I was at DFID again this week (I should be on a retainer) , presenting a paper on the impact of the global crisis on Latin America (it should be on the Oxfam website by the middle of next week). One interesting glass-half-full v glass-half-empty discussion was over income inequality: I said the region was doing well in reducing the gulf between

One of the best books I have ever read on development was ‘Crying out for Change’, a summary of a massive late 1990s study by the World Bank called ‘Voices of the Poor’. So it was a delight to pick up the summary of its new and epic successor ‘The Moving Out of Poverty Study’ (I’ve got the book on

Last week I attended two events that focussed on the crisis and its impact on development: a big DFID conference in preparation for its forthcoming white paper, and an NGO presentation to the UN ‘Commission of Experts’ on reforming the international financial system, which is chaired by Joe Stiglitz. Discussions at both events brought home just limited a role the

Last week I spent a day closeted with statisticians, UN officials and academics reviewing the MDG phenomenon. Agreed off the back of the Millennium Summit in (unsurprisingly) 2000, the MDGs, setting out 2015 global targets on everything from health to education to poverty, have become a familiar part of the aid landscape, a reference point for politicians and donors, but

The IMF has a new paper out summarizing the impact of the global crisis on 78 ‘low income countries’ (LICs) – the world’s poorest, many of them in Sub-Saharan Africa. Its findings include:

When disaster strikes in the shape of floods or droughts, aid agencies traditionally ship in food and blankets, often over great distances. But increasingly, people are trying out a novel alternative – give people envelopes full of cash and let them buy what they need. I’ve just been reading an evaluation of two such exercises in response to floods in

Leaders like Obama and (increasingly) Gordon Brown seem to be gravitating towards the ‘green new deal’ argument that massive international spending in response to the financial crisis must also shift economies onto a ‘low carbon recovery’ path. Looking at the science, there’s little argument – we have to massively reduce the carbon intensity of production if we are to keep

Oxfam GB’s media team is a class act, and has just done some useful research on ‘influencing the influentials’, interviewing senior figures in Whitehall, journalists and other ‘influentials’ (wonder what qualifies them for that?). Here are some of the headlines:

This entry was posted by Oxfam Media Unit on March 5th, 2009 at 12:00 pm – don’t think I’ll risk any editorializing on this one: ‘Oxfam GB has begun to temporarily relocate international staff to Khartoum and some national staff to state capitals in Darfur while it appeals the government’s decision to revoke its registration to work in Sudan. The

Talk of mere billions is for wimps these days. I’ve just read two proposals for ‘big numbers’ on bailouts to help developing countries get through the global economic crisis, one from the World Bank’s chief economist, Justin Lin, and the other from Washington thinktank CGD’s Nancy Birdsall. Nancy’s paper,  entitled ‘How to Unlock the $1 Trillion’, reckons ‘as much as

For a chilling view of what is at stake in the climate change talks that culminate at Copenhagen this December, read a new report from the UK Institution of Mechanical Engineers (thanks to Cat Pettengell for pointing it out). (A similar doomsday tone is conveyed in the latest New Scientist cover story on what the world would look like with a

This week’s Economist has a go at identifying the dominos before they fall. It says ‘The drought of foreign capital is beginning to wreck many economies in central and eastern Europe. Currencies, shares and bonds are tumbling, and some economists fear that one or more of these countries could default on its foreign debts. Emerging-market crises have a nasty habit