Journal of Social Development in Africa (1988) 3,2, 33-48 
The Organisation and Delivery of Social 
Services to Rural Areas* 
PATRICK JOHN MUZAALE+ 
ABSTRACT 
A critical challenge now facing social development education in Africa is the 
urgent need to specify, in concrete terms, the content of social development, 
to isolate the basic ingredients of the roles and tasks of social development 
practitioners, to determine the knowledge, skills and behaviour requirements 
of those roles and tasks, to design and produce the necessary teaching 
materials, and to arrange relevant field learning experiences. 
Introduction 
This paper attempts to contribute to the effort currently being made by 
social development educators to meet the need for more specific content 
and tasks in social development. A diagnostic profile of rural life is presented 
in order to highlight the typical problems of the rural dweller that call for 
social development intervention. Social development intervention is 
conceptualised here as the systematic assessment of human needs, die 
design and production of social services, and the delivery of diese services. 
Viewing social services as an interventional instrument, whose inherent 
strengths and limitations ought to be adequately appreciated by the social 
development practitioner, this paper proposes a somewhat unorthodox 
conception of social services but one which is deemed to be appropriate to 
social development in poor countries. A typology of social services is 
attempted as one step towards sensitising social development practitioners 
to the spectrum of non-traditional social services that might be available in 
dieir environment, and to enhance their discriminating competence in 
choosing services for inclusion in their intervention package. 
Some of the critical issues that underlie the organisation of social services, 
the common obstacles to successful delivery of benefits to intended 
recipients in rural Africa, and the implications of all of tfiese for social 
development curriculum and research are briefly considered. 
In brief then, this paper divides into five themes, namely, a diagnostic 
* Presented at the ASWEA-IASSW Training Workshop held at Nazareth, Ethiopia, 6-20th 
December 1986. 
+ Dept of Social Work and Social Administration, Makarere University, PO Box 7062, 
Kampala, Uganda.
34 Patrick John Muzaale 
profile of rural life, the nature of social services, basic questions underlying 
social service organisation, challenges to the delivery of social benefits to 
rural communities, and some implications for social development 
curriculum and research. 
Diagnostic profile of rural life 
The profile of rural life presented here is necessarily selective and is 
intentionally biased. Its purpose is to direct attention to the phenomena in 
rural areas that call for social development intervention. Thus, no attempt is 
made to describe the brighter aspects of rural life, such as the caring social 
relationships that exist among neighbours and relatives, the untapped 
intellectual assets of rural people, die unexploited natural resources of the 
land, the unpolluted atmosphere, and die relatively high moral standard 
widi which rural people normally conduct their public affairs. 
The choice of the aspects of rural life to be described here has been 
inspired by Robert Chambers' powerful concept of the 'deprivation trap' 
(Chambers: 1983a). The concept suggests five areas of assessment for the 
social development practitioner intending to make a diagnosis in a rural 
community. These areas include basic needs, die physical fitness of rural 
people, the capacity for absorbtion of episodic shocks, access to critical 
services, and dieir ability to influence policies and decisions that intimately 
affect their lives. These are, among others, the areas of basic concern for die 
social development practitioner. The necessary/ data has not been collected 
which will lend empirical support to what is being said here about rural life, 
but die purpose of the exercise is to articulate personal observations and to 
draw implications for intervention and research. The discussion now turns 
to a consideration of each of these five cases. 
The basic needs, of which die development literature currendy speak, are 
nutrition, safe drinking water, reasonable doming, reasonable housing, 
adequate heakh care, education, and participation in critical decision 
making. If one chooses an African country at random and assesses a random 
sample of rural communities on these areas of basic need, die probability is 
very high diat a vast majority of rural dwellers would be found to be 
malnourished, drinking unsafe water, wearing very.old or torn doming, 
sleeping in poor, unhygienic houses, lacking access to health care and 
education, and excluded from meaningful participation in making decisions 
diat are of vital consequence to diem, like fixing the price of the products 
upon which dieir livelihood depends. Specially designed social services, of 
one form or anodier, are needed as a direct or indirect means of redudng 
deprivation in diese areas of basic need. For example, organising the people 
of a community and linking them to die technical advice and odier services 
of public healdi personnel might lead to die establishment of primary healdi 
care in die community and to the eventual reduction of morbidity in die
Social Services to Rural Areas 3*i 
community. Morbidity reduction is likely to have widespread positive 
consequences for other areas of basic need, and to reduce poverty in the 
long run.1 The sad scenario is that food supplies are erratic and are 
quantitatively and qualitatively inadequate, and a substantial proportion of 
the rural population suffers from seasonal hunger; water supplies are far 
from developed and little or no technology exists in the rural area to tap 
underground water, to conserve rain water, or to protect existing wells and 
springs; many of the diseases rural people suffer from are preventable and 
are associated with drinking unsafe water, and a significant proportion of 
rural people's precious time is spent on collecting water from very distant 
sources. This scenario implies that there are many potential 
areas of entry for social development intervention. 
