Policymakers in a number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are seeking to work with food markets and food businesses as part of efforts to reduce undernutrition. These market-based approaches include national fortification programmes, public food distribution systems, new product development and the promotion of biofortified crops.
Food markets have clear potential to improve diets, including those of many low-income populations. However, current market-based approaches generally fail to engage a large and critical portion of these markets: informal businesses – particularly food traders, processors and retailers. It is the informal sector that supplies much of the food purchased by the poor, delivering products to the locations where they live, typically at very low prices. However, food in informal markets is often not sufficiently nutrient-rich and can be unsafe. Many policymakers regard the informal sector as a barrier to development or believe that it will quickly disappear with the spread of supermarkets and centralised food value chains. However, available evidence suggests that most food in SSA countries will continue to be sold in informal markets for the next several decades, due to broader economic and institutional conditions that favour informality.
Policy approaches aiming to suppress the informal sector are generally ineffective; in some cases, they can actually decrease the quality and safety of food. Similarly, food and nutrition policies that simply ignore the informal sector may fail to have effects for low-income populations. Finally, nutrition initiatives that include the informal sector may contribute to the success of parallel initiatives involving formal businesses, since formal businesses generally compete with informal businesses and respond to their behaviours. Developing new approaches that engage informal food businesses is therefore an important policy priority. Yet programmatic action in the informal sector has not been examined in a systematic way in the context of food and nutrition.
This Evidence Report helps to address this gap by analysing several programmes in other sectors that have sought to improve performance in informal markets in SSA. The report groups these programmes into three case studies: food safety interventions, programmes targeting small medicine sellers, and efforts to promote salt iodisation. The review finds that there are substantial benefits of adopting a facilitative approach towards informal businesses: in particular ‘light-touch’ interventions centred around training and behaviour change can yield significant improvements in the quality of products and services. At the same time, these approaches are not panaceas; the case studies emphasise that ‘light-touch’ interventions do not lead to technically perfect outcomes: post-intervention performance is patchy, and inappropriate products and practices remain. Yet, by triggering moderate improvements in informal markets, these programmes may have substantial benefits for the poor.
http://www.ids.ac.uk/publication/improving-the-nutritional-quality-of-food-markets-through-the-informal-sector-lessons-from-case-studies-in-other-sectors
I-BRIDGE's blog (Link Campus University's Research Centre on Global Affairs) - editor, Marco Emanuele - Critical thinking, complexity, international relations (Twitter, @Glob_Eye - Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/marco.emanuele.50)
Showing posts with label IDS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IDS. Show all posts
Monday, 15 February 2016
A Prognosis and Diagnosis for China and the 2016 G20: The Politics of a New Global Economic Geography (IDS)
The early Chinese Communist regime depicted T’ao Ch’ien as a people’s poet, an ascetic recluse who embraced poverty and a peasant’s life. In fact, he rose as high as provincial governor, and his verses about labour, poverty and gallons of wine were often metaphors.
He was not rich but was what one might call ‘low gentry’, able to view at first hand the wealth of those above him, sometimes to taste it. He had ‘ornate pins of office’ and delighted in feasting his poorer neighbours. But he never forgot his start in life: ‘Since my hair was bound up, I’ve laboured to do good, | For four and fifty years I’ve done my best. | As a young man, I came up against the world’ (Frodsham 1967: 114–17). The ‘Teacher of Old’ in T’ao’s poem is Confucius.
The sentiment is that virtue is greater than a concern for poverty. T’ao himself expressly suggested that such virtue was impossible to attain: ‘Man’s life is based on constant principles, | Foremost of which is the need for clothes and food. | How can we pay no heed to things like these, | And still hope to attain to happiness?’ The tension between necessity and virtue, one a material absolute (eat or die), and the other an aspirational normative condition (to be virtuous is to be happy), has run through all of China’s development assistance to the surrounding world.
Often, the two would establish contradictions in how China approached especially the developing world. The aim of this report, however, is to argue that – for 2016 – the China that will greet the states of the G20 will be a China that aims to change the material world. It will deploy a vocabulary of virtue. I have myself sought to recognise those moments when Confucian virtue was a key underlay of China’s relationship with Africa (Chan 2013). China will still hope that virtue will be achieved ‘through hard work’. Increasingly virtue embroiders a self-justifying romance as China develops an economic realpolitik that is breathtaking in its ambition.
http://www.ids.ac.uk/publication/a-prognosis-and-diagnosis-for-china-and-the-2016-g20-the-politics-of-a-new-global-economic-geography
He was not rich but was what one might call ‘low gentry’, able to view at first hand the wealth of those above him, sometimes to taste it. He had ‘ornate pins of office’ and delighted in feasting his poorer neighbours. But he never forgot his start in life: ‘Since my hair was bound up, I’ve laboured to do good, | For four and fifty years I’ve done my best. | As a young man, I came up against the world’ (Frodsham 1967: 114–17). The ‘Teacher of Old’ in T’ao’s poem is Confucius.
