This blog was launched slap bang in the middle of the 2008 global financial crisis. Its early months were dominated by discussions of its impact on poor countries and communities. So yesterday I had a plus ca change moment when I read a cluster of excellent pieces discussing the need for urgent debt relief for poor countries struggling to cope

If you want to step back and think more broadly about Coronavirus, the Universe and Everything, you could do worse than start with Plagues and the Paradox of Progress, by Thomas Bollyky, which combined a ‘germ’s eye view’ of human history with some powerful reflections on the challenges that face us over the coming decades. First the history. The book

For a while now, I’ve been suggesting Oxfam make a conscious effort to ‘seed the ecosystem’ by spinning off more start-up organizations that can be more agile and responsive than our big bureaucracy. So I was delighted to find our team in Nepal are already doing it. Guest post by Prakash Subedi, CEO, Grow Nepal Ask an entrepreneur in Nepal

This post got a lot of help from Severine Deneulin – thanks! I get a bit frustrated with the conversation on aid – too often, we seem to be expected to pick one of two equally unappealing camps: ‘all aid is bad’ v ‘all aid is good’. People tend to land on a single issue – growth, accountability, safeguarding –

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,

Max Lawson, Patricia Espinoza and Franziska Mager on the background to last week’s inequality debates at Davos. Is the gap between the rich and poor really increasing? That’s a question that has gained increasing importance, not least because in a recent front page article the Economist magazine challenged the high profile evidence presented by the economists Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman

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Davos is here again, which is always a fun time to be working for Oxfam. Every January, the world’s political and economic leaders jet in to Switzerland, and we try to persuade them, and their press entourage, to focus on the way that growing inequality is holding back global poverty reduction. This kicked off in 2014 with ‘85 richest people

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Recently, I’ve been reading up a bit about social change in the UK – I’m wondering if I should embark on some kind of ‘How Change Happens on my doorstep’ project. The stuff I’m finding is both familiar and different to what I’m used to. Take Community Wealth Building, for example, which is all the range among UK activists looking

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