Syftet med uppsatsen är att ge en förståelse för hur tonårstjejer på landsbygden i Tamil Nadu i södra Indien upplever menstruation. Aspekter som tillgång på information, hygien och traditionella sedvänjor diskuteras. Initiationsriterna som hålls för alla flickor kopplas till ritualteori av Turner, Bell, Rappaport, Staal med flera. En genomgång från det antropologiska fältet ges genom Buckley och Gottlieb. Centralt för uppsatsen är uppfattningar om orenhet och symbolisk förorening som finns inom hinduismen. Detta diskuteras med hjälp av Mary Douglas. Den till huvuddel kvalitativa studien består av intervjuer med fem fokusgrupper, bestående av tjejer i åldrarna 12-25 år, och kompletterande intervjuer med personal på NGO:s och andra med kopplingar till området. En enkkätstudie genomfördes samt en observation. Resultatet visar att tonårstjejer är i stort behov av mer reproduktiv kunskap och att det finns fördelar med att uppmärksamma och samtala kring de traditionella sedvänjorna, eftersom delar av dem upplevs som negativt av tjejerna. Det är tydligt att det finns ett behov för bekväma, hygieniska och hållbara alternativ för kvinnors mensskydd. I uppsatsen presenteras också olika projekt som syftar till att sprida information om menstruation och mensskydd. / The purpose of this thesis is to give an understanding about how adolescent girls in rural Tamil Nadu experience menstruation. Aspects on access to information, hygiene and traditional menstrual customs are discussed. The initiation rite that all girls go through is connected to ritual theory by Turner, Bell, Rappaport and Staal et al. An understanding from the anthropological field is given through the work of Buckley and Gottlieb. Central for the thesis is notions about impurity and pollution, which are discussed with the theories of Mary Douglas. The mainly qualitative research consists of focus groups interviews with girls in the age of 12-25 years and complementary interviews with NGO workers and others connected to the field. A questionnaire study was conducted as well as an observation. The results from the study show that adolescent girls are in great need of more reproductive knowledge and that there could be benefits to further bring up the traditional customs to discussion, since part of them make girls feel uncomfortable. It is seen that there is a need for comfortable, hygienic and sustainable solutions for women´s sanitary protection. Presented in the thesis are also different examples of projects that aim to spread information about menstruation and the use of sanitary pads.

ABSTRACTNGOs today meet several challenges due to growing competition and shrinking aid budgets. These demands are something all NGOs need to find strategies to meet. Learning thereby becomes essential for the organizations survival, success and for sustainable development. To meet these demands organizations need to be able to learn and develop. This minor field study is carried out to promote learning by highlighting knowledge and understanding for goals and objectives. SOIR is a non- governmental organization that in their new strategy for development work is supporting the civil society in building their own community based organizations (CBO) in the rural area of Manicaland, Zimbabwe. The organization Mandeya 2 Development was through the support of SOIR registered as a community based organization (CBO) in the spring of 2012. Mandeya 2 development is in its initial stages implementing SOIRs goals, objectives and strategies for operational work. This study has been focusing on the objective: Reduce stigma and discrimination of orphaned and vulnerable children (OVC) whose parents passed on due to HIV related illness by December 2012.The purpose of the study was to analyze staff and volunteers’ knowledge, coherence and perception of the objective and the root causes the objective aim to address, in order to promote the building of a “learning organization”. The result showed that there was a lack of knowledge and understanding for the objective and that the objective was perceived in different ways by the informants. The result further showed that this has consequences for the organizations possibility to learn and also have impact on the motivation, participation and volunteers’ possibility to affect the operational work performed.Keywords: Coherence, Goals, Learning Organization, NGO, Objectives, sustainable development

Since 2018 and what is referred to as the “Oxfam scandal” it seems that the practices around the prevention of sexual violence in the aid sector have evolved but it is difficult to estimate how much has changed. This research focuses on the specific point of view of managers in aid organizations. They have a specific role with regards to safeguarding because they manage a team and are involved in project design.  This study’s aim is to understand how humanitarian managers perceive and experience their responsibilities towards safeguarding. Based on the analysis of interviews with 6 managers, it examines how they perceive their responsibilities with regards to safeguarding and the risks of sexual violence. It also questions how equipped they feel to mitigate these risks and whether they have observed a change in the past few years, with regards to sexual violence in the aid sector.  This qualitative research relies on the framework of gender-based violence, the concept of intersectionality, the concept of situated knowledge of Donna Haraway and the theory of competencies, one of the theories of adult learning.  It demonstrates that the perceptions of sexual violence by managers of the aid sector are linked to their personal ethics and experiences and that although they consider themselves responsible to prevent sexual violence, their perceptions of the risks are not homogenous. This study lays the ground for further research on safeguarding from the perspectives of managers, with a stronger emphasis on intersectional and decolonial approaches.

No description available.

Program sustainability is a major issue for nongovernmental organizations. Sustainability depends on the ability of an organization to maintain its capacity, which can be severely hindered by high rates of personnel turnover. This is especially true for turnover in nonprofit organizations that offer volunteer-led programs and are consequently heavily reliant upon those individuals to carry out their missions. Creating a strong institutional memory for both tacit and explicit knowledge and properly managing volunteers are two critical elements in creating the capacity needed to maintain a high-quality program. This thesis analyzes the case of a youth center in Macedonia that is dependent upon its volunteers to function and is afflicted by sustainability and discontinuity issues in its programs due to a regular rapid turnover of its volunteers. The center promotes youth development through informal education of its participants, primarily high school youth. Interviews, participant observation and document analysis provided insight into the program sustainability issues present at the youth center. I present a series of scenarios that highlight the issues of volunteer management and institutional memory loss concerning volunteer turnover that I discovered in my analysis. I conclude by calling for better preservation of institutional memory, more targeted recruitment and training that emphasizes creating routines and establishing volunteer expectations to enable improved program sustainability. / Master of Urban and Regional Planning

