Community Based Development

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1.1 Background
Since 2002, international development agencies have considerably expanded their programs that are designed to improve the living conditions and reduce violence in conflict regions of Afghanistan. The perception that aid programs are not politically neutral and inevitably affect conflict dynamics is now broadly accepted by donors. In order to address this issue, the assistance agencies use a variety of tools and approaches.
The community based development (CBD) and community driven programs are the most rapidly growing approaches that are used for channeling the development assistance. The community based development term is used for the projects that actively involve beneficiaries in the selection, design and management. The …show more content…

The CBD approach is largely used by all international assistance agencies in conflict areas of Asia, including Afghanistan, Indonesia and the Philippines (Schuler, 2013). The demand for the CBC is driven by its potential to develop programs that are sustainable and responsive to the need of local communities. However, the potential gain and loss from community based development is a controversial topic among researchers. Some argues that CBD contributes local communities through distribution of power, raise the voice of poor; allowing the community to have control on development assistance, make the public sector more responsive, improve targeting poverty program, and strengthen the capacity of the villagers to initiate development activities (Mansuri, …show more content…

In order to evaluate the causal impacts of the CBD on the rural economy. This paper uses the agriculture productivity, asset acquisition, access to credit, household income, household expenditure and migration as outcome variables that will be affected by the CBD policy intervention in rural areas.
The empirical challenge is the potentially endogenous relationship between the implementation of CBD program and village characteristics. Assistance agencies, for example, may place projects in areas with high potential return or in areas with low potential return. Either way the result from the cross sectional estimation will be bias.
In order to test the efficacy of CBD program, the paper uses a randomized controlled trial to identify the causal effect of CBD intervention on rural economy. Specifically, using samples of 500 villages selected randomly. Out of 500 villages 250 villages selected to comprise treatment group, with the remaining villages assigned as a control group. The paper uses data collected by a national solidarity program through baseline, mid line, and end line surveys from 2007-2011. The data consist of 25,000 households from ten districts and six provinces that represent all ethnic of

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