Suchergebnisse

The Nepal Poverty Alleviation Fund is a World Bank supported community-driven development program. Its objective is to improve rural welfare, particularly for groups that have traditionally been excluded for reasons of gender, ethnicity, caste, and location. Since its launch in 2004, the Fund has covered the 40 poorest districts of the country, supported some 15,000 community organizations, and benefited more than 2.5 million people. This paper attempts to estimate the impact of this large-scale program using a randomized phase-in approach, in which certain localities are randomly selected for earlier intervention than others. Using two rounds of survey data and a difference-in-difference combined with instrumental variable estimation method, it finds statistically significant causal impact of the program on key welfare outcomes. The treatment-on-the-treated estimate on real per capita consumption is 19 percent growth. Other impacts include a 19 percentage points decline on incidence of food insecurity (defined as food sufficiency for six months or less) and a 15 percentage points increase in the school enrollment rate among 6-15 year-olds. Impacts (positive or negative) are yet to be detected on indicators associated with child malnutrition, social capital, and empowerment. The policy implications of these results should be of interest to the government and to development partners in determining what may be effective instruments to deliver services to marginalized communities in what remains a fragile and difficult political environment.

The United Nations and other international aid organisations have invested many millions of dollars exploring how best to build the economic and social fabric of the developing world sustainably. The tools and approaches used have real application elsewhere as they deal with community engagement, governance and institutional reform, the attraction and retention of professionals as well as quality assurance and market competitiveness. While the target market is different from Australia's regions, the tools used are well defined and tested and have generic application. This paper overviews the issues surrounding 10 case studies undertaken by the UN in the Central Asian and Southern Asian Regions and considers the lessons learned and their application to sustainable regional development and environmental management in Australia.The paper draws on the work of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) technical cooperation project which focused on the widely spread problems of poverty and environmental threats to communities in two of the Asian regions covering five countries each in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) and Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam). The project focuses on institutional capacity building and networking to build sustainable regional communities and economies. Specifically, the project is designed to improve institutional capacity and the articulation of policies and practices for local governance for regional economic development, through community based initiatives. With some innovation and lateral thinking can these well researched tools and processes have applicability to the Australian regional community development context.

This article demonstrates a practical theological approach to the challenge of poverty in post- 1994 South Africa by using Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM) as a case study. It argues that while the Reconstruction Development Plan, the Growth Employment and Reconstruction strategy, Accelerated Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa, New Growth Path and the National Development Plan have achieved some level of economic growth, the majority of people in South Africa still live in poverty. To establish this argument, the article starts first by describing the challenge of poverty in post-1994 South Africa. The different economic approaches to the challenge of poverty in post-1994 South Africa are also explained in detail. Lastly, the article elaborates on the ways in which the AFM through its local assemblies can alleviate poverty. The article concludes that the AFM is a collaborator to the post-1994 South African government. ; http://www.hts.org.za ; am2018 ; New Testament Studies

The World Bank has been accused of 'power blindness' for three reasons: its neglect of political power; its disregard for the power dynamic in inter-personal relationships; and its undemocratic corporate culture. However, power blindness, as commonly defined, does not offer a satisfactory picture of the Bank's actual conception of power used in the poverty agenda. Using a feminist framework of power, I demonstrate an evolving and transforming concept of power in the Bank's poverty alleviation policies over the past two decades. Four concepts of power are outlined: power-to; power-with; power-over; and power-from-within. The Bank's stress on economic power and the calculated adoption of two 'positive' powers -'power-to' and 'power-with' -are seen as being the key features in combating poverty. Power, in the Bank's perspective, is instrumental in nature and is a means to achieve economic efficiency. This overly limited vision of power is not without its problems. The new idea of empowerment, propounded as a solution to poverty in the World Development Report 2000/2001, actually follows the Bank's conventional principle of power, and fails to offer any new developmental thinking. This paper examines critiques of the Bank's analysis of power regarding the dark sides of 'power-to' and 'power-with', and the possibilities of including 'power-over' and 'power-from-within' in the debate. In the last section, it questions the feminist idea of power, given the diverse nature of women, the desirability of the inclusion of men and the significance of socially embedded power.

Objectives This study compares two explanations for the effects of an employment-based anti-poverty intervention, the New Hope project, on parenting and child behavior. (1) Did the New Hope intervention directly affect child behavior and, if it did, is this the result of New Hope effects on earlier parenting practices? (2) Did the New Hope intervention directly affect parenting practices and, if it did, is this the result of New Hope effects on earlier child behavior? Methods Assessments were collected two and five years after parents were randomly assigned to participate in New Hope or in a control group. The two models were tested using Baron and Kenny's (1986) recommendations for regression to test mediation. Results The results support the second research question, but only for boys; neither model was supported for girls. New Hope led to increased positive behavior and reduced behavior problems for boys after two years; children's behavior accounted for experimental effects on parents' reports of their parenting behaviors after five years. Conclusions Employment-based interventions designed for low-income parents can affect children directly; expanding such programs may help improve children's life chances. Adapted from the source document.

