The Readiness of Village Leaders for Development Challenge: Evidence from Mwanga District Council

Abstract

There have been several initiatives by the government of Tanzania to facilitating local development since the attainment of independence in 1961. To quicken the process, the idea of enabling local people to be the agents of their own development was advocated through decentralization by devolution, which aimed at empowering grass root communities through their local democratically elected leaders to plan and implement their own development activities. Village leaders who have a mandate of engineering the process of development have been identified as a key catalyst towards development success. With regard to their importance as far as community development is concerned, this paper wanted to find out as to what extent village leaders were prepared in terms of their education level and training programmes to be the source of local development. Using the two cases of Kigonigoini and Kwakoa in Mwanga district, it was found that village leaders were not well prepared and were of low capacity because of their low level of education and the absence of training programmes made them more blunt in engineering local development.