Extreme poverty alleviation through community-based entrepreneurship: PRODECO in Paraguay

Community-based entrepreneurship projects have been advocated as a potential approach to alleviate extreme poverty as they provide opportunities for income generation and capacity enhancement. This practical note provides an overview of the PRODECO project undertaken jointly by the Paraguayan government and the World Bank (1999–2008) in three southern departments of Paraguay (Itapúa, Misiones, and Ñeembucú). It describes and analyses the context, scope, operations, and results of this project, and identifies five main lessons related to frequent challenges faced by this approach; on size, access to skills, distance from government agencies, pace, and technology.     

Transforming the social capital of the urban poor: Lessons from Kisumu,Kenya

Large-scale organisations of the urban poor (OUP) are needed for greater influence in urban governance. However, where contexts are non-enabling for large-scale organisations to develop, external support may be needed. Past NGO support for building social capital has been heavily criticised for failing to address its darker side, while new forms of OUP supported by urban poor federations have been cited as more inclusive, representative organisations. This study compares NGO- and slum-dwellers’ federation-supported OUPs in Kisumu, Kenya, and finds evidence that development partners should seek to scale-up existing social capital while ensuring that networks formed are transformative for marginalised identities.     

Considering the ecohealth approach: Shaping Haitian women's participation in urban agricultural projects

This paper examines the social and gender politics of a women's urban garden project supported by the International Organisation of Migration, in Cap Haitien, Haiti. My study highlights how the development process created an unmonitored symbolic space where society's normalised gender processes reproduced broader social inequalities, which, in turn, prevented the project from meeting the women's practical and strategic goals. Then, I discuss how the ecohealth approach, as an alternative design framework, could make symbolic space visible to be critically engaged and analysed by participants, to account for gender process, and create an emancipatory activity.     

Doing development differently: Rituals of hope and despair in an INGO

Through an anthropological lens, using examples from working in an international NGO, I explore how and why a group of development workers navigated the coercive practices of aid in ways that benefitted their partners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Rather than seeking conspiracies to explain the gaps between development rhetoric and practices, I suggest that people both contest and collude with bureaucratic systems of rule. Youth Rights reformed various rituals and created different management practices internally, as well as maintaining its long-established solidarity approach with partners, but only managed to challenge the donors’ controls to a limited extent.     

A training approach for community maternal health volunteers that builds sustainable capacity

This article examines a training approach for community health volunteers which increased access to maternal health services in rural communities in Zambia. The effectiveness of the training approach was evaluated in an operations research component. Skilled birth attendance rates increased by 63% from baseline over a two-year period in the intervention districts, out-performing increases recorded in control sites at statistically significant levels. As a low-cost, high-impact intervention which shows good sustainability potential, the approach is suitable for national level scale-up and for adaptation for use in other countries in support of maternal and new-born health goals.     

A note on household approach to credit rationing in agrarian economies

Using clues from transaction cost economics this note develops an intertemporal agricultural household model to explain the demand-side credit rationing from formal financial institutions in agrarian economies. The model employs ex-ante transaction costs, namely search cost and negotiation cost to explain this phenomenon. The model shows that with market failure an agricultural household's production decision is not separate from its consumption decision. This is when the policy analysis household approach, which includes simultaneous decision making in production and consumption side, becomes essential.     

Supporting local climate adaptation planning and implementation through local governance and decentralised finance provision

Policies developed at national levels can be unresponsive to local needs. Often they do not provide the rural poor with access to the assets and services they need to allow them to innovate and adapt to the ways that increased climate variability and change exacerbate challenges to basic securities – food, water, energy, and well-being. In development deficit circumstances, common pool resources are important for climate adaptation purposes. In order for climate adaptation actions to deliver resilience, local perspectives and knowledge need to be recognised and given due priority in formal planning systems. Basing formal adaptive development planning on local strategies can support and strengthen measures that people have been tested and know to work. Local climate adaptation through collective action can address current increases in climate variability, future incremental changes, and the need to transform existing systems to deal with qualitative shifts in climate. These types of adaptation can work in cumulative ways. The results of local adaptation collective action that have benefits of low rivalry between users while being highly inclusive can be considered “local public goods”. Evidence is beginning to emerge that when local governance systems facilitate high levels of participation in planning collective action for climate adaptation, and direct access to resources for implementing local plans, “local public goods” can be created and common pool resources better managed.     

Climate resilience in fragile and conflict-affected societies: concepts and approaches

To understand resilience to climate and environmental changes in fragile and conflict-affected societies is particularly important but equally challenging. In this paper, we first develop a conceptual framework to explore the climate-fragility-conflict and climate-resilience-peace nexus. Second, we discuss approaches to promote pathways from climatic changes to peace. We draw on the relevant literature and International Alert's experience in fragile and conflict-affected societies to stress the key role of resilience. To build resilience, climate, development, peacebuilding, and government actors would have to overcome bureaucratic and institutional barriers and cooperate across thematic and regional silos.     

Centring African culture in water,sanitation, and hygiene development praxis in Ghana: a case for endogenous development

International development aid is driven by actors steeped in Western neo-liberal theory and practice. Africa has largely received failed Western aid, administered mainly through international NGOs in neo-comprador relationships. This article calls for African-centred and -led development, revitalised through endogenous development (ED) praxis. Using a water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector case study from Ghana, the article theorises Africa's WASH development within the context of globalisation and the politics of knowledge production on Africa. It shows how ED provides African people with self-determining and culturally relevant development necessary for WASH justice and improved health and livelihoods.     

The role of caste in the implementation of herbal gardens in Bangalore

Over the past few decades home garden research has emphasised the promotion of home gardening for nutritional and other welfare benefits for the poor in urban areas. Still, the urban communities who cultivate plants in their home gardens are in general represented as rather uniform groups, and no distinction is made in terms of caste, ethnic groups, or social class. This article asserts that social stratification represents an important aspect that needs to be taken into account while devising educational programmes and community projects for the promotion of home herbal gardens in urban areas.