Victor Inya Okoro

My research examines how community entrepreneurship can transform international development projects from mere delivery mechanisms into vehicles that build lasting civic wealth at the local level. While current project management frameworks often treat beneficiary participation as a process input, my work argues that true sustainability depends on whether communities actually appropriate decision rights and ownership of project outcomes. Drawing on governance theory and the civic wealth literature, I develop and test a framework consisting of four strategic orientations—holisticness, embeddedness, inclusiveness, and collectiveness—that specify the concrete governance conditions needed for communities to move from passive recipients to active authors of development assets. Using qualitative comparative analysis of historical project records, my research aims to show how different configurations of these orientations can generate social, economic, and communal value, and to provide practical guidance for designing projects that foster durable local institutions beyond donor-driven participation.