Bit of a delay this week, but here’s last week’s pick of the interwebs In the class riddled UK, even the pop stars are disproportionately privately educated DFID’s Pete Vowles has some useful advice for anyone pursuing change in large organizations Following last year’s World Development Report on behavioural economics, the World Bank sets up a ‘nudge unit’. The Global

My colleague Thalia Kidder is a feminist economist who’s been working for years to try and get the ‘care economy’ onto the development agenda. It’s been frustrating at times, but she should be celebrating right now: Oxfam’s bought in with projects that include developing a ‘rapid care analysis’ assessment tool; Melinda Gates decided to highlight Time Poverty in the Gates’

Update: It was closer than round one, but we have a winner – ripped paper with about 45% of the 350+ votes, the rest split between the other two. Thanks to everyone who voted – will pass this on to OUP. OK, so we had a clear winner on the first vote – the ripped paper one got 66% of

Max Lawson, Oxfam’s Head of Global Campaigns reflects on a recent visit The young garment factory workers share a tiny room in a wooden shack, spotlessly clean, with pictures of Myanmar pop stars beside a photo of their parents back in the village. But there is no escaping the smell of the open drain outside. The three sisters and their

Guest post from ODI’s Paul Harvey Giving people cash in emergencies makes sense and more of it is starting to happen.  A recent high level panel report found that cash should radically disrupt the humanitarian system and that it’s use should grow dramatically from the current guesstimate of 6% of humanitarian spend.  And the Secretary General’s report for the World

Inequality and someone’s been messing with Branko Milanovic’s famous chart of who’s benefited from 20 years of globalization. As Alan Beattie tweeted, ‘If only there were some elephant-based expression meaning a big issue you can’t ignore….’ A study of adults who received child sponsorship as kids finds big long term impact in India, but none in Uganda, Kenya or Bolivia

Dan Hymowitz (@dhymowit), Acting Director of Development and External Relations for the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI), reflects on what they’re learning about the development trend of ‘delivery’. I remember the first time I started to think seriously about delivery: it was just over five years ago sitting in a conference room in Liberia. At the time, I was working with

There’s a balance to be struck in writing any non-fiction book. Narrative v information. How often do you return to the overarching storyline, the message of the book, the thing you want the reader to take away? How much information – facts, names, dates, events – do you include? Too much storyline, and the book feels flimsy. Too much information

Huge thanks for all the votes, comments (and even some alternative designs by email!) on the short list for book covers. If you haven’t voted yet, please do so – will discuss the results with the publishers later this week. Early zeppelins were made from beaten & stretched cow intestine. 250,000 cows were needed per airship. Germany and its allies had

Many years ago, around the time of the invention of the printing press, interweb, I worked in a small publisher and was given a ‘guide to handling authors’. One passage stayed with me – publishers should expect authors to throw a hissy fit when they first see roughs for the cover design. It’s their first chance to vent their anxieties

Reading the ODI’s prodigious output is starting to feel like a full time job. A lot of it is really top quality, even if their choice of titles is sometimes a bit bland. One example is ‘Change in Challenging Contexts’, a name that doesn’t exactly set the pulse racing – a shame, as it’s a fascinating set of papers. The

One of the criticisms of the big picture discussion on governance  that’s been going on in networks such as Doing Development Differently and Thinking and Working Politically is that it’s all very helicopter-ish. ‘What do I do differently on Monday morning?’, comes the frustrated cry of the practitioner. Now some really useful answers are starting to come onstream, and I’ll