scholarly journals Trading Futures

Focaal ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Tom Widger ◽  
Filippo Osella

In this article, we explore what happens when idea(l)s of Islamic charity (sadaqah) and social enterprise converge within a low-cost public health clinic in Colombo, Sri Lanka. For both the clinic’s wealthy sponsors and the urban poor who use it, interpreting the intervention as a pious expression of care toward the poor or as a for-profit humanitarian venture meant extending different futures to the poor. The ambiguous temporalities of gifts and commodities anticipated by benefactors and beneficiaries involved in this challenges anthropological assumptions concerning the marketizing effects of neoliberal development interventions. Our ethnography revealed a hesitancy among the clinic’s sponsors, managers, and users to endow the intervention with a final interpretation, undermining its stated goal of promoting health care privatization and “responsibilization” of the poor.

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-106
Author(s):  
Papiya Manna

In inclusive development paradigm, every person has the right to access basic amenities, and housing is one of them. Urban governance has to provide shelter to its citizens, and when the poor occupy a sizable portion of this population, the roles of urban governance become more crucial. A significant portion of the city dwellers in-migrate into the city from the surrounding areas. They are mainly unskilled or semi-skilled people, who have migrated into the cities in search of livelihood and settle down in places which gradually transforms into slums. In India, public housing as a part of poverty alleviation, aims to provide shelter as well as a comfortable environment to the beneficiaries. The key objectives of this research are to find out the role of the local government of Asansol, West Bengal in providing housing to the landless poor and to examine the responses from the housing dwellers. Mixed method approach has been applied here, and people's responses have been recorded with a semi-structured questionnaire based on purposive sampling technique. However, it has been found that the ability to access essential services is not the same for all sections of the society. This signals that when the questions of accessing resources are linked to the poor, either their voices fail to reach the appropriate places or they remain unheard in most spheres. Thus, the gap between the government and the poor are widening regarding the provision of essential services, accountability and regularity of monitoring of the public housing environment. As a result, the functionality of the low-cost housing is yet to achieve the desired goal of inclusivity in Asansol. Urban space is still exclusive for poor and vulnerable.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Arie Herlambang

Clean water to poor communities who live in crowded municipal area is stillexpensive and a luxury. This condition is evidenced by the number of people whouse ground water for their daily water, because water taps still seems expensivefor them. Diarrheal disease is still relatively high for Indonesia, where nearly 16thousand people suffer from diarrhea due to poor sanitation. To help the poor inthe city, there are several alternative technologies that can be applied to publicaccess to clean water and adequate low-cost, including ground water treatmenttechnology with a filter system equipped with an ultraviolet sterilizer, or ozonegenerators, or using ultrafiltration, if possible can also use the reverse osmosismembrane that for fresh water. Arsinum is the best alternative should be chosenfor fulfilled potable water in slump area.Keywords : Sanitation, water treatment technology, portable water, low-cost, slump area


Author(s):  
Joia S. Mukherjee

Treatment and curative medical care often require medication. This chapter focuses on the provision of medications in impoverished settings and the challenges that inhibit access to life-saving drugs. It will review the failure of the for-profit market to increase drug access for the poor. The evolving concept of essential drugs will be explored by reviewing the history the WHO Essential Medicines List (EML) and the fight to expand the list to include new, and often patented medicines. The international treaties and policies that impact drug availability will be highlighted as will novel systems for drug development and distribution. Finally, the chapter will highlight the growing movement to decrease costs, increase supply, and advance development of drugs for neglected diseases affecting impoverished people.


What does innovation mean to and in India? What are the predominant areas of innovation for India, and under what situations do they succeed or fail? This book addresses these all-important questions arising within diverse Indian contexts: informal economy, low-cost settings, large business groups, entertainment and copyright-based industries, an evolving pharma sector, a poorly organized and appallingly underfunded public health system, social enterprises for the urban poor, and innovations for the millions. It explores the issues that promote and those that hinder the country’s rise as an innovation leader. The book’s balanced perspective on India’s promises and failings makes it a valuable addition for those who believe that India’s future banks heavily on its ability to leapfrog using innovation, as well as those sceptical of the Indian state’s belief in the potential of private enterprise and innovation. It also provides critical insights on innovation in general, the most important of which being the highly context-specific, context-driven character of the innovation project.


