Research & Pilot Projects

In January 2000, the World Bank's Cultural Assets for Poverty Reduction Group received a grant of $1.5 million from the Dutch Government. This funding was for research issues in Culture and Poverty, with the purpose of generating a significant book in the development field, and influencing the poverty agenda and modus operandi of the World Bank and others in the development community. The outputs of this grant are intended to be strategically significant in reorienting development thinking and practice.

Twelve excellent research and pilot projects and one book were funded with this grant:

• Linking Culture and Poverty Reduction in the Himalayas (India, Bhutan, Nepal)
• Youth, Identity, and Culture in Multiracial Societies (South Africa)
• Culture, Social Status, and the Demand for Education (India, Ghana)
• The Determinants and Effects of Khat Consumption (Yemen, Djibouti)
• A Comparative Analysis of Social Funds: Culture, Collective Action, and Participation (Zambia, Nicaragua, Malawi, and Jamaica)
• Poetry, Literacy, and Empowerment for Rural Yemen Women (Yemen)
• Organizational Cultures and Spaces for Empowerment (Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, and Ecuador)
• Might Culture Pay Off? Experimental Design to Evaluate Cultural Empowerment (Bolivia)
• Cultural Change, Community Mobilization, and Participatory Development (India)
• Innovations in the International Crafts Market and Artisans' Empowerment (India)
• Educating Nomadic Herders out of Poverty (Uganda, Kenya)
• Responding to the Values of the Poor (Indonesia)

Linking Culture and Poverty Reduction in the Himalayas (India, Bhutan, Nepal)

Project activities aim to bring together communities and professionals to address the role that the conservation of cultural heritage, historic centers, traditional neighborhoods and streetscapes plays in promoting urban livability, sustaining community life and social connectedness within cities and towns.

More specifically, the research uses the built form as an entry point for understanding a broader range of fundamental issues which include urban land, local governance and planning, local economic development, and employment which impact the way in which livable cities are created.

Youth, Identity, and Culture in Multiracial Societies (South Africa)

This project explores the roles that culturally-based organizations, cultural expression and the affirmation of cultural heritage can play in the forging of positive self-identities among poverty-stricken youths of African descent living in three multiracial societies (South Africa, Brazil and Trinidad and Tobago).

An over-riding policy and operational concern is to find out whether programs of cultural affirmation and expression, many of them sponsored by ethnically-based, civil society and community organizations, have a positive effect on the identities of poverty-stricken youths of African descent, especially in terms of providing them with the positive self-perceptions, values and skills to live meaningful and productive adult lives.

Such research can provide the basis for increased Bank and Borrower Country investment in programs to reinforce the cultural identities, heritage and expressions of youth of African descent in these and other multiracial societies in Africa and the Americas.

Culture, Social Status, and the Demand for Education (India, Ghana)

If discrimination against an historically oppressed social group is dismantled, will the group forge ahead?

This paper presents experimental evidence that a history of social and legal disabilities may have persistent effects on a group’s earnings through its impact on individuals’ expectations. The researchers test the hypothesis that when an individual’s social identity (caste) is made public, but not otherwise, individuals will respond differently to economic incentives depending on their social group: members of historically oppressed castes will fear being treated prejudicially, and their mistrust will undermine motivation.

The Determinants and Effects of Khat Consumption (Yemen, Djibouti)

The project is oriented to research

• the determinants of qat use (why people use qat, and who does so) and
• the effects of it both on “khateurs” (chewers) and their families.

A Comparative Analysis of Social Funds: Culture, Collective Action, and Participation (Zambia, Nicaragua, Malawi, and Jamaica)

Culture influences on the effectiveness of social funds and to prepare other papers on collective action that would feed into the research program on community driven development and its relation to culture.

Poetry, Literacy, and Empowerment for Rural Yemen Women (Yemen)

This project explores potential links between traditional arts and effective learning strategies through utilizing learners’ own oral poetic traditions to teach literacy. Two broad questions addressed by the pilot are:

• Can a focus on local oral traditions encourage women to attend literacy classes, and
• Does the attainment of literacy skills by these women encourage the perpetuation of local poetic traditions?

Organizational Cultures and Spaces for Empowerment (Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, and Ecuador)

Culture has received increasing attention in critical development studies, though the notion that there are important cultural differences within and between development organizations has received less consideration.

This paper elaborates elements of a framework for studying organizational culture in multi-agency development projects. It draws on selected writings in anthropology and in organizational theory and suggests that these two bodies of literature can be usefully brought together, as well as on insights from ongoing fieldwork in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso and Peru.

At the center of this framework is the analysis of context, practice and power. Where development projects involve multiple organizations (such as donors, government agencies, non-governmental organizations and grassroots groups) an analysis of cultures both within and between organizational actors can help explain important aspects of project performance.

The paper argues that organizational culture is constantly being produced within projects, sometimes tending towards integration, often towards fragmentation. This fragmentation, indicative of the range of cultures within development organizations, is an important reason why some projects fail, and why ideas stated in project documents are often not realized, especially in the case of the newer and more contentious objectives such as ‘empowerment’.

Might Culture Pay Off? Experimental Design to Evaluate Cultural Empowerment (Bolivia)

The introduction of new agricultural technologies may have little impact on the well being of poor indigenous people unless new technologies are accompanied by activities that reinforces the human capital and the cultural well-feeling of the poor.

The objective of the project was to assess the effect of a set of workshops design to improve the human capital, empowerment, and cultural self-worth of a lowland Amerindian group in Bolivia (the Tsimane’) on socioeconomic and psychological outcomes such as wealth, income, credit, agricultural productivity, health, reciprocity, cultural self-esteem, and feeling of security about territorial rights.

Cultural Change, Community Mobilization, and Participatory Development (India)

The objectives of the project are

• To examine the processes of dynamic transformation of cultural norms among the poor and the reformulation of their values and belief systems that make it possible for them to actively engender developmental change and embark on democratic political participation
• To investigate the specific processes through which cultural change leads to the forging of a sense of community identity and cohesion among the poor, which then ensures that community-based development interventions and collective democratic mobilization take root and endure among the poor
• To identify specific forms of policy intervention that can create an enabling environment for cultural change to happen among the poor, in which they themselves emerge as the major actors and agents of cultural rethinking
• To derive policy lessons from the findings of a specific case study of cultural transformation, community mobilization and successful developmental outcomes among a particular group of the poor (viz., sex workers in Calcutta).

Innovations in the International Crafts Market and Artisans' Empowerment (India)

The aim and objective of the Innovations project was to empower and reduce the poverty of selected target group among the Indian artisans who are producing work of quality and beauty, but have been exploited due to a lack of awareness and non-availability of an easy market access. present impact study

Educating Nomadic Herders out of Poverty (Uganda, Kenya)

The poverty of pastoral people may be more closely linked to the mainstream culture in their country than to their own. The link between education and poverty of pastoral people (via development policies and practices) appears to concern the nature of the education undergone by
pastoralists’ fellow citizens at least as much as it concerns the lack of modern education amongst the pastoralists themselves.

Responding to the Values of the Poor (Indonesia)

Usual indicators of development, like income, do not give us the whole picture of well-being. In addition to the level of income that a person might achieve, his or her well-being also depends on their capability for ‘being’ and ‘doing’ things that are valuable to them. Values can change from person to person, place to place and context to context. Therefore, we need a tool to identify these values and incorporate them into the planning or evaluation of the development interventions we undertake.