Sustainable Village Health Development

Aninkroma Primary School in Barekuma Ghana

A Program that Creates Self-Reliance

The Sustainable Village Program is based on principles of collaborative community development with a focus on long-term solutions that promote community-level self-reliance. This program is founded on the premise that working with communities members to understand, prioritize and address health and other developmental issues leads to long-term progress and independence, with the ultimate aim of having these same communities mentoring others through this progression.

Independence from Humanitarian Aid

Village Study Abroad / Student Exchange

Each year, 20-40 students from the University participate in a study abroad program in Ghana with the local Barekuma Collaborative Community Development Project (BCCDP). Students assist in BCCDP efforts to collect data, assess health status, develop appropriate health interventions and partner in other ongoing parts of the collaboration. More...

One of the primary distinctions between this process and those often used in humanitarian work is that acquisition of resources for community development activities are to be pursued as a group by the collaborative board, with the priority of mentoring local leadership in this process. By working with local leaders to access needed external resources when needed for identified development activities, skills are developed that will provide further capacity for them to lead their communities in future development efforts rather than creating a dependency orientation and the expectation that such progress must be externally driven.

Underlying Principles

Sustainable Village Progam Principles

  1. Define the project site
  2. Create a collaborative board with representation from all participating partners – lead by member from host country with specific representation from project site community leaders and residents
  3. Conduct a community needs assessment and resource inventory across the project site
  4. Prioritize setting guided by collaborative board with specific emphasis on community input (informed by the results of the community needs assessment and resource inventory)
  5. Develop initial intervention targets and plan – with specific focus on community leadership and capacity building
  6. Conduct interventions with both process and outcome evaluation
  7. Review intervention progress – make adjustments as necessary
  8. Conduct final analysis of intervention impact
  9. Update needs assessment and resource inventory – repeat process of priority setting and intervention planning and implementation

Using principles from approaches such as Community-Based Participatory Research and building appropriately scaled coalitions, the Sustainable Village Program provides a systematic approach for promoting this type of community development. The Sustainable Village Program aims to promote community development by unlocking human potential using the triad of health, economics and education, in the context of local culture, institutions and infrastructure. The following steps outline the general approach used in initiating the collaboration process and beginning the development cycle:

Through this process, contribution from the Sustainable Village Program is aimed at leadership development and mentoring, with the ultimate target of local capacity building among both key individuals and institutions. Initially, Sustainable Village Program personnel help to define the project site, coordinate the collaborative partners and organize the board, and guide conducting and analyzing the community needs assessment and resource inventory. All of this is done in conjunction with host country leaders and local community leaders so that the process can be modeled and, over time, adopted locally so that it becomes self-perpetuating.

Program Director

Stephen C. Alder, PhD currently serves as chief of the Division of Public Health. He is an associate professor of Family and Preventive Medicine and holds adjunct appointments at the University of Utah in Internal Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology and Health Promotion and Education. He also holds an adjunct appointment with the Department of Health Sciences at Brigham Young University and is affiliated with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Sciences and Technology through the School of Medical Sciences.