Alcinda Honwana is Visiting Professor of International Development at the Open University. She will be giving a talk “‘Enough!’ Will Youth Protests Drive Political Change in Africa?” as part of the London School of Economics Africa public lecture series on Wednesday 18 November 2015 at 6.30 pm. Young people have caught the attention of politicians as their backing of Jeremy

In 1800 there was no country with a life expectancy over 40. Please excuse the self promotion, but if you’re in Washington Weds, please come along to discuss How Change Happens at CGD. Put the draft book up on Friday, and the first review went up same day – not that’s what I call fast feedback. Has the governance agenda

Now for the scary part. Can I ask for a big favour? The first draft of my next book, How Change Happens, is ready, and I’m keen to get comments from as wide a range of people as possible. Deadline 10th December. Anyone out there prepared to chip in? If so, you can download the whole manuscript here  – it’s

Guest post from John Hammock of the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative In your thought-provoking blog ‘Hello SDGs, what’s your theory of change?’ you rightly identify peer pressure as a potentially very effective means of governments coming to internalise the SDGs in their domestic processes and influencing others to follow suit. Let me give an instructive case study based

Lisa Denney, Research Associate at the Overseas Development Institute, goes in search of an elusive development beast. Much has been written recently on the need for more flexible and adaptive development programming. This area has spawned considerable research attention across sectors, multiple workshops and communities of practice – but such ways of working in practice remain a little like the

This is an edited version of a piece I wrote for the LSE International Development Blog Before I started teaching at LSE in January, I had the impression that the academics and researchers around the school were totally social media savvy – prolific tweeters like Charlie Beckett and top blogs like LSE Impact are high up on my follow list.

Top geek cartoonist XKCD supports World Polio Day, while managing to satirise innovation fetishists On the other hand, for all the tech sceptics out there, here’s the price of light over the last 700 years, from Max Roser Where to go for reliable gender stats, including that 2/3 of the world’s illiterate adults are women: the UN’s new The World’s

Had a really thought-provoking conversation with Dustin Homer of Development Gateway last week. Development Gateway was originally set up inside the World Bank, then spun off as an independent tech organisation, and focuses on helping governments and international organizations make better use of data in their decision-making. So far, so technocratic, but Dustin got in touch because he read my

Max Lawson, Oxfam’s Head of Global Campaigns and Public Policy, unpacks the political implications of the recent Credit Suisse report on global wealth. At the beginning of this year the Economist, a right leaning newspaper, criticised Oxfam for predicting that by 2016 the world’s wealthiest 1% would hold more net wealth than the other 99% put together, calling our projection

This piece, written with my Oxfam colleague Takumo Yamada, went up on the International Growth Centre blog earlier this week Will the SDGs be bigger, better and more universal than their predecessor, or a bafflingly complex mishmash of issues that fail to generate traction on decision making? They could go either way. Now that the list is finalised, most of

This was posted by John Chettleborough on Oxfam’s Policy and Practice blog today, and I really liked it, so here you are Ever wondered what connects Buddhism, climate change, improved governance and a flexible approach to decision making? If so….read on. Currently if you work in the international development sector it is difficult to escape from the term “systems thinking”.

Following on from last week’s post by Naila Kabeer, Jessica Woodroffe, Director of the Gender and Development Network, argues for a change in the way we think about gender and inequality The recent launch of Oxfam’s Gender and Development Journal issue on Inequalities got me thinking about the much heralded ‘leave no one behind’ agenda in the new Sustainable Development Goals