Data for Thesis.docx

Home to over 1.3 billion people, approximately 443 million of whom lived in rural areas in 2018, Africa was the second largest, second most populous, and second poorest continent on Earth. In 2012, more than half of its rural residents lived in poverty, despite decades of initiatives aimed at poverty alleviation. These initiatives have included agriculture growth programmes, market liberalisation programmes and, more recently, rural development strategies.<br>This thesis examined the relationship between the effectiveness of implementation of rural development strategies and rural poverty reduction. The hypotheses of the study were that <i>the effective implementation of a rural development strategy reduces rural poverty</i> and that <i>Africa’s failure in the fight against rural poverty is largely attributed to ineffective implementation of rural development strategies.</i> Both of these hypotheses were accepted.<br>The study used four regional economic communities in Africa and southeast Asia as case studies. The period of study was from 1980 to 2015. This period coincided with the global deadline of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals for ending hunger. A six-step process was developed to achieve the study objectives. This process was guided by the study’s conceptual framework that <i>effective rural poverty reduction is a function of effective rural development strategy implementation</i>. This involved examination of the soundness of rural development strategies in the case studies, examination of what constituted effective implementation, profiling of theoretical expected outcomes of implementing case study strategies, and review of the poverty status in the respective case study regions.<br>The findings of the study were that a positive relationship exists between the effectiveness of the implementation of a rural development strategy and rural poverty reduction, but also that the mere existence of a sound rural development strategy was not enough to reduce rural poverty. It was the effectiveness of their implementation that mattered most. The study also found that the ineffectiveness of the implementation of rural development strategies in Africa was largely due to lack of political responsibility, weak collaborative competencies for policy implementation, and low level commitment.<br>To effectively and sustainably reduce rural poverty in Africa, the author recommended that policy makers, leaders and all key actors and stakeholders on the African continent should (a) commit to and intensify the effective implementation of sound rural development strategies, a multi-sectoral and multi-dimensional approach to dealing with the interlocking factors of poverty; (b) demonstrate political responsibility in a tangible form through including the allocation of sufficient resources (financial, human and institutional capital) for effective implementation of rural development strategies; (c) commit to establishing dynamic strategy-management team structures for effective implementation; and (d) capacitate collaborative competencies of policy implementers to effectively implement rural development strategies.<br>The study largely relied on qualitative analyses in its methodology. Consideration should be given in future studies to quantitative methods of measuring the soundness and effectiveness of the implementation of rural development strategies. Econometric modelling of the cause and effect in the relationship between effective rural development strategy implementation and rural poverty reduction is suggested.