Max Lawson on Oxfam’s latest Davos broadside and his worries that his salary is about to get cut We are living through extraordinary times. Extraordinarily bad for the vast majority of humanity.  Extraordinarily good if you are one of the richest people in the world. Normally they meet in January at Davos, but that face-to-face meeting was postponed, due to

Guest post by Justin Derbyshire, CEO of HelpAge International  The war in Ukraine has destroyed everybody’s lives regardless of who they are. We have watched in horror as children have been passed over heads onto trains, at fathers left to fight, and a steady trail of exhausted, traumatised people of all ages fleeing further West  But it is an uncomfortable

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

Understandably, perhaps, progressive researchers often prefer to try to understand the lives, challenges and struggles of the poor. Who wants to spend their time talking to sleazy fatcats? But if you want to change things, it’s often necessary to understand the people in charge. So I was very happy when public philosopher and political scientist Roman Krznaric sent over the

Guest post by Ravi Kanbur, Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez and Andy Sumner Global Inequality 101: Global inequality is the distribution of income across all people on the planet from the poorest to the richest. It can be measured with the ‘Gini’ which ranges from 1 (a totally unequal planet or one person gets everything) to 0 (a totally equal planet). Global inequality

Guest post from Anna Landre, one of my amazing students, who has bunked off class (with permission) to do some amazing work on Ukraine. And she’s pretty angry about what she’s seen. As a 23-year-old wheelchair user halfway through a Master’s degree at the London School of Economics, I didn’t expect to spend my past week working 16 hours a

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

It’s Davos time again, and here’s Oxfam’s Anthony Kamande introducing its latest blockbuster report. In the informal settlement area of Kawangware in Nairobi, my good friend Joe is quarantining in his small room after contracting COVID-19, for the second time now. He is a nurse in one of the private hospitals in the city. The contact-intensive nature of his job

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

We’ve had a cracking series of lectures and discussions on our Friday afternoon LSE ‘Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking and Practice’ series, so I thought I’d post some links to the youtube videos and podcasts for those who are looking for some escape from the family Christmas (or otherwise just need some good brainfood). Grouping a bit by subject

The World Inequality Report 2022 came out recently, and it’s a total gold mine, as you’d expect from a summary of the work of over 100 researchers over 4 years from every corner of the globe (OK, I know globes don’t have corners, but cut me some slack here – I’m clinging on til the Christmas break). Here are some

Guest post from Harley Wishart What do LGBTQIA+ rights have to do with gender-based violence? Well, a lot actually. Think about it. Patriarchal culture exists on the basis of an assumed gender binary that reinforces a power dynamic. Man/Woman: Man>Woman. Relationships between men and women are socially defined in relation to each other, reinforcing the binary through compulsory heterosexuality. The