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Introduction:

Once social change was slow. Back then you could expect to live your life pretty much as your grandparents had done. Maybe this is still the case in some isolated villages far from big cities &ndash; but even there cell phones and other modern implements are slowly finding their way.

It seems our world is developing. 50 years, then there were no cell-phones, few computers in large scale, and no satellites in sky sending hundreds of TV programs day and night.

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What are the driving forces of this development?

In colonial days the European powers declared it their mission to civilize and bring the modern world to Africa. European rule, they said, would be the driving force of development. Africa did change but very often not to the better and in the end Africa was liberated and independent. But it remained poor as the civilizing Europeans had not brought prosperity.

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So now what? How to bring development?

African nations tried different routes, some worked closely with the old colonial powers delivering raw materials as they had done before. Others tried a socialist model but found that they too were dependent on a few export commodities.

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Social scientists produced theories of development so as to help politicians in poor nations and donor agencies in rich countries decide where to focus efforts to change conditions.

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W.W. Rostow was an influential American economist who in 1952 published &ldquo;The process of Economic Growth&rdquo;.&nbsp; Here he described economic development as a natural process whereby any nation goes through five stages from the traditional rural society to the modern mass consumer society that he believed was the best possible society. His idea was that a society will grow like a tree that becomes bigger and bigger and more beautiful. It might be possible to accelerate the growth with some interventions just as the farmer might use a stick to support a young tree, remove weed around it and give it water and fertilizer to spur its growth. Like trees in a forest each nation was its own and would go through its own development.

Rostow used the word &ldquo;take-off&rdquo; &nbsp;when a traditional society starts moving and developing fast. To help in this process the country will need infrastructure such as roads, ports and electricity. &nbsp;

His theory was used to convince many poor nations to invest heavily in transportation systems, dams, and other big project when they were offered development loans in the 1970s. Unfortunately the economy of many countries did not take off in the way Rostow&rsquo;s theory had predicted. Instead they were left with a big debt from failed projects.

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Socialist theories called for developing nations to nationalize basic industries so as to end the domination of foreign owners. This brought some progress, but often the countries lacked skilled managers and Western nations did not support such socialist steps and tried to control the poor country in other ways. During the last 20 years many nationalized industries have again been privatized after demands from Western donors.

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The &ldquo;Fighting with the Poor&rdquo; profession is neither built on American development theory such as W.W. Rostow&rsquo;s theory, not on socialist theory of nationalization. It is not a top down concept that focus on the effect of the actions of governments &ndash; it focus on the action of the Poor and of the professional shoulder to shoulder with the Poor. Development it claims is something that is created by people. Development does not happen automatically in the way that a tree grows as Rostow believed, nor does it stem from even brave acts of a few national leaders. Development is a people thing.

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