What does it mean for international NGOs to truly shift power? At Oxfam, we think our fund for grassroots women’s rights organisations, which is founded on the principle that our partners should decide what to spend money on, holds some of the answers. Oxfam GB CEO Dr Halima Begum writes here about a project that last week won two 2025 Charity Awards. 

Should rich countries focus aid on fragile states? Drop development and just fund humanitarian work? Make aid a tool of soft power? The current debate on how to spend dwindling aid budgets is a depressing read, says Neil McCulloch. Let’s stop thinking about how to “buy results” and instead look at how best to support domestic initiatives for progressive change.

Protecting bilateral spending from excessive cuts is going to be the first and most important step to ensuring the FCDO can still exert influence in an era of 0.3%, say Guy Lodge and Will Paxton. They discuss the new world of a lower UK aid budget and the pitfalls and opportunities it presents.

Thinking about a career in international development? Duncan Green explores the future of the aid sector and the prospects for those who want to work in it…  This post is adapted from his shiny new blog about activism, influencing and change, hosted by the LSE.

Logan Cochrane and Alexandra Wilson on a fascinating new analysis that identifies four principles that drive NGOs to reject large donations – and if your organisation has turned away money recently, they want to hear from you…

The development sector has been too slow to invest in the healthy news media and “information ecosystems” on which healthy societies depend, say Nick Benequista, Laure-Hélène Piron and Cristina Ordóñez.

Two recent assessments of aid donors used radically different approaches – a top down technical assessment of aid quality, and a bottom up survey of aid recipients. The differences between their findings are interesting. The Center for Global Development has just released a new donor index of Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA), with a nice blog summary by Ian

The new paper comes from Shanta Devarajan, the Bank’s Chief Economist for the Middle East and North Africa Region, (recently drafted in to help get the WDR to the finishing line) and Stuti Khemani, Senior Economist at its Development Research Group. The World Bank seems currently to be awash with fascinating reflections and rethinking on politics and power. This one’s

The Thinking and Working Politically crew are reassembling next week to discuss how better to apply power analysis, political economy etc in the practice of aid, so I thought I’d highlight a couple of good examples in advance. First up is some really exciting work from DFID’s State Accountability and Voice Initiative in Nigeria, which suggests that even big donors

Everyone loves a good scapegoat. When faced with trying something exciting, risky or new, the temptation is to say ‘they’ won’t let us. In the World Trade Organization I’ve heard developing country delegates argue that there is nothing they can do to stop the tide of imports, even when the WTO rules have lots of wiggle room to allow poor

These are the questions posed by Rosalind Eyben in an intriguing new paper in the European Journal of Development Research (no ungated version, sorry). Ros, formerly of DFID and now attached to the Institute of Development Studies, knows the aid industry backwards and is struck by “the dissonance between what [aid workers] do and what they report that they do.” The aid