Aid

Rural support programmes in Pakistan are major players in rural development, with significant outreach. Owing to funding constraints, they are currently exploring an exit strategy whereby they facilitate the formation of multi-tier local support organisations (LSOs), including those exclusively run by women. The present article focuses on the impact of this exit strategy on rural women.

Since their rise to prominence in the post-World War II period, NGOs have grown exponentially in size and stature. This growth has occurred most notably under the New Policy Agenda, with Western donor states emphasising the role of NGOs in democratisation and service provision. Donors have gained the power to set the development agenda and NGOs have slowly become Trojan horses for global neo-liberalism. The present review surveys the principal ways in which NGOs have become a part of the promotion of Western hegemony in the developing world and presents some ideas for change.

Effective use of donor aid is critical in achieving the sixth Millennium Development Goal –reversing the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2015. The Paris Declaration of 2005 identified five key principles for aid effectiveness: ownership, alignment, harmonisation, mutual accountability and managing for results. As civil society organisations play a critical role in implementing HIV/AIDS interventions, it is important that they adhere to these principles. Often, however, they fail to implement interventions conforming with the principles, leading to duplication and inefficiency.

This paper examines the extent to which the key elements of globalisation, such as international trade, investments, foreign aid, transnational labour migration and tourism have been mainstreamed into the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) in the Asia-Pacific region. Using a content analysis, the paper finds that trade openness gained the highest priority in the PRSPs, followed by foreign investment, aid, tourism and, lastly, migration.

The progress in endeavours to achieve the commitments of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness has been slow. This paper explains the challenges faced by the aid effectiveness agenda and discusses why and how it needs to be revisited. In order to elucidate the differences in donors' approaches to aid effectiveness, a comparison is made between the UK and Japan, which leads to two suggestions. The main messages are that it is important to be inclusive of different donors, and to link the policy dialogue with reality on the ground.

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Young sportspersons now serve abroad within the ‘Sport for Development and Peace’ (SDP) movement. Drawing on interviews with former interns from Commonwealth Games Canada's Canadian Sports Leadership Corps programme, this study explored what interns brought to, and learnt from, international SDP service. Interns confronted notions of expertise and privilege and, in some cases, considered the limits of Northern development stewardship.

Microfinance practices were originally developed in offline contexts. Modern microfinance practices were based on development models for the financial and social empowerment of the poorest of poor in developing countries. Several of these practices drew from existing traditions of money lending within local communities that were reformed to be in sync with rural development and the empowerment of the underprivileged individual.

The past 30 years have seen a proliferation in the use of the phrase ‘civil society' linked to international aid, resulting in the creation of official donor ‘civil society departments’. At the same time there has been growing understanding that international development has become commercialised into the ‘aid industry'. The result is an explosion of ‘aided', globalised and tamed civil society at the expense of the naturally occurring, local, less predictable and more politicised‘unaided' variety.

This article reports on the Warwick Conference on Humanitarianism, where practitioners and academics shared their experiences of the problems and limitations of humanitarianism, and how they dealt with them.

Sustainable job creation in post-conflict environments often involves financing private-sector development. However, a poor business climate and the erosion of capacity in the domestic private sector reduce the effectiveness of traditional financing strategies in post-conflict environments.