IDS Practice Papers最新文献

‘Inclusive Business’ has enormous potential to contribute positively to development outcomes. Working through core business models, the ‘Inclusive Business’ approach requires minimal outside support and can often reach a scale unattainable by most direct development interventions. Take for example, Vodafone's M-PESA service, which has reached more than 18.5 million individuals since 2007 and continues to be a profitable business model (BCtA 2011).

But when is business ‘inclusive’ and when is it simply business? How does Coca-Cola's business model in El Salvador contribute more to women's empowerment than its typical approach to selling fizzy drinks? Accurate information about business impacts – direct and indirect, positive and negative – can help practitioners to better identify (and support) the approaches that can most positively contribute to development.

This paper analyses some of the current approaches and frameworks for evaluating ‘Inclusive Business’ impacts. It finds that while they shed light on the complex network of effects that businesses have and the ways in which some firms are attempting to contribute to development, they are unable to provide information about the actual impacts of business activities. More, higher quality, and less partial ‘Inclusive Business’ evaluations are needed to better enable us to harness the potential for business to contribute positively to development.

Open defecation is the norm in rural and urban Africa – only about a third of the population uses improved sanitation facilities – and this contributes in various ways to a heavy disease burden. Community-led Total Sanitation (CLTS), an approach to sanitation which focuses on community-wide behaviour change to completely stop open defecation, began to go to scale in Africa in 2006. Since then, it has spread dramatically and in many countries very successfully, and is now used at some level in at least 26 African countries.

This paper draws on the extensive involvement of Kamal Kar with the spread of CLTS in Africa to describe the early stages of the process, to elaborate on its developments and to outline insights into the circumstances and features which have facilitated its rapid spread. Taking a broadly comparative approach which draws on the somewhat earlier experience of the spread of CLTS in Asia, it identifies aspects of the institutionalisation process and circumstances, including key individuals, that have contributed to the success of the approach in Africa. It also discusses challenges, however, noting several issues which may limit its impact and hinder its dissemination. In particular, the paper discusses some of the many adaptations made to CLTS in response to a wide range of pressures, varying country circumstances and strategy choices. These adaptations, it is claimed, should be made with a clear picture of what may be lost and gained by adopting them. As CLTS progresses further, it will be important to continue to grapple with these issues, to acknowledge the lessons from adaptations that have had little success, and to retain a vision of the potential of CLTS to bring fundamental transformations in sanitation, health and rural lives.

How can educators work together to enhance work on democracy and citizenship? This paper analyses the trajectory and dynamics of the Teaching and Learning (T&L) group, an initiative that brought together educators from seven countries to address the challenges of developing and delivering courses on citizenship and democratising teaching and learning environments. Part of the Citizenship DRC, a wider research consortium that examined the dynamics of citizen participation in diverse contexts, the T&L group centred on peer-to-peer reflection, learning and support. Its innovative ways of working and success in developing a wide range of courses and trainings challenge expert-driven models of pedagogical development. They also point to the importance of transnational collaborations in enhancing curricula, courses and teaching methods that effectively support both learning about democracy and citizenship, and democratic teaching capacities.

Why is a positive and political approach to sexuality important? How might such an approach be actualised in trainings and workshops? What are the linkages between sexuality, gender justice and access to rights such as those related to bodily integrity? These are some of the key questions that this paper addresses. The paper is based on learnings that emerged from a programme initiated by Nirantar, a women's NGO that has been working on issues of gender, education and more recently, sexuality. The programme constitutes one of the first efforts in the Indian context to build perspectives on sexuality, through intensive workshops, with women from rural, poor communities as well as the organisations that work with. Through participatory exercises Nirantar introduced sophisticated and challenging ideas such as: women's right to say ‘yes’ to sex and ask for what they wanted as well as to say ‘no’ and how the two are closely linked; how control of women's sexuality oppresses women more generally; and how sex, sexuality and gender are socially constructed. Based on detailed minutes of the trainings, an external review of the impact, and on the author's personal experience as a facilitator, this paper describes the methods and shares learnings including the following:

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  It is indeed possible and welcome to talk about sexuality, particularly for rural women in this context who were far more at ease than the more middle class urban participants.

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  Sexuality and violence against women (VAW) are fundamentally connected. VAW may occur as a response to women expressing non-acceptable desires and women may return to abusive husbands in part because marriage is the only accepted place to fulfil their sexual desires.

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  Sexuality is integral to women's empowerment both because sexual fulfilment itself can be affirming, energising, and empowering, and because control of women's sexuality inhibits women's mobility, access to health care and education.

This paper looks at what donors, who are at the same time funders and critics of global funds, can do to increase the coherence of their own policies and actions. The role of global funds – that is to say, global programmes with sectoral or sub-sectoral earmarking and with substantial operations at the country level – has become increasingly prominent in the past decade as they have accounted for much of the increase in total aid and for most of the increase in aid for health. Some of the strongest criticism has come from aid donors who have supported the call in the Paris Declaration and the Accra Agenda for Action for supporting overall country strategies and systems. Yet those donors are the founders and funders of global funds and have a major role in setting their mandates and policies. Why this apparent schizophrenia? This paper, based on a set of interviews as well as published sources and the personal experiences of its authors, aims to provide a dispassionate view of the considerable strengths and weaknesses of both the global fund and Paris-Accra approaches to aid effectiveness and, taking account of the internal incentives driving the behaviour of donors and other key stakeholders, to suggest how the two models can be used more effectively together. It calls for donor agencies to see funding of country programmes and global funds as complementary instruments in aid investment portfolios and to adjust internal policies and incentives to manage competition between sectors, including through increasing coherence of their representation on the boards of global funds. It calls for more effort at ‘thinking twice’ before starting new funds, for building the principles of Paris-Accra into new global funds, and giving stronger encouragement to the efforts of existing global funds to retrofit these principles. As part of this effort, it calls for coherent strategies, agreed with ministers, that cover broad allocations between global and country programmes, rather than treating each new initiative in health or environment one by one. And it makes recommendations on a series of selected current policy issues, including sustainability, taking a broader view of country allocations, and mutual accountability.