Instructions

Read the passage and answer the questions that follow:
Passage I
There arc two main kinds of development agency: the one which trace to introduce specific changes and is mainly interested in material development: and the other which is primarily interested in people. On the whole the first wants to "get things done"; the other to develop the people's own abilities for leadership, wise judgement and co-oprative action. For agencies of the second kind, the material result is less important than the way it is achieved.

Agencies and workers, who themselves decide the specific form development should take, assume, of course, that they know better than the people what the people need. Most social development workers and technical officers have worked on this assumption in the past, and although they were often right they were not always right, for they sometimes made the mistake of assuming that what was good within their own culture was certain to be good in other cultures too. Missionaries, for instance, insisted on their converts wearing clothes because they were used to them themselves, and they established schools with syllabuses that suited the missionaries' own countries, rather than the countries where the schools were built.
Agencies and their workers tend to be more careful nowadays, but experts and specialists trained in Western ways still often make mistakes in cultures other than their own. Agencies everywhere are now realizing that they are risking failure if they assume that their own ideas are right in environments and cultures other than their own. The East African Groundnut Scheme failed because it did not take the local conditions of soil and climate sufficiently into account. The West African Anchau Rural Development Scheme illustrates, less spectacularly, the result of failing to consider the human factor when working in a different culture.

This Scheme was started in 1937 to eradicate sleeping sickness from a part of the Zaria province of the Northern Region of Nigeria. The people in charge made a detailed survey of the area, made detailed studies of the farming conditions in sample hamlets and made a careful census of the people. Indeed, they scientifically examined in minute detail every aspect of the situation that seemed to them important. But it failed because people were thought of as being there "to be done good to" in the mass, but they were not envisaged as persons, each with one's own small world of hopes and fears, who might in some way be consulted.

Question 8

The West African Anchau Rural Development Scheme failed because

Solution

The author says that the West African Anchau Rural Development Scheme failed as a result of failing to consider the human factor when working in a different culture. By this, he means that the coordinators of the project did not involve the local people in the initiative. 

Therefore the answer is C.


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