In search of a global ethic of love and humanity: Ubuntu and professional love in community development in Kenya and the United Kingdom

This chapter draws on the experience of community development academics and practitioners from different cultural and professional traditions in Kenya and the UK. The findings highlight how values-based community development practice in different countries can be characterised in similar terms, highlighting the importance of sustaining loving relationships in work with vulnerable, marginalised and oppressed groups and individuals. Drawing from different traditions—humanism; Western feminist ethics of care; African communal ethics, or Ubuntu—the chapter presents evidence that love can underpin the best forms of practice in working with people wherever they live. Examples are drawn from work with HIV-AIDs widows and slum-dwelling children in Kenya, and newly arriving refugees and asylum seekers in communities across the UK. These cases demonstrate how global practice shaped by an ethic of love and humanity can address the needs of vulnerable, marginalised and oppressed individuals and groups—wherever they live.