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

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

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

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File under ‘sounds boring, but is really important’: sources inside the UK Department for International Development (DFID) recently told the Guardian that they fully expect the department to be merged with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) after Brexit (end of this month), as part of a wider effort to slim down government and in line with the Prime Minister’s

If you don’t receive ‘This Week in Africa’, check it out – it’s an amazing and wide-ranging round up of links put together by Jeff (American) and Phil (Zimbabwean) and hosted by the University of San Francisco. And their annual version is even better. Their 2019 summary is way too long for a blog, so I’ve cut it down by

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Most discussion about ‘social protection’ focusses on programmes run by aid donors or governments, but that misses out on an awful lot. Some of my LSE students are doing a project for Oxfam on ‘informal forms of social protection’ – what families and communities are doing to build their resilience against shocks (accidents, unemployment, crop failure etc) in countries like

Please take the reader survey – FP2P is changing fast and we need your feedback and advice – two minutes, honest! Guest post from Ange Moray, David Ney and Nicola Nixon, of The Asia Foundation A central conundrum in the digital age is that the potential for technological solutions to fast-track social and economic development is simultaneously under-estimated and overstated. We’ve