Oxfam’s Senior Humanitarian Policy Adviser, Anna Chernova uses her own experiences as a refugee to reflect on how Lebanon can tackle inequality and protect the rights of millions of Syrians. Back in 2015, I remember standing in a damp, soaked tent in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley, watching kids run around in the snow in slippers. Their parents looked on in desperation

Guest post by Andrew Koleros, Programme Director with Palladium, and David Rinnert, Deputy Head of Office and Governance Adviser with the UK Department for International Development’s (DFID) Central Asia Office. The views expressed in this blog do not necessarily reflect the UK government’s official policies or Palladium’s views. In November 2018 the FP2P blog posted a couple of instalments (here

Update on some interesting research by Franziska Mager and Christopher Hoy. It builds on a December post on the World Bank Development Impact blog, covering more countries  and expanding the discussion to people’s misperceptions about the level of national inequality as well as their misperceptions of their own positions. New research by the Australian National University conducted in collaboration with

Arabic 101 for British officers, early 20th century ht David Kenner The art and science of measurement in aid and development. Nice write up of latest LSE lecture by the brilliant Claire Hutchings of OPM Major western brands pay Indian garment workers 11p an hour. Important new research on the home workers who ‘finish’ garments – adding buttons, tassels, embroidery

‘I don’t like Save the Children’. That opening line from a guest speaker at a gathering of SCF’s global big cheeses earlier this week certainly got the room’s attention. But then the speaker was pretty extraordinary. Mariéme Jamme, whose online bio includes this para: ‘Mariéme grew up in rural Senegal, from an oligarch mother who gave her away at an

Erinch Sahan, an exfamer who now heads the World Fair Trade Organization network, wants to pick your brains about how to transform capitalism I think I’m sitting on a goldmine of examples that could help efforts to transform business and economies. I lead a global community of 330 real examples of alternative business models. These are the social enterprises that

I spent a lot of time before Christmas following and commenting on Oxfam’s new MOOC (Massive Open Online Course – keep up) on ‘Making Change Happen’. A lot of time because there were so many comments (from about 3,000 participants) and they were so interesting. Now the MOOC is coming round for its second outing, starting on 4th March, so

Tomorrow night I am doing an ‘ask me anything’ session on skype with some students from Guelph University in Canada, who have been reading How Change Happens. They have sent an advance list of questions, which are really sharp. I’d appreciate your views on 3 in particular: Are there important differences to note between processes of long-term change and temporary

Branko Milanovic: ‘It cannot be said that Europe is currently politically uninteresting.’  ‘Yo get these guys off a subway & onto broadway cuz this is lit’ Qasim Rashid Feminist solutions to man-made economic inequality Good news on the Ebola vaccine from Congo: “the evidence the WHO has been gathering in North Kivu — where nearly 64,000 doses have been administered

For the past few years I’ve been one of Oxfam’s researchers in the Action for Empowerment and Accountability programme, studying how E&A function in fragile, conflict and violence-affected settings (FCVAS) – a more exact category than ‘Fragile/Conflict States’, which recognizes that it’s not always whole countries that are fragile/violent. This week we had a brainstorm to try and distil the

Thanks to Holly Porter for suggesting this intriguing guest post from Kristof Titeca, of the University of Antwerp. Originally published in The Monkey Cage at The Washington Post on 17th January Otim (a pseudonym) is a former child soldier of the Lord’s Resistance Army, the Ugandan rebel movement led by Joseph Kony. On the battlefield, Otim believed spirits rendered him bulletproof.

Oxfam has just published a reflection on how its approach to ‘influencing’ has evolved since its foundation in 1942. Written by Ruth Mayne, Chris Stalker, Andrew Wells-Dang and Rodrigo Barahona, it’s stuffed full of enlightening case studies and should be of interest to anyone who wants to understand how INGOs developed their current interest in advocacy, lobbying, campaigns etc. Some