I loved this blistering twitter thread by Justin Podur (@justinpodur) so much, I turned into a blogpost for the untwittered. ‘(In homage to Binyavanga Wainaina) First, the opening. All good articles about Afghanistan start with a few lines from a poem by British imperialist poet Rudyard Kipling. You know the one, “the women come out to cut up what remains,

Guest post from Ximena Echeverria Magariños and Jay Goulden, of CARE International INGOs have for many years felt the need to communicate how many people their programs reach in a year, but the numbers of people our programs “touch” doesn’t tell us anything about the difference they make in people’s lives. Increasingly, INGOs are seeking to report numbers of people

On Monday, exasperated by the nature of the coverage of the fall of Kabul, I tweeted a request for links: ‘What to read on Afghanistan? Interested in power analysis/stakeholder mapping of domestic players, which Afghan groups support/oppose Taliban, informed speculation about what comes next.’ Here are some extracts from what came back (plus of course, the ever-reliable Wikipedia). Do please

The British NGO network BOND recently published a report on ‘catalysing locally-led development in the UK aid system’, which summarizes a six month project involving dozens of people from different aid organizations. I have to confess that I started reading with low expectations – there are a lot of pious exhortations on localization, which all too often ignore crucial issues

An Equitable Olympics medal table, weighted for population, looks very different from the standard one. Go San Marino (shooting x2 + wrestling) An evangelical pastor in rural South Sudan recounts a personal story of travelling ‘under the water’ to ‘the land of demons’. Ryan O’Byrne on the pitfalls of outsider researchers trying to ‘make sense’ of religious experience Full listing

No excerpt

Got a gap on the blog today, so thought I’d repost this excellent piece from CGD, by Mayra Buvinic and Megan O’Donnell The rhetoric around women’s economic empowerment (WEE) in global development is finally being translated into action. Development organizations are using this objective to guide operations and exploring ways to measure impact by integrating WEE indicators into project results frameworks. But

Guest post by Will Paxton, International Director at Kivu  The 1st of September marks seven months since Myanmar’s military coup.  In that time over 700 Myanmar people have been killed in brutal military crackdowns, the economy has been ravaged, and conflict has rumbled on.  Uncertainty defines Myanmar’s future. The military government appears to have consolidated power, but economic, political, Covid,

More than 200 scientists from 66 countries have worked together to assess knowledge on just the physical science basis of climate change. Their answers were released yesterday in the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group I. The IPCC’s findings are clear, rigorous, and very concerning, but they are couched in formal, technical

Welcome to The Future. Seems about right. UK aid: Survival of the Fittest or Cutting at Random? Ranil Dissayanake and Euan Ritchie crunch the numbers and find ‘they quickly ran out of underperformers to cut and were forced to slash high-performing programmes too.’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘Theory is a kind of idolatry’. Summary of what sounds like a great lecture

No excerpt

Guest post from Graham Teskey My friend and colleague Lavinia Tyrell recently posted a note on LinkedIn, highlighting a recent WB Independent Evaluation Group report, which reflected on various methods of monitoring and evaluation currently used in development. In so doing, Lavinia referenced this diagram: As a fan of diagrams, as well as a long-time user of both the London