The deprivations outlined above have the effect of undermining the 
physical fitness of household labour. Because they have insufficiently 
nutritious diets, drink unsafe water, and live in unsanitary environments, 
rural people are constantly exposed to debilitating diseases which, in the 
absence of adequate health care, remain insufficiently treated and 
undermine physical fitness. Many rural households often experience labour 
crises, particularly during the rainy seasons (Chambers: 1983b). A recent 
series of research studies in Africa and Asia have established that there is a 
seasonal dimension to rural deprivation and that deprivation reaches apeak 
during the wet seasons when food supplies run out, malnourishment 
mounts, water-borne diseases increase, and labour-demanding activities 
assume the greatest urgency. Physically unfit, many village people fail to 
undertake productive agricultural activities at the right time and are exposed 
to further deprivations. 
A very important area of rural life, that calls for continuous assessment, is 
the capacity of households in the community to absorb episodic shocks that 
may occur in their environment. Episodic shocks in the rural environment 
include the unanticipated, unfavourable, sharp discontinuities in conditions 
of survival. They include natural hazards like drought, floods and visitations 
of locusts, which may lead to total crop failure or death of livestock. They 
also include man-made problems, like civil wars conducted in the rural 
areas. An outbreak of human disease may have die same effect on the 
household's economic survival (Muzaale:1980). The ability of a household 
or community to widistand the impact of negative events like this is a 
function of the size of its buffer stocks, cash savings and other reserves. The 
longer die duration of the environmental shock die larger the reserves 
needed to sustain the household. Unfortunately, however, the vast majority 
of rural households live hand to mouth and are constandy subject to preharvest 
hunger, and episodic shocks are exceedingly dangerous to rural life. 
Community assessment on diis criterion would result in a ranking and 
counting of households according to dieir resilience. Social development
36 Patrick John Muzaale 
intervention would take remedial, preventive and developmental forms- — 
food relief, promotion of famine insurance crops like cassava — and 
facilitate as well as accelerate agricultural development or odierwise create 
employment for the landless. Preventive action would require the 
establishment and efficient operation of a social monitoring and early 
warning system. This is a critical area of social development intervention, 
needed to reduce vulnerability. 
An equally important area of rural life that deserves assessment is the 
degree to which a community has physical and social access to the vital 
resources of health care, schools, agricultural and veterinary extension 
services, essential consumer goods, and marketing facilities. Again, even in 
this regard, many African villages are isolated from these resources, either 
physically or socially. Health care, educational facilities, marketing facilities, 
and consumer goods tend to be concentrated in the national and district 
capitals. In some countries the cost of transport to utilise services in die 
urban centres often exceeds the money value of the services likely to be 
secured diere. This is especially true of healdi care. Moreover, even the 
carriers of publically financed technical services, die extension workers, tend 
to stay away from rural areas during die wet season, a season during which 
their services are most needed — die so called dry weather bias of urban 
rural development workers (Chambers: 1983a/b). Even when diey do visit 
rural communities, extension workers tend to prefer to serve only certain 
kinds of households: diose of progressive farmers. The latter do not only pay 
the extension workers spetial/>i?r diem, but also offer die higher probability of 
success of extension services. Social development intervention is needed to 
reduce the physical and social isolation of rural households from critical 
services. 
The final area of need assessment to be considered here is diat of the rural 
dweller's ability to influence decisions and policies that affect dieir lives. This 
ability may be assessed in terms of the number of effective channels of 
participation in public decision making diat are open to them. These may 
take the form of pressure groups (like cooperatives) and have been 
appropriately referred to as upward representation linkages (Person in 
Leonard et al:1982). In most African countries diese upward linkages have 
eidier not been established or not allowed to develop to levels of effective 
functioning. Thus, die typical rural dweller is unable, for example, to 
influence decisions on produce pricing and on the location of social service 
facilities. While diis is a legitimate area for social development intervention, 
little consensus exists among practitioners as to whether the profession has 
as yet developed a 'safe' interventional technology for use in countries widi 
regimes diat cannot tolerate concepts of power sharing. The challenge for 
social development practitioners in diis area is to devise strategies for 
imparting leadership and management skills to die rural dweller, while at
Social Services to Rural Areas 37 
the same time finding ways of convincing the intolerant politician that power 
sharing is in the interest of all, including the politician himself. In this way 
the day may come when the voice of the ordinary rural dweller will be 
institutionalised in the conducting of national affairs.2 Institutionalisation of 
that voice is a crucial means to, as well as a significant index of, social 
development. 
