While Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) is a relative success in a growing number of countries, there are also difficulties in assuring all community members can build and use toilets. This paper draws on experiences of IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre and its partners in strengthening inclusiveness and sustainability in CLTS interventions. It presents practical measures to strengthen gender and poverty equity, community-based monitoring and capacity development for community institutions and the local private sector.

This paper explores how an ostensibly child-centred system can fail to protect children. In some policy arenas, the Kenyan state is recognised as a leader in Africa for the care and protection of children at risk. Yet a case study of children's experiences illuminates how, despite adherence to a legislated framework and series of protocols, the Kenyan state proves unable or unwilling to ensure children's care and protection. The deployment of child-focused discourse and practice through bureaucratic documentation and judicial rulings camouflages (poorly) the state's neglect of children's perspectives and the fundamental risks to children, families, and communities.

This paper discusses protection of children from hazards in agricultural work. International and national policies aim to protect children by eliminating all child labour. Previous literature on hazardous child labour tends to focus on single industries or crops, overlooking the variety of activities that children undertake in subsistence farming. We analyse survey and qualitative data from children, and present rates of work, injuries experienced, how children deal with risks, and perceived benefits of work. The most effective form of prevention may be to build on existing knowledge and experience, working with communities to develop strategies to make work safer.

Many reintegration programmes focus on ex-combatants rather than communities, and this limited focus has created divisions among community members and strained reintegration processes in many post-war environments. In view of this limited approach to reintegration, more and more academics and practitioners are arguing for a community-based (CB) approach as a way of addressing resentment among community members for more effective peace-building. But how can CB integration programmes be planned and implemented in post-war environments? These recommendations are based on empirical research in Sierra Leone, which explores how community-based reintegration programmes can facilitate more effective peace-building.

Development investigations focus on synergies of institutional cultures for policy and practice. International non-governmental organisations (INGOs) currently enjoy a privileged position as harbingers of world culture unity. While there is contestation on INGOs as monolithic entities, few studies delve into the voices of actors within INGOs to provide for a more pluralistic perspective. This paper separates the actors from their institution by examining their different socio-cultural takes that drive them. This emphasises that as projects and visions come and go, institutional actors draw on their own philosophy that does not necessarily mirror their institution's stance. Here, the focus is on one of the most important current development initiatives – microfinance – revealing individual understandings of what is sustainability, the role of external actors, indicators of success, exit strategies, and ethical action. In spite of situating this in the microfinance area, what is revealed is that actors are motivated by their own constructed ideology, often alluding peripherally to the specifics of microfinance. This opens another avenue of enquiry as to why organisational ideologies and popular development visions such as microfinance take on such diversity of forms and outcomes. Contrary to the world culture unity model, such communication disjunctures can be useful in understanding diverse development outcomes.

Post-tsunami rehabilitation and reconstruction activities in Aceh have been criticised as focussing on vertical reporting at the expense of lateral coordination, leading in some cases to ‘overlaps and redundancies, mis-targeting and hastily planned and implemented programs’. Our experience is that effective coordination between implementing agencies, linked to appropriate Indonesian government agencies, can effectively improve the delivery of services, in this case to coastal aquaculture farmers in Aceh. Most importantly, in an environment where numerous agencies are undertaking rehabilitation activities across a broad geographic area, this approach enables the provision of a consistent and standardised technical message to farmers.

This paper compares the economic effects of two organisational forms of the coffee supply chain (cooperative and private processors) in Rwanda and assesses quantitatively which form has benefited producers the most. The paper uses panel data from 148 coffee-producing households. Results based on a combination of the instrumental variable method and first differencing show that there is no indication that farmers who sell to cooperative factories get more benefits than farmers selling to private processing plants.

‘Faith-based organisations’ (FBOs) are gaining increasing attention within development circles – amongst practitioners, funders, and policymakers as well as academics. While some discussion has taken place over the meaning of the term ‘FBO’ in academic circles, little empirical research has been conducted as to the relevance and interpretation of the term in different contexts and what role religion plays within organisations engaged in development-related activities. This paper contributes to this discussion by comparing a range of organisations engaged in charitable and development-related activities in the city of Karachi and elsewhere in the province of Sindh, Pakistan. The findings reveal a broad distinction between local charities, which depend on individual donations for their funding, and for which religious values and beliefs are intertwined to differing degrees in their work, and professional development organisations, which rely on domestic and international institutional funding and have no apparent relationship with religion. However, not all organisations fit neatly into these two categories, demonstrating that religion operates in complex and varied ways within organisations engaged in development-related activities in Pakistan.

This paper critically examines policy in Benin against child trafficking. Drawing on interviews and participant observation with adolescent labour migrants and their communities, it problematises both the assumptions underpinning anti-trafficking policy and the appropriateness of the initiatives that comprise it. It suggests that, in order truly to protect the young labour migrants defined as trafficked, the policymaking establishment needs to focus more closely on the structural economic underpinnings of migration and exploitation, and to adopt a more participatory approach to policymaking.