Este artigo junta-se aos esforços de muitos outros africanos, entendendo-se por pobreza não só os níveis de rendimento por dia por pessoa, mas também a pobreza como ausência de poder nas relações intra-familiares, entre estas e os demais actores e entre a sociedade no seu todo e os recursos naturais de que se dispõe no Continente Africano.

The goal of the National Land Policy in Malawi is to ensure tenure security and equitable access to land, to facilitate the attainment of social harmony and broad based social and economic development through optimum and ecologically balanced use of land and land based resources.A number of specific land policy objectives have to be satisfied in order to achieve the overall goal, particularly: a) Promote tenure reforms that guarantee security and instill confidence and fairness in all land transactions: Guarantee secure tenure and equitable access to land without any gender bias and/or disc

This study stresses the importance of land for the rural poor as a source of livelihood and describes the gendered and often inequitable experience of access to land and other natural resources. It also provides a set of guidelines for actions to increase women's access to land, including awareness raising, and emphasises the need for better contextual udnerstanding of the gendered aspects in land allocation and adjudication. The report also provides suggestions for indicators of secure land access prior to, during and after programs of intervention.

This toolkit provides a framework for main-streaming gender in rural development activities.It addresses the lack of conceptual and practical tools in the area of sustainable land management. Its modular design allows for individual approaches and targets development staff at the project and programme levels, with the aim of helping them to find practical ways of dealing with gender issues in rural development activities.

High urbanization rates in Latin America are accompanied by an increase in women’s participation in the labor force and the number of households headed by single mothers. Reliable and affordable childcare alternatives are thus becoming increasingly important in urban areas. The Hogares Comunitarios Program (HCP), established in Guatemala City in 1991, was a direct response to the increasing need of poor urban dwellers for substitute childcare.

In rural Africa and the Middle East, many ecosystems are on the verge of collapse. The interplay of social, ecological, and political-economic forces has compromised the ability of farmers to sustain their precious soil. As a result, farmers, and especially women farmers, face a constant daily struggle to survive.

In this paper we investigate whether a conditional cash transfer program such as the Programa Nacional de Educación, Salud y Alimentación (PROGRESA) can simultaneously combat the problems of low school attendance and child work. PROGRESA is a new program of the Mexican government aimed at alleviating extreme poverty in rural areas. It combats the different causes of poverty by providing cash benefits that are targeted directly to households on the condition of children attending school and visiting health clinics on a regular basis.

This study analyzes the determinants of land tenure insecurity and its impact on intensity of use of purchased farm inputs among households in Southern Ethiopia. Seventeen percent of the households stated that they were tenure insecure. The feeling of tenure insecurity could be caused by the land redistribution policy in Ethiopia where household size has been the main criterion used for land allocation after the land reform in 1975. This would imply that land rich households should be more tenure insecure.

Taking the step from appraisal to action using planning techniques that respond to the needs expressed by women and men.

This is a module for project planning from a gender perspective. It outlines experiences learned by various projects in Central America and provides practical guidleines for how to manage gender equity in the plannig process of a project.

You can download this module from the International Union for Conservation of Nature's website (IUCN).

This paper is based on community-level data from 188 villages in rural Madagascar. The survey that was conducted in 1997 made extensive use of long-term recall questions ascertaining changes during the past 10 years in rice yields, wages, population, soil fertility, and other pertinent variables of rural development. We find that—on average for all villages—the yields of irrigated rice, the major food crop, and real agricultural wages declined, while the communities expanded their upland area by nearly a quarter and experienced deteriorating fertility of their upland soils.

In 1987, an improved resource management system that incorporates velvet bean (Mucuna pruriens var. utilis) to address soil fertility and weed (Imperata cylindrica) infestation was introduced to the small-scale farmers in a densely populated area of the derived savannas in Benin Republic (West Africa). Six years later, an adoption study was conducted to assess factors driving the adoption process. Four types of land tenure systems based on mode of access to land were identified: divided inheritance, purchasing, gifts, and sharecropping/renting.

In rural areas of Bangladesh, poverty is pervasive and associated with high rates of malnutrition especially among preschool children and women. Apart from low levels of energy intakes, it is increasingly recognized that rice-dominated diets such as those consumed by most poor in the countryside may not supply all micronutrients required for a healthy life and productive activities. Children and women are particularly vulnerable to these micronutrient deficiencies as they face relatively higher requirements for growth and reproduction.