ABSTRACT
The grassroots participation of people in their own development has been discussed, embraced and acted upon. When practitioners of grassroots development approach beneficiary "target groups", they suspend disbelief. Their unspoken assumption is that the poor of the Third World are a different kind of human being from those in the West or the North who come from "higher" or better-off classes. An enterprise approach to development is based on two principles. The first principle is that people appreciate something when they pay for it. There is no evidence at all to suggest that this is not a universal principle of human behaviour, cutting across all cultures. The second principle, which also seems to be universal, is that people have a stake in something that they own. The importance of an existing enterprise framework as opposed to an abstract discussion of needs is illustrated by a palm oil project Technoserve began in Ghana.
