Articles

Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. Proyecto Tequisquiapan (PT) provides protective microfinance services in a small region of rural Mexico, including, importantly, open access deposit facilities. The authors report on new research which examined PT's record in enabling people with different degrees of vulnerability to build assets and protect themselves from both sudden shocks and more predictable demands for lump sums of cash. PT was found to be relatively more useful for the most vulnerable households.

This paper explores the development issue of democratisation from a gendered perspective, emphasising the need to look for the building blocks of democracy within civil society sectors where women play a key role. Chilean and Argentinean women prove an important example for sustainable political development through their roles as Mothers, particularly in the 1980s in the movements to protest political disappearances.

The evaluation of development NGOs has seldom considered their impact on social capital and local organisational learning. Deeply intertwined, both are key dimensions of the long-term impact of development interventions. Studies have highlighted the relative success of NGOs in poverty reduction, but have been critical of the sustainability of the benefits and of NGOs' failure to strengthen institutions. This paper analyses the experience of a sustainable natural resources management project coordinated by CARE in Villa Serrano, Bolivia, between 1993 and 2000.

Social researchers continue to grasp for critical factors that foster or impede the development of social capital. This article highlights some of these factors based on an investigation of a low-income urban settlement in Guatemala.

Donors face many issues when trying to support development goals in large regions such as Latin America. In their attempts to channel assistance to appropriate end-users, they also have to provide coherence with national strategy, balance supply and demand of technical resources, and ensure accountability to their taxpayers. Resolution of these issues requires considerable focus and a clear understanding of all relevant factors. This is particularly so for, but not exclusive to, small donors.

Conceived by nurses in the hospital of a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, and inspired by Norwegian People's Aid, the international aid agency of the Australian trade unions was designed to give a genuine material base to solidarity with national liberation struggles.

Founded in 1951, War on Want is a UK-based NGO committed to the alleviation of poverty with strong roots in the labour movement. War on Want's programme on The Global Workplace provides trade unionists with a range of practical skills and knowledge about international development issues. Part of the programme involves a `Global Workers' Forum', which takes grassroots trade union activists from the UK to a similar sector or even a plant owned by the same employer in the South.

This paper argues that the NGO position on global labour rights is mistaken. NGOs' concerns over race and gender inequalities and their rejection of the primacy of class in today's global, capitalist economy have frustrated the project of incorporating labour rights into the global free trade regime. Trade unions, meanwhile, are one of the few agencies dedicated to dissolving class inequalities, especially between workers in the North and the South. Until NGOs rethink their position on class, trade unions are the only agency capable of pushing the labour rights agenda forward.

This article considers the problems of organisational survival, innovation, and inter-organisational partnerships for unions and for immigrant community-based organisations. The analysis focuses on the Citizenship Project, a project for assisting and organising Mexican immigrants, launched in 1995 by Teamsters Local 890 in response to the assault on immigrant rights in California.

In the early 1980s, support for trade unions was a significant component of Oxfam GB's programmes in various parts of the world, most notably Central America and South Africa. In Central America, this was motivated both because organised labour played an important role in popular movements that were pressing for equitable political settlements to the wars ravaging the region, and because unions as such, as well as their members and leaders, were the targets of repression and political violence.