The cartoon that Winnie Byanyima keeps on her office wall The reductive seduction of other people’s problems. Great essay on the pitfalls of northern voluntourism: ‘don’t go because you’ve fallen in love with solvability. Go because you’ve fallen in love with complexity.’ ‘The average woman is willing to give up 19 percent of the maximum total amount in order to

Written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this was first published in 1895  Said the Socialist to the suffragist: “My cause is greater than yours! You only work for a special class, We for the gain of the general mass, Which every good ensures!” Said the suffragist to the Socialist: “You underrate my cause! While women remain a subject class, You never

I’ve been using this idea in a few recent talks, and thought I’d test and improve it by bouncing it off FP2P readers. It uses a simple pair of graphs on global income distribution to start thinking through how the ‘aid and development’ sector is changing, or resisting change. The starting point is that we have moved from a two

Guest post from Sebastian Bock. Full disclosure: I’ve been mentoring Sebastian during his fellowship at the LSE’s Inequalities Institute. This was my favourite of his posts on social change. You can find the rest of the series on the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity blog or on Medium.com. Shame. It might make most of us feel horrible, but

and no I won’t be missing you……

Since the UK’s commitment to the international aid budget was set in law at 0.7% of Gross National Income, debates have shifted from ‘how much?’  to ‘how should we spend it?’ A new report calls for a seemingly radical shake up of how UK aid should be spent. Oxfam’s Gideon Rabinowitz explains what’s at stake, and why simplistic solutions are

I ran a ‘blogging for beginners’ session for my LSE students earlier this week. Some of them clearly didn’t need it. Here’s MSc Development Management student Stella Yoh. International Development is our passion – that’s why we’re all here. It’s what keeps us going through these late nights and grey London days. But let’s face it, it’s not always a fun ride. As fulfilling as

My reading pile is out of control, but I finally caught up with a useful May 2018 overview from the always excellent International Center for Not-for-Profit Law. Nothing life-changing, but a clear and concise summary of the origins of the problem and possible responses, based on some 50 contributions to a consultation by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida).

I’m not generally a big fan of randomised control trials (oversold, squeeze out other forms of knowledge – more here), but a recent RCT on violence against women in Uganda by researchers at Columbia University got my attention. Here are some excerpts from the summary on the website of Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). First the summary of the summary:

I’m teaching a course on activism at the LSE and one of my students, Gaia Frazao-Nery, asked me a disarmingly simple question – can you give us some examples of advocacy campaigns that have achieved the opposite of what they wanted? I was stumped, so threw myself on the mercy of twitter. So far, I haven’t quite got the perfect

Eyes to the Right; Nose to the Left. Delightfully straight-faced explainer by the South London Press of understable confusion over weird UK parliamentary procedures ht Esther Webber Turns out she has a genius for political theatre as well as social media. AOC is having a ball now Congress has reopened. The seven types of policy makers and what they mean for

Earlier this week I chaired a fascinating discussion on the findings of a new paper on an adaptive management (AM) experiment by Christian Aid Ireland (CAI). The paper really adds to our knowledge of AM/Doing Development Differently: It looks at the work of an INGO, when most formally identified AM practice and research involves big bilaterals like DFID Linked to