Bezalel

Institute of Microfinance in order to facilitate their future and current research initiatives and enable researchers outside the Institute to get a list of readily available literatures on topics related to microfinance, has taken initiatives to start an annotated bibliography series. InM hopes that the annotated bibliography would serve the purposes of dissemination of information to the professionals, researchers, international agencies and academics as well as helping in our capacity building. Articles includes on general aspects of microfinance and on issues like microfinance borrowers, poverty, savings mobilization, loan recovery and repayment, employment, women empowerment, microfinance innovations, sustainability, competition etc. It is a unique effort to reach general readers with the theories and practices involved in microfinance of Bangladesh in a simplistic and comprehensive manner. Full paper in PDF format (624kb); Number of pages: 108p; Source: InM.

The Extending Service Delivery (ESD) Project is pleased to announce the publication of a new tool to support the Healthy Timing and Spacing of Pregnancy (HTSP) for postpartum women.The manual is designed for health trainers, nurses, health supervisors, and community health workers who already have basic understanding and experience with RH/FP. It provides information and guidance on how to conduct a two-day training to provide postpartum family planning counseling and services and offers the necessary technical information to strengthen health care workers' knowledge and skills around postpartum family planning and HTSP, within the context of FP counseling and service provision.

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):

Building on a legacy spanning three decades, UNFPA Country Offices in the Asia-Pacific region and their faith-based partners came together for a two-day consultation to assess the nature and impact of these partnerships in the areas of maternal health, gender equality, migration and youth welfare. This report documents the experiences and lessons learned from the varied initiatives of faith-based organizations, as well as the best practices emanating from these strategic alliances around the region. The discussions, recommendations for action and the many voices of critical faith-based actors, are all documented in this report.

'Secondary urban centres lack the scale of larger urban utilities, a feature which attracts both public and sometimes private investment (national and international); yet they are often too large to benefit from the community-based and micro-finance mechanisms that are often applied with success in rural areas. Given their scope, there are potentially significant economic development and poverty reduction impacts to be gained through sustainable access to safe water, sanitation programs, and effective drainage in these areas. Thus, financing water supply and sanitation services in Secondary urban centres demands creative thinking. This paper reviews some of the creative ideas that have emerged to address the financial constraints to Secondary urban centres water and sanitation service delivery. The paper emphasizes domestic sources of finance for both hardware and software investments. These ideas involve a range of different stakeholders, including users, informal providers, utilities, governments, NGOs, domestic banks, and donors.'

'This paper presents an analysis of Official Development Assistance (ODA) flows to the water and sanitation sector, based on data gathered from the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and Creditor Reporting Systems (CRS) databases, as well as current knowledge in the sector. As part of this analysis, ODA flows to the health and education sectors, as well as to broader topics including governance and finance, are also considered. Where possible, policy implications and specific discussion about small towns is provided, however there is a general lack of information about financing flows to small towns, due to the nature of the accounting systems used by donors (and reported to the OECD).'

'This case study is the third and final in a series of three that examines how the entry of microcredit (MC) into village and household economies in Afghanistan affects informal credit relations and livelihood outcomes, either directly or indirectly, through effects on the overall village economy. It builds on past AREU research on informal credit systems, answering questions raised within that study about: the assumptions driving the introduction of microcredit in rural Afghanistan, particularly around lack of access to credit and the existence of a large, unmet demand; the successes claimed in terms of clients served and repayment rates; and how informal and formal credit systems interlink and feed off each other as well as the corresponding effects on livelihood security and debt burdens.'

'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

The world's poor are disproportionately affected by environmental degradation and lack of access to clean, affordable energy services. Climate change, loss of biodiversity and depletion of natural resources are both national and global issues requiring cooperation among all countries. UNDP works to strengthen national capacity to manage the environment in a sustainable manner while ensuring adequate protection for the poor, by identifying and sharing best practices, providing policy advice and forging partnerships.

'Women are increasingly significant as national and international migrants, and it is now evident that the complex relationship between migration and human development operates in gender differentiated ways. However, because migration policy has typically been gender-blind, an explicit gender perspective is necessary. This paper attempts this, beginning with an examination of recent trends in women's migration, internationally and within nations. It then considers the implications of the socio-economic context of the sending location for women migrants. The process of migration, and how that can be gender-differentiated, is discussed with particular reference to the various types of female migration that are common: marriage migration, family migration, forced migration, migration for work. These can be further disaggregated into legal and irregular migration, all of which affect and the issues and problems of women migrants in the process of migration and in the destination country. The manifold and complex gendered effects of migration are discussed with reference to varied experiences. Women migrants' relations with the sending households and the issues relevant for returning migrants are also considered. The final section provides some recommendations for public policy for migration through a gender lens.'

