Engaging Traditional Leadership as a Key and Practical Approach to Community Development: The Jatropha Project in Puriya Community as a Case Study

Community development plays a significant role in building and improving the lives of community members. The importance of engaging traditional leaders in community development cannot be overemphasized. The enormous scholarship on community development has revealed how effective, successful, and sustainable developmental projects and programs have been as a result of engaging traditional leaders. This chapter highlights the relevance of engaging traditional leaders in community development. Using the participatory approach to community development, the chapter discusses how the Jatropha project was successfully implemented in Puriya community in Northern Ghana through the engagement of traditional leaders and the community at large. Apart from highlighting the benefits of using the participatory approach in the project implementation, the chapter also presents some of the challenges that contributed to failure of the project some years after its implementation. The chapter concludes by calling for the continuous and effective engagement of traditional leaders and participation of community members at all levels of development initiatives to achieve effective developmental outcomes and sustainability of community projects whilst advancing the argument that the participatory approach must be used in conjunction with the principles of community development.