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Home»Social Development

Social Development

Social Protection Topic Guide

Horizontal inequalities: reading pack

Climate Change and Empowerment

Helpdesk Report
  • Huma Haider
February 2011

Key findings: There is limited but growing attention to the ways in which empowerment and climate change policy and interventions interact with and benefit each other. The vast majority of this literature focuses on the empowerment of women, and centres on climate change adaptation. While the links between gender and adaptation and gender perspectives on adaptation have been ...» more

Violence against Women (VAW) and political engagement

Helpdesk Report
  • Erika Fraser
January 2011

The link between violence against women (VAW) and women’s political engagement is a complex one, deeply rooted in patriarchal systems of gender relations.In the literature consulted for this query, convincing arguments are made about the connection between VAW and women’s engagement in political processes. The link between VAW and women’s under-representation in politics is ...» more

Women’s Participation in Elections in Afghanistan

Helpdesk Report
  • Emma Broadbent
December 2010

This review attempts to synthesise the available literature addressing women’s election participation in Afghanistan, spanning a period of 6 years. Press coverage around the recent presidential elections in Afghanistan emphasised the low turnout of women voters, the perceived lack of security at voting stations, and election fraud. However, things are clearly changing in ...» more

Climate Change, Empowerment and Accountability

Helpdesk Report
  • Andrew McDevitt
December 2010

This helpdesk research looks at how climate change policies and programmes (particularly for adaptation) can best respond to the needs of the most vulnerable. The general consensus appears to be that this requires a combination of greater investment in community-based adaptation, more decentralised planning and stronger mechanisms to link community-level decision-making with ...» more

Global Drivers of Conflict and Instability

Helpdesk Report
  • Emma Broadbent
December 2010

The security-development discourse combines a concern with poverty and economic growth with that of national, regional and global security. It incorporates country-level analyses within a broader framework of transnational issues that impact on conflict dynamics. Issues of poverty and inequality reflect power relations framed by international forces. It is generally thought ...» more

Donor Experience Working with Traditional and Religious Institutions

Helpdesk Report
  • Sumedh Rao
December 2010

Donor experience with traditional and religious institutions is poorly documented. Donors generally seem reluctant to engage directly with religious institutions, with the notable exception of USAID. Where donors do work with traditional and religious institutions this tends to be through local or international NGOs. When working on women’s issues in an Islamic context this is ...» more

Political Economy and Governance in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

Helpdesk Report
  • Huma Haider
December 2010

This report is based on some of the recent literature on governance and political economy in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It should be read in conjunction with the helpdesk research report on ‘New Literature on Conflict in the DRC’, which includes a section on political issues. The report outlines the following key governance and political economy issues discussed in ...» more

Gender Equality in Fragile States

Helpdesk Report
  • Huma Haider
November 2010

To date, the debate on state fragility has failed to take into account gender dimensions; and policy-makers have often ignored issues of gender in state-building approaches and interventions. The vast majority of the literature on gender and state-building is critical of donor approaches and interventions. Gender is typically seen as a luxury that should be left aside until the ...» more

Access to Economic Opportunities and Changes in Power Relations

Helpdesk Report
  • Emma Broadbent
November 2010

The range of interventions relevant to this question is extremely broad, and this review therefore presents a limited number of examples in the following areas: microfinance, cash transfers, technology and skills development, labour market interventions, and land and inheritance rights. Research into the impacts of interventions aimed at increasing access to economic ...» more

Mapping of Organisations Countering Trafficking

Helpdesk Report
  • Huma Haider
October 2010

The United Nations definition of human trafficking is: ‘the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a ...» more

Social Protection and Access to Education

Helpdesk Report
  • Huma Haider
September 2010

Financial barriers can greatly limit access to education for the poor. The key financial burdens of schooling are direct costs (school fees), indirect costs (uniforms, stationary, other learning materials and transportation) and opportunity costs (time for household tasks and foregone wage labour). Macro-level barriers in situations of conflict and fragility (lack of ...» more

Political and social analysis for development policy and practice: An overview of five approaches

Literature Review
  • Huma Haider; Sumedh Rao
September 2010

Political economy (PE) analysis is concerned with the interaction of political and economic processes in a society: the distribution of power and wealth between different groups and individuals, and the processes that create, sustain and transform these relationships over time. PE analysis elucidates how power and resources are distributed and contested in different ...» more

Youth, armed violence and job creation programmes

Literature Review
  • Oliver Walton
September 2010

In response to growing evidence from the social science literature about the links between youth unemployment and armed conflict, donors have increasingly used youth job creation programmes as a tool with which to address armed violence. Many donors now identify addressing youth unemployment as an urgent priority, both in the field of peacebuilding and in efforts to foster ...» more

Measuring Women’s Economic Empowerment

Helpdesk Report
  • Andrew McDevitt
August 2010

There is no standard definition of women’s economic empowerment and the term is often used loosely. From the literature reviewed for this report, it would appear that the majority of efforts to measure women’s economic empowerment programmes focus primarily on quantitative outcomes - such as increased access to credit or increased revenue - even where the stated objectives ...» more

Financing and Cost-effectiveness of Cash Transfer Schemes

Helpdesk Report
  • Brian Lucas
August 2010

There is widespread agreement in the literature that cash transfers are effective in achieving a range of development objectives and that fears of creating dependency or enabling misuse of funds by recipients are groundless. While there are many impact evaluations of cash transfer programmes, there is very little hard data on cost-effectiveness, particularly compared with ...» more

Land and Property Rights Interventions

Helpdesk Report
  • Emma Broadbent
July 2010

The literature here provides a guide to existing concerns and approaches to the promotion of pro-poor outcomes through land and property rights. Generally, there is increasing emphasis on both the impacts upon women and the need for interventions to be designed and implemented with gender sensitivity. There is also a strong emphasis on the need to locate land and property ...» more

Women’s Education, Conflict and Stability

Helpdesk Report
  • Shivit Bakrania
April 2010

There are very few studies which provide empirical support to the view that cultures where women are politically, socially and economically repressed are more prone to violent conflict and instability. Furthermore, evidence for a direct relationship between the level of educational attainment amongst women and girls and the degree of fragility or stability is scarce and no ...» more

Inclusive Growth

Helpdesk Report
  • Huma Haider
April 2010

Various barriers and constraints to poor people’s participation in growth are identified in the literature. These include:GeographyLimited investment in human capitalPoor healthLimited assets and access to creditEconomic insecuritySome of the literature argues that facilitating access of the poor to growth is insufficient to obtain inclusive growth; attention must also be paid ...» more

Promoting the Economic Participation of Women

Helpdesk Report
  • Emma Broadbent
April 2010

Facilitating the participation of women in economic life is seen to provide financial gain at both household and national level, as well as having long-term impacts upon poverty reduction through creating changes in the intergenerational transmission of poverty processes. However, enabling women to participate in economic life is subject to both formal and informal constraints: ...» more

Gender and Conflict Assessments

Helpdesk Report
  • Emma Broadbent
April 2010

Guidance for carrying out gender and conflict assessments is not well-developed; conflict assessments and gender assessments exist as separate types of analytical documents but there are comparatively few examples of gender and conflict assessments, and no established methodologies for doing them. Guidance for undertaking such assessments is drawn from three broad sources: a) ...» more

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