About James B. Mayfield PhD

The developer of these courses is Dr. James B. Mayfield, a man with over 50 years of experience, working in over 20 countries, managing, implementing, evaluating hundreds of small and large programs structured to improve the quality of life for thousands of poor villagers. 

Dr. Muhammad Yunis, founder of the Grameen Banking system in Bangladesh, wrote the following acknowledgement for Dr Mayfield’s book: One Can Make a Difference: The Challenges and Opportunities of Dealing with World Poverty: The Role of Rural Development Facilitators (RDFs) in the Process of Rural Development (University Press of America (1997)

Words of Muhammad Yunis: “In an age when centralized bureaucracies, large-scale donor agencies, and well-funded Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) seem to dominate the process of development, it is appropriate to reflect on the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individuals who have dedicated their lives to living and working among the poorest of the poor, those nearly two billion who often live in the more isolated and disadvantaged villages of the world. Professor Mayfield has sought to outline the processes of rural development, seeking to emphasize the various programs, strategies and interventions that have been successful in confronting the tragedies of world poverty. 

It is refreshing to find a book that approaches the challenge of poverty alleviation with some sense of optimism. Professor Mayfield has done the discipline a great service in outlining the many examples of success that are available in the literature. It is easy to criticize the many efforts that have tended to fail, to dwell on the blunders and mistakes that have been made in the past. What we need are models of success, approaches that have worked, interventions that appear to produce sustainable long-term development. 

For many of the general public and even a significant number of experts in development, there is not much good that can be said for foreign aid, technical assistance, and the past efforts to help the disadvantaged of this planet. While it is easy to see failure and misuse of funds, a more objective assessment of the past four decades, suggests in a most profound way that there has been far more progress than might be believed in general, that the real test of success, may not be in the budgetary allocations of the larger government programs or in the well-funded international donor agencies, but more in the lives and in the work of the many community development workers, rural development facilitators, village school teachers, primary health care workers, agricultural extension workers, micro-credit workers, and others who are willing to live and work out among the poor, experiencing the heat, the dust, and the misery on a day to day basis -- these are the real heroes of development. 

This book has been dedicated to the proposition that One Person Can Make A Difference. Over the past several decades we have learned a lot about what works and what does not work in areas where extreme poor live, what is more apt to be sustainable and what is less likely to be sustainable, and why a sensitivity and an appreciation for the local knowledge, culture and spiritual values of the rural areas of this world may well be far more important than the complicated administration systems, the large budget allocations or the costly technologies that have characterized so much of development work in the past and in the present. 

 “I agree with the notion that rural development is best defined as ‘people development’ that what is needed is a greater commitment to recruiting and training people to live and work in the rural areas of the world. This is a book that takes us in that direction, that demonstrates a number of successful approaches and interventions, and thereby helps to document that One Can Make A Difference. “ Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank.”

Robert Springborg, a well-known scholar, with many books to his credit on Egypt wrote the forward to Dr Mayfield’s book of rural Egypt, entitled: Egypt: A Field of Reeds: Social, Economic and Political Change in Rural Egypt: In Search of Civil Society and Good Governance (2012), pp. vii-x

“Field of Reeds brings one of America’s leading scholars of rural Egypt full circle, back to his starting point of PhD field research in the Nile Delta under Nasser. Rarely if ever has a political scientist completed such an intellectual journey, visiting along the way, not only every single governorate in Egypt his primary interest, but also to a host of rural settings in other countries around the globe, to say nothing of engaging with the dramatically changing circumstances and their scholarly interpretations over the last several decades.

This is truly a magnum opus, the definitive study of rural Egypt in our times. Although grounded in political science, it ranges over history from the Pharaonic era onward as well as overt academic disciplines in both social sciences and humanities. And as if this incredibly wide ranging, yet finely textured view of rural Egypt was insufficient, James Mayfield goes one step further by identifying problems confronting rural Egyptians before proceeding to draw upon his broad, practical experience in rural development to offer possible solutions. This then is a book of huge value to specialists in development, whether economic, social or political and whether in Egypt, the Middle East or beyond; to general readers with even a causal interest in Egypt of any period; and to policy makers responsible directly or indirectly for rural development.”

Robert Springborg

Department of National Security Affairs

School of International Graduate Studies, Monterey, CA 939430

This course will be divided into five major modules. The First module will seek to describe in some detail the realities of world poverty, to make concrete what is now generally abstract, to bring these realities of sickness and disease, illiteracy, malnutrition and passive resignation of their poverty. In introducing the statistics of such poverty, the numbers, causes, consequences of extreme poverty, it is our hope this will give you some sense of the challenge but also the opportunities this kind of work might provide you. Yet in the final analysis, it will be the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of these who are poor, to have a genuine impact on the mothers and fathers, the young and the old, the rich and the poor of this world. 

