has made for progress in the Western World; 
(ii) lack of appropriate market incentives, or 
(iii) unfavourable social structures. 
It is quite clear from the historical perspective presented above that rural 
poverty in Africa cannot be explained primarily in terms of traditional 
attitudes. People in the indigenous rural sector have had restricted access to 
productive assets. They have also been subject to exploitative trade with 
Europe. 
With regard to the incentive explanation, the argument cannot be sustaine 
that the rural poor are poor because they have lacked incentives to produce. 
The rural poor have many production constraints which have not received
84 Patrick J. Muzaale 
with for organisation and lobbying. In this regard systems models of social 
work practice would be useful starting points. 
Influencing demographic factors calls for family life education and other 
population strategies. Here the activities of motivating families to undertake 
family planning is a value to be pursued. 
Finally, influencing seasonal factors requires the setting up of monitoring 
systems by means of which an early warning system can be established and 
operated. With such systems in operation episodic factors can be predicted 
and their impacts reduced. 
The essence of social development 
Familiar words may mean different things to different people. If people fail to 
communicate as a result of this, the result may be funny or disastrous, 
depending on the nature of the issue involved. For example, a funny story has it 
that Americans and English men who were involved in a formal debate agreed 
*to table the motion'. Following this, the Americans proposed, to the 
amazement of the English, that they proceed to the next item on the agenda, 
The English men were, of course, preparing for a formal discussion of the 
motion, and not to ditch it, the American meaning of 'tabling the motion'. 
Social development is a relatively new concept in social work and tends to 
mean slightly different things to different people, yet the issues involved in 
social development are of grave professional and social importance. While I 
cannot claim to have had access to all the existing literature on the subject, the 
sample of the literature available makes me feel somewhat certain that 
standard works on the subject have not yet emerged. The most recent attempt 
to develop a formal conceptualisation of social development that I have come 
across is the small monograph edited by Sanders (1982), which evolved out of 
a coloquium on "The Developmental Perspective in Social Work" held at the 
University of Hawaii in 1979.1 have depended heavily for inspiration, issues 
and concepts on the set of papers published in this monograph. 
Each of the authors in this book and in other sources I have consulted 
focuses on one dimension of this broad concept of 'social development'. In 
general terms, the concept describes a radical change of mission, knowledge 
base, and practice skills in social work. The background to this radical change 
is the dissatisfaction among social work practitioners with the negative 
consequences of past decades of development effort in the Third World. In this 
sense social development may be interpreted as the proposed package of social
Social Development and Fieldwork Practice 85 
work's contribution to the redefinition of the content, objectives,methods, and 
social structures for development. 
Before we consider the specifics of social development, it is necessary to 
reflect on the implications of these changes for the continued legitimacy of our 
claims to professional status. Caution has been sounded in some quarters that 
social workers may lose credibility due to the excessive enthusiasm with which 
they are taking on new functions, many of which fall outside their socially 
recognised area of technical competence. Stein (1976) advises that the 
legitimate way for social workers to win developmental change roles in society 
must be rooted in traditional social work practice; that is to say, social workers 
will be accepted by interprofessional teams concerned with change and 
development if they can demonstrate through their practice that they have a 
unique contribution to make. Pinker (1984) goes a little further to the right and 
advises that social workers should concentrate on doing what they know how 
to do and resist the temptation to break new ground and dilute the image of the 
profession. Whether one agrees or disagrees with these views they raise an 
important issue which must be borne in mind in considering the essence of 
social development. 
Social development has been characterised as "a movement", "a 
developmental perspective in social work" and a practice mode in social work 
(Sanders, 1982). It has been defined as " a process of planned institutional 
change to bring about a better fit between human needs and social policies and 
programmes". It advocates self-reliance and stresses the need for enhancing of 
people's capacities to work for their own welfare and that of their society. It 
also stresses the need to give people the capacity to alter their institutions in 
keeping with their aspirations and desires. The broad mission of social 
development is to contribute to the emergence and maintenence of a society in 
which organisations and institutions are "more sensitive and responsive to 
human needs" (Paira, 1982). The core skills of social development are "policy 
analysis, planning, community organisation,programme evaluation and social 
advocacy", while the knowledge base includes a mastery of the ingredients of 
"social structures, economic structures, and political structures" (Hollister, 
1982). Clearly the familiar labels of the knowledge bases of social 
development are political science, economics, and sociology, with special 
emphasis on structures. This is in line with the objective of helping people to 
alter their institutional structures as the need arises. What needs a more 
explicit analysis are the skills relevant to social development tasks. The list 
given here is actually a list of activities rather than skills. For the purpose of 
identifying practical training content for social developers, it is necessary to
86 Patrick J. Muzaale 
specify the specific skills that are needed in policy analysis, social planning, 
community organisation and social advocacy. 
