DevPolitics

allAfrica.com: Nigeria: New Studies Show 81 Percent Farmers Are Women

allAfrica.com: Nigeria: New Studies Show 81 Percent Farmers Are Women.

Researchers working with the Voices for Food Security (VFS) said a study they conducted reveal that there are more women farmers than men in Nigeria.

One of the researchers, Dr. Adamu Wude said special attention needs to be given to the concerns of women farmers since they constitute 81 percent of the farming population.

He lamented the obstacles placed on the path of researchers by government officials who deny them access to public information such as states and departmental budgets.

Speaking at the public launch and dissemination of reports of studies on Agric investment, he said in some instance, they are being asked to pay before they can obtain such information and are often met with very hostile reception from government officials.

He said the study on investing in the agric sector was conducted in katsina, kano, Benue, Plateau, Nasarawa, Ogun, Ekiti and Uyo states with the aim to determine how much each state allocates to the sector in its annual budget.

According to him, the research shows that most states budget very little to agriculture and most of the projects are hardly executed at the end of the fiscal year.

The ONE Blog | Ugandans take oil transparency message to 10 Downing Street

The ONE Blog | Ugandans take oil transparency message to 10 Downing Street.

A group of Ugandans in the London Diaspora have delivered an open letter to Prime Minister David Cameron on behalf of over 200 civil society activists from their home country. The petition calls on the British government to force oil, gas and mining companies registered in the UK to be more transparent in their operations abroad.

Belinda Atim, one of the civil society activists who handed over the petition, said:

“I am proud to be representing the voices of over 200 activists from across Uganda who are calling for transparency in the oil industry. Today we sent Prime Minister Cameron the clear message that Ugandans need his support so that the resource course that has blighted so many of our neighbours in Africa doesn’t come to Uganda. By introducing a law that forces companies like Tullow Oil to publish all their payments to governments, David Cameron can make sure activists like me can get the information we desperately need to hold our leaders to account. We are determined to make sure that the huge revenues the government will generate from oil are used to help the people of Uganda, not to line the pockets of the wealthy elite.”

Uganda will soon be producing large quantities of oil, which has the potential to transform the country’s economy and help lift people out of poverty. However, the Production Sharing Agreements have been kept secret by the Ugandan Government despite repeated attempts by journalists and civil society to access the contracts. Currently there is no provision in place for publishing payments received once production begins.

The US passed a law last July as part of the Dodd-Frank Act which will mean all extractive companies registered in America will have to publish all their payments to the governments in every country they operate. ONE is now campaigning for a similar law in Europe. The key company operating in Uganda, Tullow Oil, is not listed in the US so will only have to disclose their payments once Europe follows suit.

The UK Chancellor George Osborne has pledged his support to the new law and has promised to push European legislation. Nearly 10,000 ONE members have signed a petition urging him to act as swiftly as possible.

Only 14, Bangladeshi girl charged with adultery was lashed to death - CNN.com

hariatpur, Bangladesh (CNN) -- Hena Akhter's last words to her mother proclaimed her innocence. But it was too late to save the 14-year-old girl.

Her fellow villagers in Bangladesh's Shariatpur district had already passed harsh judgment on her. Guilty, they said, of having an affair with a married man. The imam from the local mosque ordered the fatwa, or religious ruling, and the punishment: 101 lashes delivered swiftly, deliberately in public.

Only 14, Bangladeshi girl charged with adultery was lashed to death - CNN.com.

Water Supply in Rural Ghana: Do Women Benefit? (Link to PDF Below)

Water Supply in Rural Ghana:
Do Women Benefit? by Joana Costa, Degol Hailu, Elydia Silva and Raquel Tsukada
International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth
Women’s income poverty in developing countries
is usually associated with time poverty. The time that women
spend on domestic chores represents significant forgone
income. Infrastructure provision potentially reduces women’s
time burden. The saving includes time spent on collecting,
loading and purifying water. That saving would enable
women to engage in remunerated activities, dedicate
more time to pursuing education, or have a little leisure.
In this One Pager, we investigate the impact of water
provision on women’s time allocation in rural Ghana.
IPCOnePager101.pdf (application/pdf Object).

Taking the Gender Fight Worldwide - NYTimes.com

Taking the Gender Fight Worldwide - NYTimes.com.

PARIS — “I am a woman, a Socialist, divorced and agnostic,” the new defense minister told the generals of her Roman Catholic country. “But we will work together very well.”

Michelle Bachelet, who in 2002 became Chile’s first female defense minister and four years later the country’s first female president, has never shied from challenging the status quo. Now the first head of U.N. Women, the three-month-old U.N. agency for gender equality and female empowerment, Ms. Bachelet is doing it again — this time turning some traditional notions of feminism on their head.

“We need men. We need to obtain big important male champions,” Ms. Bachelet, a 59-year-old daughter of a general and single mother of three, said brightly during a recent interview in Paris.

She hired a man as one of her two deputies — “that wasn’t by chance, I wanted gender equality” — and courts male chief executives to sign up to seven principles for female empowerment. A new three-year gender awareness program for peace negotiators focuses as much on training male mediators about rape in conflict zones as on grooming future female mediators.

U.N. Women is the first high-profile international agency dedicated to gender, turning a long-held ambition of feminist activists across the world into a reality. First floated as a serious proposal in 2006, it took four years of heavy lobbying from the four U.N. units previously dealing with gender advocacy and dogged support from big hitters like Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton before the body went to work in January.

Aid agencies must listen to the people they're helping | Nicholas van Praag | Global development | guardian.co.uk

Aid agencies must listen to the people they're helping | Nicholas van Praag | Global development | guardian.co.uk.

