What could Foundations add to the aid mix? A conversation with the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation

July 31, 2014
Foundations are increasingly important players in the aid scene, spending the interest and/or capital from monster endowments set up by philanthropists. Some of the best known (Ford, Rockefeller) have been around for a long time, and as their names suggest, have an American feel – the big Daddy is the Gates Foundation, which spends some $4bn a year (by comparison,
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International Aid and the Making of a Better World: a great new book

July 30, 2014
Ros Eyben makes retirement look terribly exhausting. No sooner had I reviewed her book on feminists in development organizations than another appeared. This one is a little (170 page) gem. International Aid and the Making of a Better World interweaves her own life story with the evolution of the aid system, in which she is both a participant and a
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Four ways in which a good theory of change can help your social accountability work

July 29, 2014
This piece went up last week on the World Bank’s Global Partnership for Social Accountability blog. Sorry, I mean ‘knowledge platform’. Theories of change (ToCs) are a bit of a development fuzzword at the moment, used in lots of different and sometimes baffling ways. But Oxfam finds ToCs extremely useful, provided they address issues of power and politics, avoid linear
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The new UN Human Development Report on vulnerability and resilience: ignoring trade-offs and an epic fail on power and politics

July 25, 2014
I started off reading the exec sum of yesterday’s Human Development Report (UNDP’s flagship publication) with initial excitement, followed by growing dismay. It’s a pretty traditional kind of disillusion (I’m a bit of a connoisseur). Allow me to walk you through it. In a nutshell, an interesting diagnosis and a few good new-ish ideas, followed by a pretty thin proposal
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How can politics change to serve future generations (on climate change, but lots of other stuff too)?

July 24, 2014
No-one objected to yesterday’s rehash of a recent BS (blue sky, OK?) session, so here’s another. An hour in a cool café in Brixton market with Kiwi academic Jonathan Boston, wrestling with the really big question on climate change and the survival of our species: how could political institutions emerge that govern for future generations? Jonathan, who used to run
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Big Data and Development: Upsides, downsides and a lot of questions

July 23, 2014
One of the more scary but enjoyable things I do is be interviewed on stuff I know absolutely nothing about (yeah, yeah, I know – no change there then). You get to grasshopper around multiple issues and disciplines, cobbling together ideas and arguments from scattered fragments, making connections and learning new stuff. Great fun. This week, I’ll blog about a
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What can Islam teach secular NGOs about conflict resolution? (and human development, climate change, gender rights…..)

July 22, 2014
Lucy Moore, a policy adviser at Islamic Relief Worldwide came to talk to Oxfam staff last week. We used the ‘in conversation’ format, along the lines of my recent chat with Jamie Love, which seems to work better than the standard powerpoint + Q&A. Islamic Relief has some really interesting publications on Islamic approaches to human development, gender and development,
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What’s the best way to measure empowerment?

July 18, 2014
Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) used to send me into a coma, but I have to admit, I’m starting to get sucked in. After all, who doesn’t want to know more about the impact of what we do all day? So I picked up the latest issue of Oxfam’s Gender and Development Journal (GAD), on MEL in gender rights work,
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A seismic shift in improving the behaviour of large companies? Guest post from Phil Bloomer

July 17, 2014
My former boss, Phil Bloomer is now running the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre (check out its smart new multilingual website). Here he sees some signs of hope that the debate on corporate responsibility is moving beyond trench warfare over voluntary v regulatory approaches. Fingers crossed. ‘Mind the gap’ is a refrain that any visitor to London’s Underground trains will
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How Change Happens: Supporting tribal people to claim their rights to India’s forests

July 16, 2014
Next up in the series of case studies in promoting ‘active citizenship’ is Oxfam India’s work in an impossible-to-spell new state. All comments welcome, full case study here [P&C case study. v2 12 June 14] India’s new and heavily forested state of Chhattisgarh is home to some of its most marginalized communities, whose traditional ways of living from forest products
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Good? Bad? Ugly? Two years in, how’s Jim Kim doing as World Bank boss?

July 15, 2014
Nicolas Mombrial, head of the Oxfam’s Washington office, does his cup half full/empty thing on Jim Kim’s first two years in office This month, Jim Kim celebrated his second anniversary at the head of the World Bank Group (WBG). After his first year, I concluded “pretty good so far but the jury is still out”. Has anything changed since then?
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Links I liked

July 14, 2014
Highlights from last week’s tweets (and more displacement activity for Monday morning). Follow @fp2p if you want the rest, including lots more serious development type stuff Twitter loves snark – the ‘4th law of thermodynamics’ got by far the most (in fact, an order of magnitude more) retweets last week. [h/t Conrad Hackett] Is humour a better mobilizer than pity?
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