Methods

Gender mainstreaming was established in the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action as a major strategy for the promotion of gender equality. As a development strategy, gender mainstreaming requires attention to gender perspectives, making them visible and showing the links between gender equality and the achievement of development goals. To evaluate gender mainstreaming in development projects and programmes requires a squaring of evaluation criteria such as relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, and sustainability, with gender mainstreaming indicators at both project and programme level.

Engaging with and assisting marginalised communities remains a major challenge for governments of developing countries, as many national development strategies tend in practice to further marginalise chronically poor communities. Development aid strategies, including poverty-reduction initiatives, have focused primarily on economic development. As a result they have contributed to the erosion of the asset base of these communities, and in particular their access to natural resources.

This article analyses in detail the impact and effectiveness of peer-education projects implemented in Cambodia under the Reproductive Health Initiative for Asia (RHI), in an attempt to provide important lessons for the design and implementation of such interventions and to contribute to the development of best practice.

Microcredit, defined as small loans to people who have no regular access to credit, is an innovative strategy in the fight against poverty. Microcredit institutions can obtain funding from Private Institutional Investors (PIIs) that channel funds from donors, private lenders, and socially-responsible investors. Private financing of development aid is likely to become more important and microcredit presents an investment opportunity within this context.

In the corporate world, design has received increasing attention over the last 50 years and is now firmly embedded within almost all aspects of corporate activity. This article explores the role of design in development. Design is widely used and understood, within capitalist economies, to denote a diverse set of tools, used to maximise market share, sales, and profits, and support market differentiation and brand identity of products.

Current mainstream development thinking, with the exception of a few areas like microcredit, tends to favour size over substance. This article aims to challenge the belief that large-scale companies, markets, and institutions are the most effective means of `delivering development'. We argue that, by designing institutions to meet different needs at different scales, long-term sustainable development outcomes are more likely.

Following the Renamo/Frelimo conflict and the 1992 Rome Accord ending hostilities, the Christian Council of Mozambique undertook to remove arms from the civilian population by trading them for development tools. The weapons were given to artists associated with a collective in the capital, Maputo. The weapons were cut into pieces and converted to sculptures that subsequently focused international attention on the Tools for Arms project, or TAE (Transformação de Armas em Enxadas).

This paper describes the research methodology followed in the ‘Livelihoods of the Extreme Poor Project’, a collaborative research project in Bangladesh between PROSHIKA (a large national NGO) and DFID (the UK government department for international development). The dual purpose of this project was to learn about poor people’s livelihoods and train the PROSHIKA research team in the use of qualitative research methods. The research findings were to be fed directly into policy formulation and the planning of new development interventions for the poorest people in Bangladesh.

Epidemiological combined with experiential evidence from communities can produce important and sometimes surprising insights into gender relations, to inform policies that address changing needs. CIET has standardised a community-based cross-design for the gender-sensitive collection and analysis of three types of evidence: impact, coverage, and costs. Five steps help to ensure that women’s voices are heard in planning. Gender-stratified analysis of existing data is a starting point.

Scaling-up local innovations in natural resource management (NRM) involves learning that is centred around three themes: promoting local-level innovation, understanding why local innovations work in specific contexts, and reflecting on their relevance in other geographical and social contexts. Successful scalin- up depends in part upon the relationships among multiple stakeholders at different levels around this learning. The experiences of researchers supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) provide insights into four questions: What is scaling-up? Why scale-up?