Overcoming poverty and inequality: Rwanda's progress towards the MDGs

Despite the 1994 genocide there has been annual growth in Rwanda every year since 2000. Poverty has decreased; while the MDG target of 23.8% is unlikely to be met by 2015, the future looks hopeful. The goal of reducing hunger is measured by underweight children – already down to target – and extreme poverty – likely to hit the target. Key to success is reducing dependency on the land, but a majority of the population still depend on their farm or plot. However, hitting targets for reducing poverty is not the same thing as abolishing it, and achieving targets does not necessarily solve problems.     

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.     

Management not models: adaptability,responsiveness, and a few lessons from football

Despite a swathe of critiques of logframes and other blueprint approaches to development over the last 30 years, most aid infrastructure continues to concentrate on the design and subsequent implementation of closed models. This article does not propose an alternative to blueprints, but challenges the inflexibility of their implementation, which is inadequate given the complex nature of social change. It proposes a supplementary management and learning approach which enables implementers to be dynamic, adaptive, and responsive to problems and opportunities. Emphasising the role of donors, the paper presents a case study of one donor-led programme in Bangladesh doing just this.     

Vulnerability among paupers: Determinants of individuals receiving poor relief in nineteenth-century northern Sweden

This study combines computerized parish registers with parish meeting records that account for individuals who received poor relief in the nineteenth-century Sundsvall region, Sweden. The combination of sources especially helps to explore the recipients who are overlooked in the literature or difficult to trace in historical data. Their demographic characteristics in relation to relief allocation and experiences prior to it are analyzed and show that they did not only share the occurrence of entitlement. Vast but insufficient family networks failed to give the recipients support to manage their distressed situation. Deaths and births of relatives jeopardized their capability to guarantee subsistence for them or their family, and so did also their gender and phase in the lifecycle. The multi-dimensional concept of vulnerability is employed to comprehend the dynamic determinants of poverty represented by individuals granted poor relief. It is argued that this concept has to be further developed but nevertheless helps to identify and stratify some of the vulnerabilities that characterized paupers in the past.     

贵州扶贫开发中的制度创新思考——基于连片特困区的自我发展能力培育

贵州是全国贫困最严重的省份,贫闲人口多、贫困面大、贫困程度深,扶贫攻坚任务异常艰巨。由于经济社会发展存在很多历史欠账和瓶颈,常规的扶贫手段难以奏效,为了彻底摆脱贫穷落后的历史标签,必须加大扶贫开发力度,从本质上解决连片特困区的贫困问题,有针对性地找准扶贫攻坚的路径,立足资源优势和政策机会,通过制度创新,突破瓶颈制约,培育和形成贫困地区自我可持续的发展能力,让贵州与全国同步进入全面小康社会建设的新时期。     

Kenneth B. Clark and the problem of power

ABSTRACT

During the early 1960s African American psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, known primarily for his involvement in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education US Supreme Court desegregation decision, began organizing an ambitious anti-poverty programme called Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, Inc. (HARYOU). Dissatisfied by the lack of progress in school desegregation in New York City and discouraged by the inability of traditional social welfare organizations to address the problems of race and poverty, Clark argued that a new approach had to be developed to mobilize the black poor to gain the political and economic power that would solve their problems. At the same time, he theorized that a new form of racial segregation was beginning to develop in urban areas that foreshadowed increasing social isolation, economic dependence and declining municipal services for many African Americans. He called this new development ‘internal colonialism’ and hoped that HARYOU would be a demonstration project in the Kennedy–Johnson administration's War on Poverty that would address these problems from multiple perspectives. Nonetheless, the plan aroused the political opposition of Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. The dispute with Powell drove Clark from HARYOU and caused him to re-evaluate his thinking regarding African American leadership. He increasingly viewed the ‘ghetto’ as both a prison and a cocoon that satisfied white and black social, economic, political and psychological needs. By the end of his HARYOU experience, Clark coined the term ‘the new American dilemma’ to describe and theorize about an increasingly isolated and powerless black population in many urban centres. The term also signified his belief that the problem of power was intricately tied up in, while also separate from, the problem of race.     

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.     

Microcredit and power: examining how and why women encounter domination in Bangladesh

Using data from a recent ethnographic research project on microcredit, power, and poverty in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, this article demonstrates that the relationship of women with both NGOs and male relatives is one of dependency and subordination. Gendered power relations, embedded in NGO practices and socio-cultural gender norms, influence the female borrowers to accept the domination of the fieldworkers and their male relatives. This article examines how and why NGOs create power inequalities between fieldworkers and female borrowers, why the fieldworkers dominate a group of women, and why these women continue to participate in microcredit programmes.     

印度尼西亚政府克服贫困的新举措——家庭希望计划(PKH)

印度尼西亚政府于2007年建立了家庭希望计划,该计划属于有条件现金转移支付项目,它要求受助家庭把获得的救助金用于家庭中儿童的人力资本发展,因此,相应条件的设定主要集中在教育、营养和健康方面,体现了明显的促进发展的功能。虽然该计划还存在一定问题,但计划已初见成效,印度尼西亚的贫困问题尤其是儿童贫困问题通过该计划的实施得到了缓解,这对中国社会救助的发展完善具有一定的启示意义。     

《哲学的贫困》中的社会有机体思想研究

马克思在《哲学的贫困》一书中批判蒲鲁东无法把握"一切关系在其中同时存在而又互相依存的社会有机体",这根源于蒲鲁东的研究方法,蒲氏套用了黑格尔的方法,把人类社会区分为十个前后相继的"环节",虽然作为诸"环节"的概念是可以把握社会有机体特征的,但其方法决定了他不可能完成这一任务。马克思更多地用唯物辩证的方法把握社会有机体,他既强调共时的系统性,又强调历时的发展性。马克思不仅在《哲学的贫困》中涉及到了社会有机体理论,还在其它著作中探讨了社会有机体理论,把人类社会看作一个活的有机体是马克思一以贯之的观点。这一理论对当代社会发展具有重要的启发意义。