Sub-Saharan Africa is a critical development priority - it has some of the world's poorest countries and during the past two decades the number of poor in the Region has doubled, to 300 million - more than 40 percent of the Region's population. Africa remains behind on most of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and is unlikely to reach them by 2015. With some of the world's poorest countries, Africa is a development priority for the donor community. A major drag on Africa's development is the underperformance of the critical agriculture sector, which has been neglected both by donors and governments over the past two decades.The sector faces a variety of constraints that are particular to agriculture in Africa and make its development a complex challenge. Poor governance and conflict in several countries further complicate matters. IEG has assessed the development effectiveness of World Bank assistance in addressing constraints to agricultural development in Africa over the period of fiscal 1991-2006.Moving forward, agriculture has enormous potential to contribute to poverty reduction in Africa and the Bank can make an important contribution in this area.

The State of Food and Agriculture 2006 examines the issues and controversies surrounding international food aid and seeks to find ways to preserve its essential humanitarian role while minimizing the possibility of harmful secondary impacts. Food aid has rightly been credited with saving millions of lives; indeed, it is often the only thing standing between vulnerable people and death. Yet food aid is sharply criticized as a donor-driven response that creates dependency on the part of recipients and undermines local agricultural producers and traders upon whom sustainable food security depends. The economic evidence regarding these issues is surprisingly thin, but it confirms that the timing and targeting of food aid are central to achieving immediate food security objectives while minimizing the potential for harm. Reforms to the international food aid system are necessary but they should be undertaken carefully because lives are at risk. Included in this issue is a mini CD-ROM of the FAO Statistical Yearbook 2005-2006 Vol. 2/1, containing time series data for 200 countries in Arabic, Chinese, English, French and Spanish.

Both law and weather affect us every day of our modern lives, yet most people do not know how the weather has affected developments in the law, nor are they aware of how the law has attempted to develop ways to affect the weather. When Nature Strikes is the first book to examine the various areas in which law and weather meet and affect each other. This one-of-a-kind work describes the law related to weather in the United States in the context of specific cases, legislation, and administrative legal action. For example, weather can be the means to commit a crime or the factor that turns an event from a terrible accident into a criminal act. Weather can be a defense against liability in both civil and criminal cases. People seek relief in court from the harm caused by weather events, whether a slip on the ice or the horrible devastation wrought by a deadly hurricane. Courts and the criminal justice system can be affected by weather events that prevent physical access to the courthouse or that destroy evidence. Through laws passed by Congress, U.S. weather services have evolved from simply weather recording into weather forecasting and warning systems. Federal patent law offers monopolies over inventions to encourage inventors to develop new devices that increase human safety in extreme weather or to improve methods such as cloud seeding or wind energy.

Chatting with notorious war criminal Charles Taylor on the lawn of his presidential mansion as ostriches and armed teenagers strut in the background. Landing in snow-covered Afghanistan weeks after the fall of the Taliban and trying to make sense of a country shattered by years of war. Being held at gunpoint by young soldiers amid the tragedy of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Standing in the middle of a violent riot in the streets of Kathmandu. Having hushed conversations with the widows of Europe's largest massacre since World War II. These are all scenes from The Disaster Gypsies, a compelling personal memoir by a relief worker and conflict specialist who has worked on the ground in a host of war-torn countries. Initially deployed as part of a humanitarian relief team in Rwanda almost by accident, Norris has experienced the tragedies of Rwanda, Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Liberia over a span of ten years. Rich with poignant human stories, The Disaster Gypsies captures the reality of modern war with an immediacy and compassion that puts the reader in the front seat for some of the most wrenching events of our times. Norris approaches his story with a unique and dynamic perspective, having worked both in the upper echelons of the U.S. government and in some of the world's most dangerous places. Moving from face-to-face encounters with powerful warlords to quiet moments with the victims of horrific violence, Norris gives readers a behind-the-scenes tour of a world most of them can barely imagine. He makes a compelling argument that these nasty civil wars were often dismissed as tribal, ethnic, or regional disputes by most Americans, when in reality such violence is fundamentallypart of the human condition. That may sound simple or even self-evident, but Norris contends that most people in the United States and Europe continue to view war as something that is outside of themselves and profoundly foreign in its nature, even as their own troops continue to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

