March 31, 2015
A mysterious, anonymised, scarlet pimpernel character called J. flits around the aid world, writing a blog (Tales from the Hood – now defunct, but collected into a book, Letters Left Unsent) and fiction. He asked me for a plug for the latest novel, Honor Among Thieves. Here’s the plot blurb: ‘Mary-Anne has left East Africa and traded in her dusty
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Links I Liked
March 30, 2015
The campaign for the 7 May UK election is heating up folks: The areas in red have only ever had white male MPs [h/t Federica Cocco] Global Justice Now’s #FreeTheSeeds campaign: Are outsiders imposing disastrous noble-savageism, or defending Africa’s food security? Can religious groups help to prevent violent conflict? Nice examples from Nigeria, DRC, Most desired jobs in Britain: Author 60% Academic
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1/4 of the world’s people already subject to large annual wealth tax to tackle poverty. Has anyone told Piketty?
March 27, 2015
A few years ago, I sat next to a young muslim guy from Birmingham on a plane, and he told me how frustrated he was with the way his community’s annual act of alms-giving, known as Zakat, was managed – no accountability, no real checks on where it goes or what it achieves. I’ve wondered about that ever since, so
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Where have we got to on ‘results-based aid’, ‘cash on delivery’ etc?
March 26, 2015
The Center for Global Development churns out any number of new ideas and energetically hawks them round northern governments and multilaterals: the benefits of migration, oil for cash, the Commitment to Development Index and many more (check out the Initiatives tab on their homepage). In recent years, Cash on Delivery aid has been one of their top products, and a
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Some healthy scepticism about ‘Citizen Engagement’ (and why I’m excited about MOOCs)
March 25, 2015
MOOCs are taking over. If you aren’t yet excited about Massive Open Online Courses, you should be. When I was first getting interested in development the only way to bridge the gap between reading the news and coughing up squllions for a Masters was to cycle through the rain every Tuesday evening to London’s City Literary Institute to sit at
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How can India send a spaceship to Mars but not educate its children? Guest post from Deepak Xavier
March 24, 2015
Oxfam is going through its own (belated but welcome) process of ‘Bric-ification’, with the rise of independent Oxfam affiliates in the main developing countries. Oxfam India is one of the leaders, founded in 2008 and focussing its work on 7 of the most deprived states in India. It is rapidly becoming an advocacy powerhouse within India, running campaigns on everything from
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Links I Liked
March 23, 2015
Bit of a (qualified) feelgood to this week’s links. The IT revolution, Somalia style: goats and sheep carry owners’ mobile numbers for identification [h/t Calestous Juma, photo credit @Lattif] Germany announces record boost to its aid budget to €7.4bn ($7.9bn = 0.4% of GNI) Great idea: a new global fund launched to help developing countries fend off Big Tobacco company
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Four roles for the Multilateral System – how well will it perform any of them?
March 20, 2015
Along with a bunch of Oxfam’s specialist policy wonks, I recently helped Francoise Vanni, our new Director of Policy and Campaigns, put together a presentation on the multilateral system. Writing a new powerpoint is also a pretty good way to generate a blog post – key messages, simply transmitted (assuming you obey the ‘less than 20 words per slide’ rule,
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Modern Slavery: How widespread? What to do about it?
March 19, 2015
The Economist has a powerful series of articles on modern slavery this week. Sorry this is too long, but they write so well, I struggled to make cuts. How to reduce bonded labour and human trafficking “The time that I went into the camp and I looked, I was shocked. Where all my expectations and my happiness all got destroyed,
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Why is Britain such an outlier on aid?
March 18, 2015
My friend Ha-Joon Chang is Korean, and argues that for a development economist, growing up in South Korea is like being a physicist at the birth of the universe. I was reminded of that when the UK parliament enshrined spending 0.7% of gross national income on aid in national law last week – for an aid wonk, being British means
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The best synthesis so far of where we’ve got to on ‘Doing Development Differently’
March 17, 2015
Finally got round to reading the ‘Adapting Development’ the ODI’s latest 54 page synthesis of the theory and practice underpinning the ‘Doing Development Differently’ approach. It’s very good – a good lit review, laced with lots of case studies and good insights – and definitely worth a careful read. Weirdly the bit that jumped out for me was on results
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Links I Liked
March 16, 2015
A secret service version of “Where’s Waldo” in the New York Times front page photo of Obama’s recent visit to Selma [h/t Chris Blattman and Guo Xu (@misologie)] Excellent update on evolving Piketty debates – what he got right/wrong on inequality, how he’s responded to the backlash [h/t Ricardo Fuentes] Queuing innovation in a Thai Post Office. Wouldn’t work in UK –
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