Suchergebnisse

This article analyses land rights from a gendered perspective in the context of Rwanda, characterized by extreme resource scarcity and societal disruption. It heads off by picturing how land rights for women have evolved within the customary system. It further looks at the impact of the formal legislation with regards to women's heritage and land rights prevalent up to early 2005, especially focusing on the inheritance law adopted in 1999. To complement findings from secondary literature, the analysis includes primary data from a field research (2004) on situations regarding gender and land rights, illustrating how both formal and informal institutional arrangements prevail within local realities. The article finally looks at the new Rwandan land law, adopted by the Rwandan government in September 2005 and suggests ways of identifying the likely gendered effects. Both the implementing government as well as actors outside government have a role to play here.

This article analyses land rights from a gendered perspective in the context of Rwanda, characterized by extreme resource scarcity and societal disruption. It heads off by picturing how land rights for women have evolved within the customary system. It further looks at the impact of the formal legislation with regards to women's heritage and land rights prevalent up to early 2005, especially focusing on the inheritance law adopted in 1999. To complement findings from secondary literature, the analysis includes primary data from a field research (2004) on situations regarding gender and land rights, illustrating how both formal and informal institutional arrangements prevail within local realities. The article finally looks at the new Rwandan land law, adopted by the Rwandan government in September 2005 and suggests ways of identifying the likely gendered effects. Both the implementing government as well as actors outside government have a role to play here.

While community-based monitoring is becoming increasingly commonplace, evidence as to its functioning remains inconsistent. Based on Ugandan village network and survey data, this article studies community-based monitoring from a social-capital and perceived-efficacy perspective. From a social-capital perspective, the prospects for community-based monitoring look promising as there is a high social-capital stock and an efficient information-sharing network galvanizing information for a few key individuals. The dominant efficacy profiles are also encouraging as there is an abundance of 'followers' (with high belief in collective capabilities) and some 'leaders' for collective action (with high belief in individual and collective capabilities). And yet, few community-based monitoring activities are undertaken. Our article shows that only the intersection of both theoretical lenses explains the underperformance in community-based monitoring, as those actors who are central in the information-sharing network do not have a 'leadership' efficacy profile while those who are 'leaders' are not central in the village information network.

Over the last two decades, gender-responsive budgeting has gained prominence as an effective tool for governments to fulfil gender commitments and the realisation of women's rights. To date, however, limited empirical evidence exists of the impact and effectiveness of gender budget initiatives. This article proposes and demonstrates the integration of theory-based evaluation and process tracing to examine the effects of local-level civil society-led gender-responsive budgeting on maternal health service delivery in Kabale District, rural Uganda. It involves four steps: explicating the programme theory linking the gender budget initiative to the intended outcome; theorising the underlying causal mechanism; making case-specific predictions of observable manifestations of the mechanism; and testing the empirical evidence using Bayesian logic to make causal inferences about the effects of the civil society gender budget initiative on maternal health service delivery. This approach strengthens our confidence in the inferences made about causality and the effects of gender budget initiatives.

Donors face difficulties when handling gender concerns in the context of ongoing changes in aid modalities. Against this background, the European Union (EU) Member States and the European Commission (EC) adopted the EU Plan of Action on Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment in Development (2010-2015) and launched, in collaboration with the UN Women and the International Training Center of the International Labour Organisation, the 'Increasing Accountability in Financing for Gender Equality' programme. Within the framework of this programme, the EU delegation in Rwanda has elaborated a Gender Mainstreaming Strategy for the EC sector budget support to the Agriculture Sector in Rwanda. Given that, so far, experiences with gender mainstreaming in sector budget programmes in the agriculture sector are hardly documented, the review of the current degree of gender-sensitivity and the remedying gender mainstreaming strategy are also the focus of our contribution. Both the EC and Rwanda are interesting cases as the former is an influential actor in development cooperation, while Rwanda's own commitment to gender equality gives the EC (and other donors) an interesting entry point to further trigger gender mainstreaming through (sector) budget support.