The quest to measure South-South cooperation

May 31, 2019
Prof. Neissan A. Besharati serves as the Associate Director for Deloitte Development Africa, Strategy & Operations. He holds a Masters in International Social Development and a PhD in Public Policy & Development Management, with a focus on evaluating effectiveness of development interventions. This piece was written as part of a research project for Southern Voice’s Development Effectiveness Programme.  Most people
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Can digital really revolutionise health and education in the Global South?

May 30, 2019
Guest post from Elizabeth Stuart, executive director of the  Pathways for Prosperity Commission on Technology and Inclusive Development. One of many puzzles in development is that increasing spending on health and education doesn’t necessarily deliver expected results. To turn this on its head: Madagascar, Bangladesh and South Africa all have similar child mortality rates, but South Africa spends 19 times
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Decolonising government through Indigenous ‘love-bombing’: a Tasmanian example

May 29, 2019
Dr Emma Lee is a trawlwulwuy woman from tebrakunna country, north-east Tasmania. She is a Research Fellow at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, and an Honorary Member of the ICCA Consortium. To be an Indigenous person is to be a recipient of other peoples’ idea of what ‘development’ should look like.  I am a trawlwulwuy woman from tebrakunna country, north-east
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How to Write About Africa: RIP Binyavanga Wainaina

May 28, 2019
Binyavanga Wainaina, the Kenyan writer, died last week, aged 48. Here is his brilliant, witheringly satirical piece ‘How to Write About Africa’, first published in Granta magazine in 2005. Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also
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Links I Liked

May 27, 2019
When someone sends dumb comments on your precious draft. Stop what you’re doing and watch this for 30 secs as Bill Nye (the science guy) loses his shit on climate change denial. Genius. Rwanda’s ‘reconciliation villages’, where genocide survivor and perpetrator live side by side Low & low-middle income countries will collect public revenues of about $444 per person in
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Big demographic tides are sweeping the world: how should aid organizations respond?

May 24, 2019
Recently I spent half day BS’ing (breeze-shooting, obviously) about future trends and challenges for international organizations like Oxfam. Confession: we’re supposed to hate these, but often they’re really fun. A table on demographic shifts got me particularly excited. Great human tides are sloshing around the globe, populations are moving geographically, and their age make-up is changing rapidly. All that has
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The journey of making mental health a development priority

May 23, 2019
For years, we’ve seen first-hand that mental health support and services globally are too sporadic, poorly funded and insufficient to meet the enormous demand for them. Dr. Dixon Chibanda and Elisha London talk about the work behind making mental health a development priority.
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How do 40 supersmart young Global Activists want to change the world?

May 22, 2019
I’ve spent the last three weeks buried in marking. For most academics, this is the time of the year they complain about most – marking at Masters level is an exhausting affair requiring sustained concentration to spot what is missing, as well as critique what is there – deep brain fade is unavoidable. But what kept me going was that
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The UK’s ridiculous, self-harming scandal of visa rejections for visiting academics

May 21, 2019
We had a blog training workshop at the LSE last month where only one person out of 25 expected showed up. No, it wasn’t because they’d heard how boring I am, it was because they were Africans trying to attend the LSE’s Africa Summit and various other events, but they couldn’t get visas. So we (Esther Yei-Mokuwa from Sierra Leone,
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#PowerShifts Resources: Reclaiming Representation

May 20, 2019
This new stream of resources that we’ll be posting on FP2P will include links to stories and projects that can engage us in further reflection about the many blindspots involved in development research and practice, as well as ideas to make those power shifts happen at every level.
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‘I just won’t give up’ – 13 year old Ogen Ronald thinks football holds the key to a brighter future. And he may be right

May 16, 2019
As northern Uganda continues gradually to recover from the LRA war, peace/youth interventions using sports are playing a vital role. Former Ugandan soccer star and LSE researcher Francis Aloh (right) is studying the work of a Canadian charity, Athletes for Africa (A4A) and reports back on a recent visit. It has been said that football can heal the social wounds
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Is the African Diaspora the Continent’s “Secret Weapon”?

May 15, 2019
Diasporas are often treated as foreigners in their adopted homes and as traitors in their place of birth, despite often hidden cultural and economic contributions. In this post, first published on the LSE’s Africa Centre blog, Behailu Shiferaw Mihirete writes about the potential hidden within the African diaspora across the globe.  Behailu is a is a former journalist and communication
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