Oxfam researcher and ace number cruncher Deborah Hardoon introduces its new Good Enough to Eat index. Many of us will have overindulged this festive season. According to the British Diatetics Association, the average Brit puts on half a stone at Christmas. And it is not just Christmas Day itself, ‘the whole festive season is riddled with fat traps’. After Christmas,

Welcome back. Sharp-eyed readers may have noted that the blog looks a bit different this morning. It’s time for an upgrade, in response to an accumulating backlog of glitches and the need to, you know, keep up with the times n tech. Blog masters Eddy Lambert and Ian Sullivan have worked their magic, and this is what they say about

Advance warning – this blog is going dark for a couple of days to allow the cyberelves to give it a makeover. Back on Wednesday. Ex Tales from the Hood blogger ‘J’ has an enjoyable tirade on the Why Dev blog against the use of the phrase ‘The Field’ in aidland – (as in ‘I’m going to the Field’): ‘There

I failed miserably to stop myself browsing my various feeds over the Christmas break (New Year’s resolution: ‘browse less, produce more’ – destined for failure). One theme that emerged was the rise of the ‘North in the South’ on health – what I call Cinderella Issues. Things like road traffic accidents, the illegal drug trade, smoking or alcohol that do

One of Oxfam’s better kept secrets is that we work in rich countries too. Here Minor Sinclair, who runs Oxfam’s US domestic programme, looks back on what has changed in 50 years of the ‘war on poverty’. Fresh out of college, I jumped into the trenches of the War on Poverty – and have been there ever since. Fifty years

Oxfam’s engagement with physics-trained complexity enthusiast Jean Boulton is starting to generate some really interesting ideas. Jean has been helping us think through our work in fragile states – the big challenge for a lot of aid organizations over the next few years. Just before Christmas, she came in to tell us where her thinking has got to on the

Welcome back, HNY etc. Hope you had a good break (if you took one). Personally I’m glad it’s over – tried to ski, knackered my knee, and meanwhile back home, our cats got trapped in a room and pissed all over my son’s final year university notes. For some reason they took particular exception to the post structuralists – Derrida