Thailand National-Level Workshop Announcement

Learn, share and network at this workshop for economic and gender-based violence staff from governments, donor agencies, and NGOs in Thailand to acquire knowledge and hands-on skills necessary to implement and evaluate economic and household energy programs that will reduce displaced women’s vulnerability to gender-based violence. The workshop is limited to 25 participants.

Building on the Women’s Refugee Commission’s Regional Livelihoods Workshop on August 11-13, 2009 and on a series global workshops on safe access to firewood and alternative energy in humanitarian settings (SAFE), the Women’s Refugee Commission with support from the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration is conducting a participatory four-day national-level workshop on operationalizing protection into livelihood and household energy programs for refugees in urban, in-camp, and other settings in Thailand.

A lack of safe access to household energy and insufficient livelihoods options are key sources of vulnerability to gender-based violence, particularly among displaced and conflict-affected populations. As such, this workshop will engage participants in developing market-oriented, context-specific approaches and protection strategies for designing safe and self-reliant livelihood and household interventions.

Participants will become familiar with best practices identified and developed from the Women’s Refugee Commission’s long-standing research projects on livelihoods and household energy programming in refugee, IDP, and returnee settings. In order to facilitate participants’ operationalization of safe livelihoods and household energy programs as a tool for reducing vulnerability to gender-based violence, the workshop will include practice sessions, adapt participant project work plans, and develop a joint action plan to support collaboration and coordination between participants. Participants will have continued access to the Women’s Refugee Commission’s technical staff for technical support through 2011.

WORKSHOP FEE: There is No fee for this workshop. Participants will be required to cover their own travel expenses, including board.

Apply here before December 16, 2009.

For Questions, please contact Dena Batrice, denab@wrcommission.org.

This report by Save the Children emphasizes the role of cash transfers in lowering child mortality. It argues that well-designed cash transfer programs can help tackle many of the determinants of child mortality, most immediately by increasing access to healthcare and reducing malnutrition.The report draws on evidence across a number of countries to demonstrate that cash transfers have helped poor people to access food and healthcare, and to enhance the status of women (itself one of the most significant determinants of child survival). It further argues that cash transfers also have important positive economic benefits, helping to create livelihood opportunities, increase labor productivity and earnings, stimulate local markets, and cushion families from the worst effects of crises.

The Women’s Refugee Commission is holding a three-day highly participatory workshop designed to bring practitioners from throughout the region to learn new techniques, share experiences, and collect tools designed to improve practice on the ground. Two days of the workshop will focus on findings from the Women’s Refugee Commission’s three-year research project on livelihoods in refugee, IDP, and returnee settings and will include practice sessions on usage of the newly released Livelihoods Field Manual. A third day of the workshop will cover findings on the Commission’s project on livelihoods as a tool of protection against gender-based violence and how GBV and livelihood programs should complement each other to better protect women.

Apply for this event by July 10, 2009

Participants will be required to cover their own travel expenses. Meals and materials will be provided. There will be a very limited amount of financial assistance available to local NGOs only for partial coverage of travel and hotel expenses.

To request an application or for any questions, please contact Gillian at: gillianda@wrcommission.org

AED’s Global Learning Group cordially invites you to a panel discussion about Adolescent Girls and the Workforce

Wednesday, June 24th from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m.
In AED’s Academy Hall
1825 Connecticut Ave, NW, 8th Floor
Washington, DC 20009

Distinguished Speakers will be

• Dr. Andrew Morrison, Senior Economist and Gender Specialist at the World Bank;
• Allyn Moushey, Poverty Analysis & Social Safety Nets Advisor at USAID Bureau for Economic Growth, Agriculture and Trade; and
• Dr. Conrad Person, Director of International Programs and Product Giving from Johnson & Johnson.

The panel will be moderated by May Rihani, Senior Vice President and Director of the Global Learning Group, AED. A light breakfast will be served.

Please RSVP to Greta Stults, Executive Assistant at the Center for Gender Equity at:
gstults@aed.org or (202) 884-8517

The USAID-funded Community Action Program (CAP) III builds upon the successes of CAP I and II in strengthening local government institutions and grassroots democracy in Iraq. ACDI/VOCA and its sub-partner, International City/County Management Association (ICMA), are implementing CAP III in four of Iraq’s northern provinces: Kirkuk, Salah ad Din, Diyala and Ninawa. The goal of CAP III is to increase the ability of local government to identify, articulate and better meet the needs of its constituency.

The program’s objectives are:

• Communities better articulate their needs and mobilize resources within and outside the community to solve common problems;
• Local executive and representative government in CAP communities better meet articulated needs of the community; and
• Civilian victims of conflict assisted by the Marla Ruzicka Innocent Victims of War Fund.

Meeting the needs of local youth is important to achieving these objectives, so CAP III incorporates several youth components:

• Apprenticeship Programs for Youth in Private/Public Sector
  The Apprenticeship Program was designed and implemented under the previous CAP programs to improve youth workforce capacity in areas of high youth unemployment. The apprenticeship program currently provides short-term jobs in combination with on-the-ground training for over 460 youth between 18 and 24 years old who are graduates of technical institutes and universities.
  
