Gender-based violence is a global problem that affects women and girls of all races, colour and creed. This study locates gender-based violence within the development agenda, explores related theories and points out how culture, patriarchy and tradition influences gender-based violence perpetration and can also contribute to positive behavior change. This dissertation provides an analysis of gender-based violence globally, in the Southern African region and in Zimbabwe through secondary and primary research. The research focused on women and girls because they are constitute the majority when one looks at the victims of gender-based violence statistics and issues that come out on different communities. This research contributes to an increased understanding and knowledge of gender- based violence by interrogating the statistics of gender-based violence, response mechanisms and the role civil society organisations play. The primary research utilised guided interviews with the use of questionnaires with individuals and representatives of organisations. Findings indicate a need for greater awareness on the provisions of the Zimbabwe Domestic Violence Act, increased economic empowerment of women and more male inclusion in raising awareness as part of prevention. Key informant discussions with Non-Governmental Organisations (NGO) representatives highlighted the need for programme synergies so that gender-based violence initiatives are holistic. The case study of Musasa is key in assessing the role civil society organisations play in complementing Government actions and strategies. / Development Studies / M.A (Development Studies)

In line with international developments, the Department of Education in South Africa (SA) recognises environmental education as a key vehicle to respond to the national and global environmental crisis (DoE, 2001, P. 3). For this reason, the post-1994 education provision sought to infuse environmental education into the new curriculum called Curriculum 2005. The White Paper on Education and Training (RSA, 1995) perceived environmental education as a means to a better quality of life for all people and argued that it should be integrated at all levels of the SA Education and Training system. The White Paper further stated that “environmental education, involving an inter-disciplinary, integrated and active approach to learning, must be a vital element of all levels and programmes of the education and training system, in order to create environmentally literate and active citizens and ensure that all South Africans, present and future, enjoy a decent quality of life through the sustainable use of resources” (RSA, 1995, P. 22). How have the schools responded to this challenge by the new integration policy? How is the environmental learning provided for in the primary school curriculum across SA? What resources exist to make environmental policy workable in schools, and how are these resources mobilised and organised to promote learning? These and other questions formed the basis for the present inquiry An Opportunity to Learn (OTL) study was conducted to explore how one primary school in SA provides OTL about the environment. The main aim of the study was to understand the manner in which teachers integrate environmental learning in the school curriculum. A qualitative research approach was used as a mode of inquiry for this study. Interviews, classroom observations and document analysis were used as data collection methods. The findings of the study suggest that Sechaba Primary School has managed to integrate environmental learning in its curriculum through the help of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other stakeholders. The research concluded by arguing that OTL about the environment appear to be enhanced where there are strong connections between the schools and NGOs. Specifically, the following set of recommendations was documented: First, local leadership and agency are required to pursue the various opportunities and resources to build the school’s capacity for environmental learning. Schools should be encouraged to designate and support local leaders to take responsibility for driving the integration of environmental learning into their curriculum. Such integration is too important and maybe too demanding to be left to individual teachers independently in their own classrooms. Second, converting the latent capacity and/or physical and intellectual infrastructure for environmental learning into real OTL about the environment for the students will continue to remain a challenge for some of the teachers while others have managed the integration in some exemplary fashion. Opportunities for teachers to observe each other, plan together and work collaboratively on issues of integration should be created at school and district level. Third, it is critical that all teachers undergo in service training regarding the implementation of environmental education, and such training should provide teachers with enough time to learn. One of the major limitations of the Department of Education’s programme of implementation of the new environmental learning policy has been the inability to provide teachers with enough time to learn and implement the new ideas of the revised national curriculum statement. Finally, it is important to reiterate the importance of providing adequate resources for implementation of environmental learning from the Department of Education. Having said that, however, the case of Sechaba has demonstrated how such resources can also be mobilised from elsewhere outside the system. Encouraging beneficial partnerships between schools and NGOs may in itself be a valuable resource to encourage many primary schools in SA for whom government resources in this field continue to remain inadequate. / Dissertation (MEd (Curriculum and Instructional Design and Development))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Curriculum Studies / unrestricted

Humanitarian aid as it is known in present days has its origins in 19th century and since then it has gone through many important changes, developments and streams of thoughts. The aim of this thesis is to describe the changing character of humanitarian aid, its constraints and failures and the means of tackling them with emphasis on evolution during the last twenty years. The thesis deals mainly with failures caused by inaccurate assessment of needs of the victims of humanitarian crisis, constraints complicating complying with the principles of humanitarian action, limitations arising from the respect of state sovereignty and the problem of misappropriation of humanitarian aid and corruption. The shift in solving problems will be presented on the case of Czech non-governmental organization People in Need.

