I often experience a ‘disappointment cycle’ when reading papers on aid and development. The initial question/framing gets me excited – this is really going to tell me something new/interesting. But then the paper peters out, reverting to standard prescriptions and vague generalizations. That certainly was my feeling with the new paper from Chatham House and New York University’s Center on

Guest post by Jeff Hallock and Naomi Hossain While the world was watching the war in Ukraine, its side-effects via rising food and energy prices were also playing out in the form of mass protests about the cost-of-living crisis in 148 countries. This global wave, unprecedented in world history, tells us that not only is the global economy in bad

Guest post by David Martin and Yogesh Ghore What can you achieve with C$30m and none of the usual constraints faced by official donors and NGOs? That’s the challenge for so called ‘venture philanthropists’ like us. The Comart Foundation is a mid-sized, family-run, Canadian charitable foundation, with an endowment of C$30 million and no permanent staff.  From our inception in

The Action for Empowerment and Accountability research consortium, led by IDS and with quite a lot of involvement from Oxfam (including me) is now winding up with the customary emission of academic papers (think puffballs reaching maturity). One of these is a whole issue of Development Policy Review (now Open Access – yay!) on ‘Citizen Action for Accountability in Challenging

Spent a buzzy couple of days IRL with Oxfam colleagues recently – the first such get together since Covid, and very moving/energising to be in a room together with others working on policy, advocacy, research etc in Oxfam GB’s ‘Impact Division’. One of the conversations was about innovation (isn’t it always?). Rather than generic thoughts on what helps/hinders creativity, I

Guest post by Dominic Vickers, UK Donor Compliance Advisor (me neither) at Oxfam GB ODA – Official Development Assistance. The clue is in the name; or maybe not. There is increasing concern that the UK government is raiding its aid budget to fund activity in the UK. A close examination of the latest statistics on government aid spending (for 2021) reveals the

My last trip pre-Covid was to the DRC, to look at a water project in Goma, and the resulting research paper (co-authored with Patrycja Stys, Tom Kirk and Tom Mosquera) has just been published (yep, just three and a half years later). It charts an attempt by MercyCorps to drive change in a water sector that has massively failed citizens in the

Guest post by Emily Hayter, with one of the more improbable FP2P opening paras….. “I work in the evidence-informed policy sector” is always an interesting opener at personal and professional gatherings. I started out in the 2013 Building Capacity to Use Research Evidence initiative funded by the UK. Since then I’ve worked on a number of initiatives around the world,

Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict, by Mareike Schomerus, (Open Access here) is one of the wisest books I’ve read in a long time. To write it, she became a modern day hermit (‘solitude, storms and music’), retreating to the Shetland Islands to reflect on and synthesize the lessons of a monster 10 year ODI research

A tribute by Craig Castro Robin Palmer, Oxfam GB (OGB)’s former global land advisor, passed away on Sunday 19 February 2023. He was a wonderful friend and colleague from whom I personally learned so much about land and property rights in Africa. As a regional advisor for OGB in southern Africa, I worked closely with Robin in organizing a landmark

Had an interesting chat recently (Chatham House rule, so no names) with some people wondering what a philanthropic funder with a bit of money and little/no bureaucratic constraints could do to encourage the uptake of evidence in policy making. After swiftly batting away any suggestion of a new database (cyber tumbleweed), we got onto some practical steps – please add

Themrise Khan, Kanakulya Dickson and Maika Sondarjee introducing their new book Since the racial uprising following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the world has been faced with the reality of racism in most of what is known as the progressive, Western world. Movements like Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall have brought to the forefront the ingrained