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Guest post by Julien Landry and Ann Marie Smith What is possible today that was not possible before the pandemic? In early April, we brought together (on Zoom, of course) over a dozen seasoned activists, advocates and governance practitioners working on the ground in ten countries to share how COVID-19 is affecting them, their work, and their own learning as

Last week I sat down with Danny Sriskandarajah, who is leading Oxfam GB through its current upheaval. Here are some extracts, but do please listen to the full 25 minutes if you can. So Danny, you’re a year and a half into the job. People will have been watching with interest as you came in as a surprise choice –

Given recent events in the United States that have sparked mass protests around the banner of #BlackLivesMatter not only there, but across the world, we ought to talk about this right here. The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed us to rethink solidarity, and these protests calling for racial justice force us to ask questions also of the aid and development sectors.

Covid first, then BLM ‘Do you believe that a foreign power or other force is deliberately spreading coronavirus?’ This is so absent from the rationalist bubble of political analysis of the pandemic. And what’s with The Netherlands? 12 ways this global pandemic could transform humanitarianism forever. V good from Heba Aly. “Google searches predict Covid case volumes up to 14

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Arbie Baguios, (a former student, bio below) has been doing some serious thinking about aid. See what you think. Imagine you’re ill and need to be taken to a hospital. Would you rather go to one where the clinical outcomes seem good, but the way they treat patients is horrible? Or one where they treat patients excellently, but the clinical

No explanation needed for this, tweeted by the Martin Luther King Jr Centre More Africa-specific thinking on Covid: Epidemics and Social Observation: Why Africa Needs a Different Approach to Covid-19. Brilliant from ebol-anthropologist Paul Richards.  africanarguments.org/2020/06/01/epi This 5 point plan by Clement Sefa-nyarko for how to design a more suitable Covid response in different African countries makes a lot of sense.

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Guest post by Melanie Pinet and Carmen Leon-Himmelstine of the ODI Covid-19 is an unprecedented moment, halting life as we know it. For the global development community, the effects have been profound. Several NGOs have had to scale back or completely stop their operations overseas, while local actors and civil society are rapidly organising to respond to the crisis through their own

This brilliant post by George Kibala Bauer was first published on the Africa is a Country blog We all know the feeling—we read an article by a Western pundit, or listen to a broad-brushing intervention on everything that is wrong with Africa, and we feel the need to put the Westerner and their underlying worldview in their place. We have

Sorry to start with a downer, but things in my country are looking really bad right now. The UK has suffered the second-highest rate of deaths from thecoronavirus pandemic after Spain, according to excess mortality figures, say the FT number crunchers. 60,000 in total. Not a great leveller: UK Covid deaths v housing overcrowding, by Nathaniel Barker using official stats