Tim Wainwright, CEO of ADD International (& also chair of BOND), finds much to celebrate today Four years ago I wrote a blog, expressing my concern about how I felt that mainstream development was largely overlooking a large and highly excluded group: persons with disabilities. [Quick note on terminology: we use the term ‘persons with disabilities’ to reflect the UNCRPD terminology,

This piece by Devaki Jain, an Indian feminist economist, originally appeared on the scroll.in website The good news for the women’s movement in India came from Munnar, a hill station in Kerala, last month where a group of women workers won a signal battle against their employers, a tea estate by the name of Kanan Devan Hills Plantations. One of the slogans at

Guest post from Tim Gore, Oxfam’s climate change policy czar  No-one likes to be scooped, least of all researchers who have battled through Oxfam’s internal sign-off process. But when the authors who beat you to the publication punch include one of the most famous economists in the world – as we experienced last week – we can at least be

The IMF continues to surprise an old lag like me who cut his policy teeth condemning it as the incarnation of extreme market idolatry and anti-poor structural adjustment programmes in the 80s and 90s. Read its new ‘staff discussion note’, Catalyst for Change: Empowering Women and Tackling Income Inequality to see why. The authors point out that ‘Income inequality and

Alcinda Honwana is Visiting Professor of International Development at the Open University. She will be giving a talk “‘Enough!’ Will Youth Protests Drive Political Change in Africa?” as part of the London School of Economics Africa public lecture series on Wednesday 18 November 2015 at 6.30 pm. Young people have caught the attention of politicians as their backing of Jeremy

Top geek cartoonist XKCD supports World Polio Day, while managing to satirise innovation fetishists On the other hand, for all the tech sceptics out there, here’s the price of light over the last 700 years, from Max Roser Where to go for reliable gender stats, including that 2/3 of the world’s illiterate adults are women: the UN’s new The World’s

Max Lawson, Oxfam’s Head of Global Campaigns and Public Policy, unpacks the political implications of the recent Credit Suisse report on global wealth. At the beginning of this year the Economist, a right leaning newspaper, criticised Oxfam for predicting that by 2016 the world’s wealthiest 1% would hold more net wealth than the other 99% put together, calling our projection

Following on from last week’s post by Naila Kabeer, Jessica Woodroffe, Director of the Gender and Development Network, argues for a change in the way we think about gender and inequality The recent launch of Oxfam’s Gender and Development Journal issue on Inequalities got me thinking about the much heralded ‘leave no one behind’ agenda in the new Sustainable Development Goals

LSE’s Naila Kabeer introduces a new issue of Gender and Development, which she co-edited The development industry has focused mainly on the question of absolute poverty over the past decades of neo-liberal reform.  Given the levels of deprivation that continue to exist in poorer regions of the world, this focus is not entirely misplaced. But it only tells us part

Tremendous news that Angus Deaton has won the Nobel prize in economics, particularly because this will further direct attention towards one of the great challenges of the age – rising inequality, on which Deaton is a great thinker, not least in The Great Escape, which deserves an even wider readership. Last year, I had a public exchange with him on the

Katy Wright, Oxfam’s Head of Global External Affairs, stands back and assesses its campaign on inequality. The most frequent of the Frequently Asked Questions I’ve heard in response to Even it Up, Oxfam’s inequality campaign. is “how equal do you think we should be?” It’s an interesting response to the news that just 80 people now own the same wealth

Andy White, the Coordinator of the Rights and Research Initiative (RRI) introduces a new report. A new, unprecedented legal analysis has revealed that despite using and inhabiting up to 65% of the world’s land, Indigenous Peoples and local communities—a population of about 1.5 billion—possess legal rights to barely 18%. That’s a huge gap. And it’s a gap that explains a