We spend $10bn a year on humanitarian emergencies, but most projects are run without asking how beneficiaries feel about them

Some camps for those displaced after the Haiti earthquake had suggestion boxes, and people responded with enthusiasm. Photograph: Ramon Espinosa/AP

Lord Ashdown's review of how the UK responds to humanitarian emergencies points to a major shortcoming in today's humanitarian aid system: the absence of a systematic effort to assess whether beneficiaries are satisfied with the efforts made on their behalf by UN agencies and NGOs.

Over the past five years, we have seen a marked increase in the focus on accountability in what is now a $10bn a year humanitarian industry. But there is no systematic approach to assessing humanitarian operations through the eyes of recipients. Running aid programmes without understanding how beneficiaries feel about them is to ignore the simplest test of client satisfaction. It is amazing that donors have been willing to make funding decisions without any customer input for as long as they have.

As we see in north Africa and Asia, many push factors continue to drive humanitarian assistance – from natural disasters to global pandemics, climate-induced population displacement, war and food insecurity. These disasters have given rise to a four-fold increase in humanitarian funding since 2000 and a concomitant demand for greater accountability. Yet without the perspective of the beneficiaries, it is hard to find out whether claims about results are borne out by what is being done to help ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events.

In response, a lot of effort has gone into improving the scrutiny of humanitarian operations, and learning lessons for the future. For the most part, though, we still depend on humanitarian agencies to provide the requested data on health, nutrition and other indices of impact. Some donors do undertake their own evaluations of things they have funded – but it's rare that we hear directly from those affected about whether needs are being met, if they were consulted, or whether they are being adequately protected.

Development Horizons by Lawrence Haddad: Women's Empowerment: A journey not a destination

Development Horizons by Lawrence Haddad: Women's Empowerment: A journey not a destination.

One of the first phrases I heard at IDS when I joined back in 2004 was "women's emment". What is "women's emment"? I naively asked. The answer was: women's empowerment without the power.

The argument was that many governments, donor agencies and researchers had simplistic views of how power works. The view that power could be enhanced or bestowed simply through policy engineering was a way of side-stepping complicated reality and messy politics. The policy levers tended to focus on women as "two-dimensional economic agents", when in reality the success of policy levers was contingent on a whole host of contextual factors, factors often not seen, precisely because of the exclusive focus on the policy levers.

The above quotes are from a new forthcoming publication "Empowerment: A journey, not a destination from the Pathways of Women's Empowerment research and communications programme, of which IDS is a partner. The draft report is still being discussed with partners and it won't be released until later this year but it has already begun to inform thinking at IDS around our work on gender.

Personal Obligation and Development

The concept of development is so complicated and fraught and dependent on the context in which it is stated, that to declare any specific obligation towards it would be not only impossible but also foolish. When Peter Singer declares that every one in the Western world has the obligation to give some amount of their disposable income to feed starving children, he has de facto decided that giving money is neither complicated nor fraught nor subject to adverse consequence.  Many people who work in development, or understand the difficulties of aid, would be quick to point out all the ways in which a donation can go wrong -- money can go to an ineffectual organization; an organization that does good work can still create dependencies that hinder more than help the people they work with; donations can also abdicate the giver of responsibility to do more -- to educate themselves, to teach others, or to advocate to politicians for particular policies.  It is not altogether clear that the best, most morally correct way for a person to help others is to give money.  It is almost certain that there is no such "best" way, regardless of the tactic.  The one thing I can think we all can, even should, strive for is to be open-minded, show humility in our ignorance, and take advantage of opportunities to better understand people, places, and circumstances beyond our own.

African Ministers Mull Government’s Role in Development | Africa | English

African Ministers Mull Government’s Role in Development | Africa | English.
Ethiopia’s prime minister says Africa needs a new development plan in which the state replaces the private sector as the main engine of growth. The shadow of recent uprisings hung over a conference of African finance ministers, where officials talked about ways to satisfy Africa's growing population of restless youth.

In his keynote address, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said decades of experience with what he called the neo-liberal paradigm of growth have failed to bring prosperity to Africa.  He said such policies have led to a widening of the income gap, and urged Africa to reject western prescriptions for private sector-led development.

"Their three-decades long campaign against state activities has not resulted in sustained growth and economic transformation. It has failed to do so because, among other things, its restless campaign to enfeeble the African state and its role in the economy has not succeeded in overcoming the environment of unproductive and pervasive rent seeking," he said.

Mr. Meles said it is time for the public sector to take the lead role in developing an African infrastructure that can spur growth.

"The state has to play the leading and vital role in the sector. Three decades of waiting for the private sector to address our infrastructure gap has only served to widen the gap. We cannot wait any longer," he said.

Speaking at the same podium, African Development Bank President Donald Kaberuka cautioned ministers to ensure their policies address the aspirations of all rungs of society.  He said recent events in North Africa are an urgent reminder of the challenges of inclusive growth, job creation and opportunities for the young.

"We all know very well that economic growth that is not inclusive, that leaves some behind, as we can see again from North Africa, is neither economically, nor politically sustainable and will only lead to frustrations and social explosion," Kaberuka said.

Kaberuka said economic growth projections for North Africa are being revised downward because economies in the region are still reeling in the aftermath of the recent uprisings. But he said the bank is preparing to make huge financial commitments to help recovering economies such as Tunisia and Egypt.

YouTube - Ghana: Development Progress - Improvements in agriculture

Ghana improvements in agriculture video. One of the Development progress stories from www.developmentprogress.org looks at how sustained agricultural growth has put Ghana in pole position to become the first African country to achieve millennium development goal one.
YouTube - Ghana: Development Progress - Improvements in agriculture.