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Islamic microfinance is a substantial tool for poverty alleviation and economic empowerment. The paper aims at accessing the potential of Islamic microfinance for the purpose of achieving the economic empowerment in Tunisia.

A structured questionnaire survey method is used. The method is intended for some of the beneficiaries of Zitouna Tamkeen (ZT), the only Islamic microfinance institution in Tunisia. Responses are analyzed using the statistical package for the social sciences program.

The authors infer that though the Islamic and conventional microfinance have similar objectives, the methods are different. What is more, the economic empowerment requires not only financial inclusion and entrepreneurship, but also skill development. The results of the survey reveal that ZT has contributed to certain economic empowerment of most of ZT's beneficiaries. In addition, the authors bring to the fore that providing supportive infrastructure and investment is a prominent component of the economic empowerment process.

In the paper, the sample is limited.

The authors have highlighted that some structural barriers to entrepreneurship – such as legal, operational and marketing challenges – need to be addressed in a practical way.

This paper establishes the relationship between the Islamic microfinance and economic empowerment. The current paper is the first investigation in this field in Tunisia.

Although the last two decades have witnessed the implementation of several poverty reduction strategies in developing countries, many have failed to achieve their goal partly because of defective implementation strategies. This paper examines the implementation of one of Ghana’s flagship poverty reduction programs, the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP), with a focus on how leadership at the sub-national level influences the implementation of the program.

Using qualitative research approach, the study selected research participants from two Municipal Assemblies in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. Using a combination of Focus Group Discussions, Key Informant Interviews and Participant Observation, data were collected from a total of 44 respondents including beneficiaries, officials from the local government (district) and community level actors.

The paper shows that leaders at the sub-national level were more reactionary than proactive, thereby playing passive roles in the implementation of the LEAP program. It shows that the interaction between LEAP beneficiaries and district officials is rather low, which among others limits the effective utilization of the cash grant by the beneficiaries. It maintains that, for the LEAP program to achieve its overall goal of reducing poverty, leaders at the sub-national level ought to deploy more transformational leadership tendencies to incite beneficiaries to leap out of poverty through skill and human capital development.

The empirical literature is largely silent on the role of leadership in the implementation of cash transfer programs, such as Ghana’s LEAP program at the sub-national level. This study therefore explains the extent to which district level leaders contribute to the effective utilization of cash transfer grants and the human capital development of LEAP beneficiaries in Ghana.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of volunteers and its impact on related accountability practices towards beneficiaries by a large humanitarian non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Indonesia.

The authors adopted a qualitative case study design. The empirical evidence comes from rich fieldwork carried out in an Indonesian NGO. The authors collected the evidence mainly via 46 interviews and five focus groups.

The authors found that the case NGO drew heavily on the social and cultural capitals of volunteers in the process of serving its beneficiaries, which, in turn, facilitated the enhancement of its accountability to the beneficiaries. The authors also found that volunteers play a bridging role to reduce the distance between NGOs and beneficiaries.

For NGO managers, this study provides necessary empirical evidence on the positive role played by the volunteers in the development and operationalisation of accountability to the beneficiaries. In the authors’ case, beneficiary accountability is enhanced by the social conduct and practices performed by the NGO’s numerous volunteers. Beneficiary accountability is of significant concern to the policy makers too. This study shows that volunteers and NGO can work in a reciprocal relationship where social and cultural capital can be mobilised to each other’s advantage. To facilitate beneficiary accountability, NGOs can draw on the socio-cultural capitals held by the volunteers who appear to share the same norms and expectations with the beneficiaries. This process can also lead to the building of social and cultural capital by the volunteers themselves as they achieve great satisfaction and gain valuable experience in this process that could lead to greater satisfaction in their spiritual and material lives.

The authors extend the previous literature on beneficiary accountability by highlighting the under-researched role of volunteers in such accountability practices. In this paper, the authors first discuss the facilitating role of volunteers in enhancing NGOs’ accountability towards beneficiaries. Then, this is illustrated empirically. In addition, the authors argue that although Bourdieusian concepts like field and capital have been widely used in the analysis of various organisational practices the concept of habitus received limited attention particularly from the context of developing countries. The authors undertake an examination of the habitus of volunteers in the Indonesian case organisation and explore their linkages with the field and associated capitals.

