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Norwegian People's Aid (NPA) has provided support to Ethiopia since 1984, and established its office in the country in 2006. The NPA development programme comprises eight partner organizations working with two thematic areas: Violence against women; and Land and natural resource management. Since the programme is fairly recent and has not been externally evaluated until now, since NPA is in the process of developing a new country strategy, and because of the changing conditions for civil society activity in Ethiopia because of new legislation, NPA has commissioned this evaluation. The evaluation team find the two programme areas to be highly relevant in all dimensions: they respond to urgent needs in Ethiopia; the way that partners work allows them to be change agents in these areas in spite of the restrictive legal context in Ethiopia; and the programme therefore allows NPA’s strategic objectives to be realized.

The goal of this project was to enhance livelihood sustainability through participatory planning and management of coastal fisheries resource utilization and conservation. Its main purpose was to strengthen the capacity of communities and local authorities to conduct sustainable fisheries management within the Lamu Archipelago in Kenya. An overall assessment by the evaluation team was that the RaCCCoM project was successfully implemented, despite the few drawbacks, such as the slow disbursement of project funds and low uptake of capacity building initiatives due to low literacy levels which may have delayed implementation of some of the activities and slowed down progress such that extra effort was required to achieve desirable results in the stipulated project time. However, there was little evidence of complete ownership of the project activities by communities, such that functioning of most activities of the project to a considerable degree depends on the RaCCCoM project support.

Women’s Rights and Gender Equality is a sub-programme of the Norwegian Programme for Development, Research and Education (NUFU). The sub-programme started in 2009 and is expected to end in 2013. Five projects were funded where Norwegian universities work with partners in Tanzania, Malawi, Ethiopia, South Africa and Palestine. The programme has been successful, and has contributed to individual and institutional capacity on women’s rights and gender equality directly and mainstreamed into areas such as agricultural production and food science, education and maternal health. The report recommends that women’s rights and gender equality is included as one of the priority topics also in future university cooperation programmes.

Joint land titling in Peru implied a defacto transfer of property from men to women. This project conducted a survey of 1280 household to measure the impact on women participation in household decision making. The following report describes the methodological approach and summarizes the main results which indicate a positive effect on women empowerment.

Peru enforced joint titles between spouses and cohabitants in their land formalization process in 57 percent of the 1.5 million titles issued to date. We find a significant empowerment effect in a survey of 1,280 households, interviewing both spouses jointly and separately to disclose influence on household decision-making, in line intrahousehold bargaining theory on threat point of divorce.

The Forests and Climate Change Programme (FORCLIME) is a collaborative initiative undertaken by the German and Indonesian Governments. The project aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the forestry sector and improve the livelihoods of Indonesia’s poor rural communities. This report outlines the results of a gender analysis of Indonesia’s forestry sector undertaken to inform the design of a gender strategy for FORCLIME. The report’s findings are derived from institutional analysis, based on literature reviews, focus groups and interviews, and participatory analysis, undertaken in a forest community in West-Kalimantan. The report concludes with a set of recommendations for gender mainstreaming and women empowerment and then outlines elements of a gender strategy for FORCLIME.

This life story describes briefly a CARE Bangladesh initiative under its participatory community led development approach. This initiative is the evolving operating approach of CARE that critically analyses the underlying causes of poverty and vulnerabilities and thereby facilitates community based livelihood adaptation to climate change. Duck rearing was identified as one of the adaptive livelihood options for the people living in flood prone areas, especially for women. It is in this village of Katihara that three women participated in a CARE Bangladesh duck hatching and rearing intervention initiated by the SHOUHARDO project.