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Based on twenty-five years of fieldwork, Rural Women's Sexuality, Reproductive Health, and Illiteracy: A Critical Perspective on Development examines rural women's behaviors towards health in several developing countries.These women are confronted with many factors: gender inequalities, violence from partners, and lack of economic independence.

Sustaining the rural and urban populations of the developing world has been identified as a key global challenge for the twenty-first century. Rural-Urban Interaction in the Developing World is an introduction to the relationships between rural and urban places in the developing world and shows that not all their aspects are as obvious as migration from country to city. There is now a growing realization that rural-urban relations are far more complex. Using a wealth of student-friendly features including boxed case studies, discussion questions and annotated guides to further reading, this innovative book places rural-urban interactions within a broader context, thus promoting a clearer understanding of the opportunities, as well as the challenges, that rural-urban interactions represent.

Structural transformation and rural change revisited challenges for a late developing country in a Globalizing World is an extremely thorough and important contribution to this renewal of structural economics. It significantly improves our understanding of rural economies and structural transformation, and it could not be timelier. With duration of five years (2006-2010), its objective was to analyze the processes of liberalization and economic integration and their impacts on agriculture and the rural sector of developing countries. It also aimed to illustrate the situation of rural economies in terms of income, diversification, and overall transformation. The results obtained make it possible to improve the dialogue between national and international partners and to provide orientations for the agricultural and rural policy debates. Relying on a methodology that articulated micro-data collection with a macro structural perspective, the program conducted extensive fieldwork to investigate livelihood strategies of rural households, and married the results with a thorough understanding of structural change. The book highlights recurring patterns of diversification and specialization along the process of structural transformation. Further, reconnecting with a broader vision, it emphasizes the difficulties faced by late developers, whose economies offer few alternatives for households to diversify. Based on their assessment, the authors draw a series of policy lessons. They rightly point out the importance of states rebuilding their internal capacities to design comprehensive development strategies. These capacities are critical to addressing major constraints, defining priorities, and ensuring adequate sequencing. Above all, they show that for Sub-Saharan Africa, in the coming two decades, a strong reinvestment in agriculture (in addition to seizing opportunities for the development of manufacturing and services) will be the major policy tool for progressively raising income, mitigating risks, and fostering innovation and rural demand, which constitutes the main engine for rural diversification a major step for structural transformation. The authors also stress the role of the state in provisioning public goods, in adequately and carefully designing incentives, and in using the leverage offered by the development of small towns as a critical mechanism for rural change. These are all sensible and useful reminders for the donor community, governments, and local stakeholders, and represent an important contribution to the role of agriculture for development.

Developing country governments and the international development community are looking for ways to accelerate access to improved water and sanitation services beyond the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets. Countries do not have the capacity to meet the need for improved water supplies and sanitation services from public resources alone. These challenges present an opportunity for domestic enterprises in these growing markets. In fact, millions of poor and non-poor households rely on the private sector to meet their needs. The range of private sector services provided goes far beyond final service delivery. The domestic private sector is increasingly being viewed as a central part of the solution. Governments are increasingly interested in engaging with the private sector to increase access of the poor to services. Effective scale-up of access through the domestic private sector requires an understanding of the market potential, the state of entrepreneurs' operations, and factors that shape their business environment and investment decisions. This document examines private sector provision of piped water services and on-site sanitation services in rural areas and small towns, with case studies from several countries. The preferences and circumstances of poor households and the performance of enterprises that provide services directly to them are examined, as are commercial and investment climate factors that may affect enterprises' actual or perceived costs and risks.

Land is a key component of the wealth of any nation. Throughout history, virtually all civilizations have spent considerable time defining land rights and establishing institutions to administer them. Well-defined, secure, and transferable rights to land are crucial to development efforts. In developing countries, most land is used for agricultural production, a mainstay of economic sustenance. The possession of land rights also typically ensures a baseline of shelter and food supply and allows people to turn latent assets into live capital through entrepreneurial activity. Once secure in their land rights, rural households invest to increase productivity. Moreover, the use of land as a primary investment vehicle allows households to accumulate and transfer wealth between generations. The ability to use land rights as collateral for credit helps create a stronger investment climate and land rights are thus, at the level of the economy, a pre-condition for the emergence and operation of financial markets. Property rights to land are one of the cornerstones for the functioning of modern economies. This book looks first at the historical, conceptual, and legal contexts of property rights to land. It then considers aspects of land transactions, including the key factors affecting the functioning of rural land markets. Finally, it explores the scope and role of governments and land policy formation and discusses ways in which developing countries can establish land policy frameworks that maximize social benefit.