Oxford economics professor Paul Collier is the policy entrepreneur’s policy entrepreneur. The man who coined the phrase ‘bottom billion’ has an unparalleled ability to reach decision makers with cogent, timely and well written arguments. Paul has a long-standing connection with Haiti – he was previously Ban Ki-Moon’s special adviser on the country, (read his January 2009 paper for the UN

The Haiti operation is moving rapidly from rescue to reconstruction . What major challenges can we expect to emerge? What sort of policies have delivered results after previous earthquakes? One of the best sources on this is Responding to Earthquakes 2008: Learning from earthquake relief and recovery operations, by the ALNAP network.  Here are some highlights of that report, plus

Yolette Etienne, the Oxfam GB country director in Haiti, in an extraordinary interview with Jon Snow of Channel 4 News, matter of factly discusses burying her mother in her garden before rejoining the relief effort. For regular updates (audio, video, text), links etc from the relief effort, go to this website set up by some tech savvy Oxfam relief workers and

By chance, the day before the Haiti earthquake, we were having a discussion at Oxfam about why, when it comes to feeding programmes, disaster relief etc urban work tends to be both harder and less attractive to NGOs than doing equivalent things in rural settings. This reflected an increasing conviction that we need to do more on urban issues. Although

Conditional Cash Transfers, in which poor families receive regular payments from governments or aid donors on condition they keep their kids in school, or get them vaccinated, are all the rage at the moment. They are seen as effective ways to reduce poverty, cushion poor families against shocks and get kids into school, but it seems their benefits extend even

Hillary Clinton gave a big speech at the CGD development thinktank on Wednesday. Here are some of the things that jumped out for me: Strategic importance of development policy: ‘Development was once the province of humanitarians, charities, and governments looking to gain allies in global struggles. Today it is a strategic, economic, and moral imperative — as central to advancing

Taxation is one of those issues that usually causes the eyes of development types to glaze over. At best it’s relegated to the ‘important but braindeath’ category. When we do talk about tax, it’s often just as a way to raise money for schools and hospitals (if aid isn’t enough to do the job, that is). This is a serious

Finally got round to reading ‘Beyond Planning’ Owen Barder’s CGD paper on aid reform. Owen’s a former DFID bigwig turned Ethiopia-based consultant and blogger. Here he writes like a true economist, which can be pretty heavy going, but the paper is worth persevering with. He can also write like a human being, for example in this thoughtful and human defence

The momentum behind the Financial Transactions Tax (a tiny levy of 0.005% on all financial trades would raise about $30bn a year for climate change, development and/or filling fiscal holes) continues to grow since my last post (Why has the Tobin Tax gone mainstream?). The French government, which as far back as 2003 was the first to seriously propose the

Last week George Soros was passing through London and invited a bunch of NGO types for breakfast at his very nice house in South Kensington. (In case you’re interested we all got sticky pastries, but George made do with grapefruit and muesli). He was en route to Copenhagen to launch his big new idea – using the IMF to pump

As ministers and heads of state start to fly in, and Copenhagen (hopefully) gets serious,  here’s the companion to my previous post, summarizing key developing country positions in the negotiations. Let me know if there are any mistakes/additions and I’ll pass them on. [sorry for two blogs in one day, but this week is a bit special, and I promise

After decades of decline, aid to agriculture has started to rise in the last few years in response to a renewed understanding of the role of agriculture in triggering growth and reducing poverty (see previous blog). But some recent research from 3 countries in West Africa (Niger, Burkina Faso and Ghana) suggests that quality is as much of an issue