Practical Notes

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.

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.

Economies based on solidarity and mutual support, and which are geared to human development and social justice, represent the basis of an alternative to the neo-liberal model that is driving the current globalisation process, and which tends to destroy local initiative and expression. The author draws on long experience in southern Mexico to describe this alternative economic vision.

This paper describes seven small ways for microfinance to acquire the virtues of informal finance, which are commonly perceived as slashed transaction costs, supply of not just loans but also savings and implicit insurance, sensitivity to the constraints faced by women, substitution of confidence in character for physical collateral, socially enforced and/or self-enforced contracts, and sequences of repeated transactions.

Both national and international policy-making institutions have acknowledged the contribution of NGOs in alleviating poverty, through empowering the poor and continuing to support their endeavours. In Bangladesh NGOs are working at national and local levels, but very few are working with the poorest and most vulnerable groups who live in the riverine and coastal areas, known as the char lands.

News about Norway’s plans to establish a ‘doomsday vault’ for seeds in the permafrost of the Artic archipelago of Svalbard as a back-up for conventional gene banks reached the world press in 2006. The idea of a Global Seed Vault, which today is considered a ‘Noah’s Ark’ for seeds, was previously regarded with suspicion and considered to be unrealistic.

Many farmers in less developed countries (LDCs) lack comprehensive information detailing the acute and chronic health impacts of pesticide use. Even at low levels, the use of pesticides can have significant chronic health implications. The results of research conducted among sugarcane farmers in Fifi demonstrate significantly higher occurrences of illness and disease among farmers using pesticides compared with a control group. Government agencies, NGOs, and donor groups must provide farmers with information describing the short- and long-term health risks in using pesticides.

Nearly half of the world's population lives in areas which are malarious or in which there is a distinct risk of malaria transmission. Advances against malaria continue to made despite limited resources. Whatever biomedical advances are made against malaria they will become meaningful only when they can be applied in the field on a large scale. The complex of human factors, partially exemplified in this paper, will be crucial in such application being successful.

Although the emphasis in current thinking about work with street children has changed from aid-dependency towards youth protagonism, many organisations ignore the role of the children’s families in their interventions. In so doing, they reproduce obsolete welfare traditions and also violate rights guaranteed by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and national legislation.

National frontiers with ecosystems experiencing rapid changes pose difficult challenges for scientific contributions to democratic processes for environmental governance. We describe an innovative outreach model, the ‘knowledge exchange train’, which combines educational outreach with capacity-building mechanisms to broaden public participation in planning for sustainable development.