These have not been explicitly stated anywhere and this paper invites fellow 
professionals to take up this task. 
Another aspect that is stressed in social development is the question of 
people's values. Social developers are expected to possess skills for 
'negotiating values' with the people when social and structural changes are 
being undertaken. This is necessary to ensure acceptance of change. All of 
these principles and skills have definite implications for fieldwork practice, an 
issue we consider in the concluding section of this discussion. For now the 
discussion turns to a consideration of the social development approach to rural 
poverty. 
Finally, we consider the issue of supervision of students placed in nontraditional 
settings. This presents the problem that there is no person in the 
fieldwork practice situation who is professionally qualified as a social 
developer and who could work as co-teacher. This situation calls for 
innovation. Schools have to devise schemes for fieldwork assessment in 
situations where the qualified teacher is not available to observe and assess the 
student. It also calls for organising regular training workshops for prospective 
field supervisors from selected organisations. 
All the unfamiliar issues that have been raised here and unorthodox 
procedures that have been proposed to handle them represent the starting point 
for the indigenisation of fieldwork practice in Schools of Social Development 
in Africa. 
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Bibangambah J R (1985) "Approaches to the Problems of Rural Poverty in Africa" in 
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Press, for OSSREA. 
Brown M (1977) Introduction to Social Administration in Britain, London, 
Hutchinson, (4th ed.) 
Chambers R (1983) Rural Development: Putting the Last First, London, 
Longman. 
Chambers R, Longhurst R and Pacey A (1981) Seasonal Dimensions to Rural
Social Development and Fieldwork Practice 87 
Poverty, Frances Pinter, London. 
Griffin K and Khan A (1978) '-Poverty in the Third World: Ugly Facts and Fancy 
Models", in World Development, Vol. 6, No. 3. 
Hollister D (1982) "The Knowledge and Skill Bases of Social Development" in 
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Hawaii, School of Social Work. 
Leonard D K (1982) "Analyzing the Organisational Requirements for Serving the 
Poor", in David K Leonard and D R Marshall (eds.). Institutions of Rural 
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Leonard DK (1979) Reaching the Peasant Farmer: Organisational Theory and 
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Lipton M (1977) Why Rural People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World 
Development, Temple Smith. 
Mujwahuzi M R (1985) "The Impact of Population Growth on Food Production in 
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Journal of Social Development in Africa (1987), 2, 89-103 
Book Reviews 
Socialism, Education and Development, Fay Chung and Emmanuel Ngara, 
Zimbabwe Publishing House, Harare, 1985 (Z$6,50plus sales tax) 
This book is divided into two sections: the first on various aspects of socialism 
in general; the second as applied to education and development. Throughout, 
the authors have Africa and especially Zimbabwe very much in mind. It does 
not go into many questions in depth, but raises a vast number of very important 
issues for developing countries. 
Some pains are taken to allay the anxieties of those who fear the wholesale 
nationalisation of all institutions, or the blind application of socialist principles, 
or the confiscation of land, houses, wives, husbands and even chickens. 
Socialism does not mean state control, or excessive bureaucratic control or 
totalitariansim, but the scientific analysis of objective social reality. 
At the same time the authors point out the failures of African Socialism in 
Tanzania. In Libya, Morocco, Senegal and Sudan what is called socialism is in 
reality feudalistic, reactionary and oppressive, while other leaders are racist in 
their appeal to tribal instincts. Zimbabwe is fortunate in coming to independence 
late through an armed struggle, so that her leaders have seen the 
problems of other countries and have evolved beyond an ideology of mere 
nationalism. 
The detrimental effects of colonialism are pointed out, particularly lingering 
mental colonisation. Under neo-colonialism Western nations can overthrow 
governments, but unfortunately the authors do not have the courage also to 
criticise Soviet Union interference in less powerful states. There is a good 
analysis of the activities of multinationals, trade between developing and 
developed nations, the International Monetary Fund and NGOs. However I 
am not convinced that tourism is a major cause of the prostitution problem 
except in Swaziland and Bophuthatswana. It is essential that developing 
countries co-ordinate themselves into a stronger body to control these 
neocolonialist activities. But is is noted that it is unwise to ignore reality for the 
sake of ideological purity; there is a need to make alliances; for example, are 
there sufficient local management skills and investment available for nationalisation? 
Surprisingly no reference is made to the way multinationals make friends 
even in socialist governments by means of gifts and donations. With the