'The Africa Multi-Country AIDS Program 2000 2006' shows that the funding made available through the World Bank's Multi-Country AIDS Program (MAP) has dramatically increased access to HIV prevention, care, and treatment across Africa. The book uses extensive data from national surveys and HIV/AIDS programs that show how MAP funding has helped support children and adults affected by AIDS, prevented mother-to-child transmission, helped countries build capacity for expanded and more effective national programs--including providing treatment--and been a catalyst for greatly increased support. Published and unpublished data from 30 countries are compiled to provide the fi rst summary picture of the results to which MAP support in Africa has contributed. One unique feature of the MAP has been its emphasis on channeling money to communities, grassroots initiatives, civil-society organizations, and NGOs. Personal stories from people and groups in Uganda, Ethiopia, and Rwanda offer powerful examples of how these grass-roots efforts and sharing of knowledge and experiences among countries have improved health and lives, reduced stigma, and given new hope to people living with and affected by HIV across the continent. The book also introduces a new Results Scorecard and Framework to better measure and report on results of Bank-fi nanced HIV/AIDS programs in Africa. The results described in this book will be of great interest to readers working in the areas of civil society engagement, public health, poverty reduction, social development, and population and reproductive health, as well as to anyone interested in national and global responses to HIV in Africa."

Global poverty is falling rapidly, but in around fifty failing states, the world's poorest people face a tragedy that is growing inexorably worse. This bottom billion live on less than a dollar a day and while the rest of the world moves steadily forward, this forgotten billion is left further and further behind with potentially serious consequences not only for them but for the stability of the rest of the world. Why do the states these people live in defy all the attempts of the international aid community to help them? Why does nothing seem to make a difference? In The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier pinpoints the issues of corruption, political instability and resource management that lie at the root of the problem. He describes the battle raging in these countries between corrupt leaders and would-be reformers and the factors such as civil war, dependence on the export of natural resources and lack of good governance that trap them into a downward spiral of economic and social decline. Collier addresses the fact that conventional aid has been unable to tackle these problems and puts forward a radical new plan of action including a new agenda for the G8 which includes more effective anti-corruption measures, preferential trade policies and where necessary direct military intervention. All of these initiatives are carefully designed to help the forgotten bottom billion, one of the key challenges facing the world in the twenty first century.

Despite its good intentions, mismanagement and corruption plagued the UN's Oil-for-Food Program:
-More than 2,200 companies paid $1.8 billion in illegal surcharges and kickbacks to the Iraqi regime
-The UN Security Council stood by as the Iraqi regime outright smuggled about $8.4 billion of oil during the Program years in violation of UN sanctions
-The Iraqi regime steered oil contracts for political advantage by giving rights to buy oil to dozens of global political figures sympathetic to Iraq's goal to loosen or overturn the UN sanctions
-The Iraqi regime provided Benon Sevan, the UN's chief administrator of the Program, with rights to buy more than 7 million barrels of oil
-UN-related humanitarian agencies collected tens of millions of dollars for costs they never incurred, and some built factories in Iraq that weren't needed or that never worked at all
-Even UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan was tainted by it
But the whole story has never been told in one place.

Arguing forcefully that changing times are a clarion call for new thinking, this book convincingly shows that if humanitarian organizations continue to operate as they have in the past, they will fail to help the very victims whom they try to save. Focusing especially on the emergence of 'new wars, ' Hoffman and Weiss insist that humanitarian organizations must recognize that they live in a political world and that their actions and goals are invariably affected by military action. The brand of warfare that erupted in the 1990s-marked by civil or transnational armed conflicts featuring potent non-state actors, altered political economies, a high proportion of civilian casualties, and a globalized media-produced horrors that shocked consciences and led humanitarian agencies to question their unyielding stance of neutrality and impartiality. Indeed, in a departure from earlier norms and practices, some have reinvented their policies and tools and created 'new humanitarianisms.' This authoritative book traces the evolution of the international humanitarian system from its inception in the 1860s, parses the dynamics of war and emergency response from the 1980s through the current disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq, and provides a strategic roadmap for practitioners. By bringing historical perspective to bear, this volume provides an invaluable analytical framework for grasping the nature of humanitarian crises and how agencies can respond strategically rather than reactively to change. Students will find its blend of clearly presented theory and case studies a powerful tool for understanding the roles of state and non-state actors in international relations. By charting the tides of continuity and change, this book will prepare agencies to dodge both figurative and actual bullets that threaten humanitarian action at the outset of the millennium.

