PERSON-IN-COMMUNITY: EXPLORING THE CONCEPTUAL GAP BETWEEN HUMANITARIAN AID AND DEVELOPMENT AID

This paper is a contribution towards criticizing humanitarian aid as an authentic approach to aid and a community development. It exposes the poverty of humanitarian aid as an authentic approach to development by showing that it fails toto regard the value of person-in-community as the basis for development aid (real aid), nothing that the transition from one to the other is incomplete without a proper understanding of the direction to go; and the fear that development aid could also go the way of humanitarian aid if the gap is not filled. It therefore, proposes to bridge this gap by exploring the value of personalist philosophies as a basis for aid and development. The paper exploits the weaknesses of humanitarian aid towards community development by pointing to the nature of community as interaction of persons, by showing that community becomes valued when the value of individuals that make it up is regarded and by pointing that authentic development is rooted in human value. Specifically, this paper proposes a conception of development rooted in person-in-community as central to authentic aid and community development.

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