180,777 research outputs found

    Solutions for the Poorest: Insights on Savings Behavior of Clients

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    The Livelihood Pathways for the Poorest project, implemented in Gaya District, Bihar, India, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, aimed to demonstrate a model that could help the ultra-poor escape poverty through the provision of integrated financial, livelihood and risk management services. Savings mobilization formed the core of the project and anchored crucial activities, such as linkages with formal financial institutions and the introduction of income generating activities.Grappling with poverty at its harshest these clients are willing to set aside a tiny portion of an already low and unstable income for future consumption. What made them willing to save, what determined the amount they saved and what drove this need to save? Do they save in lump-sums and how regularly? How likely are they to save? These and more questions drove the quest to decode the savings behavior of the ultra-poor in Gaya.The poor need access to financial services to create diversified and reliable sources of livelihood, which help them move out of poverty. Microfinance, which provides essential financial services to the poor around the world, however, has found it difficult to reach out to the poorest, who live on less than US $1.25 per day. The Livelihood Pathways for the Poorest project, which is jointly implemented in Gaya District, Bihar, India, by the Grameen Foundation and the Livelihood School (part of BASIX group of companies), aimed to demonstrate a model that could potentially fill this gap in service provision to the ultra-poor. The project employed a holistic approach to address the needs of the ultra-poor by providing integrated financial, livelihood development and risk management services. It used action research to test the hypothesis that it could be financially viable for a microfinance institution to cater to the economic needs of the very poor along with their other target clients. The project also sought to determine that even the poorest could effectively use microfinance services (savings and loans) if they are provided in combination with additional services, such as insurance, livelihood development and mentoring, particularly if the products are structured to align with clients' livelihood patterns

    Barcoding and ILS Migration from Start to Finish: A Case Study

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    This practice-oriented article outlines one institution’s process of implementing both electronic checkout and a new integrated library system (ILS) for an academic library of 187,000 physical items. Special attention is given to the need for background research, administrative buy-in, and project management. Lessons learned and recommendations conclude the article

    Embodying feminist research: learning from action research, political practices, diffractions and collective knowledge.

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    In the past three decades, feminists and critical theorists have discussed and argued the importance of deconstructing and problematizing social science research methodology in order to question normalized hierarchies concerning the production of knowledge and the status of truth claims. Nevertheless, often, these ideas have basically remained theoretical propositions not embodied in research practices. In fact there is very little published discussion about the difficulties and limits of their practical application. In this paper we introduce some interconnected reflections starting from two different but related experiences of embodying 'feminist activist research'. Our aim is to emphasise the importance of attending to process, making mistakes and learning during fieldwork, as well as experimenting with personalized forms of analysis, such as the construction of narratives and the story-telling process

    Media, Public Storytelling and Social Justice: An Introduction to FOMACS, Forum on Migration and Communications

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    This case study, commissioned by Atlantic Philanthropies, presents snapshots of projects demonstrating how The Forum on Migration and Communications (FOMACS) strengthens the voices of migrants and NGOs who work in the migrant sector by using collaboration, creative arts, digital media and storytelling as catalysts for social change, advocacy and educational transformation

    Creative State: Forty Years of Migration and Development Policy in Morocco and Mexico

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    {Excerpt} This book tells the political story of how migrants from Morocco and Mexico changed the communities they left, and how their initiatives, small and bold, would ultimately transform the nations from which they had emigrated. Accounts of the ways migrants have changed their communities of origin for the better have become widespread; in their most celebratory versions, migrants\u27 philanthropic efforts at community development offer reassuring confirmation that small is indeed beautiful and that economic change can occur far outside the reach of the state. These laudatory portrayals omit a central protagonist. They minimize, when not completely obscuring, the role of governments in shaping the impact that migrants\u27 efforts to improve the lives of their families have on their communities and, more broadly, on their nation. However, the clinic in the mountain village in Morocco was not built nor was the road between the isolated Mexican town and the modern hospital paved without government support. In both cases, government policies mediated migrant investment in their communities of origin. In Morocco, government guidelines for medical equipment and the nursing staff the government provided turned the small concrete room into a working health center. In Mexico, municipal officials with maps of the potential roads in hand sought out migrants and asked them to raise funds for the project, with the promise that any road paved with migrant dollars would serve as a permanent symbol of their strong commitment to their communities, despite the border that kept them far from home. This book rehabilitates the place of the state in the narrative about the relationship between migration and development. It argues that the impact that migrants had on the welfare of their communities and countries of origin grew directly out of their involvement with the very governments that had—discreetly in the case of Mexico, enthusiastically in that of Morocco—encouraged their departure while actively neglecting the development of the areas they came from

