Search results for "Development studies"

International Assessment Surveys of Educational Achievement in Developing Countries : Why Education Economists Should Care

2015

International audience; This paper reviews the most known international assessment studies that are conducted in the context of poor countries and highlights the lack of empirical evidence on the degree to which the contents of the tests really match countries' curricula. To illustrate, the paper evaluates the sensitivity of an international testing instrument by comparing the responses of students in two consecutive grades on the same battery of tests. Using propensity score matching to control for student and teacher characteristics, the results show that the tests are not grade sensitive, which raises the question of the validity of many empirical works that are based on similar instrume…

Horizon 2000 : prévisions des dépenses d'éducation primaire dans les pays en développement

1990

The aim of the present article is to provide a statistical assessmentof the amount of public money developing countries will nedd to spend in order to meet the estimated demand for primary education in the year 2000 and to evaluate the cost of providing universal primary education by that date.

Strengthening Institutional Isomorphism in Development NGOs? Program Mechanisms in an Organizational Intervention

2017

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in international development struggle between being actors in the mainstream or representatives of alternatives to it. However, many NGOs all over the world align with the mainstream and are increasingly similar to each other. This homogenization results from institutional isomorphism, which is affected by their aspirations to be legitimate vis-á-vis the international field. Consultancies are among the main practices to promote normative isomorphism, but little is known about their micro-level dynamics. Drawing on the notion of program mechanisms in realistic evaluation, we scrutinize how external facilitators in organizational development processes enab…

Traditions, Land Rights, and Local Welfare Creation: Studies from Eastern Indonesia

2016

This research focuses on the impacts of traditional systems of land distribution among households, clans, and the government in two of Indonesia’s poorest provinces: East Nusa Tenggara and Maluku. Our main goal is to discuss and propose alternative ways of dividing and governing productive land to meet new needs in the management of agriculture and forestry. We apply a mixed research methodology that includes in-depth discussions with more than 50 key informants and survey interviews with 640 randomly selected respondents. We find that the number of land conflicts is rising, that land privatisation is becoming increasingly relevant, and that communal land ownership tends to lead to land und…

Gender, Weather Shocks and Welfare: Evidence from Malawi

2017

This paper explores the gender-differentiated effects of weather shocks on households’ welfare in Malawi using panel data aligned with climatic records. Results show that temperature shocks severely affect household welfare, reducing consumption, food consumption and daily caloric intake. The negative welfare effects are more severe for households where land is solely managed by women, a finding that sheds light on the gender-unequal impact of temperature shocks. Our evidence also suggests that women’s vulnerability to temperature shocks is linked to women’s land tenure security, as temperature shocks impact significantly women’s welfare only in patrilineal districts, where statistics show …

Crisis and credit: social and political challenges of the Malian tea market

2020

This article examines the manifold facets of crisis situations in Mali since the 1990s. Most prominent was la crise, the political crisis of 2012 that resulted from the rise of armed separatist gro...

Student outcomes in Philippine elementary schools: An evaluation of four experiments

1999

International audience; Policymakers in most developing countries are concerned about high dropout rates and poor student learning in primary education. The government of the Philippines initiated the Dropout Intervention Program in 1990-92 as part of its effort to address these issues. Under this program, four experimental interventions were randomly assigned to 20 schools in selected low-income areas. Pre- and post-intervention data were collected from these schools, as well as from 10 control schools, in order to evaluate the program's impact on dropout behavior and student learning. The economic justification for replication appears to be strongest for the interventions that provided te…

Exploring Microfinance Clients with Disabilities: A Case Study of an Ecuadorian Microbank

2016

AbstractUsing a unique sample from an Ecuadorian microfinance institution that has focused on increasing its outreach to disabled clients, we present a comparative analysis of the characteristics of disabled versus non-disabled clients. The study shows that disabled clients are more often male, are less likely to be living with a partner, have fewer children, and are older compared to their non-disabled counterparts. Moreover, we observe differences in repayment statistics between clients with and without disabilities, as well as differences within the disability sample. Our findings illustrate the importance of adapting microloans to the special needs of persons with disabilities.

Knowledge practice in development studies: Examples from ethnographies on civil society

2015

Audience involvement in creative media for development: Making sense of the semiotic interface

2017

This article explores the role that semiotic communication plays in the generation of narrative affect. It also draws on Suruchi Sood’s concept of audience involvement as being capable of increasing self-efficacy and collective-efficacy, both of which are crucial to behaviour change. It therefore, demonstrates how semiotic tropes are used in creative media narratives to elicit affect and in turn generate authentic audience involvement with the subjects of those narratives, a process which eventually has positive consequences for behaviour change communication. Hence, these narratives fueled by semiotics, become the threshing floor where potential audiences are drawn into pro-social discours…