This paper explores the communication of legitimacy in the annual reports of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), focusing specifically on the function of images. The visual mode of discourse and meaning construction has to date only scarcely been explored in legitimacy research, especially in the NGO context.

Distinguishing between normative, regulatory, cognitive and outcome legitimacy, the paper inquires into the kinds of legitimacy that NGOs communicate to their constituents and the claims that predominate. Turning to research on impression management, the paper explores whether and how organizations use images as symbolic mechanisms of legitimacy. Finally, the paper considers the socio-cultural implications of these legitimation strategies for beneficiary groups, donor communities and the organizations themselves.

A qualitative content analysis of images in the reports of the eight influential members of the US-based Global Emergency Response Coalition confirms the widespread presence of legitimacy claims in NGO visual communications, with normative (especially need) and output (especially implementation) categories predominating. However, these practices are potentially contradictory; measures to increase legitimacy to and of donors result in forms of beneficiary exclusion and reduction. Strategies of impression management, namely self-promotion, ingratiation and exemplification, appear to shape these NGO representative logics.

The results of this study extend prior research into legitimacy, legitimation and impression management in and beyond the non-governmental sector by differentiating among categories of legitimacy and incorporating images as the object of analysis. In this capacity, they also support and augment the emerging literature on imagery use in NGO annual reports.

Informed by the critical perspective of dialogic accounting theory, the purpose of this paper is to explore the use of evaluation as a means of enhancing accountability to beneficiaries within nonprofit organisations (NPOs). As a stakeholder group frequently marginalised by traditional accounting practices, the participation of beneficiaries within a NPO’s accountability structure is presented as a means of increasing social justice.

The research design used case studies involving two NPOs, examining documents and conducting interviews across three stakeholder groups, within each organisation.

Findings reveal that when viewed on beneficiaries’ terms, accountability to beneficiaries, through participative evaluation, needs to consider the particular timeframe of beneficiary engagement within each organisation. This temporal element positions downwards accountability to beneficiaries within NPOs as multi-modal.

The research poses a limit to statistical generalisability outside of the specific research context. However, the research prioritises theoretical generalisation to social forms and meanings, and as such provides insights for literature.

In acknowledging that beneficiaries have accountability needs dependent upon their timeframe of participation, NPOs can better target their downwards accountability structures. This research also has practical implications in its attempt to action two of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals.

This paper makes a contribution to the limited research into nonprofit accountability towards beneficiaries. Dialogic accounting theory is enacted to explore how accountability can be practised on beneficiaries’ terms.

This paper explores environmental accountability and downward accountability role of nongovernmental organisations (henceforth NGOs) under Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) in the food and beverage industry of Nigeria. The paper relies on empirical data gathered from qualitative interviews of three stakeholders – accountants, Corporate Social Responsibility Officers (CSROs), CEOs and NGO CSROs. It employed theoretical conceptualisation of environmental accountability and NGO's downward accountability. Analysis shows that despite the existence of attributes of environmental accountability such as sense of responsibility on the part of corporations and citizens' rights to demand for and enforce accountability, passivity of citizens' right caused by vulnerability prevails. The finding also shows that downward accountability roles of NGOs in the industry have been framed as that of enhancing activities in the value chain. Part of this is RecyclePay project that funds education for the poor. Thus NGOs' downward (environmental) accountability in Nigeria has potential to promote environmental well-being, beneficiary's economic empowerment and education for the poor, thereby simultaneously addressing vulnerability. It shows that vulnerability may induce a different conceptualisation of environmental accountability than that of a normal democratic setting where the citizens are deemed to have right to demand and enforce (environmental) accountability. This paper contributes to our understanding of (environmental) accountability and downward accountability role of NGOs within an emerging market context.

Subject area information and communication technology (ICT) for development.

Master of Business Administration Program’s Management Information Systems courses. Or introductory courses in Masters in ICT for Development.