This title uses case studies of US Policy decisions in Somalia, Bosnia, Angola, DR Congo, Sudan and Kosovo. It makes use of a variety of sources, from interviews and US embassy telegrams to firsthand experience in NGO settings. Two opposing images of humanitarian NGOs challenge efforts to understand their role in international relations. Do they function as autonomous - and influential - non-state actors in pursuit of their own value-driven agendas? Or do they serve merely as the paid agents of national governments, providing a service delivery function in line with those nations' foreign policy goals? Stoddard proposes a third view: that humanitarian NGOs, even those dependent on their home government for most of their funding, can and do influence state policy formation, but not in the manner of interest-based advocacy groups. Instead, these operational groups have the greatest impact on policy by providing hands-on information taken from experience. This information can shape what governments and other actors know, and how the policy problem is framed. Using case illustrations of US policy in the conflicts in Somalia, Bosnia, Angola, DR Congo, Sudan, and Kosovo, ""Humanitarian Alert"" charts the course of NGO information from its formation on the ground to its use by officials in all levels of government. An array of sources, from embassy telegrams to interviews with state and non-state actors, creates a compelling picture of how narratives and numbers in humanitarian crises help or hinder response.

The success of any international development agency depends on an understanding of the ways in which a community and individuals relate to ideas and resources. David Lewis and David Mosse have brought together a number of anthropologists with practical experience in development to show how ethnography can be an indispensable tool for understanding these complex and dynamic relationships. The world that this ethnography of development reveals does not divide neatly into the developers and the developed, perpetrators and victims, domination and resistance, or the incompatible rationalities of scientific and indigenous knowledge. It is a world in which interests and practices are always hybrids and in which rational policy representations frequently conceal the messiness of practice that precedes the ideas and technologies of development. The wealth of new ideas offered in this collection will be especially valuable to graduate students in anthropology and development studies, but also to undergraduates and those working in development organizations who wish to run more effective operations on every level.

An assessment of humanitarian-assistance efforts by and interaction between civilian and military providers in the early phases of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan Description and evaluation of relief, reconstruction, humanitarian, and humanitarian-type aid efforts in Afghanistan during the most intense phase of military operations, from September 2001 to June 2002. The efforts were generally successful, but there were serious coordination problems among the various civilian and military aid providers. Critical issues, both positive and negative, are identified, and a list of recommendations is provided for policymakers, implementers, and aid providers, based on lessons learned.

Can foreign donors help build new democracies? In the 1990s, public and private organizations such as USAID and the Soros Foundation poured huge amounts of money and expertise into Russia to help build the dream of a vibrant democratic society. Sarah L. Henderson argues that despite the altruistic intentions of foreign assistance agencies and domestic activists, foreign aid designed to spur civic growth has had unintended consequences. Drawing on extensive field work, survey research, and work experience for several funding agencies in Moscow in the late 1990s, Henderson focuses on donor efforts to support the emerging community of nongovernmental organizations and, in particular, on efforts to build a functioning women's movement in Russia. Her intimate knowledge of Russia's growing NGO community informs a worrisome finding: foreign aid has made a tremendous difference, but not in altogether expected or positive ways. New Russian civic groups serve either the needs of an indigenous clientele or the demands of the foreign aid bureaucracy but rarely both. Henderson's research and experience show that while aid has kept a fledgling civic community alive, it is a civic community that is disconnected from its own domestic audience. The book suggests that large flows of foreign aid have in some ways damaged the long-term prospects for democratization in Russia."

The achievements and challenges of the world's largest multilateral donor population programs In the thirty years since the United Nations Population Fund was founded, overall population growth rates have slowed, infant and maternal mortality have been reduced, and women have achieved improved access to reproductive health services. Yet, a multitude of problems remain, including the aging of Western European populations and the growth of others in the Third World, the impact of AIDS, and increases in migration and refugees. An Agenda for People examines the past achievements as well as the current and future challenges of the world's largest multilateral donor population programs. Through essays by experts in the field of development, this book tackles a series of probing questions. How has the Fund evolved and built global support? How have the major international conferences on population and environments shaped the global population agenda? What is the relationship between reproductive rights and human rights? What are the links between population and resource use and abuse? And how does the Fund help to integrate impoverished populations into national development strategies? This book provides an invaluable assessment of the state of world population programs and a fascinating look into the future of community development. Contributors include Tevia Abrams, John Caldwell, Sylvie Cohen, Rebecca Cook, Mahmoud Fathalla, Noeleen heyzer, Don Hinrichsen, Stafford Mousky, Mohammad Nizamuddin, Fred Sai, Sara Sems, Steven W. Sinding, Jyoti Shankar Singh, and Bradman Weerakoon.