Few of us can truly imagine the misery that such people must bear, the mother who weeps over her third child that has died of dehydration, the teenager that walks four kilometers along a dusty road two and three times a day to bring water to her home, the farmer who cultivates his half acre knowing that it will hardly supply the food that his family needs, the young girl who is unable to attend a nearby school because her family needs her to help in the weeding or in the meager harvest of their farm, or the landless peasant who simply cannot find enough work to feed his five children who are all undernourished and sickly. 

In the Second module of this course, a series of case studies are presented to help identify the ways in which one might make a difference. These case studies suggest in specific terms how one individual with energy and commitment was able to introduce interventions that were both sensitive and efficacious in introducing change and improvement. Each case study takes place in a less developed country, each individual approaches the problems of village development from a slightly different perspective, and each one had to confront a very different set of social, political, economic and cultural conditions. Yet it will be the contention of this course, that there are some common principles that characterized all of these efforts at village development and that anyone seeking to make a difference must be aware of and willing to consider these principles. 

The Third module seeks to outline in some detail the 12 action steps of a program in Nepal that eliminated extreme poverty in a rural area of some 68,000 people. These 12 action steps are based upon six key principles of effective rural development implementation, field-tested over nearly forty years, and now empirically verified in the rural district of Lamjung in West-Central Nepal. By the time you complete this course, you will have a comprehensive understanding of how and why these 12 Action Steps were so successful in eliminating extreme poverty. 

In the Fourth module, this course will introduce you to the process by which one might become a rural development facilitator (RDF). Within the broader field of Development there is a sub-field that focuses on the processes by which village communities can be energized and organized to confront the challenges of poverty, illiteracy and disease. This new sub-discipline requires special skills and awareness that are not readily developed simply through the reading of a book, or the completion of a university degree. In fact, one of the challenges of this new field of activity is the observation that the work of an RDF requires considerable time in the field, time to live and work with peasants, to appreciate the constraints they face every day of their lives.

The Fifth module,  presents a set of questions.

With the completion of this course of study, we believe very strongly that rural development facilitators who will make a difference must have the commitment, the cultural sensitivity, the social awareness, and field experience needed to help people help themselves, but also they will need specific information, knowledge, and competency in areas of interest and relevancy to villagers themselves. One of the interesting dilemmas of this work of village development facilitation is the seemingly contradiction that the more effective the RDF might be, for example, the more technically trained and the more competent the RDF might be in programs related to rural health, village literacy, small-scale enterprises, village credit systems, or in organic agriculture, the greater the danger that the villagers will remain dependent upon that RDF and thus will fail to generate their own sense of responsibility and independence and as a consequence, will be unwilling or unable to take initiative in their own development. Clearly, there are certain skills, competencies, and technical abilities that an RDF needs to be aware of in order to work in a village setting. However, experience also suggests that there needs to be a balance between what the RDF does for the villagers and the extent to which such an RDF is willing to let villagers make mistakes and learn for themselves. In the final analysis, RDFs must continually support local people to take responsibility for their own development, to let the villagers develop a sense of self-esteem and self-reliance, quite independent and often in spite of the RDF's efforts. Finding this balance and conceptualizing this process is the purpose of this course. 

One of the first things we must do is to explore the belief systems of effective and ineffective RDFs and to discuss the positive and negative effects of a variety of assumptions they can have on one's effectiveness. Values are an integral part of the RDF/villager relationship, and I want you to devote considerable attention to an analysis of how they influence the rural development process. I define the process of rural development in terms of how an RDF can help villagers define their own values rather than training RDFs to impose their values on others. RDFs must appreciate cultural and lifestyle differences if their interventions are to be relevant and appropriate. 

Much of this unit will provide an overview of the skills and knowledge required to be a successful RDF at each of the three stages of rural development. The focus of this part of the book is not on skill development but, rather, on the personal characteristics that enable RDFs to be effective. Effective RDFs must continually ask village community people to examine their perceptions, behaviors, their values and the way they do things and why they do such things as a way of helping them gain greater self-awareness and understanding. For that same reason, I will be asking you to be equally committed to an awareness of your perceptions, behaviors, your values and the way you do things and why. Much of the initial interaction between an outsider (RDF) and the villagers will be very stressful for both. The RDF is seeking to understand the customs, the behaviors, expectations and roles that characterize a particular group of villagers. Inexperienced RDF's are often unaware that their lack of experience in the village is the major source of their ineffectiveness, that until they understand how the villagers perceive them and are reacting to them, their relationship with the villagers will be strained and open-communication will be almost impossible. 

 Beginning and even seasoned RDFs face common problems in their work, ways of dealing with resistance, with loneliness and discouragement, with the stresses of introducing change into communities that have few resources, less willingness to support change, and often downright opposition to the things you are trying to do. In this chapter we will also review ways of working with difficult communities and individuals, on how to deal with such stresses that are common in this type of work and the long-term consequences of burnout and frustration, and on ways to stay committed and energized both as people and as professional RDFs.