NGOs and income-generation projects: Lessons from the Joint Funding Scheme

A visit to a number of small enterprise and income-generation projects supported under the ODA's Joint Funding Scheme in Zimbabwe and Kenya has raised a series of key points which have wider implications for practitioners and donors. The article discusses each point and makes nine ‘recommendations?s for NGOs and donors who support them. While the general benefits of NGOs — such as their relatively low cost, ability to reach the poor, and innovativeness — are affirmed, the article argues that the challenge facing NGOs is to progress further from this base. In particular, it argues that NGOs need to develop more business-like operations, focusing on the most practicable forms of enterprise structure, but without losing their priority of seeking to benefit the poor and other disadvantaged groups. Technology-oriented projects need to ensure that they concentrate on the application of technology in a market context, rather than developing it for its own sake. NGOs with donors need also to strive for a realistic definition of sustainability, to work towards a more credible project-planning process, and to be aware of the dangers of very visible and expensive investment in project transport undermining NGOs' efficiency.     

R&D consortia and technology transfer: Initial lessons from MCC

This paper discusses important aspects of technology transfer between MCC (the first R&D consortium to register under the National Cooperative Research Act of 1984) and company-based personnel. An evaluation of established technology-transfer models leads to a discussion of a parallel-processing approach and three important dimensions of the transfer process: mode, initiative, and continuity. Differences between R&D consortia and their member companies are categorized in terms of values and imperatives, networking, time pressure, the universalistic/particularistic nature of research activities, and different evaluation criteria. Generalized managerial implications are presented for R&D consortia.     

Objectivity and truth: Problems in doing feminist research

This paper examines principles of feminist research and discusses the authors' attempts to use these principles in a systematic way in their own research. Three principles of feminist research are identified: research should contribute to women's liberation through producing knowledge that can be used by women themselves; should use methods of gaining knowledge that are not oppressive; should continually develop a feminist critical perspective that questions dominant intellectual traditions and can reflect on its own development.Consciously applying these principles in a research study of the relation between changes in consciousness and the changes in the structural situation of individuals raised several methodological issues and dilemmas. These include the impossibility of creating a research process that completely erases the contradictions in the relationship between the researcher and the researched; the difficulties in analysing change as a process; the tension between the necessity of organizing the data and producing an analysis which reveals the totality of women's lives; and problems of validity, particularly those raised when the research process becomes part of the process of change.     

The Usurer's Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England

This article uses a case-study of the relationship between the British suffrage organization, the Women's Social and Political Union, and its equivalent on the Irish side, the Irish Women's Franchise League, in order to illuminate some consequences of the colonial relationship between Britain and Ireland. As political power was located within the British state, and the British feminist movement enjoyed superior resources, the Irish movement was at a disadvantage. This was compounded by serious internal divisions within the Irish movement - a product of the dispute over Ireland's constitutional future - which prevented the Franchise League, sympathetic to the nationalist demand for independence - from establishing a strong presence in the North. The consequences of the British movement organizing in Ireland, in particular their initiation of a militant campaign in the North, are explored in some detail, using evidence provided by letters from the participants.British intervention was clearly motivated from British-inspired concerns rather than from any solidarity with the situation of women in Ireland, proving to be disastrous for the Irish, accentuating their deep-rooted divisions.The overall argument is that feminism cannot be viewed in isolation from other political considerations. This case-study isolates the repercussions of Britain's imperial role for both British and Irish movements: ostensibly with a common objective but in reality divided by their differing response to the constitutional arrangement between the two countries. For this reason, historians of Irish feminist movements must give consideration to the importance of the ‘national question’ and display a more critical attitude towards the role played by Britain in Irish affairs.