Earlier this week I grabbed a few minutes with Aidan Eyakuze, one of East Africa’s most prominent civil society leaders. The topic (what else?) was the crackdown on civic space under way in Tanzania, where Aidan runs Twaweza, a brilliant NGO that works across the region. Tanzania’s previously liberal and vigorous environment for activism is now being reshaped by an

Guest post by Melissa Parker and Johanna Hanefeld  This excellent book provides a fascinating account of the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. It is co-authored by Sinead Walsh, who was Irish Ambassador to Sierra Leone at the time of the outbreak and, Oliver Johnson, a medical doctor, who was based at Connaught Hospital in the capital city, Freetown, and head

The cartoon that Winnie Byanyima keeps on her office wall The reductive seduction of other people’s problems. Great essay on the pitfalls of northern voluntourism: ‘don’t go because you’ve fallen in love with solvability. Go because you’ve fallen in love with complexity.’ ‘The average woman is willing to give up 19 percent of the maximum total amount in order to

Written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this was first published in 1895  Said the Socialist to the suffragist: “My cause is greater than yours! You only work for a special class, We for the gain of the general mass, Which every good ensures!” Said the suffragist to the Socialist: “You underrate my cause! While women remain a subject class, You never

I’ve been using this idea in a few recent talks, and thought I’d test and improve it by bouncing it off FP2P readers. It uses a simple pair of graphs on global income distribution to start thinking through how the ‘aid and development’ sector is changing, or resisting change. The starting point is that we have moved from a two

Guest post from Sebastian Bock. Full disclosure: I’ve been mentoring Sebastian during his fellowship at the LSE’s Inequalities Institute. This was my favourite of his posts on social change. You can find the rest of the series on the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity blog or on Medium.com. Shame. It might make most of us feel horrible, but