Today is Blog Action Day, and we’re all supposed to blog about inequality. Ricardo Fuentes (Oxfam Head of Research) & his team are even marking the day by kicking off a new inequality-themed blog, Mind the Gap – check it out. I’ve already done my more general call to arms for BAD, so here’s something more in keeping with this blog’s usual

OK, I think we’ll draw a veil over the slightly disappointing migration wonkmassacre wonkfirstroundknockout wonkwar and get on with other stuff. The latest Chronic Poverty Report (2014-15) was released last week, and I urge you to take a look. It’s a goldmine of analysis, case studies and graphics (too many for this post, I’ll have to tweet the extras).  The subtitle,

For those among you who find a blog length piece about as much as you can absorb in a busy working day, I recommend signing up to the ‘one pagers’ produced by the International Policy Center on Inclusive Growth in Brazil (a UNDP/Government of Brazil joint venture). They provide nice summaries of new research. Here’s last month’s one pager on

More thoughts (increasingly incoherent as workshop fatigue sets in) from the Manchester conference. What are the big changes in thinking from ten years of research on chronic poverty in dozens of countries? First, social protection, which has mushroomed from fringe issue to magic bullet with extraordinary speed. If the SP advocates really have won the argument on this, the next

Some random observations from the ‘Ten Years of War Against Poverty’ conference in Manchester, before I head off to Edinburgh for tomorrow’s conference on ‘Making the Most of Scotland’s Aid (it’s that time of year…) Ravi Kanbur (one of my heroes for his paper on why NGOs and the  big institutions disagree all the time) has an intriguing proposal for

I’m spending a couple of days at a big development conference in Manchester. It’s called ‘Ten years of war against poverty – what have we learned?’ and it’s heaving – there are about 500 people here. It’s hosted by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre, and is both a review of 10 years’ work, and a moment of transition as its

One of the perks of writing a blog is that I can scrounge review copies of development-related books. I’m sure they’re all fascinating and I really want to read them but alas, they don’t come with extra hours in the day attached. So I now have a growing pile by my desk that is in danger of becoming a health