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Academics examining the global South who engage in informal politics to understand social and political issues should be prepared to diversify their methods toolkit. Informal ties and politics are where one learns about social and economic exclusion. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Mixed qualitative methods – such as individual interviews, surveys, and focus groups – provide an understanding of the people’s perspective, enabling the researcher to truly know what is going on.

Fieldwork in the downtown communities of Kingston, Jamaica, has an element of danger because violence and politics are very much a part of the daily reality of the people being interviewed. In this paper, the author argues that studying how financial resources are allocated to low-income people and understanding why some groups purposefully self-exclude themselves from economic development programs require unorthodox field methods. The author thus uses political ethnography to understand the experience of marginalized Jamaican people.

Mixed qualitative methods and political ethnography assisted the author to understand the actual experience of marginalized people and politicized financial programs.

The purpose of this article is to investigate how social integration, immigrant networks and barriers to ventureing affect the entrepreneurial activities of Brazilians in Canada, indicating how mixed embeddedness takes place in that context.

Data were collected in Toronto, through the application of a survey with 74 Brazilian entrepreneur respondents and 42 semi-structured interviews with selected subjects, thus representing a multi-method approach. The analysis included descriptive statistics from the survey data and a qualitative analysis of the trajectories and life stories of Brazilian immigrants.

Our sample comprises respondents with a high level of education and proficiency in English, coming predominantly from the southeast of Brazil, white, aged from 30 to 49. The majority of businesses are small and related to the service sector. The article contributes to the literature by discussing the elements related to mixed embeddedness, including the need for cultural adaptation and for the creation of networks as a crucial element for business venturing.

The study focuses on entrepreneurs regardless of their businesses sector or formality/informality status. It could be used as an instrument to support Canadian public policies for welcoming Brazilians and for the Brazilian government to prevent the evasion of potential entrepreneurs.

The article contributes to the body of knowledge of immigrant entrepreneurship in Canada and of Brazilian entrepreneurship overseas. The results suggest factors that may be relevant to the expansion of their business, such as social networking, cultural embeddedness and adaptation of the products/services to a wider range of target customers.

The purpose of this paper is to show some of the innovative ways loans are being disbursed to help microfinance institutions (MFIs) diversify their portfolios and reach a young and viable market. The paper attempt to highlight how MEDA/PTE's project in Egypt can contribute to the industry learning on microfinance (MF) and occupational hazards and young people.

The paper presents an Egyptian case study to present how financial products can impact social issues such as working children and at – risk youth.

The study finds that the young people market has been rarely researched in the MF sector. Children and youth like many other groups face a host of issues especially unemployed and poor ones. Program design has often focused on social interventions and keeping young people away from work and in the school system. Through a rights‐based approach, this project is learning that the young people are key actors in many micro enterprises as workers and in some cases as business owners themselves. The market is diverse and so are the needs of the children and youth who are involved. It is time to consider innovation in designing programs for young people. There are alternative learning techniques and skill development for young people in poor countries where school and social services do not meet their needs. Learning within actual workplaces can provide alternate educational opportunities for children provided the work is safe and age appropriate. Programs focused on young people and economic empowerment and job creation will assist many developing nations in stabilizing systems and supporting the productive human assets. The authors have found that despite the rhetoric for youth and employment, the youth arena has been neglected of practical and relevant research. MF industry can advance thinking for young people market. We are finding that MF may impact business owners to improve workplace conditions. Loans also contribute to increase learning, higher wages and lower work hours for young people who work.

Lack of current studies focused on young people and MF. Studies carried out are based on very small samples and vignettes. A recently completed study carried out by MEDA/PTE with financial support from CIDA shows MF impacts on children as workers and business owners but there is plenty of opportunity for increasing levels of research in this area.

This paper shares original case material from Egypt's project, to share lessons on the ground and design and implementation learnings. This paper will be of interest to youth serving organizations, MFIs, banks, child rights community, donors and governments with an interest in children and youth.

Bad governance and corrupt politics have left millions of people disenfranchised. In spite of an oppressive and undemocratic state, poor Haitians have created their own informal groups, cooperatives and caisses populaires (credit union) movements – a testimony to the democratic spirit of the poor masses. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A mixed qualitative study using interviews, surveys, focus groups, ethnography techniques and literature review.

Lenders who run the caisses populaires are not class or race biased; they understand how to make microfinance assist the marginalized poor in a society segregated by class and race. Cooperatives and credit unions (called caisses populaires in Haiti) are able to reach hundreds of thousands of people.