The sentiment is that virtue is greater than a concern for poverty. T’ao himself expressly suggested that such virtue was impossible to attain: ‘Man’s life is based on constant principles, | Foremost of which is the need for clothes and food. | How can we pay no heed to things like these, | And still hope to attain to happiness?’ The tension between necessity and virtue, one a material absolute (eat or die), and the other an aspirational normative condition (to be virtuous is to be happy), has run through all of China’s development assistance to the surrounding world.
Often, the two would establish contradictions in how China approached especially the developing world. The aim of this report, however, is to argue that – for 2016 – the China that will greet the states of the G20 will be a China that aims to change the material world. It will deploy a vocabulary of virtue. I have myself sought to recognise those moments when Confucian virtue was a key underlay of China’s relationship with Africa (Chan 2013). China will still hope that virtue will be achieved ‘through hard work’. Increasingly virtue embroiders a self-justifying romance as China develops an economic realpolitik that is breathtaking in its ambition.
http://www.ids.ac.uk/publication/a-prognosis-and-diagnosis-for-china-and-the-2016-g20-the-politics-of-a-new-global-economic-geography
Wednesday, 10 February 2016
Power, Violence, Citizenship and Agency: A Review of the Literature (Marjoke Oosterom, IDS)
This Working Paper comprises a literature review that was carried out to inform the formulation of a research project on power, violence, citizenship and agency, which addresses how social actors react to complex, violence-prone contexts. It reviews recent literature on citizen agency, social agency, leadership, violence and conflict from various disciplines including security studies, conflict studies, social theory, psychology, anthropology, development studies and gender studies.
It focuses on the way that agency is conceptualised in each field. While all the disciplinary areas covered acknowledge that agency exists in complex violent settings, few studies refer to transformative agency for prevention or transformation of violent conflict, instead framing agency in terms of participating in violent activities, coping mechanisms for sustaining life in violent circumstances, or maintaining ‘ordinary life’ during conflict. The only disciplinary areas in which a more theoretical understanding of transformative agency is being developed are in gender studies and development studies, which also address issues of identity and power.
http://www.ids.ac.uk/publication/power-violence-citizenship-and-agency-a-review-of-the-literature
It focuses on the way that agency is conceptualised in each field. While all the disciplinary areas covered acknowledge that agency exists in complex violent settings, few studies refer to transformative agency for prevention or transformation of violent conflict, instead framing agency in terms of participating in violent activities, coping mechanisms for sustaining life in violent circumstances, or maintaining ‘ordinary life’ during conflict. The only disciplinary areas in which a more theoretical understanding of transformative agency is being developed are in gender studies and development studies, which also address issues of identity and power.
http://www.ids.ac.uk/publication/power-violence-citizenship-and-agency-a-review-of-the-literature
Foresight and International Development: Conference Report (IDS)
This report presents a summary of a one-day conference on ‘Foresight and International Development’ held at the Institute of Development Studies on 15 October 2015.
http://www.ids.ac.uk/publication/foresight-and-international-development-conference-report
http://www.ids.ac.uk/publication/foresight-and-international-development-conference-report
Balancing Inclusiveness, Rigour and Feasibility: Insights from Participatory Impact Evaluations in Ghana and Vietnam (Adinda Van Hemelrijck, IDS)
This paper by Adinda Van Hemelrijck and Irene Guijt explores how impact evaluation can live up to standards broader than statistical rigour in ways that address challenges of complexity and enable stakeholders to engage meaningfully.
A Participatory Impact Assessment and Learning Approach (PIALA) was piloted to assess and debate the impacts on rural poverty of two government programmes in Vietnam and Ghana funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). We discuss the trade-offs between rigour, inclusiveness and feasibility encountered in these two pilots. Trade-offs occur in every impact evaluation aiming for more than reductionist rigour, but the pilots suggest that they can be reduced by building sufficient research and learning capacity.
http://www.ids.ac.uk/publication/balancing-inclusiveness-rigour-and-feasibility-insights-from-participatory-impact-evaluations-in-ghana-and-vietnam
A Participatory Impact Assessment and Learning Approach (PIALA) was piloted to assess and debate the impacts on rural poverty of two government programmes in Vietnam and Ghana funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). We discuss the trade-offs between rigour, inclusiveness and feasibility encountered in these two pilots. Trade-offs occur in every impact evaluation aiming for more than reductionist rigour, but the pilots suggest that they can be reduced by building sufficient research and learning capacity.
http://www.ids.ac.uk/publication/balancing-inclusiveness-rigour-and-feasibility-insights-from-participatory-impact-evaluations-in-ghana-and-vietnam
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