What women do

by Haris Gazdar

Women and girls cut grass for fodder in Mirpurkhas
Photo credit: Collective team

We use the word ‘right’ a lot, but it is a haloed and distant term. In many languages it invokes truth – an aura of goodness and an assuring feeling of timelessness. A nation has the right to self-determination, an individual has the right to her or his conscience, and a child has the right to education. A nation can be hundreds or thousands of years old, and might have always had the right to self-determination, but it can practice self-determination once it is recognised by other nations. Ask any Palestinian. The individual’s right to conscience might have existed since before the day Socrates drank poisoned hemlock, but it can be practised when other individuals and the legal and political systems recognise that a person cannot be punished for their beliefs alone. The child always had the right to be educated but will actually be schooled when the community recognises this right and provides the necessary resources. Recognition, therefore, is the more accessible fellow-traveller of right. It is not only the way in which rights are realised, but is also a step towards making rights enforceable.

Aid: Who gets credit?

by Hussain Bux Mallah

Logos are one way aid agencies claim recognition, but what do they mean to the populations they serve?

Photo credit: Flickr/DFID

During our work in communities, I often encounter very interesting myths about where development aid comes from.

In 2004, when I was working on a project on social protection programmes in Sindh, I spoke to a government official affiliated with the Zakat-Ushr and Baitulmal programmes. He believed that the funding source for these programmes was “Maal-e-Ghanimat” sent to Pakistan by the Saudi government. In other words, he thought the state programmes were funded by income generated from booty accumulated during wars fought at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, which was donated to the country’s poor by Saudi Arabia. After the 2010 floods in Pakistan, we were conducting a survey on food insecurity and found little to no acknowledgement of the aid provided by the government, key aid agencies or international bodies for rescue and relief work. Most respondents believed that the work was done and funded by the Pakistan Army and NGOs. Another interesting misconception was around the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), an unconditional cash transfer programme for Pakistani women living in extreme poverty. The stipends from the programme were often referred to as “Benazir’s Money,” with a common (erroneous) assumption that the financial assistance given is generated from Shaheed Benazir Bhutto’s life insurance deposits, and not state and multilateral aid.

When help hurts

by Marium Ibrahim

Sculpture by David Shrigley, contrasting the two reactions to help.
Photo credit: Pinterest

Help is a notion that many of us take for granted. You ask for help when you cannot do something yourself. But is help always a good thing? What is its relationship to identity, agency and power?

The hurdle of hesitance

by Azmat Budhani

People's fear of health related interventions is not new. Spoof by British satirist James Gillroy depicting people's fear of small pox vaccines, 1802
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

As a researcher, I have often dealt with non-responses or respondent hesitancy in fieldwork. Earlier, I used to think that this hesitancy can only be minimized by building personal rapport through multiple visits. Over the years though, I have come to appreciate the role survey design plays in participant engagement. Our LANSA study, for example, seeks to investigate the impacts of women’s agricultural work on their own and their children’s nutrition levels. For this survey, we took the mother of an infant as the key respondent. Placing her instead of the head of household (who in most cases are male breadwinners for the family) on the top of the household roster had important implications for our fieldwork, as discussed in an earlier blog. Despite the process of anthropometric measurement being fairly clinical, or even intrusive, we found a majority of mothers eager to cooperate. They were keen to provide any information that could potentially benefit the health and future well-being of their children. Women tried to navigate constraints put by male community leaders and heads of households. One mother, for example said, ‘’My husband works in the Pakistan Army. He does not like NGOs. However, I am willing to participate.”

Flying low: Everyone seems to have a solution for PIA

by Asad Sayeed

PIA's first international flight, London Heathrow Airport, 1955
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Asif Ali Zardari and Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) are two subjects that Pakistan’s chattering classes love to loathe when they get together. However, unlike the helplessness they feel about Zardari’s continued role in politics, everyone seems to have a solution for PIA. The problem is deemed to be overstaffing due to nepotism and corruption by political governments; and the logical conclusion is that the airline should be privatised. As with most issues in Pakistan, it is useful to introduce some complexity to the equation.

Understanding agri-food value chains for nutrition

by Nigel Poole, Haris Gazdar and Mar Maestre

Photo credit: Flickr/ADB

Undernutrition is a central and persistent challenge for global development, above all in South Asia. Mobilising agri-food businesses to support efforts to reduce undernutrition is challenging. The LANSA (Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia) team has been researching for the past two years how the markets for food can be improved so that substantive and sustained consumption of nutrient-dense foods by the poor in households that are post-farm-gate is achieved. Here, nutrient rich foods are those that, if consumed in adequate quantities (WASH and health conditions not considered) are likely to improve the nutritional status of individuals who are undernourished in terms of micronutrients. We understand agri-food value chains as the initiatives, either donor, government or business driven that we will be analysing.

Ending poverty – drama or whimper?

by Haris Gazdar

Incidence of multidimensional poverty in Pakistan, 2014-2015
Photo Credit: UNDP, Pakistan

The first sustainable development goal (SDG1) is dramatic: “end poverty in all its forms everywhere” by 2030. Is it even a logical possibility? Have learned economic philosophers not pondered over the relative nature of poverty – which means that no matter how well off everyone is, some will be poorer, and poverty is about those who are poorer. Perhaps because the “ending poverty” wish is so fantastic it has been helpfully broken down into more tractable targets: ensure that no one lives on less than $1.25 a day. This idea owes its origins to a debate about global poverty lines – or levels of income below which a person is considered to be poor. And if the $1.25 a day target seems too rigid then there is the more achievable goal to “reduce by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions.” This gives quite a lot of leeway to national governments to come up with their own definitions of poverty reduction and then to try and achieve them.