Guest post by Oxfam’s Amber Parkes, Anam Parvez and Dana Stefov There’s no ‘pause’ button for care The Coronavirus is highlighting just how essential care work is to our economy, health and survival. The idea that we are in an economic ‘shutdown’ is a misnomer. Huge amounts of unpaid care work are forcing many (mainly women) to work overtime at home

Guest post by Yogesh Ghore and Farouk Jiwa, of the Coady International Institute For the last 60 years the Coady Institute has been working with community leaders and organisations supporting leadership and knowledge building at the grassroots level. Many of our 9,000 graduates from over 133 countries, and partners across the world, are on the frontlines in the fight against

I’m a huge fan of the work of Saskia Brechenmacher and Thomas Carothers at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who regularly contribute brilliant pieces like this one to FP2P on issues of democracy and civil society. They (along with Richard Youngs) have just published a really useful survey of the impact of Covid-19 on civil society worldwide, drawing on

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Although Covid’s impact in poor countries is starting to look pretty terrifying (as, often, is the political response), the debates that I see are still being framed largely in Northern terms of self-isolation, PPE and all the rest. And often it’s advice from well-meaning northerners about how Delhi, Nairobi or Cape Town should be responding. In search of other views,

How to combat Covid in crowded informal settlements where people share bathrooms and toilets? In 100 informal settlements in Cape Town and other cities, IBP South Africa is working it out on the ground. This guest post is from IBP’s Albert van Zyl More than 5 million South Africans live in informal settlements—sprawling, crowded communities that frequently lack even the

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This guest post by Graham Teskey was originally published on the Governance and Development Soap Box blog Pandemics are depressingly common in human history. We all know about the plague, cholera and the Spanish ’flu. What Dani Rodrik called ‘hyper-globalisation’ has stormed across the world since the end of the cold war and has resulted in massive increases in the

I was on a fascinating Zoom check-in on this late last week, involving researchers of the Action for Empowerment and Accountability research programme (I’m on its advisory board). A4EA is focussing on Pakistan, Mozambique, Myanmar and Nigeria, but the conversation took in a few other places as well. Things that jumped out as new, or at least new angles on

My LSE students are a challenging lot (not as in ‘problem’; as in ‘challenging’) and their questions got me thinking about Covid-19 as a critical juncture. The result is this short-ish (12 page) paper (much improved by the students’ comments on earlier drafts). Please send comments. We will also be discussing it on Zoom next Wednesday (8th April) 2.30-3.30pm UK

I chaired a panel at LSE recently that included DFID lifer Phil Mason, who ran its Anti-Corruption Unit (reviewed here) after it was set up in 2000 by Clare Short. Phil had a big challenge – he had to persuade other Whitehall departments to get behind the idea, when they often had very different priorities. He sent me a short

Oxfam today publishes (with UK think tank, the Foreign Policy Centre) a collection of essays from parliamentarians and policy experts called ‘Finding Britain’s role in a changing world: building a values based foreign policy’. Here are a few highlights from the conclusion, snappily written by Adam Hug, Abigael Baldoumas, Katy Chakrabortty and Danny Sriskandarajah: ‘The extent to which the United