July 9, 2020
A new book from Yuen Yuen Ang is always a cause for celebration. How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, is a brilliant application of systems thinking to the biggest development story of the last half century (review and podcast if you haven’t already digested it). Now she’s turned her attention to a massive conundrum and gaping hole in a lot
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The Covid Inequality Ratchet: how the pandemic has hit the lives of young, women, minority and poor workers the hardest.
July 8, 2020
On the occasion of the “ILO Global Summit on COVID-19 and the World of Work” Oxfam’s Filippo Artuso, Iñigo Macías-Aymar, and Franziska Mager looked into what we know about the unequal impact of COVID-19 on workers, and how to rebuild fairer societies. The coronavirus pandemic and global lockdown measures have shone a light on pre-existing inequalities in labour markets. What
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Local Diaries: Untold Stories of Women in India’s lockdown
July 7, 2020
Priyanka Kotamraju (@peekayty ) introduces the Local Diaries: Untold Stories of Women podcast. She is an editor in the Chitrakoot Collective and an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity. Sadrunissa is a young woman from Varanasi in northern India whose dreams abruptly faded in the wake of COVID-19. In January, she joined a tailoring course. It was the first time Sadrunissa had
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Links I Liked
July 6, 2020
Things I hate. This oldie-but-goodie has had me grinning to myself for the last 24 hours, on and off – can’t be bad. CGD is publishing some really excellent thinking around the pandemic. Here’s an example: Beyond Lockdown—Sustainable COVID Control for Low-Income Countries. As is Oxfam. ‘Care work must be at the heart of a feminist COVID-19 recovery.’ New research
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Development Nutshell: Audio summary (20m) of FP2P posts, w/b 29th June
July 4, 2020
No excerpt
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Localization in Advocacy? Don’t hold your breath (and look outside the aid system)
July 3, 2020
Johns Hopkins University and the Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health are doing some thinking on the future of advocacy, especially on health-related issues, but of wider relevance. The first of three papers is now out, on Local Ownership, Sustainability, and Grant-making. Two other briefs in the series are in the pipeline, on the need for and types of
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Covid-19 in Africa: How Youth are Stepping Up
July 2, 2020
This is a shortened and slightly updated version of a post by Alcinda Honwana and Nyeleti Honwana, which first appeared on the SSRC’s Kujenga Amani blog The African continent has, thus far, fared comparatively well in the pandemic, with just under 400,000 confirmed infections and about 10,000 fatalities at the end of June 2020. Even so, the heavy economic, social, and emotional
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How does change happen? Lessons from Malawi
July 1, 2020
Nic Cheeseman and Golden Matonga explore the factors behind a remarkable political breakthrough in Malawi In June 2019, Malawi’s democracy appeared to be in decline. President Peter Mutharika had just been declared the official winner of controversial presidential polls that were denounced by opposition parties and civil society groups. Mass protests regularly brought urban areas to a standstill but failed
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Where is the Aid Biz making progress on Localization?
June 30, 2020
There has been a spate of recent reports on localization, especially in humanitarian response. (Has anyone done a synthesis?) I’ve been browsing through a few – some highlights. First, an obvious, but important point. ‘Localization’ has always been a feature of emergency response, since long before today’s aid system was dreamt of. Globalization and migration have added new twists: ‘instances
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Optimistic or pessimistic about Covid-19? No need to choose
June 29, 2020
Jordi Vaquer is the Director for Global Foresight and Analysis at the Open Society Foundations The radical uncertainty resulting from the crises triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic makes prediction harder than ever and, yet, there has rarely been a time where everyone – thinkers and parents, artists and bankers, activists and teachers – had to confront urgent questions about the
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Development Nutshell: Audio upsum (15m) of FP2P posts, w/b 22nd June
June 27, 2020
No excerpt
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In Conversation with Deepak Nayyar on ‘Resurgent Asia’. Podcast and transcript.
June 26, 2020
I recently skyped Deepak Nayyar, Professor of Economics at India’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) to discuss his new book, Resurgent Asia You start with an economist called Gunnar Myrdal, who 50 years ago wrote a book saying that Asia was doomed! Myrdal had a European perspective of Asia, with almost no history. For him, Asia began really at the end of
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