The United Nations Intellectual History Project (UNIHP) is an independent activity located at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Originally concentrating on the economic and social arena, it was intended to include peace and security activities, thus covering the entire waterfront of UN activities. UNIHP comprises a series of books on 11 topics that range from international trade and finance to global governance via gender and global resource management (see www.unhistory.org/ for full details). Under each of these topics the history of ideas launched by the UN family will be traced. Did they come from within the Secretariat, or from outside the UN through governments, NGOs, or experts? Were these ideas discarded without discussion or after deliberation? Were they discussed, adapted (or distorted), and then mplemented? What happened afterwards?
Volume 12
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In English only
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Acknowledgements 2002
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This article describes an NGO project intended to empower scheduled caste women working in the silk-reeling industry in India through the provision of microfinance. It documents the impact that the project had on their economic and social status over a period of time and highlights the negative consequences of excluding male relatives from playing any meaningful role. It suggests ways in which the project might have been made more male-inclusive while still empowering women. At the same time, it acknowledges that even if the men's hostility to the project had been overcome, the women's micro enterprises were unlikely to have been viable commercially. This is because the project insisted that the women operate as a group in what was a high-risk area of economic activity, with no clear strategy as to how their work could be sustained.
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Sucre is a city of micro enterprises. The lines between business and household are often blurred: accounts are mixed, space is shared, and partners from outside the household are rare. On the surface, this kind of business organisation seems most inadequate for economic success. Yet a closer look at the internal workings of Sucre's businesses suggests that the complex `balancing act' between business and household may represent not sloppy management (as micro enterprise development agencies often maintain), but a flexible strategy for household well-being. Sucre's businesses essentially follow `triple bottom line' accounting at the household level, taking into account both financial and non-financial goals.
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Microfinance--both credit and savings--has potential to improve the well-being of poor women in developing countries. This paper explores practical ways to achieve that potential. Based on lessons from informal savings mechanisms that women already use, the paper proposes two savings services designed to address the development issues that confront women. The proposals call for safe-deposit boxes and for matched savings accounts for health care or education.
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This paper explores development issues from the perspective of two villages in rural Lebanon. Educated male villagers see themselves as initiators of development and use the same language as NGO officials. Client-patron relationships and wasta (the act of accessing material favours, such as development projects, from the powerful) are means for these men to achieve their political ends. Women and the less powerful men, who are not part of the wasta network, tend to be disregarded in decision making, but nonetheless have strong views about the needs of the villages. The Islamic view emphasises the moral life.
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NGOs have played an important role worldwide in trying to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS through achieving behaviour change. NGOs have often been at the fore of innovative changes, influencing government and international programming activities. This paper identifies and analyses the evolution of the HIV/AIDS programmes of one NGO in Thailand over a period of ten years. Three generations of programming are identified both through distinct approaches to this area of work, and also by the changing jargon describing the people the programmes are aimed at.
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This paper discusses the pros and cons of the experience of volunteering abroad and attempts to address a void in the literature on what is required of such volunteers. Following a brief sketch of the volunteer abroad and the motives to for following such a career path, the author provides a first-hand account of the pros and cons of this arcane vocation. While the advantages are commonly known, the author argues the less appealing aspects are often not and are of equal importance whatever an individual's situation.
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In 1999, with a view to strengthening the JFM arrangement, the Gujarat State Forest Department, in collaboration with the Aga Khan Foundation, initiated a nodal agency called the JFM cell. Its mandate is to assist in strengthening and expanding JFM in Gujarat by providing training, research, and communication support to the Forest Department (FD) and NGOs. The cell commissioned a study to understand the process of instituting JFM at the village level and the impact of training and communication by the FD and NGOs in this context. This Practical Note is based on the findings of the study conducted by the authors.
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This article deals with some aspects of Development Studies as an evolving discipline in the UK. Specifically, it offers reflections following the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) carried out by the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE), in which Development Studies was constituted as a separate panel for the first time, albeit on an experimental basis. The writers, both user representatives on the panel, present these thoughts as individuals.
