First of two posts to mark the start of Davos. Tomorrow Max Lawson digs into the links between inequality and public services. How do you follow a series of Killer Facts that have really got people’s attention? Every year the world’s political and economic leaders gather in Davos, and in recent years, Oxfam has done its best to persuade them,

Robert Chambers is a role model – in his mid-80s, he has retained all the curiosity, humour, iconoclasm, commitment and originality that has made him a cult figure on large parts of the development circuit, North and South. His latest book, Can We Know Better?, builds on a string of publications going back to 1983 (Rural Development: Putting the Last

Speculation is swirling about the reasons for World Bank President Jim Yong Kim’s abrupt departure this week. But what’s his legacy, and what happens next? Nadia Daar, head of Oxfam’s Washington DC office, gives a steer. On Monday when I drafted Oxfam’s reaction to news of World Bank Jim Kim’s abrupt and unexpected departure from the World Bank, I said

Guest post from Gisela Robles and Andy Sumner It sounds like a simple question: Who are the world’s poor? Farmers, right? Well, yes, but not only.  In a new CGD working paper, Gisela Robles and I take a closer look at the data on global poverty to answer this question in finer detail. We find that when poverty is measured over

Paul Polman is stepping down as CEO of Unilever, and the business pages are full of tributes, led by the FT, which calls him ‘the standout CEO of the past decade’. I interviewed him in 2016, as part of the research for How Change Happens. We met in Paul’s office in Unilever House, its cavernous Thames-side HQ. Inside the art

For the G20 and this week’s big climate change gabfest in Poland, Kate Raworth pulled together this smart piece on where the world’s countries have got to on living inside the doughnut, and where the burgeoning band of doughnut economists have got to in turning Kate’s big idea into a practical tool. It originally appeared on her Exploring Doughnut Economics

Every now and then a conversation, paper or book reminds me that activists in the UK are out there in their  thousands, often working and thinking along parallel lines to their counterparts in Oxfam and around the world. I just finished Radical Help, a wonderful book by Hilary Cottam, for which the tl;dr summary could be ‘Amartya Sen meets the

I’m glad to see Penny Lawrence, an Oxfam big cheese for 12 years before she resigned so publicly last February, has been busy reflecting and talking to other leaders (and me) about how large lumbering INGOs need to change. She has put together a useful paper on the topic (a source of endless fascination to INGOs, maybe not so much to

Stefan Dercon of the Blavatnik School of Government introduces two new reports. Am I alone? Was I the only one who could not believe it when the World Development Report 2016 said that 85 per cent of jobs in Ethiopia could disappear due to automation? Am I also the only one who sighs when a young entrepreneur claims the app

A 3 day conference at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) inevitably makes you dig deep and question your assumptions, and last week’s gathering of the Action for Empowerment and Accountability research programme was no exception. This time, presentations from Myanmar and Mozambique set me off. In Myanmar the researchers had expected to find communities opting between ethnic and state

Guest post by Chris Barnett, Director of Technical Excellence, Itad Back in the mid-2000s, one project stood out as a bold attempt to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) at a local level: The Millennium Villages Project (MVP). Spearheaded by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the project sought to demonstrate how the MDGs could be achieved through an integrated approach to rural

Guest post from Aidan Eyakuze, Twaweza’s Executive Director Experts say it took just four minutes from beginning to end. First, some sensors failed. Then the pilots lost control of the plane, it stalled, went into freefall and smashed onto the surface of the Atlantic Ocean at a force 35 times greater than that of normal gravity. None of the 228