Well that was intense. We’ve just come to the end of a one year programme to design and deliver a training course on ‘influencing’ to senior aid leaders (UN, INGOs, Red Cross/Crescent and National NGOs). 6 months to design the materials and methodology; the rest to deliver the training to 6 cohorts of 25 people in 5 locations around the

Imposter Syndrome – doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud. (Almost) everyone has it, even old lags like me. Just because I’ve become relaxed about banging on in front of an audience, doesn’t mean I’ve stopped living in fear of someone pointing at me and saying ‘you don’t really know what you’re talking about, do you?’ Luckily, the only

Oxfam’s Amy Croome reports back on a very different kind of localization discussion What happens when you bring together local activists and organisations to discuss how to reform the humanitarian system? I recently found out, attending a conference, where more than 85% of the speakers and moderators were from national and local organisations (compared to not even 10% at the

Next up in this series of posts from my LSE activism students, Alexia Fageroux, who went with a sound-off vlog option for her assignment. Full project on which her vlog is based here. Next week, back to boring old me – sorry!

Next up is in our series of summer students spots is Rebecca Milon. Her full campaign proposal is here.

Guest Post by Filippo Artuso and Barbara van Paassen, introducing a new episode on the People v Inequality podcast While many of us were living through the pandemic on interminable Zoom calls or watching Netflix, activists and changemakers around the world were finding new and innovative ways to respond to the pandemic. The curiosity to learn how these responses were

Guest post by Naomi Hossain & Patta Scott-Villiers In March FAO’s global food price index jumped by 17% to a level unprecedented in its 30-year history. The food riots predicted by the head of the World Trade Organization have already kicked off in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Deadly fuel riots in Peru, rising discontent in Kenya and the rising price

Guest post by Annabel Dulhunty, building on this 2018 post from Tom Wein The idea of human dignity frequently appears as a lofty overarching goal for development agencies and programs. Dignity is fundamental to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet practical ways of addressing and measuring the dignity of program participants are frequently overlooked. For example, the preamble to

This blog was first published on the EADI/ISS Development Research Blog Series, written by Oxfam’s Nicole Walshe and Anne Mai Baan. In our work to strengthen and support civic space worldwide (i.e. the space for freedoms of association, assembly and free expression) we often see that certain narratives are used to undermine the work of activists. Narratives – the collection

I know this is the week of Blue Monday, when we are all supposed to feel at our most miserable, but I’m not feeling it – this is the time of year when I am proudest of working for Oxfam, because of its annual Davos report. For several years now, this has focussed on inequality, and I honestly think (though

I sat down recently with Ayesha Khan, who works with the Collective for Social Science Research in Karachi, Pakistan. She is author of The Women’s Movement in Pakistan: Activism, Islam and Democracy (2018). Her FP2P post on that book is here. Here’s the podcast and below, a partial transcript. Enjoy. AK: Most of my professional life I’ve heard from detractors,

The latest issue of Gender and Development just dropped, and it’s on ‘Feminist Protests and Politics in a World in Crisis’ (Open Access). With academic journals, I must confess, I rarely read beyond the overview/introduction, but there’s some excellent and (to me at least) new insights in this one, by Sohela Nazneen and Awino Okech. Some of the extracts that