Education is an aid good news story, but one that needs renewed commitment if it is not to turn sour. This from ‘Rescuing Education for All’, published by Oxfam yesterday: ‘Remarkable progress was being forged across the developing world, spurred by a new global commitment to the Education For All (EFA) goals. These goals were answered by substantial increases in

Thought I’d check out what this ‘degrowth’ idea is about so went to a public meeting organized by a couple of new economics thinktanks (CEECEC and nef). It was a combination of seriously old school (standing room only; two and a half hours of speeches) and new (the bar was open throughout the event; death by powerpoint). ‘Degrowth’ is the

Conditional Cash Transfers, in which poor families receive regular payments from governments or aid donors on condition they keep their kids in school, or get them vaccinated, are all the rage at the moment. They are seen as effective ways to reduce poverty, cushion poor families against shocks and get kids into school, but it seems their benefits extend even

Networks are (yet) another development buzzword, contrasting with markets and hierarchies. They are proliferating in the international arena, as well as in academic literature – how many ‘Gs’ can you name apart from the G20 and the G8? What’s the difference? According to ‘Networks of Influence? Developing countries in a Networked Global Order‘, edited by Leonardo Martinez-Diaz and Ngaire Woods,

2010 marks two decades years since the first Human Development Report was published by the UN Development Program in 1990. Besides subsequently spawning huge numbers of useful national and thematic reports, the global HDRs have become some of the most influential of annual development analyses, for many years providing an invaluable intellectual counterweight to some of the excesses and errors

What can be done to improve the wages and conditions of the millions of migrant workers who flock to the Gulf States from South Asia? I recently had a fascinating discussion with a UK construction entrepreneur working in the Gulf States on this.   According to the construction guy, there are now nearly $2 trillion worth of major projects announced

Hillary Clinton gave a big speech at the CGD development thinktank on Wednesday. Here are some of the things that jumped out for me: Strategic importance of development policy: ‘Development was once the province of humanitarians, charities, and governments looking to gain allies in global struggles. Today it is a strategic, economic, and moral imperative — as central to advancing

Taxation is one of those issues that usually causes the eyes of development types to glaze over. At best it’s relegated to the ‘important but braindeath’ category. When we do talk about tax, it’s often just as a way to raise money for schools and hospitals (if aid isn’t enough to do the job, that is). This is a serious

Finally got round to reading ‘Beyond Planning’ Owen Barder’s CGD paper on aid reform. Owen’s a former DFID bigwig turned Ethiopia-based consultant and blogger. Here he writes like a true economist, which can be pretty heavy going, but the paper is worth persevering with. He can also write like a human being, for example in this thoughtful and human defence

Most of the coverage (and hype) around mobile phones and development is based on their potential to improve access to markets for small farmers, especially those in remote areas and to provide easy ways to transfer small amounts of money in the absence of functioning bank networks. But mobiles, which are rapidly becoming ubiquitous in most poor countries (like a