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

Tom Wingfield got in touch after reading last week’s posts on the future of UK aid, building off his recent post on LinkedIn Before we shut the door on reversing the DFID/FCO merger (See DFID 2.0…? Part 2 of Andy Sumner’s Crystal Balling on the future of UK aid | From Poverty to Power (oxfam.org.uk), we need to be clear-eyed

In this second blog of two, Andy Sumner of King’s College London asks what a change of government in the UK might mean for UK development cooperation and policy: will a new DFID rise from the ashes? Will ODA spend rise back to 0.7% of GNI? And what might a change of government mean for UK development co-operation’s policy focus?

In this first of two blogs, Andy Sumner of King’s College London looks into his crystal ball and ask what a change of government in the UK might mean for UK development cooperation and policy. This first blog asks what has changed since 1997 (when DFID was established) and what a new government would inherit. The second part of the

This post by Farida Bena (right) first appeared on the Kiliza blog A few months ago, I interviewed Abdul Muheet Chowdhary (below) from the South Centre to discuss the ongoing negotiations on a landmark United Nations tax agreement that is in the making. If approved by enough Member States, this global agreement – also called the UN Framework Convention on

Oxfam’s annual ‘Davos Report’ has become a bit of an institution. On the eve of this year’s megarich schmoozathon, Anthony Kamande introduces the main findings of the 2024 version. Full paper here. Last Christmas eve, my cousin Lucy came to my rural village. She needed some help. Lucy’s son had excelled in the national exams and was selected to join

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

Irwin Loy and Will Worley have an excellent 2024 curtain raiser on The New Humanitarian, which is now by some distance my favourite aid blog. It’s a bit long by FP2P standards, so I’ve cut it down a bit: Money: Learning to do less with less  In 2023, humanitarians took a look in the mirror and admitted what everyone already knew: They don’t have

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

When I joined Oxfam in the mid-noughties, it was a time of Big Documents: The World Development Report, The Human Development Report etc etc. At regular intervals, the latest tome would thud onto my desk and require study, debate, lots of panels and press commentary. The tomes combined in-depth research and narrative – lots of narrative – about the nature