Are these the worst aid agency road-side signs ever? Send in your candidates

November 30, 2016
Jonathan Tanner is communications manager at the Africa Governance Initiative (check out their new ‘art of delivery’ paper). Here he calls out some truly dire communication by aid agencies I was recently in Sierra Leone and Liberia to record a series of podcasts for AGI. The things I saw ranged from the jaw-dropping beauty of dawn on the road out of
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What role for local actors in system change? Fighting climate change in the UK

November 29, 2016
Ruth Mayne, Oxfam’s senior researcher on the effectiveness of influencing, reflects on some personal influencing she was involved with before (re)joining Oxfam. In the development world we often emphasise the importance of strengthening community action but is it really possible for local, rather than national and international, actors to contribute to system change? And if so, why and how does
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Links I Liked

November 28, 2016
In the US for next two weeks (Washington, New York and Boston). Here’s a list of public events if you want to come and discuss How Change Happens (seems pretty relevant right now, huh?) What is a Muslim? Funny, smart and very effective 3m video. Best/Worst charity ads of the year. Rusty Radiator awards now open for voting – get
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Friday rant: ‘development’ is not the same as ‘aid’. Got that?

November 25, 2016
A recent headline in my RSS feed flicked my ‘Activate Rant’ button. ‘This Video from Uganda Highlights Everything Wrong with Global Development’ it shouted. I knew what the video was about – some young white American missionaries getting into trouble for ‘dressing up native’ and singing ‘get your mission on’ provoked outrage in various quarters. I hadn’t found it interesting
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Payment by Results in Aid: What’s new?

November 24, 2016
Development Economist Paul Clist discusses some of the ideas from his new paper (Link to paywalled article version, link to free draft version) Payment by Results (PbR) is a fairly new idea in aid, where a donor decides how much money to disburse on the basis of how much a recipient has achieved against a target. For example, a donor
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Is it time to move on from Stats and Numbers to Metaphor and Narrative?

November 23, 2016
Post Brexit and US elections, I’ve been doing some thinking about how we talk to people. It seems to me that, along with much of the aid and development sector, and quite a few other social change movements, we have been in thrall to the power of numbers and evidence. Everyone is a policy wonk these days. The trouble is,
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Where has the Doing Development Differently movement got to, two years on?

November 22, 2016
The DDD crew reassembled in London last week, two years on from the Harvard meeting that really got the ball rolling. Unfortunately I could only attend the first session and the next day’s post mortem, so other participants, please feel free to add your own impressions/put me right. DDD is evolving fast into something approaching a big tent movement. At its
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Links I Liked

November 21, 2016
Tis the season to be evil? A fitting end to 2016 – bring the kids Next week (starting 28th Nov) I’ll be pestering the US about How Change Happens (actually, I think they might already be wondering about that). Events in Washington DC, New York and Boston. Will try and get a list of event links up on the book
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It’s International Men’s Day tomorrow – here’s why it’s a bad idea

November 18, 2016
Tomorrow is International Men’s Day, but Gary Barker isn’t celebrating I’m sure it was well-intentioned when International Men’s Day began over a decade ago. The day, in part, aims to draw attention to men’s and boy’s health; this year’s theme is “Stop Male Suicide”. This is a worthy goal: men die earlier and are more likely to face chronic illness
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Some highlights from the first 30 book launches for How Change Happens

November 17, 2016
I’m about six weeks into launching How Change Happens, and am having a great (if knackering) time. Highlights so far include a Kurdish/Dutch guitar combo warming up the crowd in Nijmegen, conversations with an Islamic finance entrepreneur trying to do financial inclusion in South Wales, a great group of women managing a community-run service station on the M5 motorway and a
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Fragility v Conflict – can you help with a new 2×2 please?

November 16, 2016
Struggling towards the finishing line on my paper on empowerment and accountability (E&A) in fragile and conflict- affected settings (FCAS) – thanks to everyone who commented on the first draft, by the way). It’s nearly there but I need your help with one particular section. I want to argue that lumping ‘fragile’ and ‘conflict’ together in one category is very
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Overcoming Premature Evaluation

November 15, 2016
Chris Roche (the koala – I’m the kangaroo, right) is a friend and a brilliant development thinker, even if he has an alarming tendency to be able to reference development jargon like a machine gun. If you can get past the first para, this is well worth your time. There is a growing interest in safe-fail experimentation, failing fast and rapid
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