The nature and role of social services 
A careful examination of the social history of any society would reveal that 
social services are an important instrument of social intervention. Their 
substance, specific purpose, and manner of provision may vary over time, as 
social policies vary, but their essential role remains that of collective 
provision designed to meet selected human needs. To use an imperfect but 
useful analogy, die role of social services in dealing with individual and 
collective needs is like that of medical drugs in curative and preventive 
health care. Just as medical practitioners must thoroughly understand the 
nature of the drugs they prescribe, so also must the social development 
practitioner understand the nature of the social services he prescribes. This 
section of the paper proposes what the present author assesses to be the 
conception of social services that is appropriate to die unique concerns and 
conditions of social development in poor countries. The set of social services 
that is suggested by the conceptualisation to be presented here will include 
many that are, admittedly, unconventional social services. But conventional 
social services cover only a subset of die concerns of social development in 
poor countries. In order to sensitise die social development practitioner to 
die spectrum of unconventional social services that may be available or 
organisable in his environment, and to enhance his discriminating skill in 
die choice of services and in the composition of his intervention packages, a 
typology of social services is also presented. The presentation is prefaced 
widi a brief review of conventional conceptions of social services. 
Concepts of social services in Western Europe and Nordi America, which 
inform much of social work education and practice in Africa today, were 
originally developed from a residual view of social policy. Social services 
were originally conceived as social benefits organised and financed by die 
many, mat were well-off, for die individual consumption of the few, that 
were assessed to be deficient and incapable offending for themselves. They 
addressed the recognised needs of the minority seeking to overcome 
personal, radier di^n systemic defects (Brown: 1977). While this conception 
of social services still appeals to the conservatives of the West, it is being 
abandoned by- an increasing number of social analysts in favour of die 
institutional view, which confers a much wider societal role upon social 
services (for instance Wilensky and Lebeaux, 1985; Wolins, 1967). But even 
this emerging, wider role of social services in advanced countries has die
38 Patrick John Muzmle 
human problems of industrial society as its focus, and is only paniailv 
relevant to the primarily rural, agrarian problems of mass poverty in 
developing countries. There being very few rich prople in poor countries, 
social services must be organised for, and sustained by, the majority of the 
poor themselves, to address primarily rural, agrarian problems of living. 
Now the discussion turns to the construction of a concept of social 
services that is relevant to social development in Africa. The concept 
includes the material benefits, technical services and emotional support 
services provided by government technical ministries, voluntary organisations, 
and local mutual aid groups. They are distinguishable not by the 
occupational identities of those who produce the individual services but by 
their direct focus on increasing the capacity of households to improve their 
own resource base and to apply it effectively to the solution of problems and 
the satisfaction of felt needs. This set of largely unconventional social 
services includes, among others, agricultural extension; public healthhealth 
education; marketing services; the construction of various infrastructural 
services, like roads and food storage; water development schemesand 
producer and service cooperatives.3 As their large number and diversity 
indicates, they are scattered and are to be found in all governmental and 
non-governmental organisations. They are not concentrated in one single 
ministry, as conventional social services tend to be. They are distinctively 
social services if they are produced, synthesised, and delivered to the 
recipient individuals, households, or communities, guided by an allembracing 
vision of the beneficiaries' needs and social situation. Since the 
social development practitioner's intervention is typically guided by an 
aggregated view of the needs of a human being, it is normally the 
participation of the social development practitioner in the organisation and 
delivery of these services that is likely to give them the distinctive character of 
a social service, as here defined. This also means that any other kind of 
professional may convert these discrete services into social services, if he is 
guided by that all-embracing view of people's needs. Social services are 
validly evaluated if they are examined in terms of their contribution to a 
timely identification and correct assessment of needs, and increasing the 
capacities of individuals, households, or institutions to meet the needs. 
At this stage it is necessary to present a typology of these very broadly 
conceived social services in order to clarify their important dimensions and 
to deepen the social intervener's understanding of his tool. A social service, 
or set of social services, may be classified by its dominant objective, its' 
primary auspices, or die dominant form it takes. On the basis of these 
criteria a number of social service typologies may be generated. Each of 
these dimensions will now be considered in turn. 
