World Bank President Robert Zoellick always gives a big set piece speech ahead of the IMF/World Bank spring meeting. Yesterday at the Woodrow Wilson Center he spoke on ‘the End of the Third World’. Highlights (and comments from me in brackets): ‘2009 saw the end of what was known as the “Third World”: We are now in a new, fast-evolving

Here’s the latest youtube treat from Richard Curtis for the Robin Hood Tax campaign (whose Facebook fan club just topped 150,000 people). OK, we oldies recognize Ben Kingsley, but test your yoof credentials by naming the rest of them…….. See here for more considered (if less enjoyable) posts on the subject.   Meanwhile Oxfam America’s animated short “Follow the Money” has been selected as one of

A delightful April fool’s post on youtube. I’ve googled it and can find no explanation of who made it or why. Anyone know? Otherwise, just sit back and enjoy. [h/t Chris Blattman]

Expect a lot of soul searching around the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) this year, in the run up to the UN high level event in September (see previous posts here and here). A recent issue of the IDS bulletin covered ‘The MDGs and Beyond’. The piece that caught my eye was an analysis of national Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) by

The Hanoi Hilton, IMF, Robert Wade and jet lag. One strange day. [any feedback on these wonku summaries, introduced in response to the reader survey?] My week in Vietnam kicks off with a weird jet-lagged day at the Hanoi Hilton c/o the IMF and the Vietnam State Bank, who organized a conference on ‘Post Crisis Growth and Poverty Reduction in

It’s world water day Bad watsan ruins lives but gets ignored. So act! Today is world water day, and reader Steve Cockburn, coordinator of a global coalition called End Water Poverty, of which Oxfam is a member, has kindly done my job for me by sending over some links and analysis. This is all him, not me:  ‘UNICEF/WHO last week

At an IDS seminar last week, part of its excellent Crisis Watch initiative, Steve Wiggins from ODI argued that his research on the food price crisis shows that during an actual shock, state initiatives are much less important to poor people than their own social coping mechanisms as individuals, communities or through local institutions like churches. These mechanisms include borrowing money,

I feel terrible today, all thanks to the Today programme. For non-UK readers, it’s the flagship drivetime radio news show – the one that politicians and chattering classes listen to as they scan the newspapers and munch on their cornflakes. I was on this morning, talking about aid and corruption. What you heard on the radio (should you have been

What impact do financial crises in rich countries have on their aid budgets? You would probably expect them to lead to a big bank bailout, producing a debt burden and a fiscal hangover, triggering bouts of cabinet infighting over public spending with aid coming off worst (after all, aid beneficiaries aren’t voters, at least in the donor country). Now some

The Institute for Development Studies is a Good Thing. Located on the brutal 60s campus of the University of Sussex near Brighton, its gurus like Robert Chambers and Hans Singer have educated and inspired generations of Masters and PhD students, who then scattered to every corner of the aid industry and beyond (diplomats, politicians etc). I was down there last

Thinking Big, Going Global is a new IDS working paper on what is arguably the first fully fledged international NGO from the South. Since 2002, BRAC, a Bangladeshi NGO, has gone global, expanding its programme of ‘microfinance plus’ (education, health, enterprise support, etc) to Afghanistan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Southern Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Pakistan, formally establishing BRAC International in mid

This from the FAO’s ‘State of Food Insecurity in the World 2009’. Click on the graphs. After decades of improvements, the number of undernourished people (in millions) in the world has been rising rapidly since the mid 1990s.       Even as a proportion of total population, hunger started rising in the middle of the last decade