Throughout the pandemic, social protection practitioners have been drawing on past experience and established ‘mantras’ to support governments and emergency actors to respond to the crisis. Valentina Barca, the Team Lead for the FCDO-GIZ-DFAT-funded SPACE service shares reflections on whether and how these mantras have been taken up. COVID-19 caught us all by surprise. The social protection sector was no exception. Often

What are the most prevalent unintended effects of international cooperation? Dirk Jan Koch, together with the Center for Global Challenges of Utrecht University, analyzed all project evaluations by the Policy and Operations Evaluation Department (IOB) of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs since the turn of the century. Here’s the top 10. The figures in brackets show the number of

Guest post by a friend working on Myanmar, who for obvious reasons would prefer to remain anonymous In a fast-moving violent crisis like the one in Myanmar, a lot of the most interesting analysis goes unpublished for obvious reasons – the safety of individuals or organizations. I’ve been working with a (suitably anonymous) national and international team on a series

I loved this blistering twitter thread by Justin Podur (@justinpodur) so much, I turned into a blogpost for the untwittered. ‘(In homage to Binyavanga Wainaina) First, the opening. All good articles about Afghanistan start with a few lines from a poem by British imperialist poet Rudyard Kipling. You know the one, “the women come out to cut up what remains,

Guest post from Ximena Echeverria Magariños and Jay Goulden, of CARE International INGOs have for many years felt the need to communicate how many people their programs reach in a year, but the numbers of people our programs “touch” doesn’t tell us anything about the difference they make in people’s lives. Increasingly, INGOs are seeking to report numbers of people

The British NGO network BOND recently published a report on ‘catalysing locally-led development in the UK aid system’, which summarizes a six month project involving dozens of people from different aid organizations. I have to confess that I started reading with low expectations – there are a lot of pious exhortations on localization, which all too often ignore crucial issues

Got a gap on the blog today, so thought I’d repost this excellent piece from CGD, by Mayra Buvinic and Megan O’Donnell The rhetoric around women’s economic empowerment (WEE) in global development is finally being translated into action. Development organizations are using this objective to guide operations and exploring ways to measure impact by integrating WEE indicators into project results frameworks. But

Guest post by Will Paxton, International Director at Kivu  The 1st of September marks seven months since Myanmar’s military coup.  In that time over 700 Myanmar people have been killed in brutal military crackdowns, the economy has been ravaged, and conflict has rumbled on.  Uncertainty defines Myanmar’s future. The military government appears to have consolidated power, but economic, political, Covid,

Guest post from Graham Teskey My friend and colleague Lavinia Tyrell recently posted a note on LinkedIn, highlighting a recent WB Independent Evaluation Group report, which reflected on various methods of monitoring and evaluation currently used in development. In so doing, Lavinia referenced this diagram: As a fan of diagrams, as well as a long-time user of both the London

Guest post by Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, Chief Executive, Oxfam GB In the past few weeks Oxfam’s work on anti-racism has attracted some criticism. Various commentators have characterised it as “woke posturing” or “anti-white.”   I think they have got it wrong. Let me explain why tackling racism is an integral part of Oxfam’s mission.   It is almost 80 years since a small group of volunteers,

Another intense couple of days hearing back from the 30 or so researchers in the Action for Empowerment and Accountability research consortium, as it approaches the end of its programme. I was returning after a couple of years’ absence (I did some work on adaptive management in an earlier phase) and it was great to hear where people had got

Guest post from Derek Thorne Back in 2015, Duncan Green published a piece on FP2P asking whether a TripAdvisor-style feedback system could work in development. If you follow the link, you’ll see it generated a lot of feedback! The idea was – and is – that TripAdvisor, and systems like it, have put significant power in the hands of consumers,