Considered in terms of typical dominant objectives, social services divide 
into three categories, corresponding to the three conceptually distinguish-
Social Services to Rural Areas 39 
able emphases of social development, namely, the developmental, the 
preventive and the remedial. Developmental social services include, but 
are not limited to, formal education, extension education, and the services 
of all organisations mat serve producers. The consumption of developmental 
social services are hypothesised to result in an increased quality of life based 
on increased higher productive capacity, both actual and potential. 
Preventive social services include, among others, family planning 
programmes, youth service programmes, public health and health 
education programmes, soil conservation and aforestation programmes, 
meteorological data, devices of social monitoring and the early warning 
signals they might provide, and die steps taken to encourage the production 
and maintenance of buffer stocks, as well as to promote famine-insurance 
crops, such as cassava. As can be seen, preventive social services are highly 
diverse and, accordingly, demand the co-ordinative contribution of the 
social development practitioner. Preventive social services are hypothesised 
to reduce die vulnerability of, especially, rural households and communities, 
by increasing their ability to absorb episodic shocks that may occur within 
their environments. By episodic shocks is meant, as earlier defined, the 
unanticipated, unfavourable, sharp discontinuities in the survival situation 
of a social entity which could seriously endanger its life, unless there are 
back-up resources available. The main purpose of preventive social services, 
therefore, is to increase absorptive capacity and social resilience by 
increasing social preparedness against episodic shocks (Muzaale: 1980). 
Remedial social services, alternatively known as social welfare services, are 
the more familiar category of social services. These largely correspond to 
those originally conceived in Western Eurpoe and North America, as 
already explained in die preface to this description, and do not need further 
elaboration here. Remedial social services include, but are not limited to, 
services for the mentally and physically handicapped, probation services, 
services for the abused or battered child, various child welfare and adoption 
services, marital counselling services, and reformatory schools. Professional 
skills for dealing with mese problems are regarded as social development 
skills only to die extent that diey include a capacity and concern for relating 
correctional actions in this area to long term, developmental objectives. The 
common feature of mis category of services is that they are highly resourcedemanding, 
although their social benefits are highly uncertain and typically 
take very long to be realised. It is assumed that, where developmental and 
preventive social services are effective, die need for remedial services will 
decrease rapidly, though not disappear altogether. 
If social services are categorised by auspices three sub-categories are 
discernible as follows: statutory, voluntary, and communal social services. 
The significance of viewing services in terms of auspices is that it directs 
attention to die policies of the supplying agency regarding who is entitled to
40 Patrick John Muzaale 
services, methods and sources of funding, and mechanisms of delivery to 
recipients. Statutory social services are established by social legislation, 
which specifies the target group, sanctions which tax revenue shall finance 
the services and establishes the bureaucracies that will produce and 
distribute the services. Statutory social services include all trie technical 
services and other social benefits administered by governmental 
bureaucracies, as earlier explained. 
Voluntary social services are provided voluntarily by, and on the initiative 
of, philanthropic private agencies, like the Red Cross, Save the Children 
Fund, Oxfam, theYMCA, YWCA, and Family Planning Associations. These 
services are conceived, financed, produced and delivered by these private 
organisations. Although private charitable organisations receive government 
subventions through the national councils of social services, the hallmarks 
of voluntary social services are private initiative and private funding. 
Further, it is important to note that th'ese services have historically been 
critical to the growth of statutory social services, in that the former have 
typically pioneered the identification of some needs and the creation of 
provisions for them, thereby stimulating social legislation to establish 
corresponding statutory social services. It must be pointed out, however, 
that social legislation has also influenced voluntary social services, 
encouraging or retarding their growth, through the legal provisions that 
govern the establishment and operation of those services. 
Communal social services are those organised informally for a household 
in need by local mutual aid groups, under the supervision of ad hoc 
traditional village leadership.4 A good number of services that are of grave 
importance to rural families fall into this category. The first example of these 
are the services organised for a bereaved family by others in die 
neighbourhood, which consist of contributions of food, funeral expenses 
and spending a number of nights in the home of the bereaved family in 
order to provide social-emotional support. Other examples include the 
benefits of rotating credit and saving groups and -those of labour-sharing 
groups, especially during such periods of acute labour demand as the 
planting and harvesting seasons. It would be a good idea for social policies at 
the national level to formally recognise, support and build on these local 
mutual aid groups, in die same way they support formal voluntary social 
service agencies. 
