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This paper explores “lessons learned” resulting from a process evaluation of a peer‐led HIV/AIDS prevention programme targeting street children and youth in urban Uganda. The purpose was to explore aspects of implementation that either enhanced or hindered the effectiveness of the peer educator (PE) role.

The process data derive from three reviews conducted throughout the project lifespan. The reviews engaged participatory evaluation methods such as focus groups (four) and workshops (three), as well as drawing on monitoring data such as activity evaluations.

The street youth in this project made effective peer educators. We suggest that letting the target group choose their peers and focusing on street youth undergoing rehabilitation engendered ownership of PEs by the target group and accountability among PEs themselves. The role was highly coveted and the PEs became powerful role models. The most useful work of the PEs lay in helping their peers to leave the risky environment of the streets, hence reducing their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. By defining the role broadly and situating peer education activities within a broader strategy of capacity building and advocacy, we were able to remain sensitive to the context in which street youth make “choices” about their sexual behaviour.

This paper contributes significantly to our understanding of the effective implementation of the PE method in this setting. It will be particularly helpful to practitioners in the design stage of similar peer‐led programmes.

Can we broaden the boundaries of the history of economic thought to include positionalities articulated by grassroots movements? Following Keynes’s famous remark from General Theory that ‘practical men […] are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,’ we might be wont to dismiss such a push from below. While it is sometimes true that grassroots movements channel preexisting economic thought, I wish to argue that grassroots economic thought can also precede developments subsequently elaborated by economists. This paper considers such a case: by women at the intersection of the women’s liberation movement and the claimants’ unions movement in 1970s Britain. Oral historical and archival work on these working-class women and on achievements such as their succeeding to establish unconditional basic income as an official demand of the British Women’s Liberation Movement forms the springboard for my reconstruction of the grassroots feminist economic thought underpinning the women’s basic income demand. I hope to demonstrate, firstly, how this was a prefiguration of ideas later developed by feminist economists and philosophers; secondly, how unique it was for its time and a consequence of the intersectionality of class, gender, race, and dis/ability. Thirdly, I should like to suggest that bringing into the fold this particular grassroots feminist economic thought on basic income would widen the mainstream understanding and historiography of the idea of basic income. Lastly, I hope to make the point that, within the history of economic thought, grassroots economic thought ought to be heeded far more than it currently is.