This paper aims to examine the role in which women's organizations, recognizing the gender-ascribed position of poor women in their household and community, play in reflecting their interests in community organizing. The case study focuses on poor women's participation in the joint activity of two women's organizations, the Gujarat Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (MHT) and the Foundation for Public Interest (FPI), in a government-led slum upgrading scheme: the Slum Networking Project (SNP) in Ahmedabad, India. The data for describing and analysing the case are based on my research and interviews undertaken in four slums from October to November 1997. The main topics to be discussed are as follows: 1) the organizational basis of the MHT and FPI, and their roles in the SNP; 2) the degree to which these organizations have institutionalized women's participation in community-based organizations (CBOs) vis-a-vis men; 3) the extent to which they have contributed to transforming women's perceptions of the management of CBOs beyond the provision of housing infrastructure preliminary aimed at the SNP.

The research findings show that in the areas where the MHT and FPI programmes were implemented to involve several female leaders, many women tended to see that they were more capable of organizing and managing their CBOs. On the other hand, in the areas where the programmes were not implemented, very few women tended to see that they were more capable than men because of their gender-ascribed nature such as their illiteracy and productive/reproductive roles that most of them are expected to perform. Throughout the analysis of the case, it can be concluded that women's organizations and the leaders operating their activities on the basis of the social relations of poor women, both at household and community level, are the key intermediaries in representing poor women's interests in policy agenda.

This article aims to present, discuss, and justify the concept of “Household Strategy” for theoretical and empirical studies of economic behaviors of peasant households. The methodological position of the paper will be articulated in contrast with the standard microeconomic formulation of optimizing behavior. In a systematic exposition and articulation of the concept of “Household Strategy”, its constituents are identified as objectives, alternative actions (as means to objectives), and constraints for the household, followed by elaboration of each of these. The objective held by the household is stipulated to be either maintenance or increase of the standard of living. The time scopes for such objectives may be short-term and/or long-term. Alternative actions include productive engagements in agriculture and non-agricultural activities either as owner-operator or as employee, social engagements to maintain and strengthen personal relations, and household activities for the maintenance and promotion of welfare of family members. Constraints comprise technical and managerial capabilities of the household, access to economic, social, and institutional resources, and scope and effectiveness of accessible risk-coping methods and measures. The value and contribution of the analytical viewpoint of “Household Strategy” is illustrated in the analysis of the household decision on participation or otherwise in communal activities and also in the examination of poor households faced with ever-present risk of income decline. The article closes with remarks on the present status of the research and remaining tasks, and also on its possible contributions to the study for participatory policy design and implementation.

This article aims to analyze the significance and challenges of primary education in developing countries from a gender perspective. In doing so, it pays special attention to the role of primary school teachers for structuring gender equality by expanding the girls' school enrollment and improving the quality of teaching with gender consideration.

The second section after the introductory section begins with a brief review of historical and theoretical background of how the approaches to education in development have evolved since the 1960s, and why the importance of girls' education has become recognized by the development society as a central issue.

The costs, barriers and effects of girls' education are examined on the basis of earlier studies in the field. It further presents the effects of girls' education from economic and socio-cultural perspectives and a conceptual framework of different types of female empowerment—thinking, skills and knowledge, social and economic—, to be brought by education.

The case study of Guatemala, where the Japanese government has been actively assisting in primary education for achieving gender equality, is presented in the third chapter. By analyzing the national statistics, it considers the current situation and problems in promoting girls' education. In the latter part of the section, it examines, on the basis of the outcome of a questionnaire survey, the levels and tendency of gender awareness of teachers in primary schools where the Japan-assisted pilot projects for promoting girls' education have been implemented. The main component of such projects is teacher training with various topics, such as gender equality, multilingual-cultural education, participatory learning method, self-esteem, civic education, etc.

Finally, in consideration of the framework and analyses presented in the previous sections, it tries to extract the challenges of primary education in structuring gender equality and comes up with a set of recommendations for possible action with special attention given to “teachers training”.

Since the beginning of the 1990's, the Philippines has been actively promoting “Privatization” to revitalize the economy. Consequently, she has now got the reputation for the success in the BOT projects. The report aims to clarify recent trends of these BOT projects based on our field survey made late January in 2000.

The report deals with the project cases of electric power generation, waterworks and sewerage, and urban mass transit LRT in Manila. The major findings are briefly summarized as follows.

First, big shares of BOT projects are held chiefly by such fields as highways, electric power generation, but new fields like ICT (Information and Communication Technology) as well as waterworks and sewerage are gradually increasing.

Second, the sites of BOT projects are now increasingly spreading to local areas supported by the strenuous efforts of Manila-based BOT Center. Among these are included sewerage and waste treatment projects.

Third, the operating results of the BOT projects are generally satisfactory in the case of the electric power generation and waterworks thanks to free or cheap supply of fuel, publicly guaranteed purchase of generated power, favorable pricing, and well-prepared risk-sharing scheme among the private stakeholders, blessed with relatively favorable economic fundamentals. Reversely, the bottom line of the LRT project is in deficit resulting from the overestimated passenger demand forecast and improper pricing policy. Sewerage and waste treatment projects seem to be in a difficult position due basically to lack of consensus on cost sharing between the citizens and municipalities.

Lastly, necessity for establishing a safety net fund is pointed out for violent fluctuations in exchange rate, in addition to fostering local financial and capital markets, combined with improvement in the legal and fiscal systems to enhance the feasibility of the BOT projects.

This paper aims to examine the framework and points for consideration associated with development assistance, with particular focus placed on post conflict peacebuilding. The objective of the paper is to provide specific strategies and policies that will allow Japan to actively contribute to peacebuilding as part of its development assistance. Specifically, the paper presents a basic outline of the background and concepts behind peacebuilding, followed by an analysis of the current situation surrounding Japan and JICA's support for this field. On top of this, using the example of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the paper provides an examination of priority support fields associated with implementation of development assistance as well as points for consideration connected with post conflict peacebuilding.

In older to respond to the requirements of peacebuilding, which is a relatively new development issue, it is important to determine methods for providing peacebuilding support that have some degree of universality and commonality by drawing out and accumulating lessons gained from individual examples and experiences. Based on the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as on experiences in peacebuilding gained thus far, this paper identifies the following six priority fields associated with post conflict peacebuilding: support for refugees, security control, rehabilitation of social infrastructure, institution-building, promotion of democratization, and economic recovery. The paper points out sustainable implementation of comprehensive support covering all six of these fields, and also a number of areas requiring consideration when providing support for post conflict peacebuilding.

PRSP by World Bank is making very dramatic impact on the policy formulation in the developing countries. There has been a great difference in the receipt of ODA between Indochina and East African Community countries. External debts have been significant factors of receiving the amount of ODA and FDI and thereafter have affected the progress of social indicators. Indochina have been rather fortunate beneficiaries in the 1990s due to the presence of Japanese aid. Talking about EAC countries, HIPCs initiatives have impeded the inflow of lending assistance into Uganda and Tanzania, while stabilizing external debt situations.

Both Uganda and Vietnam have been considered as successful countries of economic growth and income poverty reduction in the 1990s. Popularity on the achievement of both countries is outstanding. But Vietnam has been transforming its industry structures and increasing saving rates, while maintaining high economic growth rate. Uganda could not reverse the trend of deterioration of social indicators in the same period, while accepting the constant amount of ODA as an exceptional receiver in Africa and achieving remarkable economic growth.

Therefore, Vietnamese poverty reduction and PRSP efforts can go through more growth and industrialization oriented process. Ugandan efforts are still needed to tackle with the improvement of social indicators. There is contrasting PRSP pictures in both countries. Interim PRSP in Vietnam can be considered a kind of social welfare programs and its PRS (HEPR) is a complement of Vietnamese growth programs. Uganda PRSP has tried to include full of World Bank-favorite ideas and concepts, since Uganda has been achieving similar reduction of income poverty as in Vietnam, but not growing out of human poverty.

It is useful and necessary for countries such as Uganda to adopt textbook type PRSP prescription on the short term. On the longer term, World Bank needs to think about the signiticance of individualistic PRSP country approach, since poverty has multi-dimension and the signiticance of varied characters in the developing country and the corresponding poverty reduction strategy should be individualistic.

Promoting Gender Equality in the development field has been lead by gender specialists. The involvement to this field by the government of Japan, however, has been behind other donor countries. There are some reasons including the historical and ideological background that may affect the Japanese perception toward gender issue and Feminism. Another point to influence Japanese less-involvement is lack of common methods between gender specialists and non-gender specialists to see gender issues in the development projects. Though they may have less chance to have dialogue with each other, non-gender specialists, especially specialists concerning with participatory development cannot take gender issues away from their concern because ‘people's participatry’ means ‘participatry of men and women, both genders. In order to get involved into the issues, common methods to be shared are strongly required for both gender-and, non-gender specialists. Therefore, standardization of PRA (Participatory Rural Appraisal) at the planning stage of participatory development projects can be bridging common methods between them in the field. Standardization is usually regarded as a dangerous trial, and may be a foolish matter by people who really understand the variety of countries, regions, villages and families. However, as long as we do not have such common methods, gender issue would still be tackled by only gender specialists. We need common methods that can be used by even non-gender specialists to analyze gender issue. PRA could be able to become the one of the methods.

In introduction, the importance of practical methods to start dialogue between gender-and non-gender specialists is argued. In section 1, participatory development and PRA are discussed as the basis to share gender issues. Section 2 explains the example of conducting PRA at J province in Indonesia. Then, the focus turns to creating activity chart for the concerning project to be more participated by people, who are men and women. Concidering partricipatry means considering gender issues, and standardization on PRA and using the activity chart can get non-gender specialists involved into integrating gender into their fields.

This paper intends to analyze the impact of household characteristics over the health benefits, and consequently over the willingness to pay (WTP). WTP is an essential tool for the evaluation of the policies and the projects. Implementation of the environmental policies and the projects is highly dependant on the costs and benefits, where benefits are assessed through the WTP. The variation in the WTP values is related with the household characteristics. Previous studies suggest that income is positive but having very slight impact on the WTP. Furthermore, for water supply, proportion of adult women and children is a negative and education of household leader is a positive factor. However, household characteristics in the rural communities of the developing countries are dynamic in nature, as they haven't yet reached at saturation points. Community participation, targeting women can give them better voice and choice. Literacy rates are also going up. To assess the current trends, we conducted an extensive research in the five villages of Pakistan during July 2000. These villages have community water supply. Based on the multivariate regression analysis, we got few important results. Children, being the worst victims of water-related sickness, are the positive factor for the WTP values. Furthermore, women, who have to take care of sick children, are also the positive factor. Moreover, the health benefits are dependent on the hygienic behavior, which is related with the literacy. Hence, we tested the variable, proportion of literate persons in a household, besides the traditional variable of education of the household leader. This variable is also positive and also captures the effect of household leader's education, which is normally very low in South Asian villages. These results are useful for the policy makers, as they can prioritize the water coverage with limited available funds. The academic research can utilize these results to draw a benefit transfer function for the developing countries.