This paper examines the alternative strategy of enhancing the utilization of local resources by using, and improving upon, the knowledge and technical expertise of rural people to bring about local self-reliance and development in Africa and other developing countries. This effort is based on the fact that most formal approaches to rural development in such countries have hardly reduced rural poverty and backwardness. In most cases the conditions of rural people have worsened as alien rural development strategies imported from the industrialized countries have failed to fit into the local environment. The challenge for rural development and raising the quality of life of the people is so massive that new approaches must be tried. It is suggested that exploiting the human, physical and technical resources in local rural areas is a good starting point in facing this challenge. Although changes may be more gradual in this way, they have the advantage of laying more solid foundations on which faster methods can build, resulting in long-term self-sustaining development. The concept of indigenous local knowledge is examined, with its dimensions, growth, importance, the causes and consequences of its recent decline and its opportunities for rural development. Constraints and obstacles to utilizing indigenous local knowledge are explored.