Editorial

In reviewing the articles in this issue of Development in Practice, it is clear that the majority are still from rural and agricultural development programmes. There is no doubt that rural development is key to reducing the poverty of many people, as well as trying to improve food security for many more. However, an increasing number of people are now living in urban areas, with the past 50 years especially being characterised by a massive process of global urbanisation. If we think about the migration of people we tend still to think about international migration, but the largest movement of peoples has been inside developing countries from the countryside to cities.

Internal migration is dramatic in some of the emerging economies. For example, in Peru, the population of the country has doubled since my first visit in 1975 from 15 million to 31 million now. A third of the population (10 million people) is now in Lima, of which 3.5 million were born outside the city and have moved there in their lifetime, which means that the growth of the city’s population is almost double the population growth of the country as a whole if you add these migrants to the natural increase. Almost 90% of Peru’s population is now claimed to be urban, and this is similar throughout Latin America and beyond. It has been argued that the greatest population movement in history has been that of 350 million people from the countryside to cities in China.

In many countries, development agencies of all types were slow to rise to the challenges of working in urban areas with their relatively mobile population. Early development was characterised by rural development agriculture being prioritised, often with the misplaced idea that this could halt or reduce the process of urbanisation. In the late 1990s, I was involved in research in several cities across the world, and found very little work by NGOs compared to large programmes in rural areas.¹ But despite generations of such programmes people voted with their feet and began to move to urban areas. It is clear that in many countries, even with the best will in the world the pace of urbanisation is faster than most local authorities can cope with, resulting in aggravated urban poverty and poor services. Meanwhile, there is some evidence that NGOs in urbanising middle-income countries are facing a reduction in their resources as foreign funding withdraws and local funding fails to make up the shortfall. It is to be expected that we will see an increasing number of development programmes with an urban focus as conditions in cities become increasingly difficult for those living in them, both longer-term residents and new arrivals.

In this issue, we have a range of articles covering both community and state services in different contexts.

Andrea Rigon provides insights into urban poverty in Nigeria, noting the usual focus of most studies to be on rural poverty. The author views urban poverty through the lens of various well-being indicators as perceived by a range of local stakeholders. The article concludes that the rate of urbanisation is faster than the ability of local authorities to keep up, and that poor governance plus a highly unequal and stratified society means unequal access to those services which are available.

Jeet Bahadur Sapkota also uses a well-being approach, but with a Nepalese rural population, particularly the inhabitants of inaccessible areas of this mountainous country. Despite the challenges of servicing these areas, the author notes that proportionally infrastructure and other services have a greater positive impact on isolated mountain communities than plains or urban areas, because of the other major challenges faced by them.

Tobias Lunt, Jim Ellis-Jones, Kindu Mekonnen, Steffen Schulz, Peter Thorne, Elmar Schulte-Geldermann, and Kalpana Sharma use the participatory research and extension approach (PREA) to explore challenges, issues, and solutions for sustainable agriculture in Ethiopia, a country which despite significant growth still has to import a major percentage of foodstuffs for its population. The research started with a participatory community analysis, and moved from this to establish innovation platforms. These methods helped identify community priorities, constraints, and opportunities for livelihood improvements.

Asmita Kabra continues the debate covered in the Development in Practice special feature in 2015 (issue 25.5) on involuntary resettlement due to large-scale development programmes. The author was asked to design a livelihood restoration plan for poor rural households affected by a renewable energy programme. The article explores both the processes involved and the reasons why the programme seemed to fail to deliver the benefits for the affected families.

Shree Maharjan and Keshav Maharjan have researched the importance of community-based seed banks in Nepal. The authors argue that these have helped maintained livelihoods for small farmers, despite persistent and growing problems caused by climate change which otherwise weaken biodiversity and agricultural resilience.

Dena Freeman provides a detailed and insightful review of the history of Tearfund, a large UK-based development agency, which has sought for almost 50 years to think through its relationship to development as an evangelical Christian organisation. The article outlines how Tearfund’s thinking and practice related to its religious base and development work has changed many times over this period. I suspect that these are debates that have taken place in faith-based organisations of many different faiths.

Lana A. Repar, Stephen Onakuse, Joe Bogue, and Ana Afonso provide a study of a supply chain for paprika farming in Malawi based on a contract system. The authors feel that such contract farming provides many advantages for small-scale farmers, although they note some of the problems in getting such a system to work well for both producers and buyers.

Roopam Shukla, Anusheema Chakraborty, Kamna Sachdeva, and P.K. Joshi explore the decline in agriculture in the Indian western Himalayas. They outline a series of constraints contributing to this decline, including fragmentation of land, climate change, the inability to mechanise hillside farming, and other factors leading to unsustainable farming even for basic subsistence, as out-migration and other factors reinforce the abandonment of land. The article argues that one solution could be consolidation of fragmented and uneconomic land parcels, although the authors recognise the difficulty of achieving such an option for the future.

Shubham Pathak and Mokbul Morshed Ahmad focus on the effects of flood damage incurred by small and medium enterprises in Thailand. They specifically highlight the role of flood insurance, and the failure to obtain insurance by SMEs. The authors argue that many companies underestimate the risks of flooding and tend to balk at the high costs of insurance, in the hope that their own savings and government help will enable them to survive future floods.

Beniamino Cislaghi, in a review of an informal human rights education programme in an isolated small rural community in Senegal, concludes that a Freirean approach can help improve the inequitable gender relationships in such an area. The article analysis some of the lessons learnt and how they contributed to a positive outcome.

Veronique Theriault, Melinda Smale, and Amidou Assima carried out a review of a fertiliser subsidy programme in Mali, where despite higher than average rates of growth in agricultural production, questions are still being asked about the longer-term sustainability of a programme that costs the government a significant portion of its budget. Meanwhile, there are questions raised through analysis the value chain, as to the system of procurement, distribution, quality control, and final use of the fertilisers.

Esayas Bekele Geleta, Carol Henry, and Patience Elabor-Idemudia share the experiences of a pulses support programme in southern Ethiopia. Describing the programme and how it developed, they share evaluation findings that it has brought many benefits to women producers, especially those who are single, divorced, or widowed. The authors do not pretend that this programme has resolved all of the many issues and constraints on women in this region, but they do argue that participants have improved their level of economic and social empowerment.

Notes

1 INTRAC undertook reviews of programmes in Dhaka, Lima, Ahmedabad, Addis Ababa, and Johannesburg. See Sahely and Pratt (2003).