Data from Shiloh County's effort to improve quality of life for its residents lead to three conclusions: political intervention can convert private sector growth into a platform for rural development, exchanges between community and schools are not difficult to understand, and the ethnographer has a function in discovering local contexts to which…

The paper documents and analyzes the nature of community self-help efforts in rural areas of Anambra State, Nigeria. It notes that community perceptions of development are based on a social and economic yardstick and differ from the prevailing public policy on agricultural development. (Author/SB)