Improving lives through the alleviation of poverty is central to the UNDP approach to development. Some 1.2 billion people around the world live on less than a dollar a day, while almost 850 million go hungry every night. Poverty is not just about money: lack of access to essential resources goes beyond financial hardship to affect people's health, education, security and opportunities for political participation. Solutions, then, need to address many dimensions while remaining targeted and measurable, and sensitive to the wider impact of poverty on women. At the same time, solutions must derive from local conditions and enhance local capacity to respond and adapt to new challenges.

'Failure to achieve gender equality in education is often blamed on 'weak capacity'. This paper illustrates the ways in which individual, organisational, and institutional capacity all play important roles in producing positive results for girls. It is essential to recognise that these different forms of capacity are related, in order to prevent the disappearance of policies and strategies produced with the aim of achieving gender equality in education.'

'The concept of mutual accountability refers to the establishment of working relations based on respect, fulfilling commitments, being transparent about development objectives, and accounting for decisions, actions and results. This paper focusses on how mutual accountability in development aid is understood and how it works in practice in Afghanistan, while also examining the challenges involved in achieving mutual accountability in aid relationships. The paper concludes that mutual accountability can make development aid more effective by, for instance, increasing public support for development policies, increasing a government's legitimacy, increasing donor accountability, and contributing to anticorruption measures. Accountability mechanisms ensure greater transparency and help to control expectations. With these mechanisms there is more clarity on what will be delivered and on what systems are in place for people to access information and enable them to voice complaints or concerns.'

'In this paper, Owen Barder raises fundamental questions about the purpose of aid transfers. For many donors the purpose is "poverty reduction" but in the relatively narrow sense of growth that reduces poverty. In fact poverty reduction has other dimensions, including enabling the poor to live better lives through long-term, redistributional transfers while their country is developing, even with programs that might not contribute to growth. Barder's key concern is that the focus on poverty reduction through growth ignores such key tradeoffs as that between reducing current and future poverty, and between addressing the causes and symptoms of poverty. The reality of these tradeoffs stares us in the face; this is an important paper for practitioners as well as students of the way the aid system works.'

'Decisions, Desires and Diversity is one of a series of reports by the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit examining family dynamics and family violence in Afghanistan. It explores the many different ways in which marriages are decided on and practised in Afghan families.'

'News about Muslim women in America is usually saddled with the same woeful tales-abusive husbands, gruesome honor killings and the occasional controversy over headscarves. The tales are poignant, political and sad. Which is why American Muslim Women: Negotiating Race, Class and Gender within the Ummah (NYU Press) by Spelman College Professor of Religious Studies Jamillah Karim is a welcome departure from the usual portrayals of Muslim women in the U.S. as victims of their religion.'

'Jamillah Karim takes an extremely complex and contentious set of topics - race, class, gender and faith - and skillfully examines them within the framework of the ummah, or the Muslim community. American Muslim Women is an ethnographic account, but it is also a deeply personal look into the lives of a group of women whose voices are not typically heard in American society.'

Recently, gender perspectives have received more attention from various stakeholders due to consistent global advocacy and awareness-raising efforts that highlighted the importance of gender equality in disaster risk reduction. However, progress in mainstreaming gender perspectives into disaster risk reduction remains inadequate. Gender considerations are still largely marginalized from the disaster risk reduction process. Based on information provided in national reports on disaster risk reduction, such marginalization of women is especially true at the national level. In daily realities, women are key victims as well as resilient forces to natural disasters. Sri-Lanka Disaster Management Minister, Mahinda Samarasinghe, talks about the role played by women in disaster risk reduction and how gender issues have to be linked to the sustainable development goals nations want to achieve.

'Why do some countries succeed in promoting gender parity and equality in education while others do not? The answer often given is 'political will'. All too often, however, no further explanation is offered. There has been little effort to understand why governments are unwilling or unable to change their policies and priorities to achieve equal access to education for girls and boys, as expressed in the third Millennium Development Goal. This paper considers the concept of political will and explores the role that it plays in improving gender parity and equality in education.'