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In English only
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Development and the Learning Organisation: An Introduction In English only
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This article proposes Bottom-Up Learning as a normative framework for international NGOs. It explores the common but often unacknowledged disparity between organisational values and mission versus actual practice. The first section of the paper raises the question of organisational learning disorders followed by an exploration of learning organisations and bottom-up learning in particular. A section briefly summarising positive developments in the field is followed by discussions of organisational barriers and possible mitigation techniques. The paper closes with a challenge for international NGOs to take a closer look at their learning capabilities with a view to improving service to communities of need. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections
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Large companies have accelerated their control of the basic commodities markets in the last decade. The author describes what this means for smallholder farmers in the developing world who depend on these markets for some cash income each year. The consequences of the growing power of distributors (the grocery or supermarket chains) and dominant brand-owners are persistent rural poverty and the ideological and economic devaluation of the sustainable and small-scale agricultural production methods that are so essential to the 70 per cent of the worlds poor who live in rural areas. The author traces the story of a successful business partnership started in 1992 linking cocoa farmers in West Africa and fair-minded chocolate lovers in the UK and USA, an initiative launched in the face of direct criticism and harsh competitive pressure from the global chocolate giants but which has mobilised a new kind of coalition and constituency.
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Learning and knowledge management are crucial capacities for many NGOs. This article attempts to answer such questions as: why is learning seen as so important for NGOs? How do successful NGOs actually learn? And what role do key individuals or leaders play in this process? The article draws heavily on the findings of a study of South Asian NGOs, which suggests that an NGOs ability to learn is dependent on its organisational culture and in particular the development of an internal culture of learning. The case studies from South Asia reveal that the creation of this learning culture derives primarily from the attitude of the leadership towards learning: at the heart of a learning organisation is a learning leader.
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When implementing a transformational global vision and mission, three problems typically confront international NGOs: aligning different levels of planning and strategy; balancing global analysis and priorities against local realities; and identifying measures that both indicate progress and promote and encourage innovation. This article reports on the efforts of CARE Internationals Latin America Regional Management Unit to address these problems by introducing reversals to common strategic planning principles and processes. It shows middle-managers in NGOs how they can lead from the middle, and considers the region to be the nexus enabling an organisation to change and learn across multiple hierarchical levels.
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Change is driven not only by good ideas, but also by disagreement and frustration. This article takes, the reader through a selective organisational history of the British NGO, ActionAid from 1998 to 2001, looking at events and changes that had a bearing on the introduction and initial impact of the agencys new accountability system. Systematic change appears very unsystematic. Effective transformation took a long time to arrive, and was preceded by a number of failed experiments. It seems that the frustrations of this time were necessary to develop the creativity needed for significant change. The efforts started to bear fruit once the organisation began to realise alignment of mission, structures, procedures, and relationships.
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Heifer International (HI) has been applying participatory approaches to rural development for nearly 60 years. Organisationally, HI focuses on building the capacity of its country programmes and NGO partners to work independently toward a unifying mission. An open structure allows HI to validate and incorporate the rich and diverse experience of its project holders and country programme offices into organisational planning and daily operations. This article analyses three recent HI initiatives which incorporate deliberate processes to facilitate organisational learning. It outlines different strategies HI uses to institutionalise learning without imposing limitations on it.
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The integration of learning into community development processes and how that learning can stimulate positive change pose challenges that development practitioners have met with mixed success. Who are the most effective change agents, how they can be supported, and how their efforts can be diffused in the community and scaled up are key questions in the community development literature. The authors designed and implemented an action-research project in Western Kenya on traditional vegetables, recruiting pupils as co-researchers. The purpose of the research was twofold. One was to explore the feasibility of increasing the intake of traditional vegetables through a school-based horticulture programme. The other was to increase pupils competence as effective change agents by empowering them in culturally compatible ways. The results offer lessons for practitioners regarding creative means to identify and empower change agents within traditional organisations and encourage innovative creation and diffusion of knowledge.
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The research work of Harvard professor Chris Argyris gave rise to much of what is today called Organisational Learning, an approach subsequently promulgated by Peter Senge and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first section of this paper argues the relevance of Organisational Learning to NGOs, despite its origins in the study of the private sector. The second section describes a particular project intervention based on Organisational Learning theory, which is currently underway in a Brazilian NGO.
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This paper discusses the implications for organisational learning of recent research on NGO activity in natural disaster mitigation and preparedness. It identifies several institutional and other barriers to NGO learning. However, personal networks in NGOs are often strong, and determined and well-placed individuals can push significant innovations through. Greater emphasis on this human factor may be the key to mainstreaming disaster mitigation and other new or marginal approaches to development.
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If aid is found to support a war effort, should aid agencies and practitioners continue to give it? The resounding answer given by aid workers all over the world is that the needs of suffering people are too important to ignore and, further, that there can be no justification for not assisting suffering people. But how can one provide aid in the context of conflict without exacerbating the conflict? The Local Capacities for Peace Project (LCPP) was formed in 1994 to learn how aid and conflict interact in order to help aid workers find a way to address human needs without feeding conflict. This paper will discuss how the learning process of the LCPP was designed, the results gained at each step, and how the results were fed back to the participating organisations.
