Guest post from Kelly Hawrylyshyn, Head of Global Resource Mobilization at Fairtrade International; and Harriet Lamb (CEO WRAP, former CEO of Fairtrade International & Fairtrade Foundation UK) On February 13th, the Fair Trade movement mourned the passing away of the liberation-theology worker-priest,  Father Frans von der Hoff,  the co-founder of a global movement that now generates over €8 billion in

In the fourth of this series of podcasts with UN and other aid leaders making change happen on the frontline, I talked to UNICEF’s Pia Britto about how she and a group of colleagues managed to include Early Childhood Development in the SDGs.  Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa · GELI Stories – Pia Brito on getting Early Childhood Development into

Journalist, activist and anti-corruption legend John Githongo reflects on the shifting story of anti-corruption in Africa, from Western models to new agendas. This is an edited-down version of a piece published in The Elephant. Corruption, however you define it, is so integral to the way human commercial and political affairs play out that all major global developments in its regard

In the third of this series of podcasts with UN and other aid leaders making change happen on the frontline, I talked to OCHA’s Vincent Omuga about the challenges of working in closed and informal political spaces like Eritrea (although I think his experiences are probably much more widely applicable) Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa · GELI Stories – Vincent

In the second of this series of podcasts with UN and other aid leaders making change happen on the frontline, I talked to Cissy Kabasuuga of WFP about how she managed to unblock a school feeding programme in Eswatini. Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa · GELI Stories-Cissy Kabasuuga on building coalitions within UN & Eswatini for school feeding Duncan: Welcome

One of the best things about the course I give on ‘Influencing for Senior Leaders: Analysis, Strategy, and Practice’ is the anecdotes from the participants, who are working in the most difficult of circumstances and often achieve amazing results. So recently I started recording some of them to come up with a series of ‘GELI Stories’ (GELI is the name

For this podcast, I sat down a few months ago to discuss data and development with Claire Melamed, who runs the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. Apologies for delay, Claire – got caught up in internal traffic. Also apologies for length of this transcript – turns out 30m talking = 2 blog length pieces. Duncan: Like any good Englishman,

The title is a line from Rebecca Solnit’s ‘Hope in the Dark’, which I read over Christmas as an antidote to the grimness of the daily news. It’s a beautifully written collection of her essays and, at 140 pages, mercifully short. In the afterword, Solnit explains: ‘This book was written for the encouragement of activists who share some of my

Now the LSE term is over, I’ve been catching up with the backlog of The Economist and Prospect (my two print subscriptions). One Economist piece caught my eye – ‘How to Change the Policy of the British Government’. The answer is apparently….blogging! ‘To wangle £11bn ($14bn) out of the British government, it helps to write a blog post. “Full expensing”, which

I was lucky enough to attend the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley’s extraordinary speech at LSE last week (Video here or audio file here). Props to outgoing Oxfam CEO Danny Sriskandarajah and whoever else from Oxfam was involved in pulling it together, along with the LSE’s International Inequalities Institute, who hosted. It was jaw-dropping for both the performance, interweaving

Bafflingly, I was recently invited to an online ‘Expert Group Meeting’ to help UN Women flesh out a really important new strategy – making norm change central to its role. This from the Concept Note for the session: ‘In recognition of the emerging emphasis on an articulated approach to social norms in international development and acknowledging that discriminatory social norms

The same subjects have been coming up again and again in random conversations recently, especially the ones where someone comes down to South London for a general chat in a local coffee shop (one of my favourite ways of avoiding work). In a recent discussion with Oxfam Mexico’s Estefanie Hechenberger, a small penny dropped – the value of looking at