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Spent an enjoyable day last week in The Hague (see yesterday’s post). No I wasn’t on trial, I was opening a conference on ‘Pushing the Boundaries in Advocacy for Inclusion’ (my slides here). The good thing about opening an event is that you can then relax and listen and learn. And as this was a day on ultra marginalized groups

OK, I admit it, I’m sometimes a bit rude to academics, even though I have a foot in both camps (I’m 3 days a week at Oxfam, 2 at LSE). I’ve accused them of treating everyone in the aid business as either stupid, or venal, or both; I’ve complained that they slag off aid practitioners without ever bothering to talk

Stumbled across a really sharp new Oxfam briefing on ‘market-based programming’ (MBP). Super concise, with lots of graphics, and a powerful practical rebuttal to any idea that we are kneejerk ‘anti-market’. It starts from the obvious, yet often ignored, observation that markets show a remarkable ability to survive disaster and resurface at speed: ‘Communities and markets have relationships at all

IRC boss David Milliband gave a speech to the ‘West Point Class of 1983’ recently (i.e. US military leaders). The full speech has lots of the protocol stuff required of such set pieces, but also includes his take on ‘six dimensions of change in conflict where we work today’, which I thought were pretty interesting. They are: – The Rise

Vanessa Daza Castillo is a young Colombian lawyer working as an environmental justice researcher at Dejusticia, a human rights think tank, and a fellow at the Climate and Environmental Justice Media program with FRIDA – The Young Feminist Fund in partnership with OpenGlobalRights. This piece was published as part of this partnership, by OpenGlobalRights. Social media and school striking are not the

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Filippo Artuso and Irene Guijt introduce their new Oxfam discussion paper When it comes to global futures, we have information of what could be, yet are largely in the dark about what will be. To shed some light, we compared 22 recent scans of powerful global trends – or megatrends. This helps give us some tools for thought about options,

Trust Filipinos to take the piss out of SWEDOW (Stuff We Don’t Want). 30 Funny Pics Of Filipinos Dressed Up In Ridiculous Donated Clothes At A Volcano Evacuation Centre ht Tobias Denskus Davos saw some important additions to our understanding of inequality. The new UNDP Human Development Report covered Inequalities in human development in the 21st century. While the latest

Guest post by Kevin Watkins, CEO of Save the Children UK The world is in the grip of a pneumonia emergency – and, no, I’m not only talking about the coronavirus outbreak that started in Wuhan, China. While public health authorities struggle to contain the potentially lethal SARS-like viral agent – nCoV2019, as it is known – childhood pneumonia is

Max Lawson, Patricia Espinoza and Franziska Mager on the background to last week’s inequality debates at Davos. Is the gap between the rich and poor really increasing? That’s a question that has gained increasing importance, not least because in a recent front page article the Economist magazine challenged the high profile evidence presented by the economists Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman

If there was a disease that killed three times more people than malaria, nearly all of them in developing countries, and yet a cure was readily available, don’t you think the aid agencies would be falling over themselves to do something? So why is road traffic in some different category? Kudos to the Economist for regularly drawing attention to the