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Transforming African Agriculture by Promoting Improved Technology and Management Practices
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Index Insurance for Agricultural Transformation in Africa
Get PDFOver the past two decades, researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers have shown great interest
in using index insurance to manage agricultural production risk in order to promote technical
transformation of agriculture in the developing world. Unlike conventional agricultural insurance,
which indemnifies policyholders for verifiable production losses arising from multiple perils, index
insurance pays policyholders based on the observed value of a specified “index” variable, such as
rainfall, that is highly correlated with losses. Index insurance is less susceptible to the structural
problems that have rendered conventional agricultural insurance too expensive and financially
un-sustainable for the developing world. Index insurance, however, offers less efective individual
risk protection than conventional insurance and faces non-trivial challenges for sustainable
implementation. This article summarizes lessons learned from index insurance projects undertaken
in sub-Saharan Africa since 2000 and points the way forward for the use of index insurance to
support African agricultural development in the 21st century.boo
Case Study on Mindanao the Philippines: Women’s Participation and Leadership in Peacebuilding
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Is Seasonal Hunger a Distant Memory in Bangladesh? Revisiting Earlier Evidences
Get PDFWhile seasonality of income, consumption and poverty is not uncommon in rural Bangladesh, it is more pronounced in the Rangpur region, where it is exacerbated by the region’s agroecology and adverse economic geography. This paper, using three rounds of nationally representative data from household income and expenditure surveys from 2000-2010, follows up on earlier findings based on two rounds of data from 2000 and 2005 (Khandker 2012) to determine the extent and causes of seasonality and the factors that helped to combat the severity of such seasonality. This paper adds value to the earlier study in two ways. First, it examines whether the earlier findings still hold over a longer timeframe. Second, having the benefit of three data points allows us to examine the trends in outcomes and underlying factors. The paper finds that seasonal hunger, often known as ‘monga’ in the North-West region of Bangladesh, is caused by both yearly aggregate of income and its seasonal variation. The paper recommends that structural integration of labor, food, and credit markets is necessary to alleviate endemic poverty as well as mitigate the adverse impacts of agricultural seasonality. Combating seasonal hunger therefore calls for diversifying agricultural and rural incomes as well as enhancing poor households’ capacity to insure against seasonality.research repor
Does the Concept of Human Security Generate Additional Value? An Analysis of Japanese Stakeholder Perceptions
Get PDFConceptual debates on what constitutes human security have continued for two decades. However, the question remains as to whether the introduction of ‘human security’ offers any added value to the thinking and ways of achieving wellbeing and security. To provide a preliminary answer to this question, this paper focuses on the case of Japan, a country acknowledged as being one of the most committed advocates of human security in its foreign policy. This paper aims at collecting data on Japanese key stakeholder perceptions on the utility of the human security concept by conducting interviews with those who are active in the field of human security in government, academia, civil society and the private sector. Based on these interviews, this paper presents ‘issues for further research’ on the question of the added value of human security by observing how the human security concept has been understood and evaluated as well as actually applied in practice by Japanese stakeholders. The Japanese interviewees working in various sectors not only found at least some utility in the human security concept but also our interviews revealed some essential possibilities that the human security notion might bring: greater emphasis could be placed on ‘onsite needs and people-related needs’; the ‘comprehensiveness’ of the notion can provide a totally different approach to complex situations of human insecurities; and the ‘freedom to live in dignity’ might add a stronger human face to development and security-related projects. Many of the interviewees pointed out the utility of human security in addressing human insecurities in Japan as well. The paper suggests areas for future human security research. Such will include whether a stronger cross-sectoral/inter-departmental approach could increase the effectiveness of human security approach; how reluctant authorities can be persuaded to accept international assistance; how transnational actors can improve human security when state sovereignty is at issue; how human dignity aspect can be developed in human security policy and research.research repor
User-Centered Approach to Service Quality and Outcome:Rationales, Accomplishments and Challenges
Get PDFThis paper addresses the rationales, accomplishments, and limitations of the User-Centered Approach (UCA) to service provision, proposed and practiced as a solution to the problems of poor quality and insufficient outcome of services observed in impact evaluations. After discussing conceptual and analytical approaches to the question, a conceptual articulation of the nature of services and classification of services based on degrees of discretion and transaction-intensity is provided, followed by observations on two types of failures in service delivery. Next, a discussion on the effectiveness of the UCA models (co-production and self-management), on the definition and articulation of two key concepts (agency and motivation), and on the typologies of user-provider relations and of user agency in service transaction and utilization is presented. Some of the important proposals and experiences of UCA are summarized in the form of general propositions on co-production in public services, people-centered primary care, and chronic illness care, and in the form of case studies of two salient programs in social work. As the central argument of the paper, the activation and development of user agency for effective partnership in co-production and for self-management is emphasized. This is achieved by making reference to a general conceptual examination of “empowerment,” and to important cases of intervention for agency activation and development, with a view to drawing generalizable implications. A brief discussion on the rationale, accomplishments and limitations of UCA concludes the paper.research repor
Examination of Poverty in Northern Mozambique: A Comparison of Social and Economic Dimensions
Get PDFSub-Saharan African countries have demonstrated high economic growth in the last decade. However, it seems that economic growth has not always contributed to poverty reduction in Sub Saharan Africa, as found in previous studies at regional or country levels. Mozambique is not an exception. The average economic growth rate of real GDP between 2000 and 2013 was 6.76%, whereas the poverty headcount rates in rural areas did not decrease in the same period. However, this was found based on economic measures of poverty, such as consumption-based or income-based poverty. It is often said that poverty is multidimensional and economic measures alone cannot represent the real situations of the poor. This is true especially when most of the population is engaged in subsistence agriculture. Then, the next questions will be how non-economic measures of or multidimensional poverty have changed in the same period and what the differently estimated determinants of poverty are. In this paper, poverty incidence based on non-economic and multidimensional measures of poverty were explored after 2003 in northern Mozambique where severe poverty was detected in previous studies, and major determinants of three types of poverty were investigated. Analyses were made based on the survey which was conducted in northern Mozambique for small-scale farmers in 2010 by the JICA Research Institute. As a result, multidimensional poverty in rural areas appears to have decreased in the given period. Concerning determinants of poverty, positive effects of household size and negative effects of the share of literate household members on poverty are quite robust for any type of poverty; the feminization of poverty was not clearly detected in northern Mozambique.research repor
