History and Evolution
The first Social Fund was created in 1987 in Bolivia. During the 1990s Social Funds spread quickly throughout Latin America and Africa with the intellectual and financial backing of the World Bank and other donors.
The first generation social funds were created to serve as short-term safety nets to soften the impact of structural adjustment policies on the poor, which was mainly achieved by providing temporary employment. Second generation social funds have adopted more explicit institutional strategies aimed at empowerment and capacity building of communities as well as local governments in the context of decentralization.
Social Funds were created as temporary agencies that would be phased out once capacity of line agencies had been strengthened. Some Social Funds, such as in Ethiopia, are now in the process of being phased out, and others, such as in Honduras, are supposed to be closed down by law a few years from now. However, many Social Funds may well remain permanent institutions fulfilling important functions that line agencies may not be well set up to perform.
Read more about this topic: Social Fund
Famous quotes containing the words history and/or evolution:
“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)