It’s going to be a long day at Prague airport…. ht Misha Glenny Really amazing legal activism in Colombia, on intergenerational equity and environmental destruction. And the good guys won. ht Tessa Khan What to say when someone tries to mansplain away the gender pay gap Brilliant David Booth (ODI) piece on doing problem-driven development: four lessons from Nepal “Following the storms, a coalition of …
Continue readingAdaptive Management in Myanmar – draft paper on Pyoe Pin for your comments
Duncan Green - April 7, 2018
Ok, FP2P hivemind, I want your comments on a draft paper about an iconic Adaptive Management programme, Pyoe Pin in Myanmar. My co-author is Angela Christie. The paper is for the Action for Empowerment and Accountability Research Programme. Here’s the exec sum, and you can download the whole 20-page paper here. This paper examines adaptive techniques in aid programming in a fragile, conflict and violence-affected …
Continue readingGuest post by Dulce Pedroso (Manager, Health) and Taylor Brown (Director, Governance), Palladium Wakanda is in transition. This small, but prosperous East African nation has never been colonised. It has never received foreign aid, technical assistance, loans or outside advice. Yet Wakanda has thrived in its seclusion. It has managed its vast resource wealth wisely. Its isolationist foreign and autarkic economic policies have delivered prosperity, …
Continue readingPartnering Under the Influence: How to Fix the Global Fund’s Brewing Scandal with Heineken
Duncan Green - April 5, 2018
This guest post is from Robert Marten (left, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) and Ben Hawkins (LSHTM and University of York) The new head of the Global Fund to Fight HIV, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Peter Sands recently argued that “the global health community needs to engage with the private sector more rather than less.” Yet even most advocates of public-private partnership will not engage with certain …
Continue readingAnthropologists do things differently, including blogging. My attention was piqued by Tim Allen’s reply to a commenter on his recent post (with Melissa Parker) on Ebola in Sierra Leone, in which he casually mentioned ‘It is perhaps worth adding that the chief and elders wanted us to write it, and we read it out at a meeting of the whole village before posting it.’ Woah, …
Continue readingPositive Deviance in action: the search for schools that defy the odds in Kenya
Duncan Green - April 3, 2018
I’ve been thinking about why there is so little attention to Positive Deviance in development practice, so got very excited by this experiment in East Africa. Guest post from Sheila P Wamahiu (left), of Jaslika Consulting, and Kees de Graaf and Rosaline Muraya (right), of Twaweza After two hours of trampolining down dirt roads, getting lost more than once (thanks, Google Maps), we pulled up at …
Continue readingWhat does the public think about inequality, its causes and policy responses?
Duncan Green - March 29, 2018
Irene Bucelli, (left) of the LSE and Franziska Mager, of Oxfam GB, summarize the results from an Oxfam volunteer research project When it comes to inequality, a growing body of evidence shows that people across countries underestimate the size of the gap between the rich and poor, including their wages. This can undermine support for policies to tackle inequality and even lead to apathy that …
Continue readingThe UK Labour Party sets out its stall on International Development – here’s why you should take a look
Duncan Green - March 28, 2018
I’ve just been reading the UK Labour Party’s Green Paper on International Development (out this week). ‘Green Papers’ are not about the colour (this one is actually red), but ‘designed to stimulate discussion and set the direction for the Labour Party’s programme for government.’ I work for an NGO, so a couple of minor gripes first: the party political point scoring is over-done (a bit …
Continue readingInternational Donors and the exporting of 19th Century Poor Relief to developing countries
Duncan Green - March 27, 2018
This post comes from Stephen Kidd, Senior Social Policy Specialist at Development Pathways Early last year, the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper expressed its concern that the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) was exporting ‘the dole’ – in other words, a welfare system for the poor – to developing countries through its financing of a range of ‘cash transfer’ schemes across Africa and Asia. …
Continue readingDefinitions of politics, from Tanzanian kids. Take your pick, but I’m with Hayley. Ht January Makamba New IMF report: ‘The share of countries at elevated risk of debt distress, e.g. Ghana, Lao PDR, & Mauritania, or already unable to service their debt fully has almost doubled to 40% since 2013.’ Plus lenders are more diverse this time around, so it’s harder to fix debt crises …
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