Guest post by Sebastian Kratzer A few years ago, Alex Douglas from the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue shared his thoughts on this blog on what aid practitioners could learn from the peace sector’s approach  to operating in complex political environments. But the lessons from the peace world for other aid practitioners can be spun even further. Over the last decade,

Propaganda and opinion are easy; establishing the truth is hard (and I speak here as someone once branded Oxfam’s ‘chief opinionator’ – thanks John Magrath). Oxfam has been wrestling with different ways to evaluate impact for decades and in a new paper, a team led by Katrina Barnes ploughed through 67 ‘Effectiveness Reviews’ – rigorous impact evaluations on randomly selected

Guest post from Oxfam’s Anthony Kamande Over the past decade, many leading economists and global institutions such as the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have taken a keen interest in economic inequality. Tons of inequality data have been unearthed, and inequality is now on ordinary people’s lips. Indeed, in 2015 the UN adopted

Kevin Watkins introduces a new paper on a crucial topic Governments will this week gather in Rome for a UN event with one of those titles designed to induce profound boredom. The FAO is marking the second anniversary of the 2021 World Food System Summit with a ‘Stocktaking Moment’. Yes, I know, those two words feel like a good enough

One particular chapter in How to Engage Policy Makers with your Research felt particularly relevant to me. For some years, I have been working with Exfamer Jane Lonsdale, in Tanzania, Myanmar and now in Papua New Guinea (PNG), where she helps run a big Aussie-funded programme on citizen engagement. I support Jane and the teams she works with by commenting

The annual Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) report, jointly published since 2010 by the United Nations Development Programme and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), came out this week. The 2010 bit is important – the MPI has now been going long enough to start to identify trends in the nature of more nuanced, holistic (poverty plus) deprivation

Just got back from Dakar, and a great few days with the latest cohort of leaders from UN, INGOs and Red Cross/Red Crescent, all coming together in our GELI programme on influencing and advocacy, learning from each other (and occasionally from the LSE team). On top of the busy working day schedule, we invited along Elhadj As Sy (right) to

Guest post from Emmanuel Murangira, Tearfund Country Director, Rwanda 22 years ago I left the business world to work for one of the oldest church relief and development organisations. I was full of enthusiasm and excitement at the prospect of working for a church organisation that I thought served the cause of my faith. I soon found out that, although

ALNAP, which describes itself as a ‘a global network dedicated to learning how to improve response to humanitarian crises’, has just published a really good series of ‘essential briefings for humanitarian decision makers’. Proper grown-up sitreps, full of difficult questions with no easy answers (and quite a few unexplained acronyms, which can make them a bit inaccessible). The one that jumped out

Hugo Slim gets ‘slightly ethical’ (his words) as he kicks off what I’m sure will be a stream of interesting outputs from his new ‘What is Climate Humanitarianism?’ project at the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford. Initially published on the Humanitarian Practice Network blog In the run-up to COP 28, humanitarian agencies are

Thanks to Exfamer Bert Maerten for sending over this interesting reflection by Soli Middleby (16 page paper from Partnership Brokers Association). Some excerpts: ‘Leaving aside the complex and important debates around the actual effectiveness of development3 there should be little doubt that the industry operates on a significant, complex, and historic power imbalance. The development industry’s own practitioners and policy

Spent a half day at ODI recently discussing the reform of the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) – the global ones like World Bank, the regional ones like the Asia or African Development Bank, and the new ones like the BRICs Bank. It was interesting for what was said, but also for what was missing. First what was said: On World