Local Community Participation in Social Innovation Initiatives for Enhancing the Quality of Life: A Case Study in Rural Egypt

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 faculty of agriculture cairo university

2 faculty of agriculture Cairo university

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the actors-related variables that would affect the rural people’s participation in a grassroots social innovation (SI) initiative that has evolved and sustained since the 1980s in two geographically attached villages in Menoufia Governorate in Egypt. The study is based on the quantitative approach which used the socio-economic sample survey and applied a pretested structured questionnaire to a random sample of 221 household heads in the study area. The results revealed that there were significant positive relationships between the degree of respondents’ participation and their attitudes towards the SI, their degree of sense of community, and the perceived attributes of the SI. Moreover, there were significant negative relationships between the degree of respondents’ 
participation and their degree of needs satisfaction before the emergence of the SI and the degree of social loafing. Finally, 60.8% of the variance in the degree of participation could be explained by the variances in the respondents' age, geographic mobility, attitude towards the SI initiative, degree of social loafing, degree of needs satisfaction before the emergence of the SI, and the degree of sense of community. To the best of the authors' knowledge, few studies in Egypt dealt with the variables that might affect the local community participation in innovation in rural areas from actorsrelated perspectives. Hence, the results of this study might help to draw attention to the relationship between the actors’ attributes, and their social and economic conditions with the participation in local social innovations in rural Egypt.

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Scientific Journal of Agricultural Sciences
Volume 5, Issue 2
June 2023
Pages 103-120

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