The objective of this research is to analyse the impact of direct health payments on poverty. A database of 8043 households from the second Congolese household survey for poverty assessment was used. The Wagstaff and Doorslaer method was used to measure the impact of direct health payments. To identify the determinants of direct health payments, the two-part model (CDM) is used with a binary specification. The results show that out-of-pocket health payments increase household poverty and richer households spend more than poorer households. Out-of-pocket health payments vary according to the characteristics of each household. In terms of economic policy, it is suggested that the share of out-of-pocket payments in total health expenditure be reduced, for example by introducing universal health insurance. Résumé La présente recherche a pour objectif d'analyser l'impact des paiements directs de santé sur la pauvreté. Une base de données de 8043 ménages issue de la deuxième enquête congolaise auprès des ménages pour l'évaluation de la pauvreté a été utilisée. La méthode de Wagstaff et Doorslaer a permis de mesurer l'impact des paiements directs de santé. Pour identifier les déterminants de paiements directs de santé, le modèle à deux parties (MDP) est utilisé avec une spécification binaire. Les résultats montrent que les paiements directs de santé accentuent la pauvreté des ménages. Les ménages riches dépensent plus que les ménages pauvres. Les paiements directs de santé varient selon les caractéristiques de chaque ménage. En termes de politique économique, il est suggéré la réduction de la part des paiements directs dans les dépenses totales de santé en instaurant par exemple l'assurance maladie universelle. Mots clés: Santé, paiements directs, pauvreté

In the megacity of Karachi, which has a population of more than 24 million, more than 9.2 million people (approximately 40 per cent) live in squatter settlements. Communities here are characterised by low socioeconomic settings, crowded living conditions, inadequate water and sanitation facilities, and poor health-related behaviours. Such conditions create an environment favourable to the spread of communicable diseases like tuberculosis (TB), hepatitis and dengue.

Since 1985, the Department of Community Health Sciences at the Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan has run the Urban Health Program (UHP), a community-campus partnership operating in these disadvantaged squatter settlements. Recent explosive increases in the spread of dengue, hepatitis and TB, however, necessitated special attention and activities on a scale and pace that was greater than could be accommodated as part of UHP's core work. Thus, having an already well-established collaborative model with social accountability measures in place, a dedicated mass awareness program was initiated over the course of one year, from mid 2015: the AGAHI project.

This article describes AGAHI's innovative, low-cost, collaborative activities conducted in partnership with two squatter communities, Sultanabad and Rehri Goth, to build health awareness, improved care-seeking and compliance to treatment. Activities ranged from school sessions, role plays and awareness walks to laneway meetings, training of health care workers, door-to-door campaigns and collaboration with local religious leaders, public sector groups and NGOs.

Building on the collaborative work of the UHP, in just 12 months AGAHI was able to conduct 80 health awareness sessions with 4000 participants. Moreover, high-risk and vulnerable populations were identified and referred for further treatment. A comparative cross-sectional survey afterwards revealed a significant increase in knowledge among Sultanabad residents as compared to the neighbouring settlement of Hijrat Colony. As a result, this article suggests that the need for and efficacy of targeted health awareness campaigns against the major infectious diseases of poverty cannot be overemphasised. By adopting community-based participatory models, couched in a framework of social accountability, activities that are low cost, innovative and scientifically robust hold real potential for improving health awareness in vulnerable megacities like Karachi.

AbstractTo finance its ambitious development programme, Burkina Faso aims to pass tax reforms by introducing a minimum value added tax (VAT) of 5% on agricultural goods and increasing VAT on water and electricity to 18%. In a country where nearly 10% of the population is food insecure, this reform could worsen the situation. We built a dynamic and recursive computable general equilibrium model with microsimulation to evaluate the effects of these tax reforms on poverty and food security. Results show that both proposed VAT changes lead to increased poverty and food insecurity, especially with the minimum VAT on agricultural products.

AbstractPeople living in poverty are particularly vulnerable to shocks, including those caused by natural disasters such as floods and droughts. This paper analyses household survey data and hydrological riverine flood and drought data for 52 countries to find out whether poor people are disproportionally exposed to floods and droughts, and how this exposure may change in a future climate. We find that poor people are often disproportionally exposed to droughts and floods, particularly in urban areas. This pattern does not change significantly under future climate scenarios, although the absolute number of people potentially exposed to floods or droughts can increase or decrease significantly, depending on the scenario and region. In particular, many countries in Africa show a disproportionally high exposure of poor people to floods and droughts. For these hotspots, implementing risk-sensitive land-use and development policies that protect poor people should be a priority.

The concepts of poverty and development have many meanings in contemporary globalized societies. Development by definition implies desired changes in terms of livelihood, improved quality of life and better access to assets and services, etc. However in reality development programmes sometimes have negative consequences, perhaps unintended, multiplying the acute scarcity of resources and opportunities, or reproducing poverty. Also, the consequences of developmental programmes often appear to be out of focus, and seen at the ground level, there seems to be a gap between what is intended and what is actualized. In this framework, this paper presents a case study of the social, cultural and economic correlates of the development processes in Adadakulapalle, a settlement of Sugali peoples, once a semi-nomadic tribe, in Anantapur District of Andhra Pradesh, South India. The paper shows how factionalism and faction politics affect the implementation of development interventions. It also looks at the poverty in the settlement and focuses on the types of change that people have experienced with the implementation of different schemes by both government and other agencies. The type of change is discussed in the present study through the macro and micro analysis of development programmes.