1997 ◽  
Vol 23 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 221-250
Author(s):  
Lawrence E. Singer

The pressures encountered by hospitals in the current era of reimbursement declines and stiffened competition are well known. As the “ultimate” payors—primarily employers and government—aggressively continue to seek low cost care, the response of the hospital industry has been to move toward consolidation and efficiency-enhancing mechanisms.Increasingly, nonprofit, tax-exempt hospitals have come to believe that they are at a significant disadvantage vis-á-vis their for-profit brethren in their ability to attract the capital needed to compete in the market. A growing trend among nonprofit hospitals, therefore, is to sell to or enter into a joint venture with a proprietary organization, or alternatively to convert to for-profit status. In 1995, fifty-eight nonprofit hospitals became for-profit; hospital conversions to for-profit status in 1996 are projected to outstrip the pace established the prior year.The conversion trend has not gone unnoticed at the state level. Recently, several states have proposed or enacted laws regulating sales and conversions of nonprofit hospitals, and many more states are contemplating such legislation.


2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422198997
Author(s):  
Marianna Charitonidou

The article presents the reasons for which the issue of providing housing to low-income citizens has been a real challenge in Addis Ababa during the recent years and will continue to be, given that its population is growing extremely fast. It examines the tensions between the universal aspirations and the local realities in the case of some of Ethiopia’s most ambitious mass pro-poor housing schemes, such as the “Addis Ababa Grand Housing Program” (AAGHP), which was launched in 2004 and was integrated in the “Integrated Housing Development Program” (IHDP) in 2006. The article argues that the quotidian practices of communities and their socio-economic and cultural characteristics are related to the spatial attributes of co-housing practices. Drawing upon the idea that there is a mutual correspondence between social and spatial structures, it places particular emphasis on the analysis of the IHDP and aims to show that to shape strategies that take into account the social and cultural aspects of daily life of the poor citizens of Addis Ababa, it is pivotal to invite them to take part in the decision-making processes regarding their resettlement. Departing from the fact that a large percentage of the housing supply in Addis Ababa consists of informal unplanned housing, the article also compares the commoning practices in kebele houses and condominium units. The former refers to the legal informal housing units owned by the government and rented to their dwellers, whereas the latter concerns the housing blocks built in the framework of the IHDP for the resettlement of the kebele dwellers. The article analyzes these processes of resettlement, shedding light of the fact that kebele houses were located at the inner city, whereas the condominiums are located in the suburbs. Despite the fact that the living conditions in the condominium units are of a much higher quality than those in the kebele houses, their design underestimated or even neglected the role of the commoning practices. The article highlights the advantages of commoning practices in architecture and urban planning, and how the implementation of participation-oriented solutions can respond to the difficulties of providing housing. It argues that understanding the significance of the endeavors that take into account the opinions of dwellers during the phase of decision-making goes hand in hand with considering commoning practices as a source of architecture and urban planning frameworks for low-cost housing in this specific context. The key argument of the article is that urban planning and architecture solutions in Addis Ababa should be based on the principles of the so-called “negotiated planning” approach, which implies a close analysis of the interconnections between planning, infrastructure, and land.


2008 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 150-153
Author(s):  
Mun Ja Kim ◽  
Sung Min Park ◽  
Tae Young Lee ◽  
Sang Hyun Park ◽  
Jin Young Kim ◽  
...  

For the growth of Electroluminescent (EL) device market, the attention of many researchers is centered on improving the properties such as brightness, power consumption, device reliability, etc. The powder EL device is one of solutions for the easy mass production, the simplification of structure, and low cost. Although the powder process is the solution, that has the problem with the poor brightness than the film process. So, we focused on increasing the brightness of powder EL device. The emissive layer was made up the composites adding metal oxide nanopowder such as TiO2 and ZnO to powder phosphors. As the data of previous researcher, the TiO2 and ZnO had the different dominating traps by photovoltage measure, that is, TiO2 show hole traps, ZnO show electron traps [1]. The brightness of powder EL device proportions to the high electricfield formation. The TiO2 or ZnO in the powder phosphor composite can help the emission that may be advantageous to form high electricfield at low voltage. The EL devices with green ZnS phosphor were fabricated using spin coating method. The effect of TiO2 and ZnO on the luminescent property of EL device was investigated. The brightness was obtained as applied driving voltage at 400 Hz and frequency variation at 50 V.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document