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Since March 2015, the Government of Egypt has been providing cash to poor households through the Takaful and Karama program. The program is run by the Ministry of Social Solidarity (MoSS). Takaful supports poor families with children under 18 years of age, while Karama supports the poor elderly and disabled. For Takaful, the amount of cash that households receive depends on the number of children and their school level, while the Karama transfer is a set rate per individual. In 2018, Takaful will also begin requiring households in the program to make sure their children attend school and participate in health screenings. The program was evaluated by IFPRI, an international research organization, using both quantitative statistical methods (simple questions asked to many households during a survey) and qualitative methods (more in-depth questions asked to fewer households in longer interviews). The main goal of this evaluation was to measure and explain how the transfers affected the welfare of households in the program. In addition, the evaluation describes how well the program selection criteria work for identifying poor households.
This qualitative evaluation of the Takaful cash transfer program was conducted between January and April 2018 by a team of researchers trained in qualitative methods. The evaluation sought to further delve into and explain dimensions of the Takaful transfers’ impact on beneficiaries that were previously under-investigated in the quantitative survey. In so doing, the quantitative components’ findings were also further contextualized and clarified. This qualitative component’s main goals, therefore, were to explore the differences between the transfers’ impact on ultra-poor households and households near the threshold, the differences in how the two household types use the transfer, and the impact of the transfers on intrahousehold decision making with special focus on women.
From a leading scholar of the Middle East and North Africa comes a new way of thinking about the Arab Spring and the meaning of revolution. From the standpoint of revolutionary politics, the Arab Spring can seem like a wasted effort. In Tunisia, where the wave of protest began, as well as in Egypt and the Gulf, regime change never fully took hold. Yet if the Arab Spring failed to disrupt the structures of governments, the movement was transformative in farms, families, and factories, souks and schools. Seamlessly blending field research, on-the-ground interviews, and social theory, Asef Bayat shows how the practice of everyday life in Egypt and Tunisia was fundamentally altered by revolution...
A Global Idea outlines how youth—as shown by the Arab Spring uprisings and subsequent state responses—became a prominent social and political category during the first two decades of the twenty-first century in the Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interview data, and textual analysis, Mayssoun Sukarieh explains that the spread of youth as an important category is linked to the operation of a "global youth development complex," a diverse transnational network of state, private sector, civil society, and international development aid organizations that worked through key urban areas such as Washington, DC, Amman, and Dubai. In its analysis of the arrival, extension, and embedding of the youth development complex in the Middle East during this period, A Global Idea addresses a broader question that is of global and not just regional concern. How are certain ideas that are central to the working and reproduction of global capitalism able to travel the world so that they are found virtually everywhere?
The sponsoring of the Muslim Brotherhood by the Emirate of Qatar and its influential satellite channel, Al Jazeera, contributed to shaping the prelude to the uprising. But the explosion's deep roots, asserts Achcar, mean that what happened until now is but the beginning of a revolutionary process likely to extend for many more years to come. The author identifies the actors and dynamics of the revolutionary process: the role of various social and political movements, the emergence of young actors making intensive use of new information and communication technologies, and the nature of power elites and existing state apparatuses that determine different conditions for regime overthrow in each case. Drawing a balance-sheet of the uprising in the countries that have been most affected by it until now, i.e. Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya and Syria, Achcar sheds special light on the nature and role of the movements that use Islam as a political banner.
Social protection programs—public or private initiatives that aid the poor and protect the vulnerable against livelihood risks—can effectively be used to assist those trapped, or at the risk of being trapped, in chronic poverty. These programs aim to address chronic poverty through redistribution and protect vulnerable households from falling below the poverty line. Although investments in social protection programs are often motivated by equity concerns, they can also contribute to economic growth by, for example, encouraging savings, creating community assets, and addressing market imperfections. Despite their potential and proliferation, not enough is known about social protection pro...
This book on mobility of health professionals reviews, analyses and summarises published information and data as well as collected interview data from stake holders, including politicians, policy makers, health service managers and migrant health workers. It is based on the research carried out under the umbrella of the EU-funded project “Mobility of Health Professionals (MoHProf). The partners involved in the MoHProf project gathered evidence from 25 countries around basic questions and knowledge gaps relating to the international migration of health professionals, which involved an analysis of migration flows and evaluation of policies addressing migration. This book provides a comprehensive description and analysis of the mobility streams, the motives and driving forces behind them and the impact on and challenges for health systems and draws conclusions and provides recommendations for future strategic planning, monitoring and the management of mobility of health professionals as well as further research and policy development needs.
Over the last decade, social safety nets (SSNs) have rapidly expanded in Africa, becoming a core strategy for addressing poverty, responding to shocks, increasing productivity and investing in human capital. Poverty, vulnerability and well-being have inherent gender dimensions, yet only recently has gender equality been considered as a potential program objective. This study reviews the evidence on the impact of SSNs on women’s wellbeing in Africa, while contributing to an understanding of how SSNs affect gender equality. We first motivate and take stock of how gender shapes the design and effectiveness of SSNs in Africa. We then summarize evidence from rigorous impact evaluations of SSNs ...
What worlds take root in war? In this book, anthropologist Munira Khayyat describes life along the southern border of Lebanon, where resistant ecologies thrive amid a terrain of perennial war. A Landscape of War takes us to frontline villages where armed invasions, indiscriminate bombings, and scattered land mines have become the environment where everyday life is waged. This book dwells with multispecies partnerships such as tobacco farming and goatherding that carry life through seasons of destruction. Neither green-tinged utopia nor total devastation, these ecologies make life possible in an insistently deadly region. Sourcing an anthropology of war from where it is lived, this book decolonizes distant theories of war and brings to light creative practices forged in the midst of ongoing devastation. In lyrical prose that resonates with imperiled conditions across the Global South, Khayyat paints a portrait of war as a place where life must go on.