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Organisational principles or value standards are considered crucial for maintaining quality in humanitarian assistance. Research among staff members of Médecins Sans Frontières-Holland (MSF-H) showed that fieldworkers construct their own interpretations of principles and priorities in response to demands placed on them in the field. Organisational principles are important for the performance and the wellbeing of volunteers: they serve as beacons, identity markers, and interpersonal glue. It also becomes apparent that while in practice, staff members renegotiate the formal principles of their organisation, they also adhere to patterns of organisational culture resulting in a number of ordering principles they deem typical of their organisation.
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The major development agencies have ex cathedra Official Views (with varying degrees of explicitness) on the complex and controversial questions of development. At the same time, knowledge is now more than ever recognised as key to development in the idea of a knowledge bank or knowledge-based development assistance. The author argues that these two practices are in direct conflict. When an agency attaches its brand name to certain Official Views, then it becomes very difficult for the agency to also be a learning organisation or to foster genuine learning in its clients. A model of a development agency as an open learning organisation, which is in sharp contrast to other organisational models such as the Church or the Party is outlined. That, in turn, allows the agency to take a more autonomy-compatible approach to development assistance with the assisted country in the drivers seat of a learning process rather than as the passive recipient of aid-sweetened policies from the agency. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections
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This article explores attempts by eight UK-based international NGOs currently engaged in rural development interventions in Ethiopia, to employ monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems as a means of strengthening accountability and institutional learning. Premised on the conviction that such NGOs comprise loose coalitions of interest groups at different organisational levels within them, the study explores how respondents in head offices, Addis Ababa, and field offices perceived and practised M&E. It was found that perceptions of M&E vary considerably between hierarchical levels and can have a significant impact on practice. Such perceptions are also framed by individual interests and thus frequently fail to reflect the reality of M&E practice. The story that unfolds offers valuable insights into the current myths and realities of M&E among INGOs.
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This paper introduces the major concepts of Outcome Mapping and discusses the International Development Research Centres experience in developing and implementing Outcome Mapping with Northern and Southern research organisations. It explores how the fundamental principles of Outcome Mapping relate to organisational learning principles and the challenges associated with applying theory to practice. It presents cases where planning, monitoring, and evaluation processes have been used to encourage learning and improvement, and discusses the potential of Outcome Mapping as a tool for evaluative thinking to build learning into development programmes.
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This brief paper describes one attempt to update the programme logic models to incorporate organisational learning. It begins with a brief review of learning concepts, describes the traditional Logical Framework Analysis, and concludes with a sketch of an alternative programme model, entitled the Temporal Logic Model.
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Full-text sample article
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In the late 1970s, feminist social scientists began to challenge some of the assumptions underlying the dominant paradigms on organisations, arguing that they reflect and are structured by the values articulated within the larger institutional arenas in which they are embedded, thus reproducing gender-discriminatory outcomes. This paper unpacks the deep structure of one NGO, Utthan, based in Gujarat, India, to understand the extent to which it is an engendering organisation. It suggests that while gender-sensitive leadership, training, and resources play a critical role in addressing gender equity in development practice, organisational transformation is a much harder and longer process requiring sustained commitment from the leadership, staff, and funding partners.
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Learning organisations and their focus on fundamental change have been seen as having considerable potential for making organisations more gender equitable and improving their capacity to undertake development or human rights work that is not gender-biased. This article, developed by the Gender at Work Collaborative explores the usefulness of ideas related to learning organisations in changing institutions for gender equality. This collection of ideas and practice are seen helpful but a deconstruction of organisational learning points out some difficulties with this body of work and proposes an enhanced toolbox, which would pay attention to such factors as power relations, the spiritual basis of the work and the gendered deep structure of organisations.
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The Learning Organisation (LO) is both a concept and a particular methodology within the larger domain of Organisational Development (OD). To fully appreciate the premises of LO, it is necessary to fall back on the main premises of OD, beginning with the view of the organisation as an open system. Many of the established concepts of systems science as applied to organisational systems such as system robustness, system intelligence, and system proactivity have a direct bearing on the capacity for continuous learning in the organisation. Moving on from concepts to action, an organisation needs a set of working practices to acquire the characteristics of a Learning Organisation. One particularly useful gateway for the LO process is a comprehensive performance management system that compels the organisations membership to re-examine ideas of performance and the assumptions about organisational processes underlying management practices. The gateway follows the Action-Research paradigm and appears well suited to non-profit development NGOs.
