Resources

Micro-finance programmes are currently promoted as strategies for both alleviating poverty and also empowering women. However, a number of recent academic studies have questioned the benefits of such programmes for women. Given the need to examine their gender impact, this paper proposes an alternative to the traditional costly quantitative and qualitative impact studies. A participatory approach is proposed which integrates empowerment concerns with ongoing programme learning, which in itself contributes to empowerment.

Wild resources are often of vital importance to rural people's livelihoods but are often overlooked in conventional valuations. This paper provides an over view of the methodological approach used by IIED's Hidden Harvest research programme which undertook inventories and valuation studies with the resource users themselves withnthe aim of revealing more comprehensive and relevant, rather than assumed, economic values of local resources and incentives for their management.
The paper is illustrated throughout by examples from case studies conducted in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Brazil, Nigeria and Papua New Guinea.

This article outlines an approach to help communities explore market opportunities for their business ideas using PRA tools, that were piloted with the Itoseng Sewing and Knitting Women's Group in South Africa. A three month action learning book keeping and marketing course was held for 18 women, many of whom had low levels of literacy and from these the women developed a marketing plan for their business. In this paper some of the marketing tools used that were adapted from PRA methods are described.

This diary comprises part of a participatory mionitoring and evaluation system called an internal learning system for grassroots livelihoods and micro-finance programs. The diary is bsed on a pictorial record of the development experiences of a poor woman who is a member of a self help savings and credit group and enables the user to collect information on changes in livelihood variables such as health, education, savings etc using symbols. The accuracy of data entry is carried out using simple cross checks with fellow group members in a mutual learning process. The diary enables the direction and reasons for change in the data to be analysed and facilitates the making of plans based on the findings.

This article describes a participatory business planning tool involving seveal steps: mapping land ownership, pinboarding important ideas to isolate the aims of the business, resource mapping and land use mapping, business modelling and related budgeting and finally an action planning matrix.