Increasing access to rural maternal health services in Zambia through demand-side interventions

This paper examines a demand-side intervention that significantly increased access to maternal health services in rural Zambia in a context where skilled birth attendance rates had been stagnant for over two decades. Aspects of the intervention design that were crucial to the programme's success were the participatory and adult learning-centred approach used to mobilise intervention communities, the use of a community volunteer model, and the design's sensitivity and responsiveness to underlying social factors and problems. The demand-side intervention is already being scaled up in six districts, and is highly suitable for national level scale-up.     

Benefits and challenges of micro-enterprise participation: women's cottage industry in Kaimosi,Kenya

This article investigates the perspectives of Kenyan women in the Kaimosi cottage industry regarding the benefits and challenges of producing craft commodities for the global marketplace. Utilising qualitative methods, the research provides an understanding of issues the women faced in producing and marketing goods and offers insights for NGOs into some pitfalls for the sustainability of micro-enterprises. The women asserted that participation in the micro-enterprise had improved their family's economic well-being, helped finance their children's education, and improved their community status. This supports the literature that has found that women's involvement in micro-enterprises reduces poverty and improves well-being.     

When Someday Is Today: Carrying Forward the History of Old Age and Inheritance into the Age of Medicaid

Hartog, Hendrik. 2012 . Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age . Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Pp. 353. $29.95 cloth. This review essay of Hendrik Hartog's ( 2012 ) Someday All This Will Be Yours undertakes a brief overview of some of the massive changes in middle‐class planning for old age and inheritance in the United States over the course of the past century, focusing on the increased role of the state as a source of funding and regulation, the rise of the elder law bar, and the resulting new tools and motives for the transfer of property in exchange for care in the age of Medicaid.     

IP litigation, the new money-spinner

It is a truism that intellectual property litigation costs alot of money. It can be ruinously expensive even for the victor,never mind the beaten, bloodied loser. Much effort has beendirected at reducing the cost of combat in court: streamliningthe trial process, rocket dockets, better case management, toname a few, have produced some relief for costly litigationbut no cure. However, since the reward for the winner is sooften the opportunity of either enforcing a     

Introduction: The state of labor in the People’s Republic of China

Studies in Comparative International Development -