The European Conference on Psychology and the Behavioral Sciences 2015, Brighton,
United Kingdom
Official Conference Proceedings

The European Conference on Psychology and the Behavioral Sciences 2015, Brighton,
United Kingdom
Official Conference Proceedings

The European Conference on Psychology and the Behavioral Sciences 2015, Brighton,
United Kingdom
Official Conference Proceedings

Many communities in Egypt, specifically the rural areas, are unquestionably
distressed places as a result of the major economic and political shifts that have
occurred over the past few years. Strategies of community development are currently
viewed as the radical remedy for poverty related problems. In Egypt, community
development strategies are usually driven from traditional approaches including
charity, needs and rights based approaches which focus on basic needs like shelters
and food. These approaches have proved a deficiency orientation as they ignore the
structural causes of poverty and address symptoms only. In response to these
shortages came an alternative capacity focused practice called asset based community
development (ABCD) approach. The case in this research is that ABCD could offer a
coherent strategy of sustainable development in poor communities in Egypt. Based on
that, the main objectives of the research is to study the application of ABCD approach
in rural areas, and in turn present a customized ABCD approach derived from the
international guidelines and the Egyptian experience. In order to fulfill these
objectives, case studies from the rural communities in Egypt that adopts ABCD
approach were extensively studied mostly through qualitative research methods. The
analysis and the findings of the current research are most relevant to developing
countries and to those emerging from state capitalism and centrally planned
economies. The results of the research give substantial contribution in understanding
and identifying the ABCD approach. Thus, a possible way is paved to generalize this
bottom up development strategy over poor communities.

Keywords: Asset based, community development, rural communities, developing
countries, Egypt

Alyaa Hessin
Hamid Ali
Khaled Amin
Shahjahan Bhuiyan
Hamed El-Mosely