Browse by Theme: Reviewed 2021

Insights from Application of CARE’s Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis (CVCA) Methodology.

This report was written by Angie Dazé, with significant inputs from Vu Lan Huong, Dang Thu Phuong, Nguyen Thi Yen, Dang My Hanh, Julie Webb, Romanus Gyang, Cynthia Awuor, Maurine Ambani, Gabriela Fontenla Razzetto and Tatiana Farfan De la Vega. The report benefited from useful feedback from Karl Deering, Agnes Otzelberger, Tonya Rawe, Fiona Percy, Cynthia Awuor, Bruce Ravesloot, Kit Vaughan and Phil Franks. We are grateful to all staff and partner organizations that conducted field work and analysis that contributed to the report. Finally, sincere appreciation to all of the people in the communities we work with who took the time to share their experiences and provide their perspectives.

Climate change impacts involve three defining features that are not always a part of other development challenges: they are diverse, long-term and not easily predictable. Adapting to these three traits is difficult because they require making contextspecific and forward-looking decisions regarding a variety of local climate impacts and vulnerabilities when the future is highly uncertain. The 2010 World Development Report: Development and Climate Change, echoes this by stating that, “Climate change adds an additional source of unknowns for decision makers to manage” and planners must accept “uncertainty as inherent to the climate change problem.

The Adaptation Coalition Toolkit was developed to promote the World Bank’s strategic priority to empower people by creating more inclusive, cohesive, and accountable societies in the face of climate change. The framework for this Toolkit was developed from testing its implementation over a two-year period in 24 Latin American case study communities in five countries. The results from this study are presented in the companion publication Building Community Resilience to Climate Change: Testing the Adaptation Coalition Framework in Latin America produced by the World Bank’s Social Development Unit of the Latin America and Caribbean Region. The methodology has been refined and strengthened through the case study process with this Toolkit as the final product.

Reducing poverty and promoting women empowerment through market development in the southern Andean highlands of Peru

Along with the rise of the development effectiveness movement of the last few decades, experimental impact evaluation methods – randomised controlled trials and quasi-experimental techniques – have emerged as a dominant force. While the increased use of these methods has contributed to improved understanding of what works and whether specific projects have been successful, their ‘gold standard’ status threatens to exclude a large body of evidence from the development effectiveness dialogue. In this paper we conduct an evaluation of the impact on child stunting of CARE’s SHOUHARDO project in Bangladesh, the first large-scale project to use the rights-based, livelihoods approach to address malnutrition. In line with calls for a more balanced view of what constitutes rigor and scientific evidence, and for the use of more diversified and holistic methods in impact evaluations, we employ a mixed-methods approach. The results from multiple data sources and methods, including both non-experimental and quasi-experimental, are triangulated to arrive at the conclusions.

Since the introduction of the Do No Harm framework more than ten years ago, the humanitarian sector has invested in a range of initiatives to address programme quality and accountability. Although aid agencies often seek to be neutral or nonpartisan toward the winners and losers of a war, the impact of their aid is not neutral regarding whether conflict worsens or abates’. This paper identifies conflict flashpoints common to the activities of first-phase emergency responses; identifies how programme and surge capacity staff currently apply conflict sensitivity in the context of rapid-onset emergencies, maps key conflict-sensitivity challenges faced by aid agencies; and draws out conclusions and practical recommendations to strengthen the use of conflict-sensitive approaches in future humanitarian emergencies.

Many of our clothes here in the UK are made in Bangladesh, where the garment industry accounts for 78% of the economy. Those working in the industry, 85% of whom are women, are low paid, and have often had no access to education.