Bias was assessed on three levels:

* practitioner

* community

* methodological

PDF-document: Poverty and participation: an analysis of bias in participatory methods. Livestock Participation Group / Livestock Development Group , 2003

1 Analysis of the project’s Context

2 Stakeholder Analysis

3 Problem Analysis/Situation analysis

4 Objectives Analysis

5 Plan of Activities

6 Resource Planning

7 Indicators/Measurements of Objectives

8 Risk Analysis and Risk Management

9 Analysis of the Assumptions

PDF-document: Guide on Logical Framework Approach (LFA). Sida 2003.

It draws on Grameen’s experience in both Bangladesh and Uganda and establishes a template for creating sustainable initiatives that simultaneously bring telecommunications to the rural poor, create viable new businesses for microentrepreneurs, and expand the customer base of telecommunications companies. The authors point out that no two implementations of the Village Phone programme will be exactly alike. Each country will have unique variables, participants, and environments. However, it is expected that there will be common structures, applications, and processes.

Create a Village Phone programme

– Water Bussiness: Buy or Die!

– More on Water Bussiness

According to the report, there are more positive than negative trends at the global level, including a move in forest management towards multiple-use, including social and environmental benefits. Forests dedicated for conservation of biological diversity have increased by 6.4 million hectares per year to include 11 percent of all forests.

Forests for protection of soil and water and for recreation have also increased significantly. Planted forests are expanding and provide an increasing proportion of the world’s wood supply.

However, negative trends are still alarming in some regions. Forests are rapidly being lost to agriculture in Africa, Central America, South America and in Southeast Asia, accounting for almost 90 percent of the world’s deforestation of 13 million hectares per year.

Primary forests, crucial for maintaining biological diversity, are converted to agriculture or degraded through logging at a rate of 6 million hectares per year, mainly in South America and Southeast Asia.

Here is the full report Global forest resources assessment 2005

The tools are divided into (1) tools for understanding, (2) tools for organising, (3) tools for engaging and (4) tools for ensuring. They include such power tools as: Community tradeoffs assessment, Mechanisms for organisation, Connecting communities to markets and People’s law.

All tool documents are available for free download in pdf -format in four languages (English, French, Spanish and Portuguese).

Power tools: for policy influence in natural resource management

By combining the processing power of thousands of home computers it’ll hopefully be possible to make more accurate climate change predictions (to make people act). You don’t have to do anything else than download and open the program. Whenever you have your computer on the program will calculate the chosen climate prediction in the background.

Every contributor has his individual variable changes for the prediction, which is calculated from the year 1920. If your model ends up with a climate unsimilar to current year 2006, your experiment will stop. However, if the model is close enough it will continue to calculate untill it reaches 2080. This will give researchers multiple models to compare climate changes happening in the coming years.

TAKE PART IN THE BIGGEST CLIMATE CHANGE EXPERINENT EVER UNDERTAKEN: climateprediction.net

“The final ministerial declaration contained some minor gains on agriculture, such as setting a 2013 end date for export subsidies, and providing developing countries with extra flexibility to protect their small farmers. There was some progress on preventing the abuse of food aid as a disguised form of dumping, but on cotton, the steps agreed fell short even of those required by the cotton panel ruling against the USA.

Developing countries successfully fended off some of the attempts to force open their markets to Northern industrial and service sectors. However, even the toned-down text on non-agricultural market access (NAMA) and services is inimical to development. The offer of duty-free, quota-free market access to the poorest countries contains sufficient loopholes to rob the agreement of almost all value. An ‘aid for trade’ deal was agreed consisting largely of recycled money, and there was no progress on other ‘development issues’.

When talks recommence in early 2006, rich-country negotiators cannot simply turn up and carry on where they left off in Hong Kong. They need to go away, examine their consciences, and make a New Year’s resolution to turn this into a development round for the world’s poor.”

Oxfam Briefing Paper 85: What happened in Hong Kong?, Oxfam Briefing Paper, December 2005 (pdf-document)

I visited Myanmar (former Burma) twice during my stay in northern Thailand. It wasn’t something I wanted to do, I had to. I needed to extend my visa. Anyway, I’ve written down some of my experienses in Thailand to share it with you. This is how I remember the first Up-North trip.

…Before continuing to Khung Khon, I had to visit Myanmar (former Burma) to renew my visa for another month. The bus ride to the northern border town of Mae Sai took 5 hours. We found Buddhist monks smoking cigarettes while talking in cell phones quite amusing, there are also the ladyboy monks that confuse me abit. Mae Sai has a border town feeling to it. People are going back and forth with things to sell in a big hustle. My border crossing was very undramatic, I was stamped out of Thailand, crossed the border , paid 200 bahts for Myanmar border officials and came back to Thailand. The bridge crossing the border and Mekong river used to be a major entrance point for drugs to the rest of the world. Today it acts as a gap between the rich and the poor, like the borders of US and Mexico or EU and Morocco (maybe not that extreme though). The music that blasting from loud speakers on the Myanmar side, had a soap opera touch in it, making my brief visit to this notoriously militant country absurd. After lunch we hurried back to the bus and sat for another 5 hours returning to Chiang Mai. There was a construction work of a major highway on its way between Mae Sai and Chiang Mai. With China border just some hundred kilometres away from Myanmar border, Thailand hopes that in the future Chiang Mai will become a centre of China-SE Asia trade…

Continue reading with pictures in my homepage

“This innovative tool is designed to raise awareness amongst corporations, government and non governmental organisations, academics and students of how an organisation’s operations interact with wider society, and how the risks and opportunities generated can be responsibly managed through stakeholder engagement and partnership.”

You can choose the issue you want to know more about from the drop down menus above the map. The topics include global pandemic risk in 2006, climate change (actually, who is responsible of it), digital inclusion, aid depth ratio, military expenditure, human rights and many more. By clicking the maps you can find more information on specific countries or cases.

Maplecroft Maps can be found here

Maplecroft Company homepage