ABSTRACT
‘Development’ has traditionally been assumed to entail ‘progress’ – for women as well as men, but in fact often has the opposite effect. As many ‘developed’ countries can easily be considered ‘overdeveloped’, it is important not to make them the standard of measure. Development has been used to imply economic development, as opposed to social or moral development, and in this context has meant increasing technology, greater division of labor and the accumulation of wealth. There is a wide variety of western-modelled development programs, ranging from national economic planning programs to increase production, to teams of foreign agricultural ‘experts’ teaching methods to increase production for purposes of exporting. The reasons that economic development is even an issue for most third-world countries are rooted in their colonial history. Developing countries around the world, devastated by colonialism and imperialism, are then given ‘aid’, with strings attached, that keeps them dependent on the sources of this ‘aid’ – the western countries.
