Using data from a recent ethnographic research project on microcredit, power, and poverty in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, this article demonstrates that the relationship of women with both NGOs and male relatives is one of dependency and subordination. Gendered power relations, embedded in NGO practices and socio-cultural gender norms, influence the female borrowers to accept the domination of the fieldworkers and their male relatives. This article examines how and why NGOs create power inequalities between fieldworkers and female borrowers, why the fieldworkers dominate a group of women, and why these women continue to participate in microcredit programmes.

Remitting outweighs foreign aid by a rate of more than eight times, resulting in a skewed perception of the Haitian economy and consequent hindrance to development. Endowing Haitian state institutions and civil society by strengthening the potential role of migrants’ remittances in regional socio-economic reconstruction could prevent some of the mistakes uncovered in previous development policies from recurring in current nation-building initiatives. The funding gap of the United Nations’ short term funded projects could be bridged with a long term commitment of a new migrant class of investors to finance productive projects and endow regional participatory institutions.

NGOs receive praise and criticism for their international development efforts, but more work is needed to measure their contributions. This article lays out the contributions of local NGOs to HIV-prevention efforts. It draws on data from a survey of young people's experiences with NGOs to demonstrate the reach of several local HIV-prevention NGOs in Nairobi, Kenya. It argues that even small NGOs are capable of making measurable contributions to development in their fields. It also shows how factors such as education levels, religiosity, and discussions about HIV/AIDS can support NGO efforts by encouraging youth to participate in HIV-prevention programming.

This paper summarises pilot work by Irise International to develop an acceptable and replicable solution to menstrual hygiene management (MHM) in East Africa based around the manufacture of a reusable pad. The paper presents a theoretical justification for the approach and the results of pilot work used to develop it, including baseline menstrual hygiene practices and their relationship to school absenteeism in schoolgirls in western Kenya, the short-term impact of training girls to make a reusable product on school absenteeism using a partial preference, parallel group randomised control trial, and an assessment of the acceptability of the approach.

Community-based entrepreneurship projects have been advocated as a potential approach to alleviate extreme poverty as they provide opportunities for income generation and capacity enhancement. This practical note provides an overview of the PRODECO project undertaken jointly by the Paraguayan government and the World Bank (1999–2008) in three southern departments of Paraguay (Itapúa, Misiones, and Ñeembucú). It describes and analyses the context, scope, operations, and results of this project, and identifies five main lessons related to frequent challenges faced by this approach; on size, access to skills, distance from government agencies, pace, and technology.

Grounded within the substantive conception of ableism (Wolbring 2008), this article explores the prejudices and discriminations that arise out of many different forms of ableism: of bodily abilities/disabilities, gender, social structure, and economic organisation. It illustrates the processes and outcomes of ableisms deployed on the shop-floor of a multiple-award winning small-scale manufacturing unit in India. By employing a number of persons with disabilities, single women, and widows, and with plans for engaging juvenile delinquents in the near future, the manufacturing unit has seemingly created opportunities for “empowerment” of those subjected to discrimination. However, the outcomes are not necessarily so.

Gender and Development (GAD) theory has been enthusiastically embraced by all leading official donor agencies as the basis for initiating women's development initiatives in developing countries of the South. Based on a field survey of women's development initiatives in Sri Lanka, this paper shows the difficulties encountered by aid-dependent developing countries in the South in using the concept “gender”, as defined in the GAD theory, in their women's development activities, especially at the local community level.

This paper examines the social and gender politics of a women's urban garden project supported by the International Organisation of Migration, in Cap Haitien, Haiti. My study highlights how the development process created an unmonitored symbolic space where society's normalised gender processes reproduced broader social inequalities, which, in turn, prevented the project from meeting the women's practical and strategic goals. Then, I discuss how the ecohealth approach, as an alternative design framework, could make symbolic space visible to be critically engaged and analysed by participants, to account for gender process, and create an emancipatory activity.

This article presents findings on observed productivity constraints of handicraft firms in Nairobi, Kenya. The goal is to help NGOs, intergovernmental organisations, and national governments in their efforts to foster local handicraft industries in Africa and beyond. One-hundred and two respondents were interviewed about their business, cost structure, hiring practices, and other intra-industry relationships. This article points out a number of practical problems hindering productivity and limiting livelihoods, including problematic labour practices, conditions of adverse selection, the context of proprietary information in small scale manufacturing, and the tendency of the industry toward hypercompetition.