By Murray Hunter
ONE of the major deficiencies in national development is the lack of direct focus on enterprises in communities.
Much of the budget (RM90-100 billion) is spent on hard infrastructure and formal education, while communities are left out.
The responsibility for community development in Malaysia runs across a number of ministries and agencies. These include the Ministry of Rural and Regional Development (KKDW), Ministry of Housing and Local Government (KPKT), and the Ministry of National Unity.
No integrated programs exist, and there is little focus on nurturing entrepreneurship within communities.
There is almost zero outreach from public universities into communities, which focus only on awarding qualifications acceptable for students to gain employment within the workforce.
The major issue within communities today is feelings of hopelessness within the hearts and minds of residents, particularly the young.
To some degree, this is why the incidence of drug addiction is high in these communities, together with many other social problems.
As a consequence, unemployability is a major issue, currently not directly tackled by any formal programs.
One of the major issues related to poverty and destitution is the perceived lack of entrepreneurial opportunities.
Malaysia’s current growth dimensions are focused on GDP growth.
The export sector, civil service, and GLCs are all buoyant, while communities are being neglected.
The formal education system lacks any real entrepreneurship orientation, where formal courses teach more about entrepreneurship than about how a person can become an entrepreneur. This can be clearly seen in the high levels of graduate unemployment.
Looking for a new paradigm
Malaysia needs a new community development paradigm, a means to infuse creativity that nurtures innovation that can lead to new ventures and local community development.
This must also be achieved within the existing sets of community customs and cultures on the ground.
Therefore, teaching one style of entrepreneurship for all will result in project failures, as many academics can corroborate.
A new paradigm of community development can be established through community centres that assist residents in finding new ideas through an ‘idea bank’ resource, and then assist them on developing the sets of skills and competences required, acquire the necessary resources, and developing the networks they need to make an opportunity work.
This means bringing entrepreneurial education to communities, no matter how remote they may be.
These resource centres should be the place where members of communities can learn the art of creativity, innovation, and how to identify opportunities that they can exploit.
Such centres would house libraries providing feedstock to generate ideas, and teach the nature of skills they will need.
Community members will learn how to screen their ideas to determine whether they can be real entrepreneurial opportunities.
The centres would have study and meeting areas, and audiovisual facilities where practademics can give talks, and community members can contact organisations and people they need for their projects.
Practademics can either visit these centres to mentor and give group talks through Zoom.
Other people would be available to assist with packaging and design, manufacturing, and regulatory issues. Community members could also contact community finance organisations directly rather than have to travel to major towns and cities.
AI is a new asset that communities can learn, so it can be utilised for their own personalised education needs.
AI as a resource tool must be brought down to the community level through these centres with instruction on how to master the new resource.
AI can be utilised from the idea level right up to start-up and general enterprise operations.
Community members can be assisted to create their own specialised AI avatars.
The centres would enable the nurturing of community members, where they can further their education informally in a flexible manner.
In addition, these centres would be connected as nodes that would enable entrepreneurial networking.
Virtual meetings can be run through the centres bringing a new impetus to entrepreneurship in remote areas.
Around 50 per cent of those in the country make up what can be described as the informal sector of the economy.
These centres would act as a valuable resource to develop community learning to enable people to pick up the skills they need to create new enterprises and further develop existing ones by enabling them to develop new products and markets.
These centres would connect directly to micro-finance bodies to build a bridge towards enabling those within the informal sector to gain access to finance.
These centres would bring education and skills, develop capabilities, assist in building networks, and find markets in ways the formal education sector and existing ministerial programmes cannot.
The mission of these centres is to enable people to move by action (MBA) into new community activities.
They could aptly be named Creativity and Innovation Development Centres (CIDC).
These CIDC centres would become one of the most valuable resources to assist people to advance themselves and gain self-esteem in the country.
The informal sector has been grossly neglected in government development policy. FELDA and MARA once played very important roles in community development; it's now the time for CID centres to take up the mission. – October 6, 2026
