Paper long abstract:

This paper assesses team-based, participatory action research and community immersion by university students in Northern Ghana's rural communities. The community stay is a key component of the university's curriculum for undergraduates who stay with family's for a whole school term for the first two years of their studies. Using diary records of students, individual interviews and focus group discussions (FGDs), data is triangulated. The perceptions of the programme and its effects on the students, staff and host communities are compared and the processes of designing integrated community development projects evaluated. The paper highlights process whilst showing areas of agreement and disagreement as well as the successes of the programme (particularly the students' development) and areas for improvement (student preparation and follow-up actions) are set out. A key recommendation captures how the approach could be adopted for different context for sustainability of development interventions.