This article provides a systematic review of the potential and limitations of mobile phones in the delivery of rural services for agricultural and rural development in developing countries. The ...review indicates a rapid expansion of research in recent years, and a growing number of primary research studies that have developed rigorous methodologies for data collection and analysis, with welcome contribution from developing country institutions and researchers. Gaps in the literature suggest areas where future research priorities may lie. These include the provision of agricultural data sources that can provide the basis for effective planning and policymaking, and the assessment of information and service needs that take into account gender differences and the potential for user involvement in the design of service provision. Research is also needed to assess the potential for financial market integration, sustainable business models, consideration of indicators of sector performance and productivity, and assessment of broader impacts at the community and societal level.
With the target date for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) behind us, this book asks did they work? And what happens next? Arguing that to effectively look forward, we must first look back, the ...editors of this insightful book gather leading scholars and practitioners from a range of backgrounds and regions to provide an in-depth exploration of the MDG project and its impact.
Contributors use region-specific case studies to explore the effectiveness of the MDGs in addressing the root causes of poverty, including resource geographies, early childhood development and education, women's rights and disability rights as well as the impact of the global financial crisis and Arab Spring on MDG attainment.
Providing a critical assessment that seeks to inform future policy decisions, the book will be valuable to those working in the development community as well as to academics and students of international development, international relations and development economics.
Since the 1990s, the funding of multilateral development assistance has rapidly transformed. Donors increasingly constrain the discretion of international development organizations (IDOs) through ...earmarked funding, which limits the purposes for which a donor's funds can be used. The consequences of this development for IDOs’ operational performance are insufficiently understood. We hypothesize that increases in administrative burdens due to earmarked funding reduce the performance of IDO projects. The additional reporting required of IDOs by earmarked funds, while designed to enhance accountability, ultimately increases IDOs’ supervision costs and weakens their performance. We first test these hypotheses with data on project costs and performance of World Bank projects using both ordinary-least-squares and instrumental-variable analyses. We then probe the generalizability of those findings to other organizations by extending our analysis to four other IDOs: the African Development Bank (AfDB), Asian Development Bank (ADB), Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), and International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). Using data on the performance of 7,571 projects approved between 1990 and 2020, we find that earmarked funding undermines both cost-effectiveness and project performance across IDOs. Donors seeking value for money may consider allocating more money to core funds rather than to earmarked funds.
With growing evidence of unsustainable use of the world's resources, such as hydrocarbon reserves, and related environmental pollution, as in alarming climate change predictions, sustainable ...development is arguablytheprominent issue of the 21st century. This volume gives a wide ranging introduction focusing on the arid Gulf region, where the challenges of sustainable development are starkly evident. The Gulf relies on non-renewable oil and gas exports to supply the world's insatiable CO2 emitting energy demands, and has built unsustainable conurbations with water supplies dependent on energy hungry desalination plants and deep aquifers pumped beyond natural replenishment rates.Sustainable Developmenthas an interdisciplinary focus, bringing together university faculty and government personnel from the Gulf, Europe, and North America -- including social and natural scientists, environmentalists and economists, architects and planners -- to discuss topics such as sustainable natural resource use and urbanization, industrial and technological development, economy and politics, history and geography.
•Using an RCT, we assess the impacts of agriculture, nutrition, and gender interventions on women’s empowerment in Bangladesh.•Single or bundled trainings on agriculture, nutrition, and gender were ...provided to husbands and wives jointly.•All interventions improved women’s empowerment without disempowering men.•Nutrition trainings improved men’s gender attitudes, particularly on women’s responsibilities around cooking and childcare.•The role of engaging men and women jointly in interventions is a promising area for future research.
The importance of women’s roles for nutrition-sensitive agricultural projects is increasingly recognized, yet little is known about whether such projects improve women’s empowerment and gender equality. We study the Agriculture, Nutrition, and Gender Linkages (ANGeL) pilot project, which was implemented as a cluster-randomized controlled trial by the Government of Bangladesh. The project’s treatment arms included agricultural training, nutrition behavior change communication (BCC), and gender sensitization trainings delivered to husbands and wives together – with these components combined additively, such that the impact of gender sensitization could be distinguished from that of agriculture and nutrition trainings. Empowerment was measured using the internationally-validated project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI), and attitudes regarding gender roles were elicited from both men and women, to explore potentially gender-transformative impacts. Our study finds that ANGeL increased both women’s and men’s empowerment, raised the prevalence of households achieving gender parity, and led to small improvements in the gender attitudes of both women and men. We find significant increases in women’s empowerment scores and empowerment status from all treatment arms but with no significant differences across these. We find no evidence of unintended impacts on workloads and inconclusive evidence around impacts on intimate partner violence. Our results also suggest some potential benefits of bundling nutrition and gender components with an agricultural development intervention; however, many of these benefits seem to be driven by bundling nutrition with agriculture. While we cannot assess the extent to which including men and women within the same treatment arms contributed to our results, it is plausible that the positive impacts of all treatment arms on women’s empowerment outcomes may have arisen from implementation modalities that provided information to both husbands and wives when they were together. The role of engaging men and women jointly in interventions is a promising area for future research.
