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Northern Uganda has been at the centre of a two-decade long insurgency that has left the rural communities in a precarious pandemonium-like situation characterised by widespread poverty, high illiteracy levels and bad living conditions. But this insurgence just came at a time when the region was supposed to be eliminating these obstacles to achieving a dignified, civilised way of life. However, in the last 8 yrs, Apac district, where this project is located, has been relatively safe that is why WOUGNET have been able to establish the rural access project there, according to the WOUGNET Director Dr. Dorothy Okello

'This paper argues that mobility and migration have always been an intrinsic part of human development. Migration can be considered as a fundamental capabilities-enhancing freedom itself. However, any meaningful understanding of migration needs to simultaneously analyse agency and structure. Rather than applying dichotomous classifications such as between forced and voluntary migration, it is more appropriate to conceive of a continuum running from low to high constraints under which migration occurs, in which all migrants deal with structural constraints, although to highly varying degrees. Besides being an integral part of human development, mobility also tends to affect the same structural processes of which it is part. Simplistic positive-versus-negative debates on migration and development can be overcome by integrating agency-structure dialectics in the analysis of migration impacts. This paper argues that (i) the degree to which migrants are able to affect structural change is real but limited; (ii) the nature of change in sending and receiving is not pre-determined; and (iii) that in order to enable a more focused and rigorous debate, there is a need to better distinguish and specify different levels and dimensions at which the reciprocal relationship between human mobility and development can be analysed. A critical reading of the empirical literature leads to the conclusion that it would be naïve to think that despite their often considerable benefits for individuals and communities, migration and remittances alone can remove more structural development constraints. Despite their development potential, migrants and remittances can neither be blamed for a lack of development nor be expected to trigger take-off development in generally unattractive investment environments. By increasing selectivity and suffering among migrants, current immigration restrictions have a negative impact on migrants' wellbeing as well as the poverty and inequality reducing pot

Implementing Physical and Virtual Food Reserves to Protect the Poor and Prevent Market Failure

Romanticizing the Poor

The InnoWat team has created the kit InnoWat: Water, innovations, learning and rural livelihoods with the expectation that it will be useful to IFAD's country programme managers (CPMs) and will enhance IFAD's comparative advantage in rural poverty alleviation and water issues. The present text synthesizes two approach papers that together provide the rationale for a new, pro-poor approach to water issues. A series of topic, fact and tool sheets and case studies supports the papers.

The paper argues that successful service delivery to poor people requires that clients have voice and influence in the process of service design and delivery. It presents methods - such as participatory planning and gender budgeting - to strengthen the voice of poor women, and help ensure that both women's and men's concerns and priorities are taken into account. But it also recognises that tools and training are not enough; if women's perspectives on poverty reduction priorities disappear once the consultative stage is over, or if the results of a gender budgeting process are ignored, then nothing will change. Women's organisations, other civil society organisations and donors therefore have an important role to play in holding governments and providers accountable with respect to women's empowerment and gender equality. Guidelines are presented to support donors in strengthening accountability with respect to public services. These include: provide and demand sex-disaggregated data in all documents to make gender biases visible, promote gender auditing systems and gender budgeting initiatives, and carry out assessments and evaluations to measure outcomes and impact of service delivery with regard to gender equality.'

The State of the World's Children 2009 examines critical issues in maternal and neonatal health. It explains why support for the rights of women and children is a prerequisite for improving maternal and newborn health, emphasizes the need to establish effective continua of care and outlines ways to strengthen health systems.

There are growing signs that the global economic crisis has reached both poor countries and poor people in those countries. In February, for example, the World Bank's forecast for Africa's growth in 2009 was revised downward from 6.8 percent to 3.5 percent. Another World Bank document suggests that the crisis has pushed more than 50 million people below the $1.25 per day poverty line. This type of evidence has convinced many world leaders that a problem exists: U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has called 2009 "a development emergency" and this past weekend the boards of the World Bank and the IMF both recognized that the global economic crisis had metastasized into a "human and development calamity." Full paper in PDF format; Number of pages: 10p

Fragile states matter, as an ODI public event in London last week confirmed. Internal conflict and instability contaminates and infects neighbouring countries and entire regions, contributing to global security problems. In development terms, a failure to address and meet the challenges presented by fragile states means that, at the current rate of progress, the global Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will not be met, regardless of how much progress is made in other developing countries. According to the UK Department for International Development (DFID) people living in countries affected by violent conflict, or where governments are chronically weak, are three or four times more likely to suffer from extreme poverty, or die before the age of five, than those living in other developing countries.

