No description available.

Abstract Women globally are faced with many challenges and obstacles which include poverty, disease, violence and inequality. Over the years, women through their own initiative, have organised themselves nationally and internationally to have their agendas taken seriously by governments. Donor agencies did not come to supporting women due to their own conscientiousness – rather it was because of the concerted will and commitment of the international women’s movement that brought attention to the need for assistance for women. In South Africa there are many donor agencies that provide funding for programmes and initiatives that address the challenges faced by women of lower socio-economic groupings. The arising question is how effective these initiatives have been in addressing poverty and inequality of women. This pilot study attempted to investigate how select donors and non-governmental organisations have fared in relation to their target group – ‘poor black women’. The study addressed the issues of empowerment and sustainable development of ‘poor black women’ through an analysis of the work of non-governmental organisations supported by donor agencies. The findings were that donors do attempt to address the empowerment and sustainable development of ‘poor black women’ through the funding that they provide.

This study explores the relationship between two orthodoxies in contemporary development: gender mainstreaming and participatory development. Specifically, this study examines whether these two strategies stand in conflict, in theory and in practice, where the donor agency the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) serves as the empirical case. Discourse analysis was conducted to examine whether the conflict can be discerned in Sida’s written suggestions for how to work with gender mainstreaming in development cooperation. To add nuance and depth, interviews have been carried out with Sida staff members to gain broad perspectives on the potential conflict. This study argues that the conflict can be discerned based on the underlying principles of gender mainstreaming and participatory development. While this study also provides a first attempt to illustrate how the conflict manifests itself in practice, future research is needed to establish the conflict’s empirical appearances. However, this study contributes with valuable indications of the conflict’s appearance and manifestation in practical development efforts that Sida is engaged in.

This paper critically evaluates guidelines concerning participatory development by the World Bank and USAID. It focuses on the different conceptual frameworks adopted in order to examine the differing ways of adopting participation in their development agenda. A literature –based method was adopted and the analysis included evaluation of five documented experiences including the Ghana Secondary Education Improvement Project and Ghana Water Sanitation and Hygiene Project from both the World Bank and USAID. Baum project cycle stages have been taken as activities for project participation. The findings are; the need for better planning; ensuring sustainability; and involving beneficiaries. / Article was sent as 4 word documents - I compiled into pdf version and let Farhad know 21/06/2016 - sm / The full text will be available at the end of the publisher's embargo, 31st July 2018.

Yes / This paper critically evaluates guidelines concerning participatory development by the World Bank and USAID. It focuses on the different conceptual frameworks adopted in order to examine the differing ways of adopting participation in their development agenda. A literature-based method was adopted and the analysis included evaluation of five documented experiences including the Ghana Secondary Education Improvement Project and Ghana Water Sanitation and Hygiene Project from both the World Bank and USAID. Baum project cycle stages have been taken as activities for project participation. The findings are; the need for better planning; ensuring sustainability; and involving beneficiaries.

This dissertation examines in depth one of the potential causes of the low performance of foreign aid; in particular, the role incentive structures within international donor agencies could play in leading to “a push” to disburse money. This pressure to disburse money is termed as the “Money-Moving Syndrome”. In this dissertation, the “Money Moving Syndrome” exists when the quantity of foreign aid committed or disbursed becomes, in itself, an important objective side by side or above the effectiveness of aid. The theoretical analysis relies on the principal-agent theory to explore how donor agencies’ institutional incentive systems may affect the characteristics of an optimal and efficient incentive contract and thus give rise to the “Money-Moving Syndrome”. We adapted the basic framework developed in Baker (1992) to fit the organizational settings of international development agencies. The model concludes that the extent to which a performance measure based the amount of aid allocated within a specific period of time would lead to the “Money-Moving Syndrome” and affect aid effectiveness depends on the level of institutional imperatives for survival and growth, the degree of aid agency’s accountability for effectiveness, the level of corruption in recipient countries and the degree of difficulty to evaluate development activities. Due to data unavailability regarding other bilateral and multilateral aid agencies, the empirical framework tests several predictions of the theoretical model by examining whether money moving incentives affect World Bank’s decisions regarding project loan size in developing countries. Overall, the empirical results suggest that there seems to be some degree of “Money-Moving Syndrome” in effect within the World Bank.