This volume underlines that development communication: - Is, first and foremost, about people and the process needed to facilitate their sharing of knowledge and perceptions in order to effect ...positive developmental change.- Is based on dialogue, which is necessary to promote stakeholders' participation. Such participation is needed in order to understand stakeholder perceptions, perspectives, values, attitudes and practices so they can be incorporated into the design and implementation of development initiatives.- Follows the two-way, horizontal model and not the traditional one-way, vertical model of Sender-Message-Channel-Receiver and increasingly makes use of emerging many to many forms of communication made possible through new technologies. - Gives voice to those most affected by the development issue(s) at stake, allowing them to participate directly in defining and implementing solutions and identifying development directions.- Recognizes that reality is largely socially constructed-and thus culture-specific. The implications are that there can be different realities (or different perceptions of the same reality) for the same situation according to specific groups' perceptions and needs. Thus the role of development and by extension communication is not to "impose" the correct reality, but rather to foster dialogue to facilitate mutual understanding among different perspectives. - Uses a number of tools, techniques, media and methods to facilitate mutual understanding, define and bridge differences of perceptions, and take action towards change, according to the particular needs of the development initiative. These tools and techniques should be used in an integrated way and are most effective when used at the beginning of development initiatives.Jan Servaes is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Lack of access to efficient energy comes with a huge cost in terms of health costs, monetary costs, and various socioeconomic consequences. In this paper, unlike the existing studies that focus on ...health and wellbeing effects associated with energy poverty, we investigate whether the household transition from polluting energy to clean energy leads to household socioeconomic development, in line with the UNDP human development index. Mapping households in two waves of Indian Human Development Survey Data 2005 and 2012, we find that compared to the matched sample of households that did not undergo transition into clean energy (control group), the households which underwent clear energy transition experience an average 12.2% improvement in their household development. Our results remain the same after testing for potential endogeneity. Contrary to our expectations, we also find that household consumption of polluting energy sources persists even with increased clean energy consumption. The stronger preference for polluting energy consumption demands both government intervention and further research.
•Our study focuses on the effect of household transition from polluting energy to clean energy on household socio-economic development.•We created a composite Household Development Index (HHDI) using the empirical formulations of the Human Development Index developed by the UNDP (UNDP Human Development Report Office, 2015).•Households who underwent transition from fossil fuels to clean energy experienced an average 12.2% improvement in their household development.
The financial system needs to develop in order for natural resource exports to have a positive effect on economic growth. Yet, an advanced financial system is crucial for transferring the revenues ...from oil exports to productive investments. If the level of development of the financial system remains under a certain threshold, the effect of natural resource exports on economic growth is too low. In this vein, the determination of the level and the deepness of financial development that has a positive impact on the growth of natural resource exports should be clarified. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between the impact of natural resource exports on economic growth and the level of financial deepening by using the data of the selected Next-11 countries for the period of 1996–2016. Nonlinear panel data methodology is used in the study. Based on the empirical results, for the first regime, where the rate of financial deepening is under 45%, the increase in oil exports does not have a statistically significant effect on ecenomic growth. For the second regime, where financial deepening is over 45%, one unit increase in oil exports causes a 7% increase in economic growth.
•Impact of natural resource exports on economic growth and financial deepening of selected Next-11 countries for period 1996-2016.•The stationarity conditions of the series, the CIPS test (Cross Sectionally Augmented IPS), developed by Peasaran (2007).•For the first regime, the increase in oil exports does not have a statistically significant effect on ecenomic growth.•For the second regime, where financial deepening is above 45%, one unit increase in oil exports causes a 7% increase in economic growth.
This paper discusses the impacts of solid waste on human health and environmental wellbeing in Johannesburg, South Africa. Using both secondary and primary data collected through semi-structured ...interviews with members of a local community of Windsor, municipal officials and other stakeholders involved in solid waste management (SWM) in Johannesburg, it finds that mismanagement of solid waste negatively affects the urban environment and human health, leading to reduced productivity and economic growth. Further, it is argued that ineffective SWM must be seen as a consequence both of institutionalised failure to implement and enforce urban policies and regulations and a parallel failure to recognise the importance of private agents and community participation in urban development and management. Developing an effective and sustainable SWM system in Johannesburg requires city authorities to devolve resources and authority to local level along with clear guidelines and strategies to strengthen local management processes.
This fourth edition has been comprehensively rewritten and updated to provide a concise, well illustrated and accessible introduction to the characteristics, challenges and opportunities of ...sustainable development with particular reference to developing countries. The contested nature of sustainable development is explored through a detailed consideration of changing ideas and practices within environmentalism and development thinking. The text identifies the different actors involved (from institutions of global governance through to community based organisations), the policies and mechanisms through which sustainable development is being sought and considers the outcomes for particular groups and environments in both rural and urban contexts.
This edition places stronger emphasis on the global challenges of sustainable development with an understanding of inter-linked crises in climate, energy, economy, poverty and social injustice. It explores how these issues are leading to deep questioning of what sustainable development is, what it should be, and how sustainable development policies and mechanisms are being reconsidered. The book gives new consideration to the challenge of achieving lower carbon growth, climate adaptation, and the implications on sustainable development of rapidly expanding economies, including China and India. It contains greater discussion of how civil society movements influence outcomes of international climate policy, as well as technological developments in energy and agriculture. The text also contains a substantially expanded discussion of how poverty remains central to sustainable development challenges, as revealed through the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and Millennium Development Goals.
This invaluable text retains the core message that sustainable development has become central to debates about environment and development. Containing a substantial number of new boxed case studies,
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