Finally, it is also important to classify social services according to die form 
they take.5 Some forms of benefit offer a greater degree of choice to the 
recipient as to use and to delivery agency. The greater the freedom of choice 
as to use, as in the case of cash, die more difficult it is to ensure diat the 
benefit shall be used for die socially intended purpose. Gilbert and Specht 
(1974) discern six categories, namely, opportunities, services,6 goods, 
credits, cash and power. This is a much more precise way of analysing social
Social Services to Rural Areas 41 
services than limiting the categorisation to 'cash' and 'in kind' forms, and a 
grasp of these very many forms should be helpful to the social development 
practitioners in creatively conceptualising or discerning social services 
within their operational environment. 
Considering the many criteria for classification of social services that have 
been discussed here, numerous forms may be discerned. If die subcategories 
discernible under the main criteria ofobjective, auspices, and form 
are juxtaposed, numerous other sub-categories may be generated and 
further precision achieved, but there has to be a limit to the pursuit of 
precision, and this will of course depend on the practical purpose under 
consideration. It must be pointed out, in conclusion, that a social 
development practitioner needs to be acquainted with a wide spectrum of 
social services and understand what professional objectives he can achieve 
with each type of social service. 
Critical issues in social service organisation 
As may have become evident, social services are benefits collectively 
organised and provided to consumers on non-market criteria. The 
organisers are normally employees of sponsoring agencies, the organisations 
under whose auspices the services are provided. When goods and 
services are provided to consumers through the market, the critical 
organisational questions invojved, like what should be produced, how 
much, for whom, who shall pay for them, how they shall be produced and 
distributed to the intended consumers, are all answered through the 
technical market signals of supply and demand, which every experienced 
business manager can, by and large, decipher. When it comes to the creation 
and delivery of social services, however, the policies of the sponsoring 
agency, and the professional judgement of the social development 
practitioner who implements them, must take into account the role of the 
market mechanism in assessing need, determining the extent of need, 
gathering information concerning the location of intended recipients, and 
designing an appropriate mechanism for delivering the services to them. In 
the forthcoming paragraphs these issues are elaborated, except the issue of 
service delivery, which is separately dealt with in the next section. Given the 
limited amount of time and space available, these issues and questions are to 
be considered only briefly. 
On the question of need assessment, the diagnostic questions that are 
relevant to work in the rural areas have already been elaborated upon in the 
presentation of a diagnostic profile of rural life. The role of the social 
development practitioner is to interpret, and apply imaginatively, the 
policies of his employing agency in determining the areas of need and target 
groups that his agency allows him to serve. He must,- of course, provide 
information to the relevant agencies regarding needs and the target groups
42 Patrick John Muzaale 
which he identifies but which agency policy does not permit him to serve. In 
principle, the issue of whom to serve is determined by agency policy as 
interpreted by the implementer, while the questions of how much service to 
provide is determined by the assessed extent of need, on the one hand, and 
by the agency budget and-other organisational constraints, on the other. 
Determination of what service to produce is joindy determined by agency 
policy and the professional judgement of the implementer. The latter is 
guided by his theories regarding the causal relationship between assessed 
needs and the available alternative need-satisfiers, the social services. It is 
here that a deepened understanding of social services, as instruments of 
social development intervention, becomes one of vital importance. The 
social intervener must use both theory and practical experience about needs 
and services to compose his social service intervention package. 
Answers concerning the question of financing social services differ, 
depending on die type of auspice involved and have been largely dealt widi 
already in die discussion of social services by auspices. Suffice it to say here 
that social services have redistributional effects if the group that pays for 
diem is different from mat which consumes them. In the case of statutory 
services, for example, resources are transferred from die rich to the poor, if 
such services are financed by revenue from a progressive tax and consumed 
predominantly by the poor. If, on the other hand, a statutory service is 
consumed predominantly by die rich and financed by revenue derived from 
a largely regressive tax system, as is die case widi urban-based social services, 
like education and healdi in developing countries, it redistributes resources 
from the poor to die rich. Export taxes, which are levied on export crops via 
marketing boards on a flat tax rate basis, and which governments in poor 
countries are best able to use, are examples of a regressive tax. In a regressive 
tax system, the proportion of die tax payer's income paid out in taxes 
decreases as income increases. This is an important organisational issue to 
remember in designing statutory social services and in thinking about their 
consequences widi regard to social justice. 
The question of how to produce social services is exceedingly difficult to 
answer in definitive terms. Social services, as diey have been conceptualised 
in this paper, often require to be produced in relevant packages, which are 
rarely produced by one single agency. There has to be established a number 
of operational inter-agency linkages through which a social service package 
may be produced and implemented. The type of social development skill 
needed here is one of use of inter-agency collaboration. It requires a 
diorough knowledge of die geography of local services and die policies 
under which they are provided. 
