Editorial

Abstract

Greetings from MSSW,
We are delighted to bring out another issue of the MSSW Journal with an eclectic collection of contemporary empirical articles covering issues related to children, youth, women, livelihoods and urban studies. The first article examines child poverty in Uganda. It is an excellent desk review of causes of poverty impacting on children. The next article focuses on health seeking behavior of adolescent girls living in deprived neighborhoods. It is heartening to note that most respondents had moderate to high levels of health seeking behavior. The third paper is on an immediately relevant issue in urban areas -water. Based on a survey with 200 respondents, the study confirms what we knew already in terms of availability of water. Interestingly the study found that Governance framework and legal framework were good predictors of public participation.

A good paper an entrepreneurial challenges among youth is included in this issue with a specific focus on TAHDCO beneficiaries. A set of excellent recommendations to improve the scheme is presented in this paper. The next paper describes a field action project of the MCC Social Work Department with persons from Irula tribal Community. The needs of the community are highlighted well in this paper.

A paper on self-help groups and employment generation is included in this issue, which presents a study of how financial assistance to SHGs are utilized. The author concludes that such financial assistance have failed to make any
impressive results. This is followed up by a paper on Rural Women Empowerment determinants. The author has deployed advanced statistical tools to isolate enablers of empowerment. This issue of the journal concludes with a conceptual paper on Rural- Urban migration in India, which would serve as good reading material for students of social work and allied disciplines.

We do hope that these articles would be intellectually stimulating for readers and trigger better research and knowledge generation. We do urge readers to submit conceptual / empirical papers to be published in this journal.

Dr.S.Raja Samuel,
Chief Editor, JMSSW,
Principal,
Madras School of Social Work,
Chennai - 600 008.