Resources

This paper reports on the activities of the Women in Fishing (WIF) programme which aims to The article reflects on the obstacles to womens participation in both an initial meeting on the theme of social security rights of fisher women and also in the women's associations formed as a result of the meeting.

This article based on a case study of the use of REFLECT in Bangladesh, suggests that when REFLECT is linked to a savings and credit programme it can promote a change in women's status.

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.

CAMPFIRE is a Zimbabwe project which seeks to place the proprietorship of natural resources with the poepl living most closely with them. The game discussed in this article is based upon the board game "Monopoly" where the participants each have a sum of money and their objective is to develop the wildlife potential and manage visitors. The game allows participants to practice the mechanics of book-keeping, analyse their sources of income and practice developing budgets.

The Small Enterprise Foundation (SEF) is a micro-finance NGO working in South Africa to provide savings and credit facilities to support business development of the poorest people. Reacting to a realisation that they were not reaching the poorest people, the SEF undertook a pilot study using participatory wealth ranking to establish people's own criteria of poverty. These proved to differ from the externally judged criteria that they had been using to assess eligibility for membership, and led to the adoption of participatory mapping and wealth ranking instead. Their challenge was then one of scale; how to apply this methodology to villages of 700 - 1000 households? This article focuses on some of the challenges faced in designing a cost-effective system that would work in such large villages. It uses Bhungeni village as a case study to illustrate the application of the methodology and then goes on to discuss some of the wider issues of the relevance and use of wealth ranking in the context of a micro-finance programme.

This IDS Source Pack aims to give an introduction to micro-finance and micro-enterprise and provide a comprehensive listing of other good sources of information on the subject. An introductory article by Christian Sorenson gives an overview of the subject. This is followed by some readings which include: a look at how to identify the poorest clients around the world; details of how participatory monitoring and evaluation can strengthen a street youth micro-entrepreneurs programme in the Dominican Republic; and information about the work of a rural women's bank in India. The last section gives details of around twenty recommended materials on micro-finance.

Community participation has become an ambiguous umbrella term under which a huge diversity of practices may occur, ranging from 'true' participation to the rhetorical participation, which serves merely to legitimize external interests in a development project. One variable within the participation process that may differ enormously is that of who participates. The tendency to assume that communities are homogenous entities has meant that many people within the community have been excluded from participating. The first section describes some determinants of who participates, which include socio-economic and socio-cultural factors. The remainder of the paper focuses draws on the case study of a rural development project undertaken in a Guatemalan Mayan Community. The local environment and history are described followed by characteristics of the participants, including an exploration of the characteristics of the project staff. The author concludes that participation in voluntary community development projects is largely dependent on socio-economic factors. In addition, geographical access, external social links, age, personality and cultural values all played a part in distinguishing who participates.