In summary, die organisation of social services calls for a very wide range 
of skills, all of which have to do widi deriving answers to questions about 
production and distribution, which are answered dirough die market signals
Social Services to Rural Areas 43 
of supply and demand in die case of goods and services provided to 
consumers on market criteria. Other skills have to do with establishing and 
using inter-agency collaboration. 
Obstacles to social service delivery in rural areas 
A most elusive, yet critical, objective in social development is to deliver 
social benefits to those whom social agencies have assessed as needing diem 
for the purpose of improving their own situation and society at large. The 
obstacles to social service delivery are baffling, particularly where the 
recipients to be served are rural dwellers. The search for explanations of the 
problem and for analytical frameworks to guide diagnosis and improved 
future performance has engaged die attention of many outstanding social 
analysts over the past decades. The achievements made by the analysts so far 
are primarily analytical, and many incisive observations of die magnitude of 
die problem, as well as tentative prescriptions, have been reported in the 
literature'(Esman et al, 1980; Leonard, 1982:1). Indeed, the comparative 
difficulty of the task of rural development has been aptly summed up by 
Leonard (1982) in an interesting note: 
President Nyerere once remarked that while die United States was trying 
to reach the moon, Tanzania was striving to reach its villages. It appears 
that Tanzania had the harder task and one more critical for development. 
While the United States reached the moon seventeen years ago, Tanzania 
is still groping for an effective organisational arrangement and optimum 
strategies, as well as linkages, through which development agencies at the 
centre might reach die villages at the periphery widi needed services. The 
number of alternative institutional approaches tried in Tanzania is a vivid 
testimony to the intricate nature of the task of delivering services to die rural 
dweller.7 In diis paper, four basic obstacles to service delivery have been 
distilled from die growing literature on die subject. In brief, these four basic 
obstacles, which are presendy to be considered here, are bad rural roads 
and sparseness of rural populations, unfavourable rural social structures, 
problems of personnel administration, and inadequate inter-agency 
collaboration. 
Bad rural roads and sparseness of rural population are die problems of 
access and isolation already described in die diagonstic profile of rural life. 
The majority of African countries have few all-weadier roads in die 
countryside, widi die result that a significant proportion of rural 
communities are inaccessible to service providers during wet seasons and 
many cannot be reached widi relief food in cases of severe famine. In fact, 
diis accounts for what Chambers "has termed die 'dry weather bias', 'tarmac 
bias', 'road side bias' and 'urban bias' of technical service providers 
(Chambers: 1983b). The sparseness of rural populations also presents a 
serious problem for service delivery. To enhance the access of the scattered
44 Patrick John Muxaak 
people to services means spreading the available.resources thinly over wide 
geographical areas, which may not only render some services meaningless 
and too costly per person served, but also in some cases technically 
impossible. The situation implies a choice between centralisation and 
decentralisation of services. For example, a curative emphasis in health care, 
which often involves indivisible technology, would require services to be 
centralised, while a preventive emphasis, permits a greater degree of 
decentralisation. It has been said that it was the need to overcome the 
problem of a sparse rural population that led Tanzania to adopt the Ujamaa 
approach to rural development. It appears, however, that this highly 
innovative social policy did not receive the complete support of the rural 
population which it was designed to serve. The present paper has not had 
the benefit of exposure to the literature documenting experiences and 
processes of die government's 'villagisation' campaigns in the rural areas, 
and can only speculate that the participation of the affected rural population 
in die programme was inadequate. It is entirely possible, for example, that 
the very people whose condition called for the interventional package of 
services developed in Ujamaa villages did not perceive the move as a helpful 
solution. Tanzania's villagisation experience confers in this respect a degree 
of validity to Leonard's prescription that, given the always incomplete 
knowledge of the rural environment, implementation of rural development 
programmes need to be adaptable and prepared to adjust their procedures 
and assumptions in the light of the incremental knowledge obtained from 
unfolding programme experiences. Leonard discerns and explicates four 
organisational requirements for implementing agencies, and these are of 
relevance here: a special commitment of programme staff to the delivery of 
services to the poor; adequate programme resources and technical 
resources; adaptability; and community participation. 
Social structures are a variable of exceedingly great importance to service 
delivery, more especially in rural areas. First, their characteristics tend to be 
die critical determinant of die ease, or lack of ease, with which meaningful 
community participation may be incorporated into the delivery process. 
