AbstractWorld wide experiences and practices have shown that universities, especially agricultural universities, have played a very important and a key role in helping rural populations become literate, in upgrading farmers’ living quality and accelerating rural economic development. Universities are becoming the main forces for transforming knowledge and technology into agricultural productivity, especially in developing nations.
The activities carried out by universities in rural development programs cover many areas through the dissemination of new technologies for income-generation, delivering short courses and of expertise for the promotion of quality of rural life. Experience shows that universities have a strong technical expertise to enable them to become a major vehicle in promoting development in rural areas.
Implementing development changes also prove to be a very tedious and a costly endeavor for universities as they are limited by both human and financial resources. However, there are many experiences and cases of successful and unsuccessful university activities gathered by some universities that are already engaged in rural development.
In this context, two universities’s experiences have been selected concerning their role in rural development. These are Agricultural University of Hebei (AUH) China, and Charles Darwin University (CDU), Australia. AUH has been providing extension services to rural farmers since the late 1970s. CDU has been involved with education/training, research and services for rural, remote and Indigenous communities and made a contribution for their development.
This thesis focuses on a comparative analysis of the roles of these universities in rural development between China and Australia. A simple linear model is developed. Complex model development has been suggested for further study.
|Date of Award||May 2005|
|Supervisor||Darol Cavanagh (Supervisor)|