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The potential for academic-NGO collaboration is enormous, but such collaboration is far more difficult than it appears on the surface, even when collaborators share a commitment to, and values that support, a particular cause or issue. This paper looks at some of the factors that derail academic-practitioner collaborations. It then identifies five different models of collaboration and makes recommendations that, if observed, should eliminate some of the tensions in collaborative efforts, while at the same time providing a foundation for ongoing learning.
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Many organisations do not learn. There are many reasons for this, and a lack of donor support tends to be cited as the greatest of these. But this is not the primary reason for a lack of learning. We fail to learn because we are unable to see the importance of doing so. We become so embroiled in our busy-ness, our self-inflicted demands for action, that we have ceased to value learning. And we have lost sight of the fact that without learning, our action is doomed to ineffectiveness. If we are about development and cannot measure how we are doing, how can we develop a rigorous and effective practice?
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In many development projects, individuals from one organisation are assigned and relocated to another organisation. For these guests to be effective in the provision of technical assistance requires them to learn about and adapt to the local milieu. Using a Navajo case study, this paper analyses how practices called acts allow guests to make effective contributions through learning and adaptation. It is shown that two categories of acts, calibrating and progressing, are crucial in this regard. Calibrating allows guests to assess the appropriateness of assumptions, and progressing allows them to elicit information and explanations to help develop an understanding of the context. These sets of acts contribute to cross-cultural communicative competence and, thereby, to the success of the development project.
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The concept of Learning Organisations is gaining prominence in the non-profit sector. Most organisations see the concept as a means of attaining organisational change for greater impact on development. While the principles of organisational learning (i.e. team learning, shared vision, common goal and strategy) seem to have produced impressive results in the private sector and some non-profit organisations, the question is whether these principles can be adapted with similar results in complex bilateral programmes. This article explores this question in relation to a programme between the Dutch and Kenyan governments in Keiyo Marakwet. It analyses the process of institutionalising participation as both a learning and a conflict-generating process. In the highly politicised context of bilateral programmes, learning is not necessarily carried forward from one phase to the next due to rapid changes in actors, national politics, diplomatic considerations, and the international development agenda.
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Many development agencies seek to work on behalf of the `poor' and the `poorest of the poor,' often creating external definitions of poverty and of people living in poverty that are based on a complex list of things that the poor do not have. There are others who have spearheaded efforts to define poverty based on criteria derived from members of (largely) rural communities, many of whom would be considered poor. All these definitions ultimately result in some type of grouping of people into different categories of `poor people.' By creating a list of characteristics of poverty, agencies believe that they are better able to target `the poor' as beneficiaries of interventions to eradicate poverty. This article is intended to challenge development organisations (governmental and non-governmental) to look beyond simple definitions of poverty that are based on static characteristics. It is intended to provoke readers to re-evaluate some of their ideas about definitions of poverty; and to critically examine their agency's role in the business of poverty.
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This paper is based on a small micro-level study carried out to assess the impact of recent socio-economic changes in Tajikistan on the livelihoods and well-being of women in Gorno-Badakhshan. It examines the recent involvement of women in trading and informal economic activity with a focus on the trade-offs that women have faced as a result. It argues that the shift towards a market economy in a depressed economic environment has resulted in increasing socio-economic differentiation, insecure livelihoods, and declining social capital. Women's involvement in trading along with the withdrawal of the state from basic social services have increased women's workload. Women's participation in the political sphere is declining from an already low base. Increasing material poverty and multiple roles and responsibilities have made it difficult for women to take up opportunities for public participation, even at a local level. It concludes that there are structural barriers to reducing poverty in Gorno-Badakhshan and raises questions about the possibilities for disadvantaged groups and regions to benefit from a strongly market-based development paradigm.
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Microcredit has been introduced to rural communities in Bangladesh as a means of economic and social development, but there are increasing doubts about its effectiveness and suggestions that it causes domestic abuse. A review of various studies indicates that microcredit can result in social disruption through exacerbating gender conflict. It is suggested that micro-level study is required before credit is introduced to local communities.