Timely and controversial, A Bed for the Night reveals how humanitarian organizations trying to bring relief in an ever more violent and dangerous world are often betrayed and misused, and have increasingly lost sight of their purpose. Drawing on first-hand reporting from hot war zones around the world - Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo, Kosovo, Sudan and, most recently, Afghanistan - David Rieff shows us what humanitarian aid workers do in the field and the growing gap between their noble ambitions and their actual capabilities for alleviating suffering.

Tracing the origins of major humanitarian organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and CARE, he describes how many of them have moved from their founding principle of neutrality, which gave them access to victims, to encouraging the international community to take action to stop civil wars and ethnic cleansing. Rieff demonstrates how this advocacy has come at a high price. By overreaching, the humanitarian movement has allowed itself to be hijacked by the major powers, sometimes to become a fig leaf for actions that major powers take in their own national interests, as in Afghanistan, sometimes for their inaction, as in Bosnia and Rwanda. With the exception of cases of genocide, where the moral imperative to act overrides all other considerations,

With the number of violent conflicts within countries increasing all the time, as well as other forms of natural and man-made complex emergencies, humanitarian intervention has become a much more frequent form of development assistance. There has also been a corresponding rise in the need to evaluate the effectiveness of such interventions. In this volume, the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Assistance (ALNAP) has compiled for the first time an examination of the experiences of, and lessons learned by, those practically engaged in humanitarian programme evaluations.
The case studies included in this volume are drawn from four continents, including Central Asia and the Balkans, and they embrace the different kinds of humanitarian emergency that have afflicted so many people during the past decade. The volume addresses the context in which evaluations of humanitarian assistance take place; the actual process of doing evaluations; and the lessons for improving how such evaluations might be better undertaken in future.
This pioneering volume is likely to be of great practical value to agencies and individuals engaged in both the delivery of humanitarian assistance in complex emergencies and its evaluation.

Worldwide more and more governments have begun to buckle under a variety of strains, including the ongoing pressures of economic crisis, followed by structural adjustment programmes, and the impact of declining legitimacy, often resulting in the outbreak of civil war. In this study of aid policy, Joanna Macrae argues that the disintegration of state authority and civil order has created acute problems in aid management. Largely ignored by major aid organizations, insecurity and failures of governance are now the major obstacles to aid reaching those in most need. International aid has traditionally assumed the existence of stable, sovereign states capable of making policy. In a number of developing countries, including post-conflict regimes like Cambodia, Uganda or Kosovo, this is no longer the case. The big donor agencies have usually responded by suspending development aid and substituting some kind of emergency or relief assistance. Now, as the author shows, there are calls to make relief more development-oriented and for it to address the underlying conflicts which causes these crises. But she concludes from her investigations on the ground in a number of countries that relief and development aid are very distinct processes. In the absence of public policy-making authorities, aid becomes highly fragmented, often inadequate in scale, and certainly not capable of building local sustainability for particular programmes. The international aid system, she concludes, faces real dilemmas and remains ill-equipped to respond to the peculiar challenges of quasi-statehood that characterize chronic political emergencies and their aftermath. An important book for policy makers, scholars and students of the development process wrestling with 'real world' issues of aid delivery.

Michael Taylor spent 12 years of his life as director of Christian Aid, during which time he came face to face with world poverty. In this book he gives three examples of theological work which promotes historical change in favour of the poor.

This report explores how the US military might improve co-ordination with relief agencies and with European allies in such operations. It examines the dynamics of complex contingency operations, provides an overview of the relief community, and delineates barriers to better co-operation.

From Rwanda to Bosnia-Herzegovina to Kosovo and beyond, devastating human tragedies have torn apart communities -- and too often, the international response has been ineffective. Here now is a wealth of pragmatic information on how the international community can help these regions rebuild their communities.

Yunker sets forth the case for initiation of a massive foreign development assistance effort termed the World Economic Equalization Program (WEEP). The scale of the program would dwarf that of all historical foreign aid programs, yet the proposed contributions by the donor nations would not be unmanageable. The richest nations would contribute amounts ranging from three to seven percent of their Gross National Products.

Computer simulations of a model of the proposed program over a 50 year period show the possibility of a tremendous rise in the living standards of the poor nations, while, at the same time, the living standards of the rich nations continue to rise at rates closely comparable to those of the recent past. Sensitivity analysis demonstrates that the optimistic conclusions forthcoming from the baseline policy simulation remain robust against wide variations in the numerical parameter values. However, since it is obvious that real world results might not resemble results derived from computer simulation of a theoretical model, the recommendation put forward is that a World Economic Equalization Program be initiated on a tentative and provisional basis, with the explicit intention of terminating it if, after a reasonable period of time, real world results are insufficiently promising. A provocative analysis and proposal aimed primarily at economists and policy makers involved with economic development, international economics, and global economic policy.

