Social sector

In 1994, the authors conducted research in the Iasi district of Romania, and present here findings about institutionalised children's aspirations, education, level of family contact and their assessment of the problems they face. The research provides some interesting pointers for those involved in programme planning, suggesting that better education and encouraging familial contact, where possible, throughout institutionalisation are more effective than strategies which seek to help the children when they leave.

The problem of inadequate housing and living conditions facing one quarter of the world's population is situated in this article within the framework of human rights, and of international recognition of the basic rights to a place to live, and to gain and sustain an adequate standard of living. The nature and scale of the housing crisis points to a failure of governance that leads to exclusion, dispossession, and violence becoming endemic to societies: the institutionalisation of insecure and inadequate housing and living conditions.

The author discusses her involvement, as a member of the Indian Women's Movement (IWM), in campaigning for increased protection under Indian law for women, and children, from sexual assault of any kind. The law at present has large gaps in it, and is formulated with the joint aims of protecting `virginal' women and protecting men at risk from the false allegations of low caste, impoverished, sexually-aware women.

The author researched women's experiences of domestic violence and abuse in Calcutta, India. She reports on their strategies for coping with and resisting this violence, noting that the majority of the women developed resistance strategies, and that in many cases these worked. A pragmatic approach is taken, since, the author argues, it is unhelpful to assume that the best course of action for these women would be to leave their partners.

The need for a comprehensive information service based at the rural level in Bangladesh is discussed, noting the demands of NGO activists who require reading materials, particularly in their own language, for updating their knowledge, developing skills, analysing social issues, and motivating communities.

In 1994, the UN Volunteers programme (UNV) and UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) collaborated on a research project, Volunteer Contributions to Social Integration at the Grassroots: the Urban or `Pavement Dimension'. The author describes how the researchers hope to contribute to understanding of how global forces erode community structures, including the way governments increasingly privatise public services, and highlights the challenges and potential rewards for communities which voluntarily pull together to change their circumstances.

This article reviews the extent to which the educational system has acknowledged the importance to women of the informal sector of the economy, and the extent to which it has sought to prepare them for employment or self-employment within it. It assesses the record of both formal and non-formal education in providing women with the necessary skills to compete with men for employment, and concludes that both have generally failed to assist women to obtain skilled, well paid, and secure jobs, leaving them in overwhelming numbers in subsistence-level activities in the informal sector.

Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) and Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) emerged in the context of working with rural communities in developing countries. But the principles of participation and of action-oriented research are equally valid for development work in the urban sector, and in industrialised countries. This article describes the use of participatory appraisal techniques in disadvantaged communities in the UK, in the fields of health and social welfare.

Academic urban development training programs tend to either train in town planning, where the focus is on the production of plans, or in urban studies, where the focus is on the development of urban areas; there is a need, the author argues, for training that produces `working planners' with knowledge of both. He advocates `for-the-job training', in which trainees use the real problems they face in their working environment as study material, allowing trainees to produce useful outputs while being trained, and ensuring the relevance of training.

NGOs are receiving and distributing increasing funding for projects attempting to help traumatised victims of political violence. The author argues that many of these projects are ill conceived, failing to recognise that one aim of modern warfare is the dissolution of the social fabric and that survivors will be trying to manage their distress in damaged social environments. Also, the Western conception of mental trauma does not provide an adequate model for understanding the complex and evolving experiences of those in war-affected areas.