Social Safety Nets for Food and Nutritional Security in India

This paper brings together existing literature on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNRGEA) and the Public Distribution System (PDS) in India, offering a narrative review of the evidence on impacts on food security, health and nutrition of beneficiaries. Both programs operate on a large scale and have the capacity to impact the factors leading to undernutrition. It is evident that despite the deficiencies in implementation, both the MGNREGA and the PDS are inclusive and reach the poor and the marginalized who are likely to also experience greater undernutrition and poor health. Data challenges have however prevented researchers from conducting studies that assess the ultimate impact of these two large-scale programs on health and nutrition. The evidence that exists suggests largely positive impacts indicating a clear potential to make these programs more nutrition sensitive not just by incorporating elements that would explicitly address nutritional concerns but also by directing specific attention to innovations that strengthen critical complementarities and synergies that exist between the two programs

How water users operate policy: the case of pump communities in the Kassena-Nankana district of Ghana

No Abstract. Ghana Journal of Development Studies Vol. 5 (1) 2008: pp. 58-7

Water storage: a contribution to climate change adaptation in Africa

Water storage can help to safeguard livelihoods and reduce rural poverty. However, ill-conceived water storage will fail to deliver intended benefits and, in some cases, may worsen the negative impacts of climate change. More systematic planning is required to ensure suitable storage systems that support development targets, as an international research project demonstrates

A comparative socio-economic analysis of water storage schemes in Sub-Saharan Africa

Paper presented at the 2nd International Comparative Water Studies Workshop, Bonn, Germany, 20-21 January 2012The recent interest of international funding organizations for financing water storage schemes in Sub-Saharan Africa as a response to anticipated climate change has revived the debate on more appropriate methodologies for welfare assessments. Increasingly, water storage construction is moving away from single objectives like simple irrigation or hydropower production to multiple purpose systems. The inclusion of other socially and environmental related aspects like poverty alleviation and sustenance of minimum ecological services becomes a highly demanding objective for most of the donors. The multi-objective purpose of water storage questions in turn impacts the scaling of a storage scheme as well as the effectiveness of larger versus smaller technical options. The prevailing monetary assessments of direct costs and benefits appear inefficient to capture the diversity of multi-objective targets and the scaling issue by often indicating sub-optimal solutions. The current study proposes an alternative methodological approach based on an outranking methodology equipped with a set of preference conditions and weighting indices. Though based on the underlying principle of economic efficiency, the approach avoids some crucial weaknesses of the mainstream analysis by giving higher attention to a wider range of criteria. The method was tested in six case studies in Ethiopia and Ghana where representative small and large water storage types of Sub-Saharan Africa (small dams, large dams, wells, river diversion, ponds and soil moisture) were assessed in comparison to each other and then evaluated with the help of ethnographic findings