Chapter 1: Unveiling Ghana’s Community Development Tapestry: An Exploration Through Time

The sense of community and communal living are greatly prized ideals and beliefs of traditional Ghanaians. Collective effort toward developing communities have always been part of the African culture before colonialism. Hence, the principles behind community development are not foreign to Africans. The purpose of this chapter is to reflect upon the history of community development in Ghana, starting from pre-colonial up to the current perspective and to discuss future ways forward. During the pre-colonial period, communities in Ghana relied on forms of cooperative labor to meet their needs as well as setting up community development initiatives. During the colonial period, communal labor metamorphosed into forced labor due to the way it was administered. Mass education was introduced by the British as a means of colonizing the minds of the Indigenous people. After independence, community development became a major function of the Government of Ghana and was implemented through various forms of decentralization and local government policies. In contemporary Ghana, the key community development actors include the government, non-government organizations, international non-government organizations, civil society organizations and community-based organizations along with community members themselves. In conclusion, the history of community development in Ghana is not a history of stages, in which later forms of community development are entirely replaced by former policies, but a history of supplementations, in which early forms and strategies continue to thrive with some transformations alongside later ones.