The unprecedented turmoil in the world's financial markets has resulted in a significant loss of trust in the global financial system. Financial institutions and the market as a whole have been criticised for short-termism, for lacking transparency, and for not being properly accountable to regulators or to wider society. The credit crisis has also raised wider questions about the proper role of investors in society, both in terms of the specific investments that they make and the manner in which they use their influence to ensure that the positive social and environmental impacts of their investment activities are maximised, and the negative impacts minimised.

The growing of the Microfinance Institution (MFI) movement has created great expectations because the MFIs have been seen as an instrument to tackle poverty and promote micro entrepreneurship. However the exponential expansion of the industry and the newly business consciousness need to be properly tackled to avoid the microfinance movement going adrift, namely where the industry could become a tool of wealth redistribution without accumulation in presence of spot areas where it could evolve by neglecting its genuine mission.'

Drivers of change and development in Malawi

A key point in the paper is that many poor people are forced to move on a regular and chronic basis and that this movement has both negative and positive consequences for their health and nutritional status. The paper is concerned with the high levels of infant and child illness and death amongst poor urban slum communities in Rajasthan, a state with one of the highest infant mortality rates in India. The paper examines the consequences of internal migration for women's reproductive experiences and for their children's health and is based on work between 2002-2004 carried out by Unnithan-Kumar in two urban slums (basti) in Jaipur city, the capital of Rajasthan in NW India.

Millions of women have no access to reproductive health services; many more have little or no control in choosing whether to become pregnant. As a result, every year, some 19 million women have no other choice than to have an unsafe abortion. Many of these women will die as a result; many more are permanently injured. Nearly all the women who die or are injured are poor and live in poor countries. Preventing these deaths and injuries will not be achieved without stopping unsafe abortions which cause around 13 per cent of all maternal deaths. Virtually all the deaths of women from unsafe abortion are in fact preventable. . Full document in PDF format (695kb); Number of pages: 20p; Source(s):

'Despite demonstrable benefits, the rapid ascendancy of Sustainable Livelihoods Approaches (SLA) in the mid to late 1990s was followed by their quick demise among some donors, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and development agencies, as a result of internal politics and other factors.'

The integration of human rights into the practice of development cooperation has been increasingly debated during the last decade, particularly thanks to Amartya Sen and UNDP work. However, while a consensus seems to exist around the core principles of an "appropriate" development process, there are still a number of different interpretations of how human rights and development relate, and what is meant by rights-based approaches. This paper addresses the idea that the concept of right to development, correctly understood as "the right to a process of development in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized", following the definition of Arjun Sengupta, can be a very useful tool to provide a common normative framework to this discussion. Little attention has been given to identifying the extent to which the concept of the right to development and a human rights-based approach to development differ. Whether the two paradigms have many common points, as the emphasis given to concepts like equality, freedom, participation and non discrimination, there are also some important differences. Expressed simply, the right to development is broader that the human rights-based approach, because it involves a critical examination of the overall development process, including financial allocation, and priorities in international development cooperation. Thus, the right to development cannot be equated with a rights-based approach to development, because it not only prescribes certain rules according to which development should be realized, but also defines development itself as a human right. This definition has important consequences not only in terms of theoretical debate, but also in its practical implications related to policy-making and international cooperation. The most important of these consequences is a shift, in the discourse of international development cooperation, from a context of need/charity/aid to a context of right/respons

'As part of its strategy to increase rural incomes, USAID/Kenya has supported two projects to develop tree fruit value chains-the Kenya Business Development Services (KBDS) project implemented by the Emerging Markets Group and the Kenya Horticulture Development Project (KHDP) implemented by Fintrac. This report presents the findings from a study of the impacts of these projects on smallholder farmers who grow avocados and passion fruit in Central and Rift Valley provinces in Kenya. The study included a panel survey of 1,640 farmers including those who have participated in these projects and a comparison group of non-participating farmers. The survey was complemented by qualitative research comprising in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with over 100 individuals involved in the tree fruit value chains: farmers, producer group leaders, input suppliers, extension service providers, brokers, exporters and the KBDS project and KHDP directors and staff.'