Topic: Technology

I wrote this before interviewing Branko for yesterday’s podcast, but thought I’d put it up anyway as a companion piece Full disclosure, I am a huge fan of Branko Milanovic, both because of his brilliant analysis of inequality (think Elephant Graph), but also because of his style – a formidable old-school Serbian public intellectual, never […]

Elizabeth Stuart is Executive Director of the Pathways for Prosperity Commission, which released its final report, The Digital Roadmap, today. Digital technology is sometimes portrayed as a painless shortcut to development, a technical fix to reduce poverty. The Pathways Commission disagrees: getting the small p politics right is a crucial part of successful digitisation. Our […]

I’ve been doing a fair amount of blog training recently, whether for students, academics, NGOs or other aid agencies. It’s fun but quite time consuming, and I recently realized (not for the first time), that I’m actually pretty redundant. If I post the slides (below) and some suggestions for structure, pretty much anyone can run […]

Open Access (OA) week is drawing to a close, so I thought I’d take a look at the stats for How Change Happens, published three years ago this week. They were pretty mind blowing, at least for an author. HCH was published by Oxford University Press and has been OA since day 1 – you […]

I’ve been taking advantage of the summer lull to skim some of the backlog of tomes that have accumulated on my study floor. Some were so bad and/or obscure that they really don’t deserve a mention, but two on activism got my attention. First up, Be the Change by Gina Martin. Full disclosure, I bought […]

I arrived at Oxfam towards the end of its big Make Trade Fair campaign on global trade rules. One of its core figures was Romain Benicchio, who just got in touch with this piece about how one aspect of that campaign has become all-too personal. One of the major illustrations of the rigged rules and […]

Final instalment from my amazing LSE students. Wednesday and Thursday’s posts ran some of their blogs, which were part of their assignment to write an influencing strategy on a topic of their choice. But I gave them the option of doing a video blog (vlog) instead, and several of them grabbed it, with some impressive […]

I found reading The Business of Changing the World rather disturbing – a bit like being taken hostage by a cult and submitted to polite but persistent brainwashing for several days (I’m a slow reader). The cult in question is what Anand Giridharadas calls ‘MarketWorld’ – an effusive, evangelical belief in the power of markets, […]

Aliya Ryan is an anthropologist working with Digital Democracy on their Ecuador programme to support the Waorani and Siekopai territory mapping projects.  Last month the Waorani hit the headlines due to a landmark win against the Ecuadorian Government. Sixteen Waorani communities contested the supposed consultation that the government carried out in 2012 before putting millions […]

Guest post from Elizabeth Stuart, executive director of the  Pathways for Prosperity Commission on Technology and Inclusive Development. One of many puzzles in development is that increasing spending on health and education doesn’t necessarily deliver expected results. To turn this on its head: Madagascar, Bangladesh and South Africa all have similar child mortality rates, but […]

Recently I spent half day BS’ing (breeze-shooting, obviously) about future trends and challenges for international organizations like Oxfam. Confession: we’re supposed to hate these, but often they’re really fun. A table on demographic shifts got me particularly excited. Great human tides are sloshing around the globe, populations are moving geographically, and their age make-up is […]