I’ve been thinking about TripAdvisor recently, as a model of fast, crowdsourced feedback which highlights rubbish hotels and restaurants, and creates pressure for them to shape up. There’s plenty of rubbish performance in the aid and development sector, but our feedback loops are mainly limited to conversations in corridors and the occasional email. So what would be your top candidates for a developmental TripAdvisor?

Erinch Sahan, an Oxfam ag and supply chain wonk who is currently leading its Food & Climate Policy and Campaigns, argues that the best way to understand a company’s approach to doing good is by asking who owns it. When it comes to the private sector, the biggest mistake the aid world makes is to see business as a homogeneous

Really horrible. Photo of 4-yr-old Syrian girl surrendering to a camera’s telephoto lens is real, not faked  Tourism: the world’s largest industry. One in every 11 jobs worldwide; 9.5% of global GDP. Yet of every $100 spent by an average developed-world tourist, only $5 remains in the destination’s economy [h/t Erinch Sahan] What the climate movement must learn from religion:

Everyone’s heard of the World Bank, but far fewer people know of its private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation, which describes itself as ‘the largest global development institution focused exclusively on the private sector in developing countries’. It’s huge and growing, and it’s got some nasty skeletons in its cupboard – today it comes in for a good kicking from

A colleague of mine who shall be nameless (you know who you are Max), urges his fellow campaigners to ‘learn from the enemy’ – Machiavelli, Friedman, Big Tobacco, you get the picture. A new book by Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell may help. A Quiet Word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain has lessons for activism stretching well beyond

A mysterious, anonymised, scarlet pimpernel character called J. flits around the aid world, writing a blog (Tales from the Hood – now defunct, but collected into a book, Letters Left Unsent) and fiction. He asked me for a plug for the latest novel, Honor Among Thieves. Here’s the plot blurb: ‘Mary-Anne has left East Africa and traded in her dusty

The campaign for the 7 May UK election is heating up folks: The areas in red have only ever had white male MPs [h/t Federica Cocco] Global Justice Now’s #FreeTheSeeds campaign: Are outsiders imposing disastrous noble-savageism, or defending Africa’s food security? Can religious groups help to prevent violent conflict? Nice examples from Nigeria, DRC, Most desired jobs in Britain: Author 60% Academic

A few years ago, I sat next to a young muslim guy from Birmingham on a plane, and he told me how frustrated he was with the way his community’s annual act of alms-giving, known as Zakat, was managed – no accountability, no real checks on where it goes or what it achieves. I’ve wondered about that ever since, so

The Center for Global Development churns out any number of new ideas and energetically hawks them round northern governments and multilaterals: the benefits of migration, oil for cash, the Commitment to Development Index and many more (check out the Initiatives tab on their homepage). In recent years, Cash on Delivery aid has been one of their top products, and a

MOOCs are taking over. If you aren’t yet excited about Massive Open Online Courses, you should be. When I was first getting interested in development the only way to bridge the gap between reading the news and coughing up squllions for a Masters was to cycle through the rain every Tuesday evening to London’s City Literary Institute to sit at

Oxfam is going through its own (belated but welcome) process of ‘Bric-ification’, with the rise of independent Oxfam affiliates in the main developing countries. Oxfam India is one of the leaders, founded in 2008 and focussing its work on 7 of the most deprived states in India. It is rapidly becoming an advocacy powerhouse within India, running campaigns on everything from

Bit of a (qualified) feelgood to this week’s links. The IT revolution, Somalia style: goats and sheep carry owners’ mobile numbers for identification [h/t Calestous Juma, photo credit @Lattif] Germany announces record boost to its aid budget to €7.4bn ($7.9bn = 0.4% of GNI) Great idea: a new global fund launched to help developing countries fend off Big Tobacco company