Working paper
The discussion was part of the series of events organised on the occasion of ICIMOD’s 25th anniversary with a view to understanding the major challenges in the region and the role of a regional institution such as ICIMOD, with a focus on the mountain agenda in the context of climate change. The discussion revolved around 2 broad themes:
- the key issues and challenges posed to the HKH...
This paper looks at the issue of poverty and food shortage in Ethiopia and questions why this continues to be a burgeoning issue when Ethiopia has increased its food production by 70% since the 1980s.
Reasons for poverty and food insecurity in Ethiopia include:
- Vulnerability: subsistence agriculture is vulnerable to shortages...
Recent research has shown that improving women’s decision-making power relative to men’s within households leads to improvements in a variety of well-being outcomes for children. In South Asia, where the influence of women’s power is particularly strong, these outcomes include children’s nutritional status and the quality of feeding and health care practices. Focusing...
Among South Asian countries, Nepal has liberalised most extensively during the 1980s and 1990s on both fronts, domestic and external. Nepal is a least developed country with a gross national product of US $235 per capita in 2001 and second lowest per capita wealth in the world. In South Asia, Nepal has the lowest per capita income, highest dependence of population on agriculture and second...
This paper presents an empirical case study about farmer management of rice genetic resources in two communities of Nepal, drawing on interdisciplinary, participatory research that involved farmers, rice geneticists and social scientists. The decision-making process of farm households is modeled and estimated in order to provide information for the design of community-based conservation...
While ample evidence documents that urban children generally have better nutritional status than their rural counterparts, recent research suggests that urban malnutrition is on the rise. The environment, choices and opportunities of urbanites differ greatly from those of rural dwellers' from employment conditions to social and family networks to access to health care and other services. Given...
The Farmer Field School (FFS) approach emerged out of a concrete, immediate problem. At the end of the eighties of the last century farmers in Indonesia were putting their crops, their health and their environment at severe risk through massive abuse of highly toxic pesticides promoted aggressively by the private industry and government. Pest species were becoming resistant and in some cases...
Markets play a basic role in economic welfare. In rich countries life would be unimaginable without access to a wide array of reasonably well functioning markets, from food to credit and insurance. It is almost never the case that a rich-country household has to produce something in order to consume it, or that its members cannot sell their labour for a salary or wage. Credit markets function...
This case study examines the scaling-up experiences of two microfinance institutions: the Nirdhan Utthan Bank Limited (NUBL) in Nepal and the Self-Help Group (SHG)-Bank linkage programme of the National Agricultural Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) in India. Both NUBL and NABARD groups use self-regulation (peer selection, peer monitoring and peer enforcement of contracts) as...
Child labour is widespread in developing countries, but its causes are debatable. Poverty is considered the primary reason, but many theoretical and empirical analyses show that other factors, such as lack of access to credit, poor school quality and labour market opportunities play equal or even greater roles in the decision to have children work.
This study surveys the existing...
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