Assistance In Ways Research Articles

Entrepreneurial Women in a Saturated Marketplace: How Gendered Power Shapes Experiences of Debt in Rural Cambodia

Debt can be both a path to freedom and prosperity and a source of exploitation. This article analyses the embodied debt relations of rural shop owners in Cambodia to show how gender, class, and ethnic relations of power shape people’s ability to benefit from micro-credit. Drawing on 25 interviews with rural shop owners, the article analyses how the expansion of micro-finance loans for Khmer and Indigenous women to set up micro-businesses with little capital has encouraged an over-supply of rural shops. Struggling shop owners seek to retain loyal customers and perform obligations of altruism rooted in gender and ethnic norms by offering interest-free credit to customers, a practice that brings benefits to communities but entails gendered risks and embodied labour that is disproportionately borne by poorer women. This analysis reveals how formal debt can articulate with traditions of reciprocal assistance in ways that expand reciprocal bonds, while also enabling exploitation. The expectations placed on “entrepreneurial women” neglect the structural conditions of loan saturation and the intersectional relations of social power that shape people’s ability to run small businesses.

Building rural wealth through a value chain approach

ABSTRACT Rural wealth creation is a salient approach to local economic development. This paper advances the implementation of this practice by documenting how targeted business investments within a value chain built multiple forms of wealth. We provide exploratory evidence of how consideration of value chain gaps, wealth-building opportunities, potential for expansion, and an emphasis on improved livelihoods can prioritize the allocation of resources to support businesses. We further show how modest investments into targeted businesses built multiple forms of wealth throughout a value chain. Our results provide examples of how to implement the rural wealth creation concepts and a refined understanding of how to target business assistance in ways that build multiple forms of community capital.

National Perspectives and Quantitative Datasets: A Silver Lining?

AbstractAs noted by other contributions to this special issue, an American perspective shapes many leading quantitative datasets used by international relations scholars. This tendency can lead to biased inferences, but it can also enhance scholarly accuracy under certain conditions. Precisely because some datasets reflect national perspectives, they are appropriate to use when seeking to test theories in which the actors of interest subscribe to the same national perspective. This argument is illustrated with the case of US democracy assistance. Using an appropriate measure of democracy reveals that—contrary to some claims in the literature—US policy-makers allocate democracy assistance in ways that reflect their perceptions of countries’ regime types, giving less democracy assistance to countries that they perceive as more democratic.

Who pays for cooperation in global health? A comparative analysis of WHO, the World Bank, the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance

In this report we assess who pays for cooperation in global health through an analysis of the financial flows of WHO, the World Bank, the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. The past few decades have seen the consolidation of influence in the disproportionate roles the USA, UK, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have had in financing three of these four institutions. Current financing flows in all four case study institutions allow donors to finance and deliver assistance in ways that they can more closely control and monitor at every stage. We highlight three major trends in global health governance more broadly that relate to this development: towards more discretionary funding and away from core or longer-term funding; towards defined multi-stakeholder governance and away from traditional government-centred representation and decision-making; and towards narrower mandates or problem-focused vertical initiatives and away from broader systemic goals.

Bridging the gap: using direct payments to purchase integrated care.

This paper reports on a study of disabled people with receiving Direct Payments who were able to purchase assistance in ways that cross conventional boundaries between 'health' and 'social' services. Indeed, most of the Direct Payment recipients used the term 'personal care' to describe a range of help that extended right across this conventional divide. Nevertheless, most of the users reported purchasing help with aspects of health care through their Direct Payments, including physiotherapy, management of incontinence, chiropody, changing dressings and sustaining tissue viability. They chose to purchase this help from their personal assistants (PAs) because statutory services were not available, had been withdrawn, or because they were able to retain greater independence and control over their lives compared with receiving conventional services. Many Direct Payment users wanted more opportunities to purchase a range of health-related services, although this also raised questions about training, supervision and the professionalisation of flexible personal assistance. The paper concludes that health purchasers may need to consider contributing to Direct Payments in acknowledgement of the health care which such schemes are currently providing.