    Co-constructing a new framework for evaluating social innovation in marginalized rural areas

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    The EU funded H2020 project \u2018Social Innovation in Marginalised Rural Areas\u2019 (SIMRA; www.simra-h2020.eu) has the overall objective of advancing the state-of-the-art in social innovation. This paper outlines the process for co- developing an evaluation framework with stakeholders, drawn from across Europe and the Mediterranean area, in the fields of agriculture, forestry and rural development. Preliminary results show the importance of integrating process and outcome-oriented evaluations, and implementing participatory approaches in evaluation practice. They also raise critical issues related to the comparability of primary data in diverse regional contexts and highlight the need for mixed methods approaches in evaluation

    Resilience, moorings and international student mobilities - exploring biographical narratives of social science students in the UK

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    Whilst research into the changing landscape of the UK Higher Education (HE) has produced a burgeoning literature on ‘internationalisation’ and ‘transnational student mobility’ over the past few years, still fairly little is known about international students’ experiences on their way to and through the UK higher and further education. Frequently approaching inter- and transnational education as ‘neutral’ by-products of neoliberal globalisation, elitism and power flows, much HE policy and scholarly debate tend to operate with simplistic classifications of ‘international students’ and therefore fail to account for the multifaceted nature of students’ aspirations, mobilities and life experiences. Drawing on the notion of ‘resilience’ and insights from the ‘new mobilities paradigm’, this paper envisages alternative student mobilities which run parallel or counter to the dominant flows of power, financial and human capital commonly associated with an emerging global knowledge economy. Engaging with ‘resilient’ biographies of social science students studying at three UK HE institutions, the paper challenges narrow student classification regimes and calls for a critical re-evaluation of the relationship between international student mobility and other contemporary forms of migration, displacement and diaspora

    The Broken Village: Coffee, Migration, and Globalization in Honduras

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    [Excerpt] This book describes how people cope with rapid social change. It tells the story of the small town of La Quebrada, Honduras, which, over a five-year period from 2001-2006, transformed from a relatively isolated community of small-scale coffee farmers into a hotbed of migration from Honduras to the United States and back.1 During this time, the everyday lives of people in La Quebrada became connected to the global economy in a manner that was far different, and far more intimate, than anything they had experienced in the past. Townspeople did not generally view this transformation as a positive step toward progress or development. They saw migration as a temporary response to economic crisis, even as it became an ever more inescapable part of their livelihood. The chapters that follow trace the effects of migration across various domains of local life — including politics, religion, and family dynamics — describing how individuals in one community adapt to economic change. This is not a story about an egalitarian little Eden being corrupted by the forces of capitalist modernization. La Quebrada\u27s residents have lived with social inequality, violence, political conflict, and economic instability for generations. As coffee farmers, their fortunes have long been tied to the vicissitudes of global markets. However, the social changes wrought by migration presented qualitatively new challenges, as a functioning local economy became dependent on migrants working in distant places such as Long Island and South Dakota who lived in ways that most people in La Quebrada struggled to comprehend or explain. The new reality of migration created a sense of confusion that was especially strong in the early stages of La Quebrada\u27s migration boom, when communication between villagers and migrants was rare. The decline of coffee markets and the rise of the migration economy happened so quickly and chaotically that people struggled to understand, evaluate, and give meaning to the changes they wereexperiencing. Therefore, migration was experienced as sociocultural disintegration in 2003-2005, when the bulk of the research for this study was conducted
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