Economic impact of microfinance in Nepal: a case study of the Manamaiju Village Development Committee, Kathmandu
The concept of micro-credit was developed to mobilize small savings of poor people to create deposit, which may be accessible to unreachable and un-bankable poor, especially women. The study has highlighted that microfinance is an effective tool for bringing positive impact on the economic status of the respondents along with their family members. It has helped to generate extra income for their family and their own use. The extra income allows the respondents family to buy nutritious food, access to modern health care services and they can afford to send their children to the school. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/ejdi.v15i1-2.11861 Economic Journal of Development Issues Vol. 15 & 16 No. 1-2 , pp. 36-49
Competing gender norms and social practice in Himalayan farm management
Abstract Gender relations in Himalayan farm management are influenced by differentiated social expectations of men and women. How people negotiate their gender role space and how they relate to explicit and tacit gender norms, shape gendered patterns of decision-making in agriculture. In this case study from the Nepali Middle Hills I argue that there are two competing sets of cultural gender norms at work, in contrast to Sherry Ortner’s classical theory of a gender hegemony, where she describes a hegemonic collection of cultural logics, meanings and practices related to gender. In this case, modern development ideas of women empowerment and gender equality currently challenge traditional gender norms, but there are also areas of conjunction between the two. Traditional gender norms constrain women’s decision-making power to mostly within the household and farm. While men increasingly migrate for work, women take over more of the agricultural labor, and temporarily, all farm-management decisions. When both spouses stay at the farm they often decide together, contrary to common assumptions that men mostly decide in agriculture. However, cultural conflicts arise when women engage in social spheres outside the farm and household, such as in financial, public, or political matters. How people through social practice relate to competing gender norms, and to what extent they either feel caught in a cultural conflict or have a sufficiently strong social position to take advantage of the situation and alter local gender roles depends not on gender per se, but on other markers of social prestige such as caste/ethnicity, wealth, age, and marital status. Interactions between modern development norms and traditional gender norms inspire cultural change at the local scale, which has implications for women’s participation in financial and market spheres.
Deliberative Democracy and the Resource Curse: A Nationwide Experiment in Tanzania
Oil and gas discoveries in developing countries are often associated with short-sighted economic policies and, in response, calls to insulate resource management from populist impulses. We report on a randomized experiment testing methods to overcome this apparent tension between sound resource governance and democratic politics. Soon after Tanzania’s discovery of major natural gas reserves, we invited a nationally representative sample of voters to an intensive public deliberation of policy options featuring nationally recognized experts and small-group discussions. Democratic deliberation reinforced the public’s strong preference for rapid spending of gas revenues, but also increased support for various prudential and economically orthodox measures, including independent oversight of gas revenues, limits on government borrowing, and selling gas abroad rather than subsidizing fuel at home. These effects were driven by deliberation per se, rather than a pure information treatment, and show no evidence of contamination by facilitatoror peer-effects in group deliberations. www.cgdev.org Justin Sandefur, Nancy Birdsall, James Fishkin, and Mujobu Moyo