Strengthening Managing for Impact in Eastern and Southern Africa : Grant Completion Report

The Strengthening Managing for Impact Programme (SMIP) was a pilot initiative established to test the extent to which the use of the Managing for Impact (M4I) approach could enhance the impact of pro-poor interventions for greater development effectiveness. This programme was implemented in the Eastern and Southern Africa region (including French speaking countries) from 2006 till the end of 2009 and was largely funded by IFAD. A partnership was developed between Wageningen UR Centre for Development Innovation (formerly part of Wageningen International), Khanya6aicdd, IFPRI6IKCD (formerly IFPRI/ISNAR) and Haramaya University (in a joint partnership ‘Carmpolea’); and the Impact Alliance

Information about bank intangibles, analyst information intermediation, and the role of knowledge and social forces in the ‘market for information’

Although developments in the sell-side analyst literature have revealed the role of intellectual capital (IC) in analysts’ work, the whole information intermediation progress of IC remains a “black box”. This paper develops an analyst information intermediation model, illustrating how ‘soft’ information changes through analyst acquisition, processing and disclosure of information. Bourdieu’s ideas of habitus, field and capital are used to develop our explanation of the analyst information intermediation model. We argue that the combination of empirical evidence and theoretical explanation provides a new and more comprehensive way to improve understanding of the role of analysts within knowledge and social contexts

Employment Sector Working Paper No. 3, Recognizing ability: The skills and productivity of persons with disabilities, Literature Review.

The ILO will increase its efforts to advocate access to adequate skills development opportunities for disabled persons, in the coming years, as part of the process of implementing these international standards. To provide a solid knowledge base for these activities, a literature review of skills development initiatives targeting persons with disabilities was commissioned, focusing in particular on the contribution of skills development to enhancing the productivity of disabled persons. It is hoped that the review will contribute to opening opportunities for disabled persons to acquire skills which will lead them to obtaining and keeping decent work. Tony Powers of Powers and Associates (Australia) was the author of this working paper. The research was guided by Barbara Murray, Senior Specialist on Disability, Jo-Ann Bakker edited and prepared the manuscript for publication. The research was conducted as part of the preparation of the report for the General Discussion on Skills for improved productivity, employment growth and development at the 97th session of the International Labour Conference (2008). This working paper reviews the available evidence connecting the employment and economic status of disabled persons with their skills and productivity. It examines skills development strategies and their effect on employment, income-generation and productivity in both the formal and informal sectors in developed and developing countries. It also considers the impact of policies and practices designed to assist disabled people to achieve their productivity potential at work, including workplace accommodations and teleworking. It includes a number of illustrative case studies. It concludes with key policy messages which emerge from the literature review

Generación de riqueza en el tercer mundo a través de la formación financiera en el entorno de los microcréditos

Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, leída el 09-12-2021Global poverty and its relationship with financial inclusion and financial education provide the motivation for this research. Although extreme poverty has been declining for nearly 25 years, the World Bank estimates that there are still more than 800 million people that subsist on less than US 90 a day. Most of these individuals are unbanked and relay on local informal economies. Financial inclusion has been broadly recognized critical in alleviating poverty and achieving inclusive economic growth. Access to financial services is referred in at least five of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations 2030 Agenda. Undeniably there is a close relationship between economic development and financial inclusion, however recent research suggests that having an account does not necessarily imply better financial health. Although much economic and financial literature has highlighted the importance of microfinance as a factor in development, there is also an intense debate about its effectiveness as a development tool. Some researchers even suggest that microcredit can have a negative impact on the most vulnerable...La pobreza global y su relación con la inclusión financiera y la educación financiera son la motivación de esta investigación. Aunque la pobreza extrema ha ido disminuyendo durante los últimos 25 años, el Banco Mundial estima que todavía hay más de 800 millones de personas que subsisten con menos de 1,90 dólares al día. La mayoría de estas personas no están bancarizadas y dependen de la economía informal. Es ampliamente reconocido que la inclusión financiera es fundamental para aliviar la pobreza y lograr un crecimiento económico sostenible, como demuestra que el acceso a los servicios financieros está presente en al menos5 de los 17 Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS) establecidos por la Agenda 2030 de las Naciones Unidas. Aunque gran parte de la literatura económica y financiera ha destacado la importancia de las microfinanzas como factor de desarrollo, también existe un intenso debate sobre su eficacia. Investigaciones recientes apuntan que tener una cuenta bancaria no implica necesariamente una mejor salud financiera e incluso sugieren que puede tener un impacto negativo en los más vulnerables...Fac. de Ciencias Económicas y EmpresarialesTRUEunpu

Harnessing the power of unified metadata in an ontology repository: The case of AgroPortal

As any resources, ontologies, thesaurus, vocabularies and terminologies need to be described with relevant metadata to facilitate their identification, selection and reuse. For ontologies to be FAIR, there is a need for metadata authoring guidelines and for harmonization of existing metadata vocabularies—taken independently none of them can completely describe an ontology. Ontology libraries and repositories also have to play an important role. Indeed, some metadata properties are intrinsic to the ontology (name, license, description); other information, such as community feedbacks or relations to other ontologies are typically information that an ontology library shall capture, populate and consolidate to facilitate the processes of identifying and selecting the right ontology(ies) to use. We have studied ontology metadata practices by: (1) analyzing metadata annotations of 805 ontologies; (2) reviewing the most standard and relevant vocabularies (23 totals) currently available to describe metadata for ontologies (such as Dublin Core, Ontology Metadata Vocabulary, VoID, etc.); (3) comparing different metadata implementation in multiple ontology libraries or repositories. We have then built a new metadata model for our AgroPortal vocabulary and ontology repository, a platform dedicated to agronomy based on the NCBO BioPortal technology. AgroPortal now recognizes 346 properties from existing metadata vocabularies that could be used to describe different aspects of ontologies: intrinsic descriptions, people, date, relations, content, metrics, community, administration, and access. We use them to populate an internal model of 127 properties implemented in the portal and harmonized for all the ontologies. We—and AgroPortal's users—have spent a significant amount of time to edit and curate the metadata of the ontologies to offer a better synthetized and harmonized information and enable new ontology identification features. Our goal was also to facilitate the comprehension of the agronomical ontology landscape by displaying diagrams and charts about all the ontologies on the portal. We have evaluated our work with a user appreciation survey which confirms the new features are indeed relevant and helpful to ease the processes of identification and selection of ontologies. This paper presents how to harness the potential of a complete and unified metadata model with dedicated features in an ontology repository; however, the new AgroPortal's model is not a new vocabulary as it relies on preexisting ones. A generalization of this work is studied in a community-driven standardization effort in the context of the RDA Vocabulary and Semantic Services Interest Group