Make up classes March reflex report - Hanane Ben abdeslam

What I learned from social development is mostly that in our recent decades our society has developed from a fairly homogenous, orderly and stable society, to a society with enormous variety and diversity. During these classes I know now that social development refers to how people develop social and emotional skills across their lifecycles. It also focusses on the need to put people first, which is necessary for our society, and for the groups of people who are part of it. This makes me realize that our world is constantly changing because of social development. Furthermore, working with Wikipedia was a challenging project. I discovered that Wikipedia made a historical evolution in our society. I would have never thought that Wikipedia would be the biggest web research of all time. It has now become the very best web searching in an ethics of our economy and society. But Wikipedia is an online web search, which is caused by technology. What I’ve also learned more about how technology is important for our society. I kind of want to believe that I couldn’t live without the technology anymore. Over the years, technology has revolutionized our world and daily lives. I believe that technology has created amazing tools and resources, putting useful information at our fingertips. For example, most of our education programs are based on the internet. We do more online research instead of going to the library to dig in books, because it is more efficient and faster to search online. Moreover, I also discovered that human rights made also a huge impact on the development of the society. The standards like dignity, freedom, equality, justice and peace, allowed people to live with it, because every person has these rights simply because they are human beings. Unfortunately, not everyone is able to have these rights, even though they are human. 

During this semester I did a lot of research in human rights and values, and it made me realize that I have the privilege to have these kinds of standards. This encourages me to help the society with developing a more, and better world. To continue on setting goals for developing in the society, I also learned more about the MDGs. Now I know that these are international goals, which focuses on development issues. There are eight life changing goals, outlined by the UN in 2015, including extreme poverty, giving people better healthcare, and achieving equality for women. I think we all see now a huge positive difference between now and back then, but I also think that there is still room for improvement. Especially with demography, it shows that the human population is constantly changing. Also, the changes of the structure and distributions of populations, and how populations change over time due to births, deaths, migration and aging. What I find interesting is that there are many countries with more people than supplies to survive. I’ve only learned from this learning what the consequences could be, but not how to provide it. I think that there has to be a way to ensure enough supplies for every single citizen, so that they don’t have to live in the streets without anything to survive. Furthermore, it is also new to me that the concept of “social development” was initially used almost synonymously with social evolution. The major stages in the evolution of human society, identified in a macro-sociological perspective, presented a profile of social development. However, in more recent discussion the notion of social development has been detached from the evolutionary hypothesis and has focused on the questions of the satisfaction of human needs and improvement in the quality of life. It has been observed and amply documented that economic development while it is undeniably necessary can also lead to certain undesirable consequences. 

Therefore, it has to be geared to specific social objectives. What I also learned is that gender and development approach is not concerned specifically with women, but with the way in which a society assigns roles, responsibilities and expectations to both women and men. It also shows the way in which men and women work together. gender and development are an interdisciplinary field of research and applied study that implements a feminist approach to understanding and addressing the disparate impact that economic development and globalization have on people based upon their location, gender, class background, and other socio-political identities. A strictly economic approach to development views a country’s development in quantitative terms such as job creation, inflation control, and high employment. Gender and development consider many of these same factors, however, gender and development emphasize efforts towards understanding how multifaced these issues are in the entangled context of culture, government, and globalization. The gender and development theory focus on the socially constructed differences between men and women, the need to challenge existing gender roles and relations, and the creation and effects of class differences on development. Finally, what I find interesting is that, in the last decade and a half, there has been a great deal of innovation in social assistance programmes, and a marked increase in their reach. 

In the last decade, social protection has emerged as a policy framework employed to address poverty and vulnerability in developing countries. This report has two main keys: to province an overview of social protection, and to provide an assessment of its potential contribution to addressing poverty and vulnerability in developing countries. It provides some preliminary definitions and tracks the emergence of social protection as a policy framework against a context of poverty and vulnerability trends in the 1980s and 1990s. Rising poverty and vulnerability following the 1980s in Latin America, the financial crises in 1997 In Asia, and the rapid economic transformation in transition economies demonstrated the need to establish strong and stable institutions directly concerned with reducing and preventing poverty and vulnerability. Furthermore, the extension of social protection in developing countries will require overcoming a number of constraints, which are more acute for low-income countries. The issue is long-term sustainability, as developing countries are not in a position to finance the extension of social protection through payroll taxes that was crucial to the emergence of the welfare state in developed countries. Regular and reliable social assistance programmes based around income transfers, but increasingly combining access to basic services and investment in human development, now reach a significant proportion of those in poverty in the South. This sums up about every topic what I’ve learned during this semester. Thank you!

- Hanane Ben Abdeslam