I’m committing potential hara-kiri by giving a DFID staff talk on the future of INGOs tomorrow lunchtime (Wednesday) – if you’re an FP2P reader in DFID, do please come along. Here’s the background and a call for comments on the draft paper I’m presenting: (INGO futures, Green v5 April 2015 (edited)). Just before Christmas, Oxfam boss Mark Goldring collared me in

Disarming (if unintentional) honesty: Oil company advertising has changed a bit since 1962 (not sure about their practice though) The Jeevan Bindi, which doubles as an iodine patch and could save millions of lives  [h/t Nisha Agrawal] Global obesity: 2.1 billion people are overweight or obese. It causes 5% of all deaths and costs $2 trillion a year. 60% of

I’ve been thinking about TripAdvisor recently, as a model of fast, crowdsourced feedback which highlights rubbish hotels and restaurants, and creates pressure for them to shape up. There’s plenty of rubbish performance in the aid and development sector, but our feedback loops are mainly limited to conversations in corridors and the occasional email. So what would be your top candidates for a developmental TripAdvisor?

Erinch Sahan, an Oxfam ag and supply chain wonk who is currently leading its Food & Climate Policy and Campaigns, argues that the best way to understand a company’s approach to doing good is by asking who owns it. When it comes to the private sector, the biggest mistake the aid world makes is to see business as a homogeneous

Really horrible. Photo of 4-yr-old Syrian girl surrendering to a camera’s telephoto lens is real, not faked  Tourism: the world’s largest industry. One in every 11 jobs worldwide; 9.5% of global GDP. Yet of every $100 spent by an average developed-world tourist, only $5 remains in the destination’s economy [h/t Erinch Sahan] What the climate movement must learn from religion:

Everyone’s heard of the World Bank, but far fewer people know of its private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation, which describes itself as ‘the largest global development institution focused exclusively on the private sector in developing countries’. It’s huge and growing, and it’s got some nasty skeletons in its cupboard – today it comes in for a good kicking from

A colleague of mine who shall be nameless (you know who you are Max), urges his fellow campaigners to ‘learn from the enemy’ – Machiavelli, Friedman, Big Tobacco, you get the picture. A new book by Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell may help. A Quiet Word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain has lessons for activism stretching well beyond