Impact Measurement and Accountability in Emergencies

What difference are we making? How do we know? The Good Enough Guide helps busy field workers to address these questions. It offers a set of basic guidelines on how to be accountable to local people and measure programme impact in emergency situations and contains a variety of tools on needs assessm...

Learning Endogenous Development

Endogenous development places the major importance in working with local communities on using people's own resources, strategies, and initiatives as the basis for their development. It considers not only the material, but also the socio-cultural and the spiritual resources of people, in order to bro...

The Sustainability Handbook for Design & Technology Teachers

Ian Capewell

Most people are now aware of their eco-footprint and the need to cut carbon emissions. Local councils have set up recycling schemes and people are encouraged to reduce travel emissions, but this is not enough. Designers need to incorporate sustainability considerations into their work, and this book...

Trail Bridge Building in the Himalayas

Artha Tuladhar

A co-publication with Helvetas in their Experience and Learning in International Cooperation series, this publication describes the rural infrastructure support work conducted by Swiss development agency Helvetas in Nepal and Bhutan where over 4000 trail bridges have been built in the last 40 years....

Village Savings and Loan Associations

Hugh Allen, Mark Staehle

While many banks and microfinance institutions provide valuable services to the poor in the developing world, they are most successful in economically dynamic urban or peri-urban areas. 30 years since the start of the microfinance revolution, poor people who live in many rural areas and urban slu...

Voices from the Margins

Roger Lewins, Stuart Coupe, Francis Murray

Describes the work of Practical Action in introducing consensus-based planning approaches in villages that are poor even by Bangladesh standards, where 90 per cent of people live under the poverty line and over 60 per cent are illiterate. These methods work on raising the voice and confidence of the...

Water Supply and Sanitation Services for the Rural Poor

Pamela Keirns

Safe drinking water near to the home and adequate household sanitation save poor households time, reduce illness and increase a sense of well being and dignity. Gram Vikas, a non-government organization working in one of the poorest states in India, recognized this key role and encouraged villages t...

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...

Where There is No Artist

Petra Rohr-Rouendaal

A simple to use catalogue, containing a wealth of illustrations, with a unique combination of written text and visual aids.Visual aids can provide information, provoke discussion and discovery, and make difficult ideas easy to understand. They can also improve the accessibility of a book or a poster...

The Aid Chain

Tina Wallace, Lisa Bornstein, Jennifer Chapman

The Aid Chain explores the role of funding conditions in shaping co-operation and resistance as aid moves from donors, to NGOs, to local communities. Significant proportions of aid flow through the non-governmental sector but questions are increasingly being asked about the role of NGOs and whether...