Topic: Aid

Next up in my series of interviews on the real-world influence of researchers at the LSE Centre for Public Authority and International Development, I explore the impact of Ryan O’Byrne and Charles Ogeno’s work on how South Sudanese refugees in Uganda understand and interact with refugee camp authorities, and how they engage with those authorities when […]

Guest post by Oliver Scanlan ‘Two donor agencies, alike in dignity, in fair Bangladesh, where we lay our scene, from ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean‘. [With Apologies to William Shakespeare/Romeo and Juliet] “You’re not doing it right,” has been the mantra of development academics when diagnosing the […]

Guest post by Kristina Zittel & Scott Guggenheim Earth observation (EO) with drone and satellite-based remote sensing enables the monitoring and assessment of the ever-changing natural and man-made environment in which we live. The most innovative community programs are already noting the potential of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, to enhance data collection, mapping, […]

Bens Ramalingam and Kumpf have a thought-provoking new paper out on Covid-linked innovation in poor countries, and the lessons for aid donors. Here are some highlights, and a minor rant it inspired in me. The paper documents a range of fascinating innovations. Here’s a flavour: ‘Problem: A health official in a large city in India […]

I’ve been chatting to a few people about their efforts to change how their organizations think, work and behave. By ‘people’ I mean the foot soldiers, not the bosses – there’s a huge amount written for managers about how to change their organizations, but what if you’re not a boss? For a subject that is […]

This is an edit of a post that went up on the LSE Africa blog earlier this week I’ve been having a fascinating time recently looking at the real world impact of some of the research by the LSE’s Centre for Public Authority and International Development and exploring some of the factors which help achieve that […]

Yesterday I summarized the thinking behind an important new toolkit on adaptive management. In this second post, I want to have a look at the tools themselves. These come in the form of 15 ‘guidance notes’. The 15 notes cover the 3 elements of Adaptive Management that Angela Christie and I identified a couple of […]

In recent years, I’ve been one of a crowd of people thinking and pontificating about ‘adaptive management’. The debate has been rather dominated by academics and thinktankers, fond of hand-waving generalizations and rather better at taking down the bad stuff that suggesting what might replace it. In those conversations, Graham Teskey has played the role […]

Continuing on the theme of how aid agencies can work better in fragile and conflict affected settings (FCAS), there’s a new e-book (Advocacy in Context) looking at the work of national NGOs in South Sudan, Nigeria, Burundi, Central African Republic and Afghanistan. The researchers, Margit van Wessel, Wenny Ho, Edwige Marty and Peter Tamas, talked […]

Guest post by Tom Kirk For the last few years, I’ve co-delivered an MA module on influencing, activism and campaigning with Duncan at the LSE. For the last lecture, we always ask students what two topics they would like us to delve into in more depth. They’ve plumped for everything from leadership and how INGOs […]

I’ve been bouncing some ideas around with Irene Guijt on how aid agencies can/should work in what we call ‘fragile and conflict-affected settings’ (FCAS). This matters because FCAS are where a lot of the aid business (both donors and INGOs) will end up, as more stable countries grow their way out of aid dependence (and […]

Guest post by Rory Horner (University of Manchester) and Ken Shadlen (LSE) Various UK media reports have blamed lower than expected supply of the AstraZeneca vaccine from India for a slowing of the UK’s vaccination programme, especially delaying immunisation of the under-50s. Although five million doses of vaccines produced by the Serum Institute of India […]