Practical Notes

AIDS-related morbidity and mortality affects not only individuals and their families, but is rapidly undermining the struggling capacity to develop of African states. Stemming the impacts of the pandemic has therefore become a major concern. This calls for addressing the issues of care and support for those affected, and increasing the access of persons living with HIV/AIDS to effective treatment. Provision of such complex medication in resource-limited settings is a fairly recent phenomenon.

This article discusses the role of animals in small-scale crop/animal systems in Asia. It examines how the animals are generally multipurpose, rather than single or dual purpose, with security also being an important element. Farmers can be stimulated to produce more meat and milk when other forms of security such as banks are considered equally reliable. Multiculture is the predominant system of plant production in the region with leguminous crops complementing non-leguminous crops. This also has benefits for soils.

International networks for social change are growing in number and influence. While they need to be able to assess the extent to which they achieve their purpose and determine ways in which to be more effective, conventional evaluation methods are not designed for such complex organisational forms, or for the diverse kinds of activity to which they are characteristically dedicated. Building on an earlier version of the paper, the authors present a set of principles and participatory approaches that are more appropriate to the task of evaluating such networks.

Since July 1999, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), at the request of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and the Kosovo Force (KFOR), has undertaken the implementation of the Information Counselling and Referral Service (ICRS, which aimed to provide support mechanisms for demobilised Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) combatants in their return to post-conflict society. This Practical Note is based on the findings of a research project funded by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) to assess the initial impact of this reintegration process.

The pro-poor agenda sees the dissemination of research findings as fundamental to ensuring that research helps contribute to poverty alleviation. In recent years this has led to a substantial growth in intermediary services, such as ‘infomediaries’ (1), networks and websites. Yet the pathway to, and actual uptake by, the ‘poor’ continues to elude practitioners, researchers and policy-makers alike.

Floating-bed cultivation has proved a successful means to produce agricultural crops in different wetland areas of the world. In freshwater lakes and wetlands, vegetables, flowers and seedlings are grown in Bangladesh using this floating cultivation technique, without any additional irrigation or chemical fertiliser. No detailed study of this indigenous cultivation technique has been published to date, although the laboratory method, hydroponics, is well documented in the professional literature.

Harriet Matsaert, Zahir Ahmed, and Shah Abdus Salam This paper describes the experiences of a small Bangladeshi NGO in using actor-oriented tools to focus on key people and partnerships in project planning, monitoring, and evaluation. The approach has helped to identify interventions that are context-specific, building on key local actors and indigenous networks, and sensitive to the constraints experienced by the poorest. As a result, the NGO has away from an externally driven agenda and to become a more thoughtful and responsive organisation.

This paper offers a case study of a secondment of staff from a Northern NGO (Trócaire) to a Southern partner, the Catholic Development Commission (CADECOM) of Malawi, as a possible model for capacity building. The approach described was tried in the context of an emergency programme but could also be used in a development context. The paper analyses the appropriateness of the model in terms of its administrative structure, focus, and impact, and attempts to draw lessons for practitioners for its successful application.

Conferences are typically organised around specialist presentations and panel discussions in ways that do not foster broad participation or effective knowledge-sharing. The paper describes a computer-based method to facilitate focused dialogue among participants.

This paper describes the Participatory Change Process (PCP), a model that promotes the formation and action of sustainable grassroots organisations in poor and marginalised communities, using participatory learning and action methods to provide people with the capacities, self-confidence, and organisational structures needed to plan and implement development projects and influence policy formation. This article is freely available as a chapter in Development Methods and Approaches: Critical Reflections