Health and Education | From Poverty to Power

Ebola: How a People’s Science Helped End an Epidemic

Duncan Green - October 11, 2016

Guest book review from Anita Makri, an editor and writer going freelance after 5+ years with SciDev.Net. (@anita_makri) I’m sure that to readers of this blog the Ebola epidemic that devastated West Africa a couple of years ago needs no introduction (just in case, here’s a nice summary by the Guardian’s health editor). So I’ll cut to the chase, and to a narrative that at …

Talk is cheap, but will the World Bank really step up on inequality?

Duncan Green - October 4, 2016

Max Lawson, Oxfam’s Head of Development Finance and Public Services raises the curtain this week’s World Bank and IMF Annual Meetings before hopping on the plane to Washington I have been going to the Annual Meetings of the World Bank and IMF longer than I care to remember, certainly since most Oxfam policy wonks were still at school. Every time I go to the office …

Why the World Bank needs to ask Jim Kim some tough questions in his Job Interview

Duncan Green - September 22, 2016

Guest post from Nadia Daar, head of Oxfam’s Washington DC office Preparing for an interview is often traumatic – by this point I’ve done a few and believe me, Oxfam doesn’t make things easy! And I’ve heard the World Bank doesn’t either. Yet for the position of president, there is a widespread feeling that Jim Kim’s upcoming interview with the Board of Directors this week …

Precarious Lives: Food, Work and Care after the Global Food Crisis. Launch of new report, 9th September

Duncan Green - August 31, 2016

Oxfam researcher John Magrath profiles a new joint Oxfam/IDS report and tries to convince you to come along to the launch in London on 9th September Duncan has written previously about one of the projects he was most proud of initiating while in (nominal!) charge of Oxfam’s Research Team. This started out as Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility’ and was a four year study …

How do you make aid programmes truly adaptive? New lessons from Bangladesh and Cambodia

Duncan Green - August 5, 2016

Following on from yesterday’s post on adaptive aid, a guest piece from Lisa Denney (left), Daniel Harris (middle)and Leni Wild (right), all of ODI (sorry layout’s gone so weird – it’s cos there’s so many of them…..) A swelling chorus of the development community has been advocating for more flexible and adaptive programming that can respond to the twists and turns of political reform processes. They argue that in order …

What explains advocacy success in setting global agendas? Comparing Tobacco v Alcohol and four other Global Advocacy Efforts

Duncan Green - August 3, 2016

Oxfam researcher/evaluation adviser Uwe Gneiting introduces a new set of case studies It’s an age-old puzzle – why do some advocacy and campaigning efforts manage to influence the political agendas of governments, international institutions and corporations but others don’t? What explains the difference in attention, resource mobilization and policy traction of some issues (e.g. anti-Apartheid, HIV/AIDS) compared to others (e.g. the limited success of gun control …

Deworming Delusions and the flimsiness of ‘evidence-based policy’

Duncan Green - July 28, 2016

This post is co-authored with Mohga Kamal-Yanni (right) Should I blog about things that are way over my head? Well it’s never stopped me in the past…… My LSE colleague Tim Allen, along with Melissa Parker and Katja Polman have edited an issue of the Journal of Biosocial Science on ‘Biosocial Approaches to the Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases’. It’s open access and worth a skim, …

Campaigning to Make India’s Roads Safer: A nice How Change Happens case study

Duncan Green - July 7, 2016

A smart How Change Happens case study by David Bornstein in the New York Times’ ‘Fixes’ series (highly recommended). Bornstein looks at the advocacy of the SaveLife Foundation, set up by Piyush Tewari, a businessman, after his cousin Shivam was knocked down by a jeep then left to bleed to death by the roadside. Excerpts + commentary from me in italics. “India has surpassed China as …

The 2016 Multidimensional Poverty Index was launched yesterday. What does it say?

Duncan Green - June 3, 2016

This is at the geeky, number-crunching end of my spectrum, but I think it’s worth a look (and anyway, they asked nicely). The 2016 Multi-Dimensional Poverty Index was published yesterday. It now covers 102 countries in total, including 75 per cent of the world’s population, or 5.2 billion people. Of this proportion, 30 per cent of people (1.6 billion) are identified as multidimensionally poor. The …

Some fascinating new research on how food prices affect people’s lives and politics

Duncan Green - April 5, 2016

One of the projects I was proudest of getting off the ground while in (nominal) charge of Oxfam’s research team was ‘Life in a Time of Food Price Volatility’, a four year study of the impact of the chaotic food prices of recent years on the lives of poor people and communities in rural and urban communities in ten countries. DFID funded it (thanks!), and …