  Under CAP III, supervisors are being trained in how to mentor and coach apprentices, which improves employers’ human resource management. This addresses the needs of youth in the community, and also has the benefit of strengthening human resource capacity within the local government, which will be critical as local government becomes more decentralized. In addition, CAP III is introducing an apprenticeship program targeted at public health outreach. Through this program, young graduates, will assist health specialists in developing outreach and training materials targeting maternal and child health, water-borne diseases, and other community-identified critical public health issues.
  
  
• Youth Civic Action and Governance Summer Camps
  ACDI/VOCA will conduct two Youth Civic Action and Governance Summer camps for a total of 120 youth in the summer of 2009. The camps will bring together male and female youth from all four provinces who represent diverse ethnicities to engage them in activities that will teach community governance strategies through active simulation and participation. Through the camps, youth will be exposed to both diversity and commonalities among themselves, and they will learn how to effectively use conflict-mitigation strategies, team-building, and advocacy strategies as responsible citizens.
  
  
• Development of Youth Community Action Groups (CAGs)
  Under CAP II, the Quratoo Community Action Group in northern Diyala developed a strong focus on advocating for youth issues and developing youth leadership. It formed a Youth Action CAG, predominantly composed of men and women under 30 years of age who work in the public sector as teachers and government employees, to support and inform its work with and for young people. Currently, the Quratoo CAG focuses on promoting and advocating youth leadership to their sub-district council and higher levels of government.

Brandie Maxwell
bmaxwell@acdivoca.org

October 2008 - March 2010

How do economic shocks, in particular the current economic downturn, affect the wellbeing of children? What can be done to mitigate harm? This paper explores these questions, presents a framework for analysing the impact of shocks on children in different contexts and suggests initial policy implications.

This paper analyzes changes in the allocation of child labor within the household in reaction to exogenous shocks created by a social program in Nicaragua. The paper shows that households that randomly received a conditional cash transfer compensated for some of the intra-household differences, as they reduced child labor more for older boys who used to work more and for boys who were further behind in school. The results also show that households that randomly received a productive investment grant, in addition to the basic conditional cash transfer benefits, both targeted at women, show an increased specialization of older girls in nonagricultural and domestic work, but no overall increase in girls’ child labor. The findings suggest that time allocation and specialization patterns in child labor within the household are important factors to understand the impact of a social program.

The relationship between wealth and child labor has been widely examined. This paper uses three rounds of time-series, cross-sectional data to examine the relationship between wealth and child labor and schooling. The paper finds that wealth is crucial in determining a child’s activities, but that this factor is far from being a sufficient condition to enroll a child in school. This is particularly the case for rural girls. Nonparametric analysis shows a universal increase in school enrollment for rural girls from 1998 to 2006. This increase is independent of wealth (measured by per capita expenditure). Multinomial logit regression further shows that wealth is insignificant in determining rural girls’ activity decisions. Thus, interventions to increase school enrollment should incorporate broad-targeted, demand-side interventions as well as supply-side interventions.

Application deadline for West Africa workshop: 20 April

The Women’s Refugee Commission will be conducting three livelihood workshops this year in West Africa, East Africa and Asia. The workshops focus on the needs of displaced women and youth, and will include a session that addresses implications for child protection.

The first one will be a three-day, highly participatory regional livelihoods workshop in Accra, Ghana from May 12-14, 2009 designed to bring practitioners from throughout the region to learn new techniques, share experiences, and collect tools designed to improve economic programming practice on the ground. Two days of the workshop will focus on findings from the Women’s Refugee Commission’s three-year research project on livelihoods in refugee, IDP, and returnee settings and will include practice sessions on usage of the newly released Livelihoods Field Manual. The third day of the workshop will cover findings on the Commission’s project on livelihoods as a tool of protection against gender-based violence and how GBV and livelihood programs should complement each other to better protect women.

Participants will be required to cover their own travel expenses. Meals and materials will be provided. Participants attending from local NGOs can apply for financial assistance for partial coverage of travel and hotel expenses.

To request an application or for any questions, please contact Sonali at livelihoodsworkshop@wrcommission.org

Since the early 1990s, several states in India have introduced financial incentive programs to discourage son preference among parents and encourage investment in daughters’ education and health. This study evaluates one such program in the state of Haryana, Apni Beti Apna Dhan (Our Daughter, Our Wealth). Since 1994, eligible parents in Haryana have been offered a financial incentive if they give birth to a daughter. The incentive consists of an immediate cash grant and a long-term savings bond redeemable on the daughter’s 18th birthday provided she is unmarried, with additional bonuses for education. Although no specific program participation data are available, we estimate early intent-to-treat program effects on mothers (sex ratio among live children, fertility preferences) and children (mother’s use of antenatal care, survival, nutritional status, immunization, schooling) using statewide household survey data on fertility and child health, and constructing proxies for household and individual program eligibility. The results based on this limited data imply that Apni Beti Apna Dhan had a positive effect on the sex ratio of living children, but inconclusive effects on mothers’ preferences for having female children as well as total desired fertility.