March 7, 2024
In a blog for International Women’s Day, new parent Anthony Kamande reflects on the heavy cost his partner and family have paid for the simple act of having a baby. In one of the proudest moments of our lives, my wife and I became parents on Valentine’s Day. But for us, as for millions of others having babies across the
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GELI Stories – How to get Early Childhood Development into the SDGs (with a bit of help from Shakira)
March 6, 2024
In the fourth of this series of podcasts with UN and other aid leaders making change happen on the frontline, I talked to UNICEF’s Pia Britto about how she and a group of colleagues managed to include Early Childhood Development in the SDGs. Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa · GELI Stories – Pia Brito on getting Early Childhood Development into
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GELI Stories – Building Coalitions between UN Agencies and Government Ministries in Eswatini
February 20, 2024
In the second of this series of podcasts with UN and other aid leaders making change happen on the frontline, I talked to Cissy Kabasuuga of WFP about how she managed to unblock a school feeding programme in Eswatini. Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa · GELI Stories-Cissy Kabasuuga on building coalitions within UN & Eswatini for school feeding Duncan: Welcome
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Will growth be enough to end poverty? New Projections of the UN Sustainable Development Goals
October 17, 2023
Guest post by Arief Anshory Yusuf, Zuzy Anna, Ahmad Komarulzaman and Andy Sumner Today, October 17th is the UN International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (you already knew that, right?). In new analysis for UNU-WIDER, we assess progress towards the global poverty-related SDGs, specifically monetary poverty, undernutrition, child and maternal mortality, and access to clean water and basic sanitation.
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School children are bearing the brunt of the global hunger crisis – just feed them.
July 24, 2023
Kevin Watkins introduces a new paper on a crucial topic Governments will this week gather in Rome for a UN event with one of those titles designed to induce profound boredom. The FAO is marking the second anniversary of the 2021 World Food System Summit with a ‘Stocktaking Moment’. Yes, I know, those two words feel like a good enough
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The Global role of Grandmothers in the Care Economy
February 1, 2023
In recent years, Oxfam’s been doing some pioneering work on the ‘care economy’, aka the bit Adam Smith left out (example here and here). My uninformed mental image of this had been all about the role of parents, generally mothers, in running the household and bringing up the kids, so I was struck by a recent Economist piece on the
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Student Summer vlog and campaign: Tackling period poverty in France
August 23, 2022
Next up in this series of posts from my LSE activism students, Alexia Fageroux, who went with a sound-off vlog option for her assignment. Full project on which her vlog is based here. Next week, back to boring old me – sorry!
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Summer Student blog and campaign: Why you should change your mind about the start-up that invented the Covid vaccine
August 18, 2022
Next up in our summer student post series is Andreas Brox. Here’s his full project, on which this blog is based. It has been two years since this fricking pandemic has started and like everyone else, I am pretty sick of hearing about it. Thankfully, it feels very much like it is over in Germany, where I am from, or
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Hunger, Inequality and the Birth of Oxfam
May 18, 2022
This post by Oxfam’s Max Lawson first appeared on its Equals blog. I’ll be summarizing our new paper on the East Africa hunger crisis tomorrow. The other day I was speaking to Nellie, an old friend and primary school teacher in Malawi, about the rapidly rising prices: ‘Prices have risen, just since last month. Imagine a loaf of bread was
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The Disabled Ukrainians Doing What the UN Can’t (or Won’t?)
March 9, 2022
Guest post from Anna Landre, one of my amazing students, who has bunked off class (with permission) to do some amazing work on Ukraine. And she’s pretty angry about what she’s seen. As a 23-year-old wheelchair user halfway through a Master’s degree at the London School of Economics, I didn’t expect to spend my past week working 16 hours a
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Is Social Media a New Frontier for Marginalised Communities to Challenge Old Power? The Flint Water Tragedy, and the Power of Place-Based Digital Activism
February 3, 2022
In the second of their four-part blog series (first published on Global Policy), which seeks to spark new ways of thinking about digitally-mediated activism, Nina Newhouse and Charlie Batchelor (two of my LSE students from last year’s cohort), use Timms and Heimans’ New/Old Power framework to ask how activists can use the internet to achieve new forms of power and
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Deconstructing this year’s Oxfam Davos report – what makes it so good?
January 20, 2022
I know this is the week of Blue Monday, when we are all supposed to feel at our most miserable, but I’m not feeling it – this is the time of year when I am proudest of working for Oxfam, because of its annual Davos report. For several years now, this has focussed on inequality, and I honestly think (though
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