Gender Equality Results Case Study - Nepal: Community-Based Water Supply and Sanitation Sector Project

Development Aims and Impacts. The Community-Based Water Supply and Sanitation Sector Project aimed at expanding the coverage of improved water supply and sanitation facilities to poor and remote areas, and improving health and hygiene practices related to waterborne and sanitation- related diseases. Key project results were (i) water supply services provided to 90,397 households, covering 716,542 people; (ii) water supply coverage increased from 72% (2002) to 89% (2010) with marked decrease in the time spent by women and girls in transporting water; (iii) latrines constructed in 44,768 households, of which 8,909 were in ultrapoor households and 354 were school latrines—contributed to the safety of women and girls; (iv) sanitation coverage among the rural population increased from 20% (2002) to 33.5% (2010); and (v) a total of 690 water users’ committees were formed with 52% of women members—Dalits and ethnic minorities— represented almost proportionately to their percentage in the general population. The participation of women in decision making in water users’ committees contributed to the sustainability of the water systems and changed the status of women in communities. ADB Processes and Management Tools. A specific project component addressed gender and social inclusion objectives. Also, gender, caste, and ethnicity considerations were incorporated into all other project components, and corresponding strategy was developed. This strategy was based on earlier evaluations and policy dialogues with local authorities that noted the need for specific measures to address gender and other inequalities. Gender and social development specialists were included in the project team—at both central and regional levels. These specialists also participated in the monitoring and evaluation team, strengthening attention to gender, caste, and ethnicity issues. Specific participation targets were set at the outset. Sex- and caste-disaggregated data were collected, analyzed, and included in the project performance management system

Performance of Build-operate-Transfer Projects: Risks' cost implications from professionals and concessionaires perspective

Determining cost implication of risk factors on performance of Build Operate Transfer (BOT) projects is a major focus of this study. One-hundred and seventeen structured questionnaires were used to collect information randomly from the respondents which made up of professionals such as Builder, Architect, Quantity surveyor and Civil engineer. Content analysis was carried out on the responses for validation; data were further analyzed with Mean Item Score using Risk Mean Index and validated with regression analysis. Meanwhile, the most common risk to all the projects executed are inflation, variation to works, change in government policy and fluctuating nature of foreign exchange with inflation being the highest on rating scale of 0.1 to 1.0 with corresponding cost implications and years. Against the background of the research outcome therefore, cost and time is used in this context as a model typifying the extent of risk implication experienced on the projects

On the tailoring of CAST-32A certification guidance to real COTS multicore architectures

The use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) multicores in real-time industry is on the rise due to multicores' potential performance increase and energy reduction. Yet, the unpredictable impact on timing of contention in shared hardware resources challenges certification. Furthermore, most safety certification standards target single-core architectures and do not provide explicit guidance for multicore processors. Recently, however, CAST-32A has been presented providing guidance for software planning, development and verification in multicores. In this paper, from a theoretical level, we provide a detailed review of CAST-32A objectives and the difficulty of reaching them under current COTS multicore design trends; at experimental level, we assess the difficulties of the application of CAST-32A to a real multicore processor, the NXP P4080.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under grant TIN2015-65316-P and the HiPEAC Network of Excellence. Jaume Abella has been partially supported by the MINECO under Ramon y Cajal grant RYC-2013-14717.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft