Remittances for Financial Access: Lessons from Latin American Microfinance

The potential of migrant remittances to foster access to financial services for low‐income households has been largely unexplored. Comparing three Latin American countries – the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Mexico – this inter‐disciplinary study links research on remittances and microfinance with multi‐actor governance approaches. While the context of high remittance‐dependence provides similar challenges in all cases, it finds remarkable variety both in the structure of the remittances market and the actors involved in microfinance and in the role governments play. It explains the diverging success of MFIs in remittance markets by pointing to the interplay of for‐profit, non‐profit and state actors embedded within the specific market structures of each country.     

Confronting Uncertainty: Lessons from Rural Social Work

Abstract

Communities in Australia and internationally are experiencing massive change. Climate variability is an aspect of change that social workers in Australia, particularly in rural areas, are grappling with. Vulnerable populations will be at increased risk as extreme weather events increase in frequency. Communities will be facing social challenges hitherto unknown. The experience of uncertainty and fragmentation as characteristics of postmodernism has exposed the ambiguous and contested nature of much of social work practice and contributed to a crisis of confidence for the social work profession. The move towards rationality and linear approaches in the postwelfare state is often at odds with the complexity and uncertainty of human situations that has always been social work terrain. It can be argued that social work, with its ethical base, person-in-environment approach, expertise in ambiguity and complexity, and recognition of context, is well-placed to manage postmodern uncertainty. Using the 2009 Victorian bushfire example, I argue that an uncertain future is an opportunity for social workers, those working in rural areas in particular, to reassert social work's moral purpose in working with communities facing change. Implications for social work policy, practice, and education are briefly explored.     

A Strategic Approach to Rights: Lessons from Clientelism in Rural Peru

International norms of social, economic and political rights are presented as a means of transforming social relations in developing countries. Yet, when rights norms are introduced into domestic practice, they do not always produce liberal, democratic results. Instead, rights and local practices of clientelism mix. This article examines this political process in rural Peru. Alternatives to clientelism emerge when NGOs and international development agencies forge strategic and selective coalitions between urban middle‐class sectors and the rural poor. This calls for an explicit politics of advancing rights by any means necessary: accepting hybrid forms when inevitable, incorporating excluded groups when possible, and striking alliances that displace traditional elites.     

Gaining Access to Economically Marginalized Rural Populations: Lessons Learned from Nonprobability Sampling*

Poverty is a significant problem in rural America. Gaining access to economically marginalized rural populations in order to recruit individuals to participate in a research study, however, is often a challenge. This article compares three different nonprobability sampling techniques that have been used to recruit rural, low-income mothers—purposive sampling, respondent-driven sampling, and mixed purposive sampling. We review the relative advantages and drawbacks of the three methods in terms of access to the targeted population, methods of recruitment, size of the sample pool, randomness of the sample, generalizability of results, and researchers' control over the process.     

Innovating Practices to Prepare Students for Graduate School: Lessons From a Social Work MOOC

This article describes the implementation of a massive open online course (MOOC) developed by a school of social work and piloted in the incoming 2016 MSW class (N=397). Using implementation science as a framework, we describe the MOOC as an intervention for preparing students for graduate school and share findings from the pilot evaluation. We argue that MOOCs can represent an innovative approach for other schools of social work, but our lessons learned suggest that they also require resources, time investment, organizational support, and understanding of the implications for students and the school. Future questions for research include examining the long-term benefits of MOOCs to students, their broader application, and the cost-benefit analysis for schools interested in developing MOOCs.     

Borrowing from the Rural to Help the Urban: Organic Farming Exemplars in Postsocialist China

This article examines an alternative food movement in China called exemplary agriculture. A key characteristic of the movement is its recuperation of legacies of state socialism including exemplary morality (leadership by example and the emulation of role models) and the pervasive urban/rural dichotomy (a dichotomy that privileges the urban over the rural economically, politically and culturally). Adopting practices derived from rural culture and putting a positive spin on them, movement protagonists promote alternative urban lifestyles they believe will improve the experience of city living and the malice of modernity. Drawing on ethnographic research across organic farms and farmers’ markets, this article examines some of the tensions revealed when these legacies of socialism interact with processes of globalisation such as consumer culture. It offers insights into the changing nature of activism in postsocialist China and how new economic classes are attempting to reconfigure the cultural and moral landscape of the city.     

Perceived Norms and Alcohol Consumption: Differences Between College Students From Rural and Urban High Schools

Objective: The authors examined perceived norms and drinking among college students who attended high schools in rural and urban communities. Participants and Methods: Undergraduates (99 men and 85 women) who attended high schools in communities with populations ranging from less than 100 to more than 400,000 completed surveys assessing perceived norms and alcohol consumption. Results: Analyses revealed that students from smaller towns and in smaller high school graduating classes reported heavier drinking and that perceived norms were positively associated with drinking. Perceived norms were unrelated to population variables, and the relationship between perceived norms and drinking did not vary as a function of population variables. Results suggest that differences in drinking as a function of coming from more rural areas contribute to drinking behavior in college independently of perceived norms. Conclusions: College students may adjust to campus drinking norms relatively quickly, and longitudinal research would be useful in understanding this transition.     

Migration and Inequality in the Rural United States: Connecting Urban to Rural and Local to Global

This article draws from several overlapping literatures to frame urban–rural migration in the United States as the cause of emerging dimensions of inequality. To begin, the article reviews the amenity migration field of research, noting that scholars often underestimate or overlook inequality within rural destinations because common research lenses and methodological decisions inadvertently mask it. The article then describes a second thread of research that explicitly implicates migration as a driver of inequality and a third that draws connections to gentrification. Finally, the article reviews more recent research that characterizes inequality in rural destinations using a more global sociological perspective. The author draws attention to work, which recognizes that migration constitutes a material and theoretical connection between inequality experienced locally and societal inequality at the national and global scales.     

Lessons From Infants: 1960–2000

Our image of the infant as an organism interacting with the environment has changed dramatically in the past 40 years. A new surge of infancy research began in the 1960s and continues unabated today. The view of the infant has been transformed from that of a primarily reflexive organism to a highly competent being, exquisitely sensitive to sensory and perceptual information. Controversy still swirls around the issue of when infants acquire specific knowledge about objects and events. New work is reviewed on how infants and toddlers use knowledge to guide their behavior in challenging situations. Despite the tremendous growth of knowledge about infant development over the past 40 years, it seems that we are on the threshold of even more exciting discoveries.     

Reconceptualizing Women's Paid Informal Work: Some Lessons from Lower‐Income Urban Neighbourhoods

This article evaluates critically whether women's paid informal work is low‐paid market‐like work conducted for the purpose of economic gain. Drawing upon interviews with 400 households in UK lower‐income urban neighbourhoods, we show that only a small segment of the paid informal work conducted by women is of this character. The vast bulk is undertaken for and by friends, relative and neighbours under non‐market relations for reasons associated with redistribution and sociality. Given this finding, we thus conclude that a reconsideration is required of whether eradication alone is always the appropriate policy response.     

Substantive Legitimacy of Transformed Microfinance Organizations: Case Study from India

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - An increasing number of nonprofits have shifted their microfinance operation to a for-profit format. Little has been...     

Emerging Patterns of Hispanic Residential Segregation: Lessons from Rural and Small‐Town America

