DEVELOPMENT
COOPERATION AWARDS
In 2016, the Province of Antwerp awarded its Prize for De-
velopment Cooperation to three students from the Master
programmes run by IOB.
Gelagay Megos Desalegne (Master in Development
Evaluation and Management) won the prize for his dis-
sertation, “The impact of Productive Safety Net Program
(PSNP) on economic empowerment of women: The case
of North-East Ethiopia”, supervised by Dr. Els Lecoutere.
Gelagay looks at the economic empowerment of women
as a result of participating in Ethiopia’s Productive S afety
Net Program ( PSNP), a conditional cash transfer program.
It uses original data randomly collected by the Interna-
tional Food Policy Research Institute and employs the
Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) for
measuring ten different aspects of economic empower-
ment of women.
His results show a positive impact of PSNP participation
on women’s access to and decision-making power about
savings and credit, while women’s decision-making over
agricultural production and household assets seems to
have declined by program participation. The PSNP did not
have any effect on other aspects of women’s economic
empowerment. The morale of this study seems to indicate
that the design and implementation of the PSNP should
more explicitly aim to economically empower women,
and primarily focus on addressing its negative effects on
women’s economic empowerment
Ana Julia França Monteiro (Master in Governance and
Development) received an award for her dissertation, “The
Political Governance of the Brazilian Racial Issue”, super-
vised by Prof. Stef Vandeginste. Ana Julia analyzes how,
since the end of World War II, the racial segmentation of
Brazil’s society has been addressed in parliament. For her
analysis, Ana Julia studied draft legislation tabled at the
Chamber of Deputies. As a theoretical framework, she
used the literature on accommodation versus integration
versus assimilation based responses to societal cleavages.
Her work covers a period of more than 50 years and three
different political regimes. She shows that after the end of
the military dictatorship, which coincided with the end of
the Cold War, legislative activity in parliament addressed
Brazil’s racial segmentation more frequently and more
openly, and from a predominantly accommodation orient-
ed perspective. Her work is truly innovative and combines
methodological rigour with great policy relevance that
reaches beyond the case of Brazil.
Mary Ann B. Manahan (Master in Globalisation and
Development) received an award for his dissertation,
“Painting the Town REDD-Plus?: Competing Narrati-
ves on Forest Tenure, Land Rights, and REDD+ within
Contentious Politics in the Philippines”, supervised
by Prof. Johan Bastiaensen. Ms. Manahan’s study
makes an original contribution to the current debates
surrounding the links between development and the
environment, in particular how forest tenure and
land rights are tackled within REDD+ strategies in
the Philippines. Her study highlights four interrelated
findings. First, forest tenure and land rights are defi-
ning, if not central, themes in REDD+ interventions in
the Philippines. However, there are competing views
on how these issues are framed, largely informed by
differing interests, motivations, and claims of various
development actors. Second, the crafting of policies
and projects on REDD+ has become an arena where
various interest groups push for their ideas and agen-
da, which generated collective actions for or against
it, participatory development planning and project
implementation, and interest group politics. Third,
rather than the usual top-down versus bottom-up
policy translation, her study paints a more dynamic,
messy, and two-directional process. Finally, the Phi-
lippine REDD+ experience underscores the capacity
of indigenous peoples and civil society to redefine
REDD+ to fit their own interests and co-shape the
future of global mechanisms such as REDD+. Her stu-
dy thereby challenges the common-held notion that
there is a smooth transmission belt for global policy
application to local ground realities.
Cathy Berx and Rik Röttger (resp. governor and counsellor
of the Province of Antwerp) together with the winners of the
prize of development cooperation.
Annual report 2015 • 25