Giving cash to poor people and reducing inequality: lessons from Latin America

August 4, 2009
Two interesting ‘one pagers’ from the consistently excellent International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth, run by the UNDP and based in Brazil. In ‘Do Conditional Cash Tranfer (CCT) Programmes Work in Low-Income Countries?’ Simone Cecchini of ECLAC takes the well-known successes of cash transfers in large middle income countries such as Brazil (Bolsa Familia) and Mexico (Oportunidades) and evaluates efforts
Read more >>

Paul Collier on post conflict reconstruction, independent service authorities, how to manage natural resources and the hidden logic of the G20 London Summit

June 29, 2009
Paul came to give a talk to Oxfam’s big cheeses last week based on his new book War Guns and Votes (see my review here) and they invited me along. Here are some highlights: Post Conflict Reconstruction: The conventional sequence is ‘build the politics first, then the economics will follow’. Collier thinks the order should be reversed. Conflict is a zero
Read more >>

Does aid work? Ask Nepalese women.

June 18, 2009
Ok I’m getting tired of picking holes in the arguments of aid sceptics, so here’s something positive – a specific example of what aid can achieve in a country like Nepal, which is recovering from a decade of conflict with devastating consequences for the delivery of basic services. One third of its population lives below the poverty line and one
Read more >>

Road accidents claim the life of Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, and another 1.3 million people this year

June 1, 2009
I read with sorrow but no great surprise about the death of yet another outstanding activist in a road crash. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, a renowned pan-Africanist, journalist and campaigner, died in a car crash in Nairobi, Kenya on 25 May – Africa Day. For an obituary and hundreds of affectionate farewells see Pambezuka News. Tajudeen (pictured), a Nigerian, was a fearsome
Read more >>

108 countries now malaria-free. What’s happening in the rest of them?

May 13, 2009
The Financial Times recently published an excellent special report on Combating Malaria (can you name any other newspaper that would do that?). It pulls together a really good overview of the disease, including the science, politics, examples of successful eradication in Mozambique and elsewhere, the role of community health workers, the debate over bed nets, impact of climate change, and
Read more >>

Developing country governments are dragging their feet over the global crisis

May 1, 2009
What are developing country governments doing to respond to the damage being inflicted by the global economic crisis? Answer, according to two new papers: not much, and they could be doing a lot more. A study from the Overseas Development Institute pulls together the draft findings from studies in ten countries. The ODI finds that in terms of economic policy
Read more >>

Is HIV a disease of inequality?

April 30, 2009
There is a strong statistical link between income inequality and the prevalence of HIV around the world. Göran Holmqvist, of  the Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm and Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, has an IPC paper out on it, and a one page summary.
Read more >>

How do poor people see the impact of the global crisis? New research from five countries.

April 29, 2009
Some excellent new research on the impact of the global economic crisis: ‘Accounts of Crisis: Poor People’s Experiences of the Food, Fuel and Financial Crisis in Five Countries’. The project was run by the Institute of Development Studies, UK and builds on its pioneering work in participatory research methods to try and get inside poor people’s experiences. I’ve not come
Read more >>

Viet Nam: how the crisis is hitting migrant workers in globalization’s poster child economy

March 26, 2009
As we approach the London Summit on 2 April, I’ll be putting up some findings from research Oxfam has been doing on the impact of the crisis in a range of developing countries. First up, some early results from our hyperactive Viet Nam team on the impact of the global crisis on what has been one of the world’s most successful
Read more >>

Is British aid bad? Owen Barder locks antlers with Bill Easterly

March 25, 2009
Time for a little attention to the rising aid sceptic tide. A number of books (Dambisa Moyo, Jonathan Glennie, Michela Wrong), blogs etc have been trashing aid with both good and bad consequences. Good in that, as From Poverty to Power argues, there is lots wrong with the aid system that urgently needs fixing (and some deeper questions on the
Read more >>

Want to reduce inequality? Look at Latin America!

March 19, 2009
I was at DFID again this week (I should be on a retainer) , presenting a paper on the impact of the global crisis on Latin America (it should be on the Oxfam website by the middle of next week). One interesting glass-half-full v glass-half-empty discussion was over income inequality: I said the region was doing well in reducing the gulf between
Read more >>

‘Moving Out of Poverty’: Outstanding new mega-study from the World Bank

March 18, 2009
One of the best books I have ever read on development was ‘Crying out for Change’, a summary of a massive late 1990s study by the World Bank called ‘Voices of the Poor’. So it was a delight to pick up the summary of its new and epic successor ‘The Moving Out of Poverty Study’ (I’ve got the book on
Read more >>