The past two decades have ushered in a period of widespread spatial diffusion of Hispanics well beyond traditional metropolitan gateways. This article examines emerging patterns of racial and ethnic residential segregation in new Hispanic destinations over the 1990–2010 period, linking county, place, and block data from the 1990, 2000, and 2010 decennial censuses. Our multiscalar analyses of segregation are framed by classical models of immigrant assimilation and alternative models of place stratification. We ask whether Hispanics are integrating spatially with the native population and whether recent demographic and economic processes have eroded or perpetuated racial boundaries in nonmetropolitan areas. We show that Hispanic residential segregation from whites is often exceptionally high and declining slowly in rural counties and communities. New Hispanic destinations, on average, have higher Hispanic segregation levels than established gateway communities. The results also highlight microscale segregation patterns within rural places and in the open countryside (i.e., outside places), a result that is consistent with emerging patterns of “white flight.” Observed estimates of Hispanic‐white segregation across fast‐growing nonmetropolitan counties often hide substantial heterogeneity in residential segregation. Divergent patterns of rural segregation reflect local‐area differences in population dynamics, economic inequality, and the county employment base (using Economic Research Service functional specialization codes). Illustrative maps of Hispanic boom counties highlight spatially uneven patterns of racial diversity. They also provide an empirical basis for our multivariate analyses, which show that divergent patterns of local‐area segregation often reflect spatial variation in employment across different industrial sectors.     

Factors contributing to eviction from permanent supportive housing: Lessons from HUD-VASH

IntroductionEviction from housing is associated with several negative outcomes, further exacerbated among high-need populations requiring financial and supportive services to maintain housing stability. This study investigated risk and protective factors—both characteristics and precipitating events of tenant eviction—informing permanent supportive housing (PSH) programs’ efforts to identify tenants at risk and intervene.MethodsUsing administrative data for a cohort of 20,146 Veterans participating in PSH, this study assessed differences in Veterans who exited the program due to eviction and Veterans who exited because they accomplished their goals. A series of logistic regressions identified patterns of health services use that may signal imminent eviction.ResultsVeterans with a drug use disorder and those who received inpatient, emergency, or outpatient care related to mental/behavioral health and substance use conditions proximal to program exit had greater risk for eviction. Receipt of outpatient primary medical care and supportive services was generally protective against eviction. The likelihood of eviction was greatest for Veterans with acute care use within 30 days of exit.DiscussionPSH providers may use these correlates of eviction to identify Veterans in need of an intervention to prevent eviction. Future work should focus on operationalizing these findings and identifying appropriate interventions.     

Public‐Service Provision in Clientelist Political Settlements: Lessons from Ghana's Urban Water Sector

The politics of public‐service delivery continues to be neglected under the supposedly more context‐sensitive post‐Washington Consensus. Using interviews and documentary evidence from Ghana, this article provides an account of the networks of political interference and informal practices in Ghana's public water utility. It argues that, in order to understand why private‐sector participation succeeds or fails and why similar arrangements have different outcomes across developing countries, we need to examine the effects of the informal institutional context, particularly the country‐specific political settlement in which public‐service provision operates.     

Approaches to post-war reconstruction and development: Lessons from Africa

Between 6 July 1967 and 15 January 1970, Nigerians fought a bitter Civil War. The economic and social life in the main theatres of war was totally disarticulated. Damage to physical assets and the infrastructure of the economy was considerable.With the end of the war came the need for urgent reconstruction and rehabilitation of the Federal and States' economy. This need led to the establishment of five different Four-year (1970–1974) Reconstruction and Development Plans. These were: the Second National Development Plan; East-Central State Programme of Post-war Reconstruction; Mid-Western State Development Plan; Rivers State Development Plan; and the South-Eastern State Development Plan. Essentialy, the objectives and priorities of these Plans were similar.The aim of this paper is to review these post-war rehabilitation, resettlement and reconstruction programmes as expressed in the various Development Plans for the period 1970–1974. An attempt will be made to determine the degree of success achieved in programme implementation and the extent to which people were considered as the central focus of the reconstruction efforts.     

One Family, Two Households: Rural to Urban Migration in Kenya

Many households in sub-Saharan Africa allocate their labor resources between rural and urban areas to diversify risks and maximize income. One such strategy would be for a husband in a rural area to migrate to an urban area while his wife and family remain in the rural area without any chance of joining the migrant husband in the urban area. The family maintains a rural home and an urban home. This article explores possible determinants of this type of migration using data from Kenya. Nontrivial findings suggest that such migratory behavior may be motivated by agglomeration effects of household size in the rural area, an increase in remittance by the migrant husband to his rural family, a relatively low education for the husband, and a high urban cost of living.