Community empowerment through appropriate technology: sustaining the sustainable development

Rural communities are the major entities in developing and third-world countries. While outsiders want to develop local community, they should develop the local conditions and sustain the result. In order to get sustainability among rural communities, technology become a booster to reach it. However, the success rate of many community development projects result only compare between "before" and "after" condition of technology implementation. Furthermore, when its result reaches sustainable condition of community development, many communities can not further maintain as well as develop their sustainable development because low level of empowerment. This paper attemped to develop conceptual framework how to reach the sustainable development in a community which was strengthened through the implementation of appropriate technology in order to reach empowerment. The framework will be constructed through literature survey and then combined with several sample cases to provide a comprehensive discussion. This paper concluded that empowerment was the next shape of sustainable development. Three stages of community development were revealed. Appropriate technology can be positioned as the bridging point in reaching empowerment of rural communities. By looking at previous efforts which treated sustainable development as the final purpose of community development projects, this paper gave new lights how to reach beyond it. Empowering rural communities, sustaining their sustainable development. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.