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Gender experts who formulate planning frameworks, and strategies for mainstreaming gender issues in organisational policies and programmes usually characterise non-expert policy makers and planners as either active resisters or passive implementers rather than as capable change agents. Because of this, more resistance to gender mainstreaming is encountered than is necessary, and mainstreaming programmes often fail to take into account the needs and contributions of planners as stakeholders. The paper discusses these shortcomings and presents cases from the UN system in which the author was involved, where organisational change and mainstreaming were based on stakeholder participation that began to overcome some commonly identified limitations. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections
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This article highlights the personal and professional problems of NGO fieldworkers in Bangladesh. The paper draws on field research with the front-line workers of four NGOs, their clients, immediate superiors, and senior management. Fieldworkers face personal problems such as job insecurity, financial hardships, difficulties with accommodation, and family dislocation. These problems differ according to gender, marital status, and age. Professional problems include training, promotion, and transfer. In addition, fieldworkers face problems in their external relationships such as suspicion, resistance or lack of cooperation from religious leaders and local élite, time and resource constraints, competition for clients, and eagerness of the intended beneficiaries simply to get access to financial or material benefits. It will be argued that the strengths of the fieldworkers of Southern NGOs have been largely unexplored and undervalued.
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This paper is based on the authors' analytical study of the experiences of participatory development interventions in Mozambique, which compared how different projects interpreted and applied the concept and identified the problems encountered and lessons learnt in using such approaches.
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This article focuses on the personal, social, and psychological hazards that children and the elderly face in Russian state-run institutions. The paper challenges two assumptions: that Russia's problems are purely economic, and that the state is solely responsible for the solutions. We argue that Russia's problems are basically social, and that the community can take the lead in solving them. We introduce low-cost, practical, humane, and community-driven initiatives as an alternative to rigid institutionalisation. The model is applicable elsewhere, and can be customised by the community itself.
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Two energy development projects were examined as the basis of recommending improvements in how resettlement issues are handled. One of these illustrated the [INS: following :INS] problems: lack of a proper communication channel from the implementing body to the local residents; the failure to address the resettlers' own preferences; the compensation scheme for the resettlers did not allow them to re-build their livelihoods; employment of local people in project-related activities was only marginal; and the development of communities and local industry failed to benefit the resettlers.
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Ghana has a history of failed rural development projects and Tono seems well on its way to being one more. This paper analyses contrasting accounts of the success of a rural development project given by public officials who run it and the local intended beneficiaries. Official figures claim a great success. The intended beneficiaries, however, perceive minimal material improvement in their lives. They also see considerable disruption in their community. There is evidence of alienation due to lack of local involvement in the project and gradual withdrawal from it. Migration from the project area has not slowed. This paper asks whether the data represent two views of the same facts or a picture of the inevitable disruption caused by social change. Suggestions are made for how material improvement in people's lives can be introduced with minimal structural disruption and pain for the people involved.
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In English only
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Reforms and development in the Cameroon Grassfields have raised the costs of building materials, which means that the poor may never be able to afford to build their own homes and so must rent. Locally available materials have been disregarded and their use is not allowed in urban areas. It is true that Western-style medical care costs patients less than they would pay to rely on traditional doctors. By the same token, while Western imported arms have replaced traditional weapons, modern agricultural tools are badly needed in order to reduce the level of poverty in the Cameroon Grassfields.
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Full-text sample article FREE from Taylor & Francis. International funding of civil society organisations within the framework of support for democratisation processes has increased significantly in recent years. Yet this raises a set of questions quite apart from the effectiveness of the activities of the recipient organisations. Who are these groups? Whom do they represent? What effect does international funding have on their organisational workings and their rootedness in their local societies and political systems? This article presents the results of a survey that examined the sources of financing, level of organisation, domestic constituencies, and relationships to political parties of 16 civil society groups in Latin America that received support from the National Endowment for Democracy in 1999. It finds that while the groups demonstrate a remarkable diversity in their sources of funding, all of them receive the lion's share of financing from international donors. The author argues, however, that given the scant possibilities for domestically generated funding, this dependence is to be expected. The article concludes with a series of questions about the meaning of international support for local groups in developing democracies and the potential effects it may have on de-linking such groups from their broader political and party system.
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World trade is increasingly conditioned by the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). In the case of the garment industry this means the phasing out of the Multifibre Arrangement, which has dominated trade in textiles and garments since 1974. This phase-out is seen as benefiting developing countries and criticism focuses on the manner in which the USA and Europe are holding up the process. However it is important to look at who exactly will gain or lose. Not all poor countries will benefit. Furthermore, the main profits from garment production go to the Northern companies who control the industry. These companies will benefit from more open markets and associated competition between global suppliers. Meanwhile for workers North and South this increased competition brings insecurity and the threat of deteriorating conditions of work.
