Aid | From Poverty to Power

Smart thinking from USAID on putting adaptive management into practice

Duncan Green - April 23, 2018

I recommend USAID’s recent paper ‘What difference does CLA (Collaborate; Learn; Adapt) make to development: Key findings from a recent literature review’, which provides further evidence that USAID for all its problems with the Administration, continues to do some really interesting work. The 12 key findings are neatly summarized in this graphic: The paper’s only 5 pages, but for those that can’t even manage that, …

Adaptive 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 …

Africa’s First Panther Economy? Wakanda’s development dilemmas

Duncan Green - April 6, 2018

Guest 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, …

Partnering 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 …

The 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 …

International 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. …

What is really stopping the aid business shifting to adaptive programming?

Duncan Green - March 23, 2018

Jake Allen, Head of Governance for Sub Saharan Africa at the British Council, left such a well argued, sweetly written comment on Graham Teskey’s recent post that I thought I’d post it separately “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” (HL Mencken said something similar to this, just not as pithily) With each piece that I read on the …

Bruised but better: the stronger case for evidence-based activism in East Africa

Duncan Green - March 22, 2018

Wrapping up Twaweza week, Varja Lipovsek (left) and Aidan Eyakuze reflect on the event that has provided the last week’s posts It was a stormy couple of days in Dar es Salaam. First, it is the rainy season, so the tent in which we held our meeting flapped and undulated over our heads like a loose sail. More importantly, we crammed the tent with more …

Can religion play a role in evidence-obsessed governance strategies? Lessons from Tanzania

Duncan Green - March 21, 2018

Next up in the Twaweza series, Aikande Clement Kwayu reflects on the development sector’s blind spot with religion When it comes to social change, religion is a double-edged sword. It can be both a force for good and/or for bad. The world-wide positive contribution by religious organisations in providing public services such as health and education is undisputed. The role of religion in areas of …

When does Tech → Innovation? Here’s what 178 projects tell us

Duncan Green - March 20, 2018

Next up in Twaweza week, a realists’ guide to tech and development. I’m basically a grumpy old technophobe who can’t even manage Excel, and whose hackles rise whenever geewhizz geeks pop up and claim that the latest digital gizmo (blockchain, clicktivism or whatever) is going to usher us all into the promised land. I dislike the implicit individualism, the blind eye to issues of power …