Topic: Aid

File under ‘sounds boring, but is really important’: sources inside the UK Department for International Development (DFID) recently told the Guardian that they fully expect the department to be merged with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) after Brexit (end of this month), as part of a wider effort to slim down government and in […]

If you don’t receive ‘This Week in Africa’, check it out – it’s an amazing and wide-ranging round up of links put together by Jeff (American) and Phil (Zimbabwean) and hosted by the University of San Francisco. And their annual version is even better. Their 2019 summary is way too long for a blog, so […]

Most discussion about ‘social protection’ focusses on programmes run by aid donors or governments, but that misses out on an awful lot. Some of my LSE students are doing a project for Oxfam on ‘informal forms of social protection’ – what families and communities are doing to build their resilience against shocks (accidents, unemployment, crop […]

Please take the reader survey – FP2P is changing fast and we need your feedback and advice – two minutes, honest! Guest post from Ange Moray, David Ney and Nicola Nixon, of The Asia Foundation A central conundrum in the digital age is that the potential for technological solutions to fast-track social and economic development is […]

Last week I went along to the launch of  People Power Under Attack 2019, the latest output of the Civicus Monitor project on the state of civil society organizations around the world. Afterwards, I picked the brains of two of the speakers, Dom Perera of Civicus, and Tonu Basu of Open Government Partnership. Here are […]

What, if anything, should academics, NGOs and funding institutions wanting to support researchers in fragile and conflict-affected states (FCAS) do differently compared to their work in more stable contexts? Been thinking and talking to people quite a lot about that recently, and based on those conversations and some great #PowerShifts posts, here are some thoughts: […]

Dear Reader, Please take the new FP2P reader survey – we really need your feedback to get new ideas and keep on improving! 2 minutes max (honest). Guest post from Exfamer Nicholas Colloff, who now runs Argidius, a private family foundation that supports intermediaries that help businesses grow and create quality employment in low income […]

Given that we spend nothing on advertising on this blog, we reckon the traffic for a given post is a reasonable proxy for quality, so here are the top 5 posts from the last two months, courtesy of you (and Google Analytics). In descending order. The Randomistas just won the Nobel Economics prize. Here’s why […]

Love the idea (and the title) of this report from MITGOV LAB. As someone who attempts to straddle academia and practitioners, I can vouch that such conversations are often marked by mutual incomprehension, sometimes laced with suspicion and/or contempt – not a good basis for a useful exchange. The authors, Varja Lipovsek and Alisa Zomer […]