ÌÇÐÄTV

A buffet lunch will be available from 12 noon with a time for networking, before the seminar begins at 12.30pm.  For catering purposes, RSVP Ros Lucas on Rosalind.Lucas@warwick.ac.uk  by Wednesday 11 November. This seminar is open to anyone - all are welcome.

There will be two talks:

1. - IAS Visiting Fellow - Senior Lecturer, Development Studies, University of The Gambia: 'The Land Tenure System in The Gambia: Practices and Prospects of Reform for the Empowerment of Rural Women’

The main aim of this emergent study is to generate fresh data to fill the gender gaps on the status, situation, representation, performance and needs of rural Gambian women, in their access to, ownership and use of land, as a catalyst for their holistic social, political and economic empowerment. The study focuses on the need to elicit emergent gendered land-related issues for deepening insights, in order to influence and redress imbalances related to the gender empowerment vision, reform priorities and resource allocation practices of development policy makers, planners, traditional opinion leaders and the women themselves. These concerns have necessitated a paradigm shift from a traditional land allocation conceptualization to the plane of a ‘rights based approach’ to development, which is mediated by national Constitutional provisions, in order to attain gender equity. 

Mrs. Phillott-Almeida’s study on the land issue is the outcome of a Faculty Competitive Academic Research Programme at the University of The Gambia, which is combined with a Research Project of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), in 2009.

2. Professor John Bennington - WBS: 'Challenges and Contradictions of "Capacity Building" Programmes in Post Conflict Governments - Findings and Experience from 2 Years Work with the Government of the Southern Sudan.' 

ÌÇÐÄTV ÌÇÐÄTV School's Institute of Governance and Public Management was invited by the Government of Southern Sudan to contribute to a programme of capacity building for senior managers in two Ministries (Commerce and Trade; and Labour and Human Resources).  We appointed a full time research and development fellow Kathy Johnson to work inside these two Ministries for a year each, to assess needs from the bottom up and at the front-line. This led to us running a series of Workshops for the top 50 managers on issues like Managing People and Performance; Managing Projects and Operations; and Managing Budgets and Finances, plus organising "Shoulder to Shoulder" exchanges with public sector counterparts in the UK (eg the UK Trading Standards Institute).  

This paper will reflect critically on the findings and experience from this two year action-research programme and will propose some alternatives to the traditional top down trickle down models of "capacity building" used by donor agencies.  A copy of the presentation and of a draft journal will be handed out at the seminar.       

 HOLLYWOOD AND POSTWAR EUROPE