The paper aims to highlight the endeavour of public distribution system (PDS), a food security scheme for under-privileged people in India, towards excellence, using ICT in the state of Chhattisgarh. It presents two important roles of ICT: one, as a system improvement tool, through supply chain integration (in Phase 1) and, the other, as tool for empowerment, by providing choices through computerized online real-time electronic (CORE) PDS (in Phase 2). CORE PDS was intended to provide choices of retail outlets to poor beneficiaries for collecting their food entitlement, breaking the retail outlet’s monopoly. The project was successfully implemented in some urban areas of Chhattisgarh, providing motivation for its mass scale roll-out. But, the contextual differences between rural and urban settings were raising questions on the ultimate value expected to be delivered by the project in rural areas.

Two major learning outcomes of the case: students will appreciate the multi-faceted role of ICT in improving the performance of a system meant for a financially poor section of the society; students will understand the role of contextual settings in a developing economy in the endeavour of ICT projects for societal development.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 10: Public Sector Management.

This study offers a critical inquiry into accountability vis-à-vis organizational identity formation. It investigates how accountability evolves in the transformation of an NGO operating in the field of migration management from an informal grassroots group into a fully-fledged organization.

The paper is the outcome of a participatory action research project on Welcome Refugees (WR), a UK-based NGO. The project involved documentary analysis, focus group and semi-structured interviews, field notes, and participant observation. The analysis draws from poststructuralist theorization to explain the interplay between organizational identity and different forms of NGO accountability over time.

The study shows how different forms of accountability became salient over time and were experienced differently by organizational members, thus leading to competing collective identity narratives. Organizational members felt accountable to beneficiaries in different ways, and this was reflected in their identification with the organization. Some advocated a rights-based approach that partially resonated with the accountability demands of external donors, while others aimed at enacting their feelings of accountability by preserving their closeness with beneficiaries and using a need-based approach. These differences led to an identity struggle that was ultimately solved through the silencing of marginalized narratives and the adoption of an adaptive regime of accountability.

The findings of the case are of practical relevance to quasi-organizations that struggle to form and maintain organizational identity in their first years of operation. Their survival depends not only on their ability to accommodate and/or resist a multiplicity of accountability demands but also on their ability to develop a shared and common understanding of identity accountability.

The paper problematizes rather than takes for granted the process through which organizations acquire a viable identity and the role of accountability within them.

The purpose of this paper is to describe in-depth a community-based social partnership, emerged in response to the financial crisis in Greece, with members from the private, public and civic sectors, using a case example of a grass-root self-organised national network.

Formal and informal interviews as well as written communication with members of the partnership mainly formed the basis for the analysis. Topics covered formation and implementation activities, outcomes, relationship issues, such as trust and links to social capital.

A shared community risk and a national media campaign to increase public awareness of the issue were catalysts for individuals’ sensitisation and participation in the partnership. The shared risk was the loss of community’s social cohesion, through poverty aggravated by the financial crisis. Self-organisation led to innovative relationships, whereas trust, collective action and collaboration show social capital attributes in the partnership enabling resilience development.

The research contributes in the fields of community-based partnerships and engagement in building community and crisis resilience. The findings are based on a case example. More evidence is needed in order to derive generalised statements about the partnership’s contribution to crisis resilience.

The partnership has shown impact on community engagement, health and well-being.

This paper presents a partnership type for building community and crisis resilience with the case example of one such partnership in Greece, formed to alleviate community distress caused by the crisis.

In recent years, with the advent of the phenomenon known as corporate social responsibility (CSR), transnational corporations have moved away from traditional modes of philanthropic largesse, to a focus on ‘community engagement’, partnership, empowerment and ‘social investment’. This chapter draws on ethnographic research, tracing the practise of CSR in a transnational mining company, from its corporate headquarters in London, to its mining operations on South Africa's platinum belt. It explores how the practices of corporate–community partnership – and the goal of ‘self-sustainability’ that the company propounds – project the company as a vehicle of empowerment as it strives to convert ‘beneficiaries’ to the values and virtues of the market with an injunction to ‘help yourself’ to a piece of ‘the market’ and share the opportunities that it offers. However, while the promise of CSR holds out this vision of mutual independence and self-sustainability, I argue that the practise of CSR reinscribes older relations of patronage and clientelism which recreate the coercive bonds of ‘the gift’, inspiring deference and dependence, on the part of the recipient, rather than autonomy and empowerment.