Lately, I’ve enjoyed learning about the development and status of women’s rights movements and the feminist agenda in the Balkan countries, which in many ways sit uncomfortably within geopolitical and developmental binaries like Global South/Global North, developed/developing. Here is a compilation of some stand-out contributions from four of the most prominent women’s rights activists in the Balkans.

Emily Janoch of CARE International wants to talk about failure Everyone agrees that we need to learn more from failure, but … you first. I sat on a ‘failure panel’ once where two speakers weren’t even allowed to mention the organization where they worked, much less use current failure examples. Over coffee, everyone will talk about what’s not working, but

ODI’s Tiina Pasanen argues that more data doesn’t necessarily mean we make better decisions. It often means just having more data that is not used Do any of these situations sound familiar to you? as an M&E manager, you worry that there’s a crucial aspect of your project that the current logframe doesn’t cover as a programme manager, most of

Vishwesh Sundar has recently graduated with an Advanced Master’s degree in International Relations and Diplomacy from Leiden University, The Hague. He was also a research assistant at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies where he assisted with a project on South-to-West Asia migration governance. We live in a globalised world, and my family is an epitome of that phenomenon.

I’ve been taking advantage of the summer lull to skim some of the backlog of tomes that have accumulated on my study floor. Some were so bad and/or obscure that they really don’t deserve a mention, but two on activism got my attention. First up, Be the Change by Gina Martin. Full disclosure, I bought this by mistake, mixing up

Felogene Anumo is a  pan-African feminist activist who is passionate about using her creativity, politics and intellect to strengthen feminist movements to build collective power. She co-leads the Building Feminist Economies program at the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID). If you have been on the breastfeeding journey or supported a loved one through it, you may have heard these myths:  “Breastmilk alone

Blimey, here’s a blogpost from former Oxfam GB boss Mark Goldring, written in response to a tweet of mine, repeated below. Pleased to see that someone takes my social media seriously. “’@Oxfam’s published its evaluation of its 2013-19 Strategic Plan. Some +ves: ‘one lesson rises to the top: we must learn how to continuously test & review our theories of

Charles Dhewa is a knowledge management specialist working at the intersection of formal and informal agricultural markets. The organisation he founded, Knowledge Transfer Africa, has set up a fluid knowledge and information platform called eMKambo, which tracks trends and ensures agricultural value chains are driven by knowledge, technology and innovation. Between key informants and literature reviews, which are the most

Anam Parvez Butt is a Gender Justice Research Lead in the research team at Oxfam GB. Gopika Bashi is the Asia Campaigner for the Enough Campaign at Oxfam International. As researchers and campaigners in development organisations we constantly grapple with the question of how to design research that is useful to influencing change. At Oxfam, we’ve been thinking a lot

I arrived at Oxfam towards the end of its big Make Trade Fair campaign on global trade rules. One of its core figures was Romain Benicchio, who just got in touch with this piece about how one aspect of that campaign has become all-too personal. One of the major illustrations of the rigged rules and double standards that shaped (and

How you behave depends on where you sit (or is it vice versa?). Love this guide to parliamentary seating arrangements in different countries from The Economist Anxiety is rising over Ebola in DRC, with 4 cases confirmed in Goma (pop 2 million) and chaos as Rwanda briefly closed the border there. Amy Daffe of MercyCorps argues that the problem is

Final instalment from my amazing LSE students. Wednesday and Thursday’s posts ran some of their blogs, which were part of their assignment to write an influencing strategy on a topic of their choice. But I gave them the option of doing a video blog (vlog) instead, and several of them grabbed it, with some impressive results. Here are three of