Practical Action Publishing
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Water Treatment and Sanitation
The purpose of this handbook is to put together in a simple and logical form various aspects which must be considered when investigating the development of a water supply and sewage disposal scheme for a small community. This could be a rural village or small town, or a school or hospital situated t...
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We Work at Home
A training manual designed to assist organizations or individuals to facilitate the building of independent home-based worker organizations. Home-based working is defined as paid employment in the home or in a building or yard near the home, for example traditional crafts, making clothes and shoes,...
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Wealth Ranking in Smallholder Communities
A guide on how to carry out a wealth ranking exercise. The technique allows researchers to understand quickly the nature of wealth differences in a community and to determine the approximate wealth status of each community member.
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Wellbeing and Quality of Life Assessment
Sarah C White, Asha Abeyasekera
Human development may encompass social, cultural and spiritual facets as well as economic improvement, and development organizations are beginning to recognize this fact. But building into programming a wider understanding of development throws up a number of questions: how do our organizations defi...
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Wellbeing Ranking
Wealth-ranking is a participatory tool enabling people to group their fellows into wealth bands, and thus identify the very poor. Now the method has been developed to include the broader aspects of wellbeing, such as social standing and health, that people value as much as material wealth. Wellbeing...
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What Works for Africa's Poorest
David Lawson, David Hulme, Lawrence K. Ado-Kofie
Although great strides have been made, Africa still lags behind other parts of the world in the reduction of poverty. We now know that the poorest people rarely benefit from poverty reduction programmes, and this is especially true in some countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Microfinance programmes, fo...
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What Works for Africa's Poorest Children
David Lawson, Diego Angemi, Ibrahim Kasirye
While there has been substantial progress in reducing global poverty in recent years, hundreds of millions of vulnerable children remain trapped in extreme poverty. This is especially the case on the African continent, where children account for the majority and growing proportion of the population....
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What Works for the Poorest?
David Lawson, David Hulme, Imran Matin, Karen Moore
Poverty reduction has become the central goal of development policies over the last decade but there is a growing realization that the poorest people rarely benefit from poverty reduction programmes. Microfinance programmes can help poor people improve their lives but generally such programmes do no...
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What's Wrong with Microfinance?
Thomas Dichter, Malcolm Harper
Microfinance has been a long-lived development fashion and in 2005 it enjoyed the accolade of a UN International Year. Many of the world's biggest multinational banks are now eagerly committing quite substantial sums to it, for business as well as public relations purposes. However, there are some i...
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Wheels of Trade
High levels of subsidy have tended to create dependency and interventions, which run in parallel with the day-to-day workings of the small enterprise sector. This book presents the findings from the ILO's FIT programme which has worked to define and explore a different approach to the provision of B...