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This article offers a qualitative investigation of how human rights education sessions, embedded in a multi-faceted intervention, helped members of a rural community in West Africa challenge inequitable gender norms that hindered women's political participation. Results show a change in women's political participation and community members' descriptions of women's potential. Three features of the intervention contributed to this change: (1) its pedagogical approach; (2) its substantive content; and (3) the engagement of men and women together. The article calls for interventions that facilitate sustained dialogue between men and women to achieve greater gender equity.

Although resources are invested in maintaining the professional standards, knowledge, and skills of community development practitioners (CDPs), research has not established if they have benefited adequately from the provisions of an appropriate professional development programme. The Stufflebeam's CIPP model was used to evaluate this, which is the first exercise of its kind in South Africa. This qualitative study reports on the circumstances associated with its planning. Lack of alignment between the professionals' needs and learning activities was uncovered, which resulted from the absence of learning activities which meet the needs of CDPs and poor planning. A planning framework is proposed to mitigate the obstacles and challenges.

The Middle East region has witnessed tumultuous humanitarian crises over the past decade resulting from political conflict and forced migration of refugees fleeing for safety. Fulfilling Sustainable Development Goal 4 within the context of protracted conflict and large-scale forced migration has been very challenging to host countries and concerned civil society organisations. The Syrian conflict has generated 5.6 million registered refugees in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt. This viewpoint highlights the critical role of education in relation to SDG4, sharing the Ghata schools project as a case study, which was designed with a view to sustainability and equitable opportunity for Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Key lessons from this five-year project are shared, offering considerations to broader efforts towards sustainable quality education for refugees.

It is important to think critically about how we develop leaders, particularly in highly unpredictable countries like South Sudan. This article gives an account of a yearlong reflective and experiential programme in Juba which sought to straddle the paradox of outside and inside: it took seriously the critical insight that leadership development needs to take greater account of endogenous experience. However, to do so we drew on methods developed elsewhere, but which prioritise local experience. The programme focused on the everyday interdependencies of group life, rather than an abstract and often idealised understanding of leadership favoured in many business schools.

This article documents the level of access to infrastructure and assesses its perceived impacts on human well-being in rural Nepal. The study found a more varied level of well-being in less remote communities and determined that the perceived impacts of access to infrastructure on human well-being is higher in more remote areas. Notably, access to roads received the highest priority among respondents, followed by drinking water and irrigation. The methodology and findings of this study have practical implications for rural development in hills and mountains where human settlements are highly dispersed and access is key to human well-being.

Parivartan Plus is a structured sports mentoring programme for girls, implemented in a Mumbai slum where social expectations around gender-appropriate behaviour and good parenting restricts girls' mobility and visibility in public spaces. This article presents practice-based learning from developing and implementing programme theory to empower girls in achieving changes in their everyday social interactions at home and beyond. Gender and social norms theory were combined with local practical wisdom to turn main implementation challenges into opportunities. The article reflects on the strategies that gave visibility to, and achieved community endorsement for, the erosion of restrictive gender norms while ensuring community safety.

This study examined how dietary diversity and key demographics are linked to greater Spanish reading comprehension for child beneficiaries of a USDA-funded Food for Education programme in Guatemala. All students in 3rd and 6th grade were surveyed across 118 schools, 3519 children in total. Generalised linear mixed models examined the influence of dietary diversity, and K'iche' language ability, on children's Spanish reading comprehension. Dietary diversity showed no significant relationships. However, consumption of eggs on the day of assessment predicted higher reading comprehension scores. Children who indicated they spoke K'iche' fared worse on assessments. Implications for policy, practice, and research are discussed.

In Bangladesh, dramatic social and economic changes are transforming historical forms of patriarchy with various impacts on pathways to women's empowerment. We hypothesised contemporary resources would be more strongly associated with women's empowerment, as reflected in their influence in family decisions. In cross-sectional analysis, we found the contemporary resources of employment and membership in NGOs were most strongly and consistently associated with women's influence in family decisions. Education was only modestly associated, as were customary resources, including age and fertility. Programmatic efforts to enhance women's empowerment should consider the rapidly changing environment and the importance of women's economic participation.

Agents of sustainable international development seek to impact community transformation through developing the capacity of stakeholders. This article analyses six semi-structured interviews with mentors from two international development projects in the Middle East. Programmes sought to advance international development and human rights in a region challenged by political and social barriers. Analysis of the mentorship cases revealed that mentors used approaches that applied transformational leadership concepts in the form of idealised influence, inspirational motivation, individualised consideration and intellectual stimulation. Approaches used by mentors were examples of the Taxonomy of Significant Learning used to facilitate deep and independent learning.

This article addresses the persistent claim that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) has a negative impact on the availability of labour for agricultural operations, which has significant implications for the induced demand for child labour as a cheaper substitute for unskilled adult labour on agricultural farms in peak seasons. The study contributes to this debate by examining three issues: (i) effects of seasonality on child intensity of labour; (ii) impact of MGNREGS on child intensity of labour; and (iii) impact of seasonality and MGNREGS on human capital formation.