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The article investigates the impact of anthropology consultancy activities in the UK university sector and the role of the UK Department for International Development (DFID) as a major provider of consultancy work. DFID and other donors see anthropology consultancy as useful primarily in the delivery of technical assistance to Third World projects with a community or social development dimension. The article points to tensions both between UK-based consultancy and `grassroots' development in the Third World, and between applied anthropology and the relative autonomy of anthropology as an academic discipline. The author suggests that a necessary precondition for understanding the contribution of anthropology to policy is the need to overcome the unwillingness by practitioners to question politically the power relationships within which the social sciences, anthropology, and commissioned activities themselves are located. The primary purpose of the paper is to open up a debate on the relationship between power, knowledge, empowerment, and consultancy work.
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In May 2000 a group from Ashoka, a US-based charitable foundation that gives grants to 'social entrepreneurs', or innovators for the common good, visited a number of projects for sustainable development on the coast of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. The author accompanied the group and here relates his observations and raises challenging questions about unforeseen contradictions and pitfalls in these visionary ventures.
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The author asks what'win-win'public policies can substantially reduce the percentage of people who live in absolute poverty and enable the poor to become richer even if the rich also become richer.
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Gender-specific strategies have become very popular in efforts to achieve the sustainable alleviation of rural poverty in Africa. However, there is growing concern that this strategy is based upon weak conceptual grounds. Based on insights gleaned from years of involvement with women-only development projects in Nigeria, the authors highlight some key conceptual challenges to this strategy and argue that unless these are overcome, these pitfalls will eventually consign Nigeria's gender-specific poverty alleviation strategy to the graveyard of disused development paradigms.
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Inadequate household income due to degraded resources and limited opportunities has led to migration, malnutrition, and poor quality of life among tribals in India. These problems have been effectively tackled by enabling people to re-build their resource base, and by strengthening local action through Gram Vikas Mandals (village development forums) and developing human resources at village level. The orchard programme described in this paper currently reaches more than 11,000 families and 4000 ha of marginal lands are converted into orchards. It has helped people to plan further development actions, improve their knowledge and risk-taking ability, and build social cohesiveness. Thus, it has ensured that tribals' wellbeing is linked with that of the ecosystem. This time-bound, result-oriented programme is now recognised as a model for development of tribals and rural poor and is run by BAIF Development Research Foundation and sponsored by the Government of Germany through KfW and NABARD, India.
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The paper argues the case for innovative trail-setting projects and reviews the experience of the North Bengal Terai Development Project (India). It summariss several of its lessons: creating the conditions for 'in-project' cost effectiveness, managing goodwill, promoting innovation through the full cycle of scaling up and consolidation, linking ongoing government programmes and private initiatives with ground-level policy development, and relying on local talent. The case is made for an opportunistic approach in institutional development and policy innovation, focusing on what can be made to work rather than what is preconceived to be the correct way of doing things.
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In English only
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This secondary source study was conducted on behalf of UNICEF in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, to establish what information was available about acid violence with a view to informing potential interventions to prevent attacks. The study showed that young women are the main survivors who, having repelled advances by men, have acid thrown at them as revenge. Although it occurs throughout Bangladesh there are limited data from reliable sources about the real number of attacks, the rehabilitation of survivors, and the outcomes for perpetrators. The report suggests that further research is required to fill these gaps and that consideration be given to capacity building data management at the point of service delivery.
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This article focuses on performance measurement in the democracy and governance (DG) programme of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in its Zimbabwe mission. The article tells the story of one qualitative indicator used for measuring progress, namely the 'Advocacy Index.' It traces the history of this indicator, from rationale and concept through the early stages of implementation. The article discusses the problems of quantitative measurement and observes that there have been a number of suggested 'qualitative' responses. It goes on to describe the introduction of the Advocacy Index by USAID mission and the responses of its Zimbabwean partners, and draws out some tentative lessons and questions raised by the experience.
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Expatriate volunteers in Phnom Penh, Cambodia work in a country where many of their fellow expatriates are paid considerably more than they are. Such volunteers often find that the financial disparities affect the perceptions that people have of them. This paper explores the self-perceptions of volunteers working with Voluntary Service Overseas in Phnom Penh, and sets these perceptions within current theories of motivation and commitment. Two issues are then raised: whether these volunteers are willing and able to deliver quality assistance; and how perceptions of their status can affect their ability to deliver such assistance.
