ABSTRACT
Development initiatives have become more sophisticated in the level of analysis used to understand how people in villages and rural communities engage in self-sustaining activities. Often these activities are stimulated by and linked to the central government agencies, but defined and made meaningful through social and cultural experiences quite independent of a government's administrative systems. Rural development was thus defined in terms of administrative capacity. The chapter reviews the role that a decentralized local government system might plan in stimulating and developing a self-sustaining process of rural/local development. It identifies the crucial financial, managerial and training strategies deemed prerequisites to the establishment of an effective local government system. On August 29, 1982 The Government of Egypt and the government of the United States signed the Decentralization Sector Support Agreement which formalized an effort to consolidate five United States Agency for International Development-sponsored projects designed to encourage and support Egypt's commitment to local government decentralization.
