Down to Basics: Reflections on the Basic Need Debate

Edited by: Alan Rew

October 1978
Volume 9 Number 4

That people caught up in the development process have 'basic needs' and that these have not been met should have come as no surprise. The fact that in the last two years or so it has is in one view almost incredible. With the new concern for basic needs strategies are we admitting that development institutions simply forgot that people had basic needs? And are we now to applaud their rediscovery when to anyone else the need to satisfy them was self evident?