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This article comments on the evaluation of poverty alleviation impact of development strategies in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Talking about policy failures presumes the existence of political will to reduce poverty. Poverty reduction can be made more effective by strategies specifically designed for that purpose. However, a consensus has begun to emerge that poverty is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. The poor themselves have related poverty to powerlessness, to insecurity, and to vulnerability.

This article comments on participatory monitoring and evaluation in poverty alleviation programs. Evaluations are often perceived as negative and external instead of as interpretive negotiations of value. Evaluation should be interpretive rather than judgmental. And one must see evaluation as a process of negotiation. The challenges to participatory evaluation are understanding the nature of the relationships between outsiders and insiders and building trust and mutual partnerships between unequal allies.

This article comments on the discussion about participatory evaluation (PE) in poverty reduction programs. PE is not an easy issue to tackle. It is one thing to pay the personal costs of specific evaluation by specific individuals. It is another to reward the collective intellectual capital of the primary beneficiaries who participate in the evaluation. If the benefits of PE are better information, a greater sense of ownership and higher accountability, then one should face its costs and be prepared to pay for them.

In situ hybridization is a procedure that allows the detection of the site(s) of transcription of a given gene at a cellular level within an entire organism. Since its introduction into developmental biology (1), this procedure has become an indispensable tool to investigate gene expression; initial protocols employed tritiated probes. These procedures required very long exposure times and allowed the detection of transcripts only on tissue sections. The method was drastically improved by the use of nonradioactive digoxigenin-labeled probes. This allowed the detection of gene transcription also in whole-mounted Drosophila embryos (2). This enhanced technique allowed to obtain results within a few days instead of weeks. The Drosophila protocol was quickly adapted to embryos of vertebrate model organisms that are widely used in developmental biology like Xenopus (3), zebrafish (4) and mice (5). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]