These lenders one or two generations removed from the people they serve understand their reality and take careful steps and plan in a way to ensure their loans are structured to be socially inclusive. In fact, black microfinance lenders, as well as whitened local elites and foreigners, have a socially conscious philosophy of using microfinance as a vehicle to ensure economic democracy for the masses. In doing this, they take personal risks. The ti machanns recognize these efforts and as a result trust these credit programs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the importance of adaptive methods for junior researchers undertaking research in volatile and dangerous environments.

Through the presentation of two case studies of the authors’ own experiences in the field, the authors demonstrate the way the use of adaptive methods is crucial for junior researchers to overcome unforeseen obstacles and day-to-day difficulties presented by field studies in volatile locations. Finally, the authors address the gap in the methodological literature on how junior researchers can best communicate adaptive methods in the methodology section of his/her research project.

The authors argue the importance of embedding a first-person narrative into the methodology sections of the project as a clear way for a junior researcher to demonstrate elements fundamental to the data collection experience, thereby engaging the reader with crucial aspects of the research findings.

The need for junior researchers to draw on a greater degree of flexibility in the field when confronted by the challenges of conducting research in volatile environments is paramount to the success of the project. The authors offer, based on the experiences in the field, pragmatic techniques to addresses some of the “messiness” of field studies that allows the researcher to demonstrate the crucial importance of adaptive methods in the doctoral projects.

This study aims to determine the contributing factors to technical knowledge valuation at the related quadruple levels of commercialisation, including the idea, benchtop technical knowledge, prototype technical knowledge and commercialised technical knowledge, and then classify the factors by the valuation objectives.

The study method is descriptive-causal, and documentation tools of published scientific research articles in authentic local and international journals were used to extract the contributing factors to technical knowledge valuation. Moreover, the Likert spectrum-based questionnaire is used to determine the weight of each determined component. On the other hand, hierarchical analysis is used based on the extracted results from the distributed classification questionnaire among scholars to determine the allocable weight of each component.

The results indicate that at the idea step, the highest ranks among the contributing factors to technical knowledge valuation are for the indicators of innovation rate enhancement, novelty, creation of new products, profitability growth and dependence decline. In the benchtop technical knowledge step, the indicators of profitability growth, product quality enhancement, novelty, production risk drop, innovation rate enhancement, production costs drop, product price competitiveness and independence from rare machinery have the highest impact coefficients on valuation. Moreover, the prioritisation of factors in prototype technical knowledge shows that the indicators of productive risk decline, infrastructure, decrease in product delivery time, productivity growth and profitability growth are the most critical factors in technical knowledge valuation. Finally, profitability growth factors, production cost drop, productive risk drop, creating a new product, product price competitiveness and dependence decline determine the most valuable technical knowledge in the commercialisation phase.

The most salient innovation of the study involves the development levels of technical knowledge in the commercialisation cycle for determining the contributing factors to technical knowledge valuation and using multivariate decision-making methods to classify the so-called factors. The major limitation can be the context of the study because the paper was carried out by Iranian assessors and specialists using the experiences, opinions and approaches of opinion leaders based on the dominant social, cultural and accounting background of a developing country, not a developed one.

This paper is applicable because it elucidates the technical knowledge valuation factors for managers and owners of technological and knowledge-based companies to facilitate value determination and register the technical knowledge of innovative products in financial statements for the logical presentation of available intangible assets in the economic unit. Besides, in the high-tech area, collecting information from the contributing factors to technical knowledge valuation provides an opportunity to support intellectual property rights and facilitate transaction processes. Finally, in legal areas, in cases of breaching intellectual property rights relative to technical knowledge, the determination of technical knowledge value provides a solid basis for estimating the damage rate.

Baru is a fruit of the Brazilian Cerrado, important to the local economy and social culture. The use in food formulation is due to it being highly available and its nutritional profile; however, the changes in the texture of products are still unclear. In this study, an experimental design was conducted to develop cakes by replacing different levels of wheat flour with baru nut flour, and comparing them.

Cakes were developed with 20, 40, 60, and 80 replacement of wheat flour by baru nut flour and compared with standard formulation (100% wheat flour). The physical-chemistry composition of the flour, nutritional composition of the cakes and texture profile analysis were evaluated.

Baru nut flour showed greater protein, lipids, and ash than wheat flour, and this result was also observed in the cakes developed. The cake with 80% of almond baru flour showed an increase of 60.3% in protein. The texture profile analysis showed that the addition of baru nut flour affected the texture of products. The cakes showed more hardness and chewiness; however, the springiness and cohesiveness were decreased.

The findings of this study demonstrate that baru nut flour is a great option as a new ingredient for bakery products, due the increase of protein. This is the first study analyzing the effect of baru nut flour addition on the texture profile of bakery products. These results can orientate future studies, especially sensory assays.