A côté des grandes ONG qui bénéficient d'une visibilité dans l'espace public national, de nombreux citoyens décident, suite à une expérience vécue dans ou avec le Sud (voyage, résidence, adoption, etc.), de « faire quelque chose » pour améliorer les conditions de vie des populations rencontrées et, avec le concours de quelques amis, créent leur propre association de solidarité internationale. Dans un contexte marqué par la recherche d'une meilleure efficacité des interventions menées dans les pays du Sud, leitmotiv de l'injonction à plus de professionnalisme de la part des acteurs, cette thèse étudie les discours et les pratiques de ces citoyens « ordinaires » afin de mettre en lumière le rôle qu'ils jouent dans le champ du développement à travers l'animation de ces « initiatives populaires de solidarité internationale » (IPSI). Plus précisément, dans la tradition interactionniste de la sociologie des groupes professionnels, nous nous intéressons au processus dialectique par lequel les responsables salariés des ONG et les responsables bénévoles des IPSl construisent et définissent leur légitimité d'amateur et de professionnel, en tant qu'acteur de développement. La sociologie de l'action publique nous invite également à étudier l'influence que les pouvoirs publics, par leurs instruments, ont sur la responsabilité et la légitimité des acteurs, sur leurs interactions, sur leur reconnaissance mutuelle. L'injonction externe au professionnalisme provenant également des exigences formulées par les partenaires du Sud, nous nous intéressons enfin, de manière transversale, aux perceptions de ces derniers, dans le cas de projets soutenus au Sénégal. / Alongside established, high-profile non-governmental organisations (NGOs), many individuals decide that they need to "do something" to improve the lives of the people they have met (while travelling, living in another country or adopting a child, etc.). These people join forces with a small group of friends to set up their own development organisations (referred, to hereafter as "popular development initiatives", or PDIs). At present, one of the major concerns in international development cooperation is to make development workers more professional in the interest of better aid effectiveness. This thesis therefore looks at the discourses and practices of these "ordinary" citizens, in order to highlight their role and to identify key issues for this sector. More specifically, we study the dialectic process by which NGO staff and PDI volunteers build and define their professional and amateur legitimacy as development actors, through the prism of the interactionist perspective of the sociology of professional groups. We also draw on the sociology of public action to consider how public authorities, through their policy tools, influence the responsibility and legitimacy of these actors, the interactions between them, and their mutual recognition. The need for professionalism also stems from demands by local partners in the developing world, so we have taken an interest in their perceptions in the case of Senegal.

"The question of locus standi regarding the non-state complaints procedure before the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (the Commission) is a very flexibile one. Although the language of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (the Charter), the enabling powers and functions of the Commission, does not provide for such broad standing, the Commission has over its 20 years of operation, given broad interpretation to the question of standing by adopting the actio popularis doctrine. As a reslut the Commission has entertained communicatons from any person, group of persons or non-governmental organisation (NGOs), whether on their own behalf or on behalf of tothers. The location or nationality of such persons is also not a bar to standing. Consequently, the Commission has accepted communications from national NGOs operating in the country of the state party against whom the complaint is made, NGOs with a regaional focus, international NGOs, and non-African nationals. ... The study has five chapters. Chapter one introduces the study and the justification thereof. Chapter two explores the origin, nature and application of locus standi in domestic legal systems with particluar respect to private protection of public rights and human rights protection using Ghana, Mozambique and South Africa as case studies. Chapter three examines the standing requirements before other regional human rights protection systems namely the ECHR, and the IACHR as well as global human rights protection mechanisms throught the lens of the HRC, the CERD-Committee, the CAT-Committee and the CEDAW-Committee. Chapter four traces and assesses the development of the broad standing requirements before the Commission regarding its non-state communications procedure and the problems associated with them. And Chapter five presents the conclusions and recommendations of the study." -- Introduction. / Thesis (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa)) -- University of Pretoria, 2006. / Prepared under the supervision of Mr. Angelo Matusse at the Faculty of Law, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Maputo, Mozambique / http://www.chr.up.ac.za/academic_pro/llm1/dissertations.html / Centre for Human Rights / LLM

Bibliography: pages 191-199. / Black people in South Africa have been the targets - or victims - of massive development intervention by successive South African governments. And in more recent years urbanised Africans in particular have been the targets of increasing levels of development intervention, much of which has been funded and directed through bilateral aid programmes initiated by western governments. It is with those kinds of development intervention that this thesis is concerned. Research, conducted during 1989 and 1990, examined a slice of development activity occurring in an African urban area during what is becoming a period of transition from South Africa's effective isolation to the beginning of its reincorporation into the world "development system".

