Recent studies in the DRC tend to focus
on human rights abuses or on the status of women, however
few investigations examine the link between mining and
sexual violence. There is a dearth of research specifically
into the gender dimensions of artisanal and small-scale
mining (ASM) as a means to economic security for both men
and women. Further, there has been insufficient analysis of
the real and potential threats to women’s human rights in

The housing finance market in Mali
remains small and under developed. Few banks currently offer
a full mortgage product with Banque Malienne de Solidarite,
Mali Housing Bank (BHM), Bank of Africa, and EcoBank being
the main lenders although at minimal levels. The total
annual housing need in Mali based on the household formation
rate amounts to 82,500, split between 51,100 urban units and
31,400 rural units. Overall some social housing is

New qualitative fieldwork in eight
countries of Europe and Central Asia (ECA) indicates that
the dramatic declines in poverty in much of the region over
the last decade do not appear to be registering very
favorably with men and women on the ground. This paper
provides a gender analysis of findings from equal numbers of
sex-specific focus groups with employed and jobless
individuals. The methodology featured a standardized package

Launched in 2011, the Second Sustainable
and Participatory Energy Management Project (PROGEDE II) for
Senegal has been hailed for effectively mainstreaming a
gender perspective into an energy project. Under the
project, women have participated more in decision making;
developed skills in technical production, entrepreneurship,
and organizational management; and benefitted from increased incomes.

Recent surveys show considerable
progress in maternal and child health in Ethiopia. The
improvement has been in health outcomes and health services
coverage. The study examines how different groups have fared
in this progress. It tracked 11 health outcome indicators
and health interventions related to millennium development
goals one, four, and five. These are stunting, underweight,
wasting, neonatal mortality, infant mortality, under -five

Refugee return is one of the three
so-called durable solutions to refugee displacement
envisaged by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) and the international community. The objective of
this study is to identify the conditions that influence the
decisions by refugees in protracted displacement regarding
return to their home country - when, why, and by whom are
decisions on return or other coping strategies made, and how

Most reports on refugees deal with the
immediate needs of displaced people. This paper seeks to go
beyond the emergency phase and explore the challenges
surrounding protracted refugee situations. The paper
examines the refugee situation in Sub-Saharan Africa from a
long-term angle, from the perspective of refugees own agency
as well as from the perspective of the host community. The
paper aims to shed light on the economic lives of refugees

Social norms affect almost every aspect
of people’s lives, and can be an obstacle to or support
economic development. This paper outlines what social norms
are and how they work, providing examples from everyday life
and from development case studies. Sometimes not much can be
done about changing undesirable social norms. In those
cases, development economists need to be aware of how the
existence of those norms can impact the effects of the

This paper evaluates the impact of
access to credit from banks and other financial institutions
on household welfare in Mauritania. Micro-level data from a
2014 household survey are used to evaluate the relationship
between credit access, a range of household characteristics,
and welfare indicators. To address potential endogeneity
issues, the household isolation level is used to instrument
access to credit. The results show that households headed by

Almost a decade after large land-based
investment for agriculture increased sharply, opinions on
its impact continue to diverge, partly because (positive or
negative) spillovers on neighboring smallholders have never
been rigorously assessed. Applying methods from the urban
literature on Mozambican data suggests that changes in the
number and area of large farms within 25 or 50 kilometers of
these investments raised use of improved practices, animal

The recent decline in India’s rural
female labor force participation is generally attributed to
higher rural incomes in a patriarchal society. Together with
the growing share of the urban population, where female
participation rates are lower, this alleged income effect
does not bode well for the empowerment of women as India
develops. This paper argues that a traditional supply-side
interpretation is insufficient to account for the decline in

This report is based on a field study of
two large settlements, Satghara (a census town) and
Bhagwatipur (a rural cluster with 10,000 plus population) in
the Madhubani district of Bihar. The study explores the
social dynamics of the rural non-farm economy by empirically
mapping non-farm occupations in both the settlements. It
examines the dynamics of caste, community, and gender within
the social organization of the non-farm economy in terms of