This article explores three NGO projects that assemble and distribute clean birthing kits in Ethiopia. It contrasts the government's health strategy that aims to increase skilled birth attendance, with local realities as most women in rural and remote settings give birth at home, often in unhygienic conditions, and without skilled assistance. Many health facilities are also unable to provide hygienic conditions for birthing women. The findings indicate that clean birth kits have assisted the NGOs to effectively promote clean delivery at home or in health facilities, and to encourage antenatal care, and early referral to emergency obstetric and new-born care.

Through an anthropological lens, using examples from working in an international NGO, I explore how and why a group of development workers navigated the coercive practices of aid in ways that benefitted their partners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Rather than seeking conspiracies to explain the gaps between development rhetoric and practices, I suggest that people both contest and collude with bureaucratic systems of rule. Youth Rights reformed various rituals and created different management practices internally, as well as maintaining its long-established solidarity approach with partners, but only managed to challenge the donors’ controls to a limited extent.

Extremely weak R&D has a negative impact on growth and development in Arab countries. Developing a better R&D strategy could enhance capacity and effectiveness of R&D. The failure of the previously developed strategies in Arab countries was due to lack of vision, incorrect identification of R&D priorities, and disregard consulting stakeholders. This article discusses the challenges of developing R&D national strategies in Arab countries including identifying R&D priorities, managing stakeholders, assessing the current situation of R&D, and defining objectives of the strategies.

This article is based on a field study carried out in Indian-administered Kashmir after the 2005 earthquake. In this analysis of how non-governmental development organisations (NGDOs) engage and coordinate with one another and with other disaster response agencies during post-disaster relief and rehabilitation operations, it can be concluded that NGDO coordination was ineffective. The research points out that, even though there is coordination among the international and national NGDOs, local NGDOs are seldom engaged in the overall coordination processes. The paper advocates developing coordination among the humanitarian agencies as a pre-disaster initiative for a more effective collaborative humanitarian disaster response.

Most African states like The Gambia use European languages for state activities and formal education. Africa has been a global pilot site for “transplanted” development initiatives with apparently consistent outcomes: failure, medium triumph, or unsustainable “success stories”. Its natural resources have been fully exploited, perhaps at the expense of resources like mother-tongue languages. Sidelining mother-tongue languages as the medium for the translation of the voice of the state, explains the gap in cultural relevance of many borrowed development initiatives, but also the neglect of workable endogenous practices. Africa must look inwards and exploit its indigenous language assets to benefit sustained development.

In South Africa, local economic development has become the focus to overcome obstacles such as low skills, low entrepreneurial culture, weak support mechanisms, and spatial marginalisation, which lead to high unemployment and poverty. With conventional approaches having little effect, local communities are looking for innovative approaches to their economic challenges. PACA methodology prepares an action-oriented diagnostic of the local economy to initiate economic development initiatives. It mobilises local stakeholders to take an active role through fast analysis and action learning. This article assesses how the PACA approach implemented by George Municipality was applied, and what advantages and limitations were experienced.

Contemporary development issues are not new. All groups of people, based on their worldviews and contexts, found ways of addressing these societal problems. By their nature, solutions were relevant, legitimate, and sustainable in their contexts. A prerequisite for effective development practice is to understand and respect the roots of African culture. There needs to be a “rootedness” to change and development. Exogenous ideas and practices of potential benefit to Africa must build from the inside out, not outside-in, as an imposition. This article illustrates how African societies have viewed and dealt with these socio-political issues from within.

Policies developed at national levels can be unresponsive to local needs. Often they do not provide the rural poor with access to the assets and services they need to allow them to innovate and adapt to the ways that increased climate variability and change exacerbate challenges to basic securities – food, water, energy, and well-being. In development deficit circumstances, common pool resources are important for climate adaptation purposes. In order for climate adaptation actions to deliver resilience, local perspectives and knowledge need to be recognised and given due priority in formal planning systems. Basing formal adaptive development planning on local strategies can support and strengthen measures that people have been tested and know to work. Local climate adaptation through collective action can address current increases in climate variability, future incremental changes, and the need to transform existing systems to deal with qualitative shifts in climate. These types of adaptation can work in cumulative ways. The results of local adaptation collective action that have benefits of low rivalry between users while being highly inclusive can be considered “local public goods”. Evidence is beginning to emerge that when local governance systems facilitate high levels of participation in planning collective action for climate adaptation, and direct access to resources for implementing local plans, “local public goods” can be created and common pool resources better managed.

Agricultural innovations are increasingly emerging from African research scientists. This paper looks at an innovation developed by animal scientists at the University of Agriculture Abeokuta in Nigeria. They identified a method for drying cassava peels, which creates an income source for rural women, reduces environmental waste, and raises the income of goat herders by transforming the cassava waste into animal feed. Initially funded by a World Bank grant, this paper addresses the challenges of securing donor funding for local innovations and presents an argument for a new model of development that supports locally driven solutions to current development issues.

More than 50 years after independence Africa is yet to move from colonial to post-colonial identity – and to entitlement to determining its own destiny. Increasingly, however, African development thinkers and practitioners are questioning the dominance of externally driven, mostly Western models of development, which they believe have done little to date toward bringing about self-reliant sustainable development. We have observed successful patterns of endogenously led development in East Asia and Brazil. In Africa the papers included here suggest emerging new patterns of local leadership and of resurrecting and renewing cultural and traditional strengths to support modern development. Endogenous development, while a sometimes awkward term, is a concept increasingly informing practice.