scholarly journals The Secret to Getting Ahead Is Getting Started: Early Impacts of a Rural Development Project

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 2644
Author(s):  
Alexandra Peralta ◽  
Scott Swinton ◽  
Songqing Jin

Interventions in rural development projects vary in their likely time to impact. Some offer rapid payoffs after minimal learning and investment, while others offer larger payoffs but entail delays and may require learning or significant investment of labor and capital. Short-term impacts included reductions in stored grain losses due to improved silos and increase in household savings due to increased participation in savings groups. The least poor are most likely to invest labor and capital in slow-to-accrue payoffs like soil erosion abatement from building conservation structures. Our results suggest that targeting project interventions by asset level can enhance impacts.

Author(s):  
Mira Dineen

Young Canadians have access to a wealth of opportunities to participate in short-term development projects within developing regions in Canada and around the world. These projects include voluntourism, ecotourism, academic exchanges at educational institutions abroad, research projects, religious missions, internships, and short-term development initiatives organized by student-run campus organizations. Although there are numerous studies that examine gap year projects or short-term development projects, there are currently no studies of young Canadian university students’ involvement in short-term development projects through student-run organizations. This study seeks to explore young Canadian adults’ motivations to participate in short-term development projects, how participants in short-term development projects imagine themselves as agents of development, and what short-term development projects are teaching participants. Individual interviews were conducted with young Canadian adults between 18 and 24 years old who participated in a short-term development project between 2008 and 2011. Participants were recruited from two student-run development organizations at Queen’s and all projects lasted between six weeks and three months. This study draws on development theorists such as Edward Said, Barbara Heron, Kate Simpson, and Rebecca Tiessen, to frame and examine participants’ responses. This study finds that young Canadian development workers draw motivation, justification, and imagined identities as agents of development from a complex interface between whiteness, gender, colonialism, Orientalism, and morality. This study concludes that a short-term development work is dominated by a simplistic narrative that depoliticizes development and identifies concepts produced and reinforced by this narrative. Further, this study identifies needs and recommends opportunities for future research.


2001 ◽  
Vol 17 (suppl) ◽  
pp. S201-S208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Díaz ◽  
Daniel M. Cáceres

Most rural development projects include ecological considerations, and most conservation projects include some reference to sustainable development. However, conservation projects frequently fail because they do not incorporate local communities' perceptions and needs. Many development projects are also unsuccessful because they are not based on adequate ecological assessment. We focus here on the most important ecological issues to be addressed in order to place development projects in an ecosystem context. Such projects should incorporate updated and precise ecological concepts and methods. Some key ecological issues in development projects are the relationships between ecosystem functions, services, and sustainability, the concept of loose connectivity, the distinct and complementary concepts of ecosystem resistance and resilience, and the links between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. We claim that an ecologically sound development project maximizes the preservation and improvement of ecosystem services, especially for local communities. We pose a series of questions aimed at placing rural development projects in an ecosystem context and suggest ways of organizing this information.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 517-520
Author(s):  
Diana Elena Ranf ◽  
Elida-Tomiţa Todăriţa ◽  
Dănuţ Dumitru Dumitraşcu

AbstractEuropean funds are a development opportunity for the Romanian organizations. The research in the article aims to identify the main risk categories that the beneficiaries from Centre Region have faced, and also the effects of not considering certain risk categories in the stage of filling out the application form and also in the implementation stage of the projects have had on the development of these projects. Identifying how the organisations have managed projects during the development projects 2003-2013 finds its usefulness in the following period that is knocking on our doors: 2014-2020 that should find us better prepared and more capable of proving seriousness and professionalism. Therefore, training in projects should not end once the structural funds have been attracted, but it should be regarded as destined to modernize our way of thinking and actions in helping organisations develop their businesses.


Land ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (10) ◽  
pp. 352
Author(s):  
Claire Kelly ◽  
Maarten Wynants ◽  
Linus K. Munishi ◽  
Mona Nasseri ◽  
Aloyce Patrick ◽  
...  

Achieving change to address soil erosion has been a global yet elusive goal for decades. Efforts to implement effective solutions have often fallen short due to a lack of sustained, context-appropriate and multi-disciplinary engagement with the problem. Issues include prevalence of short-term funding for ‘quick-fix’ solutions; a lack of nuanced understandings of institutional, socio-economic or cultural drivers of erosion problems; little community engagement in design and testing solutions; and, critically, a lack of traction in integrating locally designed solutions into policy and institutional processes. This paper focusses on the latter issue of local action for policy integration, drawing on experiences from a Tanzanian context to highlight the practical and institutional disjuncts that exist; and the governance challenges that can hamper efforts to address and build resilience to soil erosion. By understanding context-specific governance processes, and joining them with realistic, locally designed actions, positive change has occurred, strengthening local-regional resilience to complex and seemingly intractable soil erosion challenges.


1984 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 144-149
Author(s):  
J. Mende

A manager facing the decision whether to proceed with a proposed computer system development project needs to determine whether its benefits are worth more than its costs. This can be done by applying a simple mathematical formula to calculate the project's 'net worth', as the sum of the annual benefits obtainable during the system's life span, less its development costs. The formula recognizes that a system's annual benefit, comprising enhanced informational value plus reduction In data processing cost, will change as a result of obsolescence, cost of capital, organizational growth and learning.


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