Greek governments have supported investments to rural areas financially either by covering part of the investment and/or offering advantages with respect to interest rate loans or tax advantages. This support had been tendered either by nationally financed programs, called Development Laws, or...

Using a participatory rural appraisal approach, a series of qualitative studies were conducted in four countries facing negative impacts of climate change—Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Kenya and Mali—in order to determine men’s and women’s perceptions of climate change,...

This paper presents evidence on rural Ethiopian households’ time allocation to different activities, especially fuel collection work, and examines the effect of changes in the availability of firewood resources on households’ time allocation to fuel collection and on- and off-farm...

Financial cooperatives and microfinance institutions (MFIs) are the two major sources of rural finance in Ethiopia. Whereas MFIs are relatively new, financial cooperatives have existed for centuries in various forms. The coexistence of two different institutions serving the same group of people,...

This research has been undertaken to improve our understanding of stakeholders’ knowledge and perception about ecosystem services (ES), which provides a valuable means of gaining insight into the opportunities and constraints that face ES management in a multiuser landscape. Land use...

The paper is an attempt at evaluating the degree of accuracy of realization of the project: distance learning centres in rural areas financed from the European Social Fund in the frame of the priority II: Development of knowledge-based society, action 2.1.: Broadening the access to education –...

The aim of the paper was to discuss selected problems of Polish rural areas and agriculture. The main factors slowing down the development of rural areas and agriculture in Poland are unfavourable income situation by comparison to other economy branches, small size of farms (fragmented agrarian...

The EU membership requires introduction of significant changes in the agricultural sector. Such changes will not be possible without investments in human capital. The aim of the paper is to make an attempt at presenting the coincidence of three factors conducive to the development of lifelong...

The aim of the paper was to present numbers and proportions of researched rural households which members had run own firm in the past or had not had experience in that field in before the moment of the research. Regional diversification and ownership of a farm were also taken into account as...

The state of the municipal waste management in the urban areas of Podlaskie region has recently shown a significant improvement. In 2008 only one out of the 26 person included in the research did not sign any contract for his/her household waste disposal. However, waste containers often have too...