Guidelines on participation in rural development

Van Heck, B., 2003, Participatory development: guidelines on beneficiary participation in agricultural and rural development, FAO.
This manual provides suggestions on how to incorporate beneficiary participation in agricultural and rural development projects, while stimulating reflection on what participation is in development practice, on how it can mean different things, on its benefits and its constraints.
After a [...]

Indian Travellers Tale 2: From ‘rags’ to respect

In the streets of any large city in India you will see small groups of women (and sometimes children) around garbage skips, going through them and collecting scraps of paper, tin, plastic, and cloth. These are the ‘rag pickers’, and in India’s pervasive caste system they sit fairly close to the bottom rung. They are a sub-group of Dalits (once known as sudra or untouchables) and are generally marginalised in society, kept to the most menial and unpleasant tasks.

But a remarkable thing has happened with the ragpickers of the city of Pune in Western India: the ragpickers are now a central part of the city’s new waste management system, and had a critical hand in its design. But let us go back to the beginning. Twenty years ago, a couple of people from the SNDT Women’s University in Pune started an ILO-supported project to provide adult literacy to the city’s ragpickers. Very early on, the ragpickers made it clear to them that it was not literacy they wanted but respect and the opportunity to have a safe work environment free from harassment from the police and city government officials. Thus Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (KKPKP) was formed: the Pune Ragpickers’ Union.

Madagascar – Island up for grabs?

Madagascar has been in political turmoil these last few months, and there are no signs of improvement any time soon. Key to the recent downfall of former President Marc Ravolomanana was the announcement by South Korean firm Daewoo Logistics that they had leased 1.3 million hectares of land in the north of the island to grow corn and oil palms. According to officials of the former government, the agreement involved less than 4% of Madagascar’s largely unexploited arable land. Both parties cited considerable advantages for the country as a whole, including 6 billion USD in infrastructure development and 70,000 jobs. But what do deals like this really mean for the country’s rural poor, which make up almost 70% of the population?

Traveller’s Tale: Indian NGO development revisited

I remember many years back in the early 1980s, I came across an older journal article by a pair of brothers with the arresting name of Paddock. They wrote in the mid-1960s, saying that India was beyond redemption, and that the world should undertake triage and only provide emergency assistance. Similar things are often said about Africa in today’s discourse, including Dambisa Moyo’s argument (discussed on this blog) to cut aid all together. It is nearly ten years since I was last in Bangalore (in Karnataka state) in India. Now the question is: what is the relevance of aid agencies and NGOs in the context of a booming economy, at least in southern India, and Karnataka in particular? Ten years ago, the concrete and glass IT offices were on the edge of Bangalore, standing rather incongruously in farmland and paddy fields, and people commuted out from the city to them. Now these IT offices are all surrounded by luxury apartments and gated highrise suburbs for the IT elite.

Now where does this leave the ‘real’ India – the rural communities which still make up most of the population and most of the poverty? They have not been left out all together: the construction work on roads and the like is evident everywhere. The question is does this reach the most marginalised?

‘Zero Tolerance’ with exceptions?: The UN and NGO response to peacekeeping

The ANU Gender, Sexuality and Culture Seminar Series. Gabrielle Simm (PhD Candidate) on “‘Zero Tolerance’ with exceptions?: The UN and NGO response to peacekeeping“. 1.00 – 2.30pm, Monday 6 April 2009, Seminar Room C, Top Floor, RSPAS Coombs Building.

New World Bank book “re-hash of standard World Bank dogma”

I first heard of the “new and epic” World Bank book entitled ‘Moving Out of Poverty: Success from the Bottom-Up’ on Duncan Green’s (of Oxfam GB) blog, From Poverty to Power, where his enthusiasm (“I’ve got the book on order, but this is so good, I wanted to tell people about it right away”) sent us scurrying to the World Bank’s PovertyNet publications for a read of the 50-page overview, only to be bitterly disaapointed. Green suggests that “there are rich pickings in here for anyone interested in the reality of poverty and development, big challenges to our assumptions, and blessed relief from all the frustrating generalities about ‘the poor’, ‘developing countries’ and so on”. For me the ‘pickings’ were very lean indeed in this re-hash of standard World Bank dogma, at the expense of social justice and the human rights of the marginalised.

The book reports on a multinational study of the factors that enable people to move out of poverty, and follows the Voices of the Poor study the Bank undertook in 2002. This current study was undertaken across 15 countries and involved 9,000 household interviews, 1,500 focus groups, as well as other survey instruments. But rather than using existing poverty statistics, the Study took a community or village approach, and asked communities to identify who was poor, their characteristics, and how they moved into or out of poverty.

But a major issue with the conclusions contained in the overview is that there is no mention of gender, ethnicity, or other characteristics of minorities which lead to exclusion and marginalisation. By ignoring the evidence that inequality is widening as economies grow, and furthermore that the depth of poverty is worsening (an indicator of increased marginalisation), the Bank with its new report is glossing over the fundamental factors of poverty. [...]

Shifts in New Zealand aid policy: a sign of things to come?

The New Zealand aid program has hit the headlines in the last week with an announcement by Foreign Minister Murray McCully of two reviews into the foreign aid program, and at the same time flagging a shift away from poverty reduction to economic development.

Green Jobs for the Poor

Lieuw-Kie-Song, 2009, Green Jobs for the Poor: a public employment approach, UNDP
Green jobs are jobs beneficial to the environment, such as those aimed at reducing carbon emissions or at realising alternative sources of energy use. In this paper the author discusses the utility of such green jobs to address environmental concerns and create jobs for [...]