Civil wars, genocides, natural disasters and other emergencies multiplied in the 1990s, and not just in the South, but in the Balkans and the former Soviet bloc. This book examines how to respond to the fundamental difficulties thrown up by these humanitarian crises. What kind of aid, in particular, should be brought in when the situation on the ground mixes up emergency relief with the longer-term process of development? The book includes many different voices and embodies an open-ended debate about the whole diverse process of international aid. The experiences and lessons it contains are relevant to all those playing a part in, or wishing to understand, the practice and dilemmas of humanitarian aid in the 1990s.

The 'anthropology of development' is already challenging the received wisdom of development thought and practice. In this book, Crewe and Harrison build on existing work by using their own experience of aid projects in Africa and Asia to examine a number of deep-seated assumptions in the minds of 'developers'. Flawed notions about progress, gender, technology, partnership, motivation, culture and race persist, and there are yawning gaps between these and the policies and actual practices of development. Through ethnographic case material from two different organizations - one an international NGO, the other a multilateral agency - the authors explore what actually happens when expatriate development personnel, local government officials and the intended beneficiaries of aid interact with one another. They describe how power inequalities based on race, class and gender are reflected in the processes of aid. This is a work of considerable subtlety. The authors find the dichotomies between 'us', the 'developers', and 'them', the 'beneficiaries' of development, inadequate. They question the apparently monolithic power of the developers, and show the need for a more nuanced, contextual account of the complex and often ambiguous relationships that exist within the aid industry. And while it refuses to provide simple answers, this book greatly enriches our understanding of the cultural and structural dynamics of the development process.

'This book is valuable for and beyond the international development industry. It deftly leads a non-specialist through the maze of ideas and arguments plaguing the concept of civil society, and critically examines how and what happens, when the international aid system tries to turn confusing and complex political theory into effective development policy and practice fitting the individual preconditions and historical trajectories of the worlds varied nations. The comparative evidence, analysis and recommendations on offer are essential reading for anyone attempting to understand or ''build'' someone else's - as well as their own - civil society, especially when justifying the use of tax payers' money to do so.' ALAN FOWLER, CO-FOUNDER, INTRAC 'This book will be really useful to numerous readers, 011 a subject becoming ever more topical in the world of development and beyond. It puts order into the deeply confused debate about civil society, describes what the aid donors are doing to pursue their new goals, offers four penetrating case studies, and concludes with sensible suggestions for future policy. The authors have made a practical and lucid assessment of the huge civil society literature; they have also contributed valuably to it, and deserve to he listened to.' PROFESSOR ROBERT CASSEN, LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS Northern governments and NGOs are increasingly convinced that civil society will enable people in developing countries to escape the poverty trap. Civil Society and the Aid Industry, the product of extensive research by the prestigious North-South Institute in Canada, makes a critical appraisal of this new emphasis in the aid industry. It explores the roles of Northern governmental, multilateral and non-governmental agencies in supporting civil society, presenting in-depth case studies of projects in Peru, Kenya, Sri Lanka and Hungary, and gives detailed policy recommendations intended to improve the effectiveness and appropriateness of future projects. Originally published in 1998

What impact do international economic inputs have on human rights in Third World nations? William Meyer explores the effects of direct investment by U.S. multinational corporations, economic and military aid, and MNC manufacturing plants. He examines the international political economy of human rights at both the national and the international levels. Case studies are combined with quantitative studies that use aggregate cross-national data, and theories that link MNCs to human rights are subjected to empirical testing.

As Meyer illustrates, at the national level, human rights violations are associated with U.S. MNCs in Chile, Honduras, India, Indonesia, and Mexico. MNCs have been especially guilty of violating labor rights, particularly through their reliance on sweatshops. MNCs have also been responsible for widespread pollution and environmental degradation. At a broader international level, increased investment by MNCs tends to go along with human rights improvements in the Third World as a whole. Meyer shows that there is a broad positive relationship between direct investment by MNCs and broader political rights and improved living standards. Aggregate data are also analyzed for human rights as compared to U.S. economic and military aid. Economic aid is found to be associated with improved civil-political rights and improved socioeconomic rights. Military aid, by contrast, is associated with declining levels of civil rights and with lower levels of social welfare. This book will serve as an important study for researchers, activists, and students of human rights.