Apologies for extra post today, but the guest posts and new papers are coming thick and fast. John Magrath, Oxfam researcher and renewable energy fan, celebrates a new report by Kofi Annan. In Zimbabwe last week I was talking to a nurse at a rural health centre who described how the cost of two candles can be a matter of health

Guest post from Oxfam inequality researcher Daria Ukhova Last month, the OECD published a new flagship report on inequality In It Together: Why Less Inequality Benefits All, continuing a series and building on the findings of the previous reports Growing Unequal? (2008) and Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising (2011). At Oxfam since the launch of our Even It

Oxfam researcher Katherine Trebeck introduces some new work on doughnut economics, (whose inventor, Kate Raworth has left Oxfam to write a book on it) There is an African proverb that says: ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together’ It could be taken as call for inclusivity, solidarity, and equality of people and

A bunch of students and academics from Sheffield University had what sounds like a fun time at last week’s big global meeting on land. George Barrett, Yoshabel Durand, Tom Goodfellow, Vremudia Irikefe, Mikael Omstedt, Edward Searight, Julie Shi, Deborah Sporton and Nguyen Vo report back. Last week, dispersed among 700 participants at the International Land Coalition’s global forum in Senegal sat

In the first of two posts on how aid agencies can use their grassroots work to exert wider influence, Erinch Sahan discusses his work with livelihoods programmes (jobs, incomes etc). Tomorrow, I’ll discuss the conditions for such ‘joined-up influencing’ to work. “Give someone a fish and you feed them for a day; teach someone to fish and you feed them

Yesterday I went to the London launch of UN Women’s new flagship report, Progress of the World’s Women 2015-16, in the slightly incongruous setting of the Institution of Civil Engineers – walls adorned with portraits of bewigged old patriarchs  from a (happily) bygone era (right). The report is excellent. These big multilateral publications are usually a work of synthesis, bringing

Erinch Sahan, an Oxfam ag and supply chain wonk who is currently leading its Food & Climate Policy and Campaigns, argues that the best way to understand a company’s approach to doing good is by asking who owns it. When it comes to the private sector, the biggest mistake the aid world makes is to see business as a homogeneous

Along with a bunch of policy wonks from NGOs and thinktanks, I had an exchange with World Bank chief economist Kaushik Basu this week. Rules of engagement were that the meeting  was off the record, but I was allowed to blog as long as the Bank saw a draft to make sure I wasn’t about to get him the sack.

One of the many positives about development is that lots of good stuff is happening much earlier in a country’s trajectory – on average, falling infant mortality, access to healthcare and education, rights, democracy etc all take place at lower levels of GDP per capita than in the past. Unfortunately, guru economist Dani Rodrik has also found something not so

My colleague Max Lawson (@maxlawsontin ), Oxfam’s head of global policy and campaigns, lost a friend to illness recently, and wrote this fine, angry polemic in response (it appeared earlier this week in Huffpo): My friend died last week. Mr Kumambala was a great man, who had taught mathematics to Malawi’s children for more than forty years. His huge smile and

Katherine Trebeck (@ktrebeck), Oxfam policy adviser and all round well-being guru, reports on a new effort to apply doughnut economics at a national scale, starting with the UK   Every so often, a simple idea catches people’s imagination. Complex concepts get distilled into a mantra or image that elicits an ‘a ha’ moment. World views can be changed. Perspectives shifted.

This post by tax campaigner Christian Hallum (@ChrHallum) also appeared on the Eurodad blog.  Last Saturday a landmark decision was taken when the African Union, made up of 54 African Heads of State, adopted the report of the High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows (IFF). This report documents the scale and impact of IFF from the continent and gives a