![Featured image for “Why and how the UN and NGOs need to work together at national level”](https://frompoverty.oxfam.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/GELI-impact-framework.png)
October 5, 2022
Two participants from our recent influencing training in Panama (Thomas Dunmore Rodriguez, National Influencing Adviser at Oxfam, and Alice Shackelford, UN Resident Coordinator in Honduras) discuss what they learned and the implications for more effective advocacy A couple of weeks ago the GELI course on Influencing for Senior Leaders brought representatives from the UN and several national and international NGOs
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What did we learn from six months of training senior Aid people in Influencing?
October 4, 2022
Well that was intense. We’ve just come to the end of a one year programme to design and deliver a training course on ‘influencing’ to senior aid leaders (UN, INGOs, Red Cross/Crescent and National NGOs). 6 months to design the materials and methodology; the rest to deliver the training to 6 cohorts of 25 people in 5 locations around the
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Goodbye Government, Hello Corruption
August 31, 2022
Guest post from Peter Evans, who has left the UK Government in order to become more irritating (his words – see last para) In December 2021 I left the UK Government after 20 years as a governance adviser, and then research commissioner, and became Director of the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre in Norway. After 20 years of being a ‘flexpert’,
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![Featured image for “Book Review: Gambling on Development, by Stefan Dercon”](https://frompoverty.oxfam.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Gambling-on-Development.jpg)
Book Review: Gambling on Development, by Stefan Dercon
August 30, 2022
Ah the summer reading backlog. A hammock, sunshine (lots of it) and some good books. Top of my reviews list this year was Gambling on Development: Why Some Countries Win and Others Lose, by Stefan Dercon. He summarized his book on this blog back in May, but I wanted to read (and review) it for myself. Dercon is a big
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![Featured image for “Who are ‘we’? Seeking African solutions to crises and funding gaps”](https://frompoverty.oxfam.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Donna-pic-1.jpg)
Who are ‘we’? Seeking African solutions to crises and funding gaps
August 2, 2022
Guest post by Eyokia Donna Juliet At the recent AU Humanitarian Summit, finding African solutions to African problems was an important theme. What will it take to walk the talk? In Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia now, it’s likely that a person is dying of hunger every 48 seconds. How many years of neglect, denial, and short-sighted decisions by policy makers
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![Featured image for “Playing the long game: politics, elite bargaining, and change over 20 years in Peru”](https://frompoverty.oxfam.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Mendizabal-fig-2-1.jpg)
Playing the long game: politics, elite bargaining, and change over 20 years in Peru
July 26, 2022
Guest post by Enrique Mendizabal Change is not linear. Policy change is not the end of the story. The relationship between evidence and policy is not linear. Politics matters. Research matters very little. Individuals and individual organisations can do very little. At On Think Tanks, we’ve been making these points for over a decade. Events in Peru can now help
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![Featured image for “Hopelessness?”](https://frompoverty.oxfam.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Inequality-seesaw.jpg)
Hopelessness?
July 20, 2022
I’m a huge fan of Branko Milanovic’s writing. In both books and blog he is consistently original, erudite and thought-provoking. A genuine old-school European intellectual. Here’s the latest post on his Global Inequality blog. That today’s world situation is the worst since the end of the Second World War is not an excessive, nor original, statement. As we teeter on
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![Featured image for “Red Tape, Risk and Decolonization: how can the Aid Sector square the circle?”](https://frompoverty.oxfam.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Decolonize-your-mind-credit-flickr.jpg)
Red Tape, Risk and Decolonization: how can the Aid Sector square the circle?
July 19, 2022
When discussing a bunch of Good Things in the aid sector – decolonization, adaptive management, thinking and working politically etc, a common complaint is that the procedures of the aid bureaucracy frustrate a lot of good intentions. On decolonization, the main culprit is seen as ‘compliance’ – a set of procedures to ensure that those receiving the money do not
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Where have we got to on Thinking and Working Politically? Update and a Mildly Heretical Thought.
July 14, 2022
Headed off recently to discuss the state of Thinking and Working Politically within the aid sector. This is a loose network of aid wonks that came together to try and move aid from a pure focus on technical issues, towards taking account of power and politics and why they can facilitate/frustrate attempts to make change happen in any given context.
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![Featured image for “Why we need to build a larger us”](https://frompoverty.oxfam.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/larger-us-943x560-1.png)
Why we need to build a larger us
July 12, 2022
Alex Evans summarizes a new report with five questions for change-makers How big is our idea of ‘us’? Are our family and friends part of ‘us’? Of course. Our immediate communities? Sure. But what about beyond that? When we meet a homeless person, are they part of ‘us’? Or do we consign them to being Other, part of a ‘them’?
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![Featured image for “Starving civilians is an ancient military tactic, but today it’s a war crime in Ukraine, Yemen, Tigray and elsewhere”](https://frompoverty.oxfam.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/de-Waal-fig-2.jpg)
Starving civilians is an ancient military tactic, but today it’s a war crime in Ukraine, Yemen, Tigray and elsewhere
July 5, 2022
Aid organizations, including Oxfam, where I work part time, have been trying to draw attention to the looming hunger crisis across much of Sub-Saharan Africa. But some have been criticised for portraying the causes as mainly about drought, when in fact, war and conflict in countries such as Somalia and Ethiopia have been crucial factors. So I’m reposting this excellent
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Latin America in turmoil, an update
June 29, 2022
Throughout the 1980s and 90s I was a ‘Latin Americanist’, living and travelling in the region, writing about it first as a journalist, then as a writer of region-wide books on the rise of market economics, child rights or, well, everything. Most of what I’ve thought and done since then has been shaped by those years, but living in the
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