Noah’s Ark destroyed by flood. Really. (Update: actually, not really – it’s a fake (see comments). But I’m leaving it up anyway cos it’s funny) Fancy a week in Bologna in June learning about Adaptive Management and the implications for Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL)? I’m running a summer school with two of the sharpest minds in Oxfam, Irene Guijt

Guest post by Caroline Cassidy and Louise Ball  Over the years, at ODI’s Research and Policy in Development (RAPID) programme, we have worked with an array of researchers, communicators, practitioners and policy-makers, trying to make head and tail of how to get evidence to influence or inform policy. Reflecting on how far we’ve come, we realised that there’s a ton

Studying development is fascinating, but will there be jobs for students once they graduate? I chaired a careers panel for LSE students recently, where a variety of alums, now rising up the greasy poles of the aid industry, came back to share their thoughts. One recurring theme of the evening was the kind of skills and knowledge that will be

Guest post from Tom Wein, of the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics, based in Nairobi. Is your program respectful? How, exactly, do you know that? Did you ask people? Development aims to give people better lives. In doing so, we mainly aim to increase wealth and health – in part because we can measure those outcomes with ease. But there’s

Oxfam’s Emily Brown on today’s 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in the UK Today marks 100 years since some women in the UK first gained the right to vote. The People’s Representation Act of February 6th 1918 represents both a historic milestone in the post-war opening of public and political spaces to women, but also a move designed to keep

There’s research impact, and then there’s social media Props to the World Bank and Shanta Devarajan for putting together this series of development economics lectures by distinguished academics. Notice anything about the lineup? H/t Alice Evans Alex De Waal demonstrates how the concept of the ‘political marketplace’ helps explain four enduring puzzles in contemporary Africa and the Greater Middle East.

Guest post from Foyez Syed of Save the Children I went into my local chippie this weekend and got talking to Ahmed, the person serving me behind the counter. I told him I worked at Save the Children as a conflict and humanitarian campaigner. To my surprise he instantly jumped to the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, talking about the blockade

This term, I’m teaching a new course at LSE based on How Change Happens. It’s called ‘Advocacy, Campaigning and Grassroots activism’. It lasts 11 weeks, and is the first fully fledged university course I’ve taught, complete with lectures, seminars and assessed work (essays, but also blogs and vlogs). So far, I’m loving it. I realized how much fun this could become