Featured image for “How do we liberate agriculture and development from academic preferences?”

How do we liberate agriculture and development from academic preferences?

August 8, 2019
Charles Dhewa is a knowledge management specialist working at the intersection of formal and informal agricultural markets. The organisation he founded, Knowledge Transfer Africa, has set up a fluid knowledge and information platform called eMKambo, which tracks trends and ensures agricultural value chains are driven by knowledge, technology and innovation. Between key informants and literature reviews, which are the most
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Featured image for “5 Top Tips for Designing Research to change Social Norms on Gender (or anything else)”

5 Top Tips for Designing Research to change Social Norms on Gender (or anything else)

August 7, 2019
Anam Parvez Butt is a Gender Justice Research Lead in the research team at Oxfam GB. Gopika Bashi is the Asia Campaigner for the Enough Campaign at Oxfam International. As researchers and campaigners in development organisations we constantly grapple with the question of how to design research that is useful to influencing change. At Oxfam, we’ve been thinking a lot
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Featured image for “Patent rules are still stopping us helping our children, and this time it’s personal”

Patent rules are still stopping us helping our children, and this time it’s personal

August 6, 2019
I arrived at Oxfam towards the end of its big Make Trade Fair campaign on global trade rules. One of its core figures was Romain Benicchio, who just got in touch with this piece about how one aspect of that campaign has become all-too personal. One of the major illustrations of the rigged rules and double standards that shaped (and
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How to survive in an Open Plan office and other Links I Liked

August 5, 2019
How you behave depends on where you sit (or is it vice versa?). Love this guide to parliamentary seating arrangements in different countries from The Economist Anxiety is rising over Ebola in DRC, with 4 cases confirmed in Goma (pop 2 million) and chaos as Rwanda briefly closed the border there. Amy Daffe of MercyCorps argues that the problem is
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Featured image for “How to vlog – top examples and advice from some very tech savvy students”

How to vlog – top examples and advice from some very tech savvy students

August 2, 2019
Final instalment from my amazing LSE students. Wednesday and Thursday’s posts ran some of their blogs, which were part of their assignment to write an influencing strategy on a topic of their choice. But I gave them the option of doing a video blog (vlog) instead, and several of them grabbed it, with some impressive results. Here are three of
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Featured image for ““Seaing” a Sustainable Future in the Caribbean”

“Seaing” a Sustainable Future in the Caribbean

August 1, 2019
Next up in these highlights from this year’s LSE activism students is this post by Jacinta Gomez on her campaign proposal for saving Belize’s beleaguered fisheries The “Glory Days”. That’s what you’ll hear from fishermen today reminiscing on a time when the abundance of Belize’s Caribbean Sea gave the impression that its limits were non-existent and its bounty inexhaustible. Their reality today is
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