Despite knowledge being recognised as a valuable resource for organizations, there is limited research on knowledge management and knowledge sharing in the humanitarian- and development sector. Trying to fill this gap, this study aimed to examine how employees in an international Non-Governmental Organization in the humanitarian- and development sector, experienced the internal knowledge sharing, within their working organization. As well as aspects that affect knowledge sharing, what difficulties and opportunities there are, and the role of tacit and explicit knowledge for their knowledge sharing. The study was conducted as a hybrid of a cross sectional study and a case study with a qualitative approach and was based on the theoretical framework of the SECI-model, its processes and ba. Empirical data was generated through qualitative interviews with seven employees from a humanitarian- and development organization called organization X, in the context of a developing country in sub-Saharan Africa. Qualitative thematic analysis was used for analysing the empirical data based on research and the SECI-model. The result demonstrates that explicit knowledge is prominent in organization X because the employees are governed by documents and other explicit sources. The result also showed that the employees experience that there is trust and willingness to share knowledge, but that there is a lack of knowledge management strategy which affects knowledge sharing processes.

This work is concerned with the financing of Chinese social entrepreneurship. China is experiencing an all-time high in terms of pollution, as well as increasing social unrest. The introduction of a market economy in the country has led to a rapid economic growth, but has left many issues unsolved. The mass lay-offs that followed therationalization of State-Owned Enterprises in the 1990s created a large unemployment,and the industrialization process has only very recently been accompanied by measures toprotect the environment. To tackle those issues, more and more are appealing to theefficiency of the very same market economy to produce sustainable and scalable solutions.To better understand the financing landscape that presents itself to entrepreneurs in needof capital, a literature and interview-based study has been conducted to summarize it interms of sources, stage, efficiency and average size. Unfortunately, few sources of capital have been found to be available to them, and none of them can be described as easily accessible. It is therefore recommended that the different actors involved in the marketwork together to lower these barriers.

The thesis examines Canadian and Japanese human security assemblages. It aims to delve below stereotypical imageries ¿representing¿ these human security articulations. The concept of ¿human security¿ is not a starting point, but a result of elements, processes, structures and mechanisms which need to be investigated in order to reveal insights about a given articulation of human security. Each human security assemblage is composed of messy discourses and practices which are loosely related and sometimes even disconnected. Academics have frequently avoided studying the messiness of political discourses and practices and their mutual dependencies or their lack thereof. By contrast, this thesis ascertains what has lain beneath Canadian and Japanese spatio-temporal articulation of human security and establishes the kinds of structural terrain which have enabled, shaped, or blocked the unfolding of certain versions of human security. The pivotal contention of the thesis is that Canadian and Japanese articulations of human security have been different because they have grown from completely different domestic economies of power governing the relationship between the state apparatus and the non-profit and voluntary sector. While the Canadian human security assemblage has been shaped by transformations in the country¿s advanced liberal model of government, the Japanese has been shaped by the continuities of Japan¿s bureaucratic authoritarianism. A novel approach is employed for the related process-tracing: a general series linking structural conditions with actual articulations of the human security projects, and their further development, including analysis of their unintended consequences. / Grant Agency of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Japan Foundation/Government of Japan, International Council for Canadian Studies/Government of Canada, Jan Hus Foundation.

Background: Cultural projects are increasingly being implemented to help inmates cope with their situations. Nevertheless, research has been scarce in relation to the experiences of the cultural workers implementing the projects within the Prison and Probation Service (PPS). Objective: The study intends to explore the experiences of Skådebanan’s cultural workers in the implementation of cultural projects in relation to the Swedish PPS and the inmates. More specifically, the study addresses two research questions: (1) How do cultural workers experience the interactions with the inmates while implementing cultural projects? (2) How do cultural workers experience the relations with the Prison and Probation Service while planning and implementing cultural projects?  Method: Data was gathered from six cultural workers, working in five regional associations, through four surveys and one interview. These were qualitatively analyzed using a thematic approach. The themes found were then interpreted using Goffman’s theories on “total institution” and the “dramaturgical self”.  Results: The results showed how, according to the cultural workers’ perspective, their interactions with inmates and their relations with PPS were mostly positive, with the exceptions of few challenges. Conclusion: This study can give insights into the interactions that cultural workers have during the implementation of cultural projects with the inmates and the PPS, which might be helpful in the understanding of challenges and facilitators of the implementation process. Nevertheless, further research is needed.

Children engage in paid and unpaid work that is damaging to them daily all around the world. They are categorized as child laborers, however when they are either too young to work or are engaged in dangerous activities that may jeopardize their physical, mental, social or educational development (Unicef 2021). The topic of Child labour relates to the broader area of peace and development due to child labour being a development issue. The theoretical frameworks selected for this thesis are Amartya Sen’s ‘capabilities’ theory. The aim with this field study is to recognize the strategies of NGO’s combat against child labour and their challenges as well as their improvements. To gain an understanding of child labour in relation to hazardous environments and their impacts on a local level in Mwanza, with the help of key informant interviews and stakeholders. Indirect data was chosen rather than direct data, because it would be unethical to interview children. The fact that children suffer makes child labor a touchy subject. It is impossible for me to discuss every aspect of child labor because the subject is so vast and sensitive. I therefore only have knowledge that is applicable to my research. I have come to the conclusion that the factor of child labour is mainly poverty. The strategies of the NGOs to prevent child labour differs from one another, but many of them use awareness as a strategy. Their challenges are lack of resources and the community’s perception.