Thesis (M.Dev. (Planning and Management)) -- University of Limpopo, 2022 / Small and Micro-Enterprises (SMEs) are considered sources of income that give people the purchasing power to meet their basic needs and improve their standard of living. Primarily, this study investigated the effects of SMEs on employment creation in Sefene Village, Limpopo Province (South Africa) with the following objectives: to determine the types, characteristics and challenges of SMEs in rural areas; to explore the management approaches for SMEs in rural areas; to examine the types and quality of employment created in rural areas; to determine the effects of SMEs on employment creation in rural areas; and to recommend measures that could enhance the effects of SMEs on employment creation in Sefene Village. The study used a literature review, interview schedule and semi-structured questionnaires. The findings of the study revealed that SMEs played a tremendous role in improving the local economic development of Sefene village. The SMEs are employment creators that have provided economic opportunities for the local people of Sefene village. In terms of employment creation, the SMEs in Sefene confronted challenges such as lack of access to finance, marketing aptitudes, markets, and lack of significant infrastructural facilities and management skills. In any case, literature and empirical data gathered at Sefene uncovered that the major challenge experienced by SMEs was a lack of access to finance. An entrepreneur can have the knowledge and skills but without funds, they are then constrained and impeded. The government institutions for SMEs ought to also target rural areas since that is where there are market potential and overwhelming poverty and unemployment. Further, the SMEs proprietors were aware of financial institutions but accessing them was a major challenge since they did not know about ways to approach them. Hence, the study has recommended that the government financial institutions needed to build relationships with the Molemole Local Municipality to extend access to their services by people who aspire to venture into SMEs. Similarly, the SMEs are major employment creators and need support from private sectors, community members, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and government institutions.

This thesis explores how research is implicated in the constitution of post-war environments, and gives an account of being and becoming a researcher in post-war Bosnia. My main contention is that when peace and conflict researchers conduct research in post-war contexts, their presence, practices, and the consequential production of knowledge and representations, have political effects. I argue that the implications of this have not been fully explained, acknowledged, or problematised within Conflict Resolution, which tends to rely on research approaches and assumptions taken from ‘normal’ science. This thesis suggests how reflexivity and alternatives methodologies, including visual research might be used to represent the emotional, sensory, and often intangible elements of post-war realities. It enacts an engagement in the politics of research and uses reflexive writing and visual methods to draw attention to the importance of the relational aspects of research in postwar environments. Visual journeys are also used to argue that visual methods can provide a way of revisiting the epistemological and ontological assumptions about lived experiences and realities in post-war settings. The thesis is based upon one year of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in Bosnia, and is also informed by eighteen months of volunteer work with a Bosnian Community Centre in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. / Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)

No description available.

Organisations need to learn from their current and past experiences to optimise their activities, decisions and future strategies. Non-governmental organisations are similar to public or governmental departments in that learning is crucial for their existence. One of the key factors influencing learning is the development and maintenance of a functional organisational memory. The organisational memory is a dynamic entity encompassing more than the storage facilities provided by an information technology system. It also resides in human form, acting as reservoirs and interpretation centres and feeding the organisational memory as a whole. Previous research in organisational memory focussed mostly on describing the structure of the storage systems, with the current focus on developing management information systems to enhance organisational memory storage and retrieval. Some work has been undertaken to describe the processes involved, which include accessing, storing and retrieving the memory. Other functions that need special attention are the development of data to information, and especially creating and using knowledge. The studies mostly involved existing organisational memory as it was represented at a specific time of the organisations’ development. This study looks at all the different developmental phases of a regional NGO, which include start-up, expansion in target territory, expansion in activities, consolidation and close-out. To investigate the temporal changes of organisational memory in a regional intermediary NGO, a retrospective case study methodology was used. The NGO was closing down, providing an opportunity to investigate all the stages of development. The data collection, analysis and interpretation involved various in-depth interviews with current and past staff members and other key stakeholders, such as beneficiary organisations and consultants. In addition, a complex set of documents were studied, including proposals, strategic documents, minutes of meetings, and audiovisual material. The main themes and factors, such as individuals, leadership, electronic and other management of the organisational memory, culture, including the importance of a vision and theory of change, policies and global developments are discussed using a temporal ecological framework. The key findings of this study illustrate the importance of directories as part of the metamemory in accessing seemingly dormant organisational memories. The conclusion is that organisational memory survives after the demise of the organisation and that it is accessible through directories. / Psychology / Ph. D. (Consulting Psychology)