Secondly, diey influence die likelihood of a social programme being 
'hijacked' before its benefits are delivered to die intended recipients. In this 
regard, Leonard has observed mat certain kinds of social structures 'are 
more likely than odiers' to permit die local elites to 'appropriate' 
programme benefits, and, further, diat certain types of social programmes 
are more likely than odiers to be 'vulnerable' to such appropriation. 
Vulnerable programmes are to be found in all sectors, be it in agriculture, 
education, healdi or public works. One pertinent example of die kind of 
programme diat is likely to be vulnerable in agriculture is one involving 
monopolised input or product marketing facilities. Social development 
practitioners need to be keenly aware of diese unfavourable possibilities and
Social Services to Rural Areas 45 
to act accordingly, both in programme design and implementation. 
Another set of service delivery problems in rural areas lies in the 
dimensions of programme personnel administration. To maintain morale 
and motivation among field staff requires the provision of favourable 
working conditions, including reasonable housing, impartial treatment, 
timely payment of salaries and allowances, consistent personnel policies, 
and promotion based stricdy on merit. Secondly, in order to ensure efficient 
and effective field performance, as well as adequate accountability within the 
programme, effective field supervision is critical. All of the abovementioned 
personnel management requirements are likely to be a missing 
ingredient in most of the rural service delivery systems operating in Africa 
today.8 It is situations like this, among other factors, that often make for 
inadequate commitment to die delivery of services, especially to die rural 
poor, by programme staff. 
Finally, diere is die problem of achieving adequate inter-agency 
collaboration. As pointed out at the beginning of this paper, the social 
services diat are relevant to social development are best conceived as 
consisting of an intervention package made up of specialised services 
mobilised from different service agencies in order to address complex 
human needs. From that perspective, it can be readily realised that die social 
service delivery system of a country, considered as a whole, may suffer from 
the sibling rivalry and selfishness diat commonly exists among service 
agencies whose collaboration is essential to the processing and delivery of a 
package of needed services. For example, the field staff of the ministries of 
health, agriculture, veterinary services and education can often be seen 
going to the field to meet 'their own clients' individually on different days of 
the week, each team using its own transport, and some teams not visiting at 
all for lack of transport! It is impossible under such a system to produce and 
deliver an integrated and effective bundle of services to the rural 
community. The remedy lies in the establishment of some effective, coordinating 
audiority equipped with adequate administrative resources as 
well as inter-agency collaborative skills. In die Ugandan example the Prime 
Minister's office is responsible for co-ordinating the numerous rehabilitation 
programmes that have been offered by bodi national and international 
relief agencies. However, because of the magnitude of die task and the 
service delivery bottlenecks referred to earlier, co-ordination is being 
performed with limited success. 
Implications for social development curriculum and research 
The observations made in this paper concerning organisation and delivery 
of social services to rural areas have such wide implications for social 
development curriculum and research diat all diat can be attempted within 
die time and space available is to categorise diem and to discuss the resulting
46 Patrick John Muzaale 
categories briefly. The implications to be considered here relate to 
knowledge and skills requirements, teaching methods, teaching materials, 
and the relevant areas of research. 
development practitioner equip him with a systematic knowledge of rural 
life and crucial aspects of die rural environment. He needs to know, for 
example, what is making it difficult for the rural dweller to adequately meet 
The demands of rural development require that the training of a social 
the basic needs of nutrition, clothing, shelter, health care, education, safe 
drinking water, and participation in vital decision making. He also needs to 
know what forces are acting together to increase the vulnerability of rural 
households, especially vulnerability to sharp seasonal changes in his 
livelihood-producing environment. Unfortunately, there exists little reading 
material mat can provide information in down-to-earth terms. 
In addition to this knowledge, the development practitioner needs to 
acquire such intervention skills as human assessment, interviewing, 
problem formulation, social programme development, resource mobilisation, 
programme implementation and programme evaluation. To acquire 
diese skills, there must be a fieldwork component in the training. Among the 
most suitable placement agencies for this purpose would be those agencies 
operating in the rural areas, and which have suitably trained staff to 
supervise the student. Since few agencies employ suitably trained student 
supervisors, training institutions ought to mount regular training workshops 
for field supervisors in order to prepare them for that responsibility. 
The choice of teaching mediods in social development needs to take into 
account the nature of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that a student must be 
enabled to acquire. Theoretical knowledge calls for systematic lectures, 
followed by small group discussions or seminars. The acquisition of relevant 
skills requires the involvement of the student in carefully designed field 
experiences. This requires the training institution to find out the types of 
experiences that currendy-implemented field programmes are generating. 
In this regard, mere is a need for close collaboration between training 
institutions and rural development agencies. The two need to cooperate in 
order to enable students to learn from suitable practical experiences. 
As already pointed out, there is little locally-relevant reading material 
available to recommend to students. There are a variety of textbooks on 
rural development, but diese tend to be too global in focus and are in nearly 
all cases generated by international researchers, many of whom generalise 
from limited observations. There is, therefore, an urgent need for the 
production of locally relevant materials based on adequate observations and 
conceptualisations of the local scene. Among the reading materials of 
potential value diat are immediately accessible to many African training 
institutions and which could be creatively used, are the field reports and 
dissertations of past students, as well as research reports of the teaching staff.
Social Services to Rural Areas 47 
Unfortunately, however, the focus of the latter tend to be dictated by 
research funding agencies which nearly always determine the areas of 
research to be undertaken. 
Potentially important areas of relevant research in social development 
include those concerning the emerging survival strategies of rural people; 
the factors that tend to make them successful or to frustrate them; the 
distribution of vulnerable households in the countryside; the trends that are 
generating various types of vulnerability and the characteristics of local 
social structures in rural areas, together with their impact on rural service 
programmes, to mention a few. Since the knowledge sought through 
research is to be used collaboratively by the social development practitioner 
and his clients, students and their teachers need to engage in participatory 
research. In this type of research, the villagers and the researchers will joindy 
define the problem that needs to be studied, agree on the reasons why it is 
necessary to carry out that study, agree on the strategy for collecting the 
necessary information, co-operate in the analysis of the collected information, 
attempt to achieve a shared interpretation of the findings, and discuss 
together the issue of what is to be done in the light of the findings. That type 
of research is likely to lead to the production of a more reliable fund of 
knowledge about the rural situation and to increase the knowledge of rural 
dwellers about their own situation. Above all, it is likely to make teaching, 
learning, and social development intervention more effective. 
FOOTNOTES 
1. It is now believed by a growing number of development professionals that the most 
meaningful indicator of development and poverty-reduction is the degree to which basic 
needs are met in a community. Seejossy Bibangambah, '"Approaches to problems of rural 
poverty in Africa" in Kiros (ed) Challenging Poverty, 1983, OSSREA. 
2. The current government of Uganda (since January 1986) of the National Resistance 
Movement has established a hierarchy of elective committees of the Movement, from the 
village to the national level, to which people of any political party are freely elected by the 
local people. These committees could become important upward representational linkages, 
if the top national leaders are genuinely committed to the idea of power sharing at all levels of 
society. It is now, perhaps, too early to assess this and the committees themselves are yet to 
mature into effectively performing groups perceived by the people as viable problemsolving 
instruments. 
3. A recent series of studies on decentralisation and organisational linkages brings out the 
social service components of the work of these organisations and offer conceptual 
frame works for analysing the organisational requirements for serving the rural poor. See 
David Leonard, ct al (ed) Institutions of Rural Development for the Poor, Berkley (1982). 
4. The local committees of Uganda's National Resistance Movement (see footnote no 2) may 
in time earn leadership roles in this field of welfare, if they establish themselves as viable 
problem-solving instruments. 
5. For an extended explanation of the social importance of providing benefits of one form 
rather than another, see Neil Gilbert and Harry Specht, Dimensions of Social Welfare 
Policy, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc 1974, pp 82-102.
48 
6. Note that in Gilbert and Specht's Scheme of analysis 'Services' refers primarily to social work 
services. In our scheme everything is services, except that the words 'technical services' are 
used to identify all benefits in intangible form. 
7. For an analytical review of some of Tanzania's frustrated experiments in institutional 
building for rural development, see Dan Mudoola's chapter 'The Pathology of Institutional 
Building', in Kiros (ed) Challenging Poverty, OSSREA, 1983. 
8. In a recent study conducted by the author and associates for USAID Kampala office, 
concerning the contribution of central government institutions to the survival strategies of 
rural households in Uganda, the following service delivery bottlenecks were identified in 
the field: lack of transport, lack of programme funds, lack of housing and office 
accommodation for field staff, lack of stationery, and lack of contact with the Headquarters 
in Kampala. In many cases technical assistance was only being delivered to households 
which could meet the expenses of extension workers. See Carol Jaenson, Josephine 
Harmsworth, T Kabwegyere, and PJ Muzaale, "Social and Institutional Profiles of Uganda", 
USAID Kampala, 1984. 
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