November 25, 2020
Maria Faciolince introduces one of her amazing resource lists. 25 November is the International Day to End Violence against Women, kicking off #16DaysofActivism. Once considered a private issue pertaining to ‘family matters’, now it is largely recognized as part of large-scale social issues and systemic oppressions. But to make sense of this day, we have to extend our gaze beyond
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Power and the Pandemic: Observing COVID-19 in Africa through a Public Authorities Lens
October 9, 2020
This post went up yesterday on the LSE Africa Centre blog, plugging a new paper I co-edited with Tom Kirk Most discussion of Africa’s response to COVID-19 takes place at the national level, focussing on the role of formal state authorities. However, less is known about the role of ‘public authorities’: traditional chiefs, self-help groups, kinship networks, professional associations, faith-based
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Zooming in with LSE’s thinkers on International Development (and me)
July 30, 2020
One of my more enjoyable projects during lockdown has been finding out what my LSE colleagues do all day. We have recorded a series of 15 minute podcasts called ‘Zooming in With ….’ (catchy, eh?). Each interview is roughly divided up between their lives, an area of their research, and what insights it provides onto the current pandemic and response.
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Effective Activism in a Time of Coronavirus: what are we learning six months in?
July 10, 2020
Kirsty McNeill of Save the Children had a great piece on Global Dashboard this week. It mainly focuses on the UK, but I think its relevance is much wider than that. I’ve cut down the original for the tl;dr community, but if you have time, do read the full post here. In a fight between a rewind and a revolution,
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The Covid Inequality Ratchet: how the pandemic has hit the lives of young, women, minority and poor workers the hardest.
July 8, 2020
On the occasion of the “ILO Global Summit on COVID-19 and the World of Work” Oxfam’s Filippo Artuso, Iñigo Macías-Aymar, and Franziska Mager looked into what we know about the unequal impact of COVID-19 on workers, and how to rebuild fairer societies. The coronavirus pandemic and global lockdown measures have shone a light on pre-existing inequalities in labour markets. What
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Local Diaries: Untold Stories of Women in India’s lockdown
July 7, 2020
Priyanka Kotamraju (@peekayty ) introduces the Local Diaries: Untold Stories of Women podcast. She is an editor in the Chitrakoot Collective and an Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity. Sadrunissa is a young woman from Varanasi in northern India whose dreams abruptly faded in the wake of COVID-19. In January, she joined a tailoring course. It was the first time Sadrunissa had
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Optimistic or pessimistic about Covid-19? No need to choose
June 29, 2020
Jordi Vaquer is the Director for Global Foresight and Analysis at the Open Society Foundations The radical uncertainty resulting from the crises triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic makes prediction harder than ever and, yet, there has rarely been a time where everyone – thinkers and parents, artists and bankers, activists and teachers – had to confront urgent questions about the
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How Important is the Weight of History in Shaping Covid Responses?
June 25, 2020
There’s an interesting pattern that emerges from the coverage of how different countries have performed in their Covid-19 response: it is greatly influenced by their experience of previous disease outbreaks: Kerala had Nipah, which made all the difference according to this piece in The Guardian China had SARS and South Korea had MERS West Africa, Uganda and DRC had Ebola But the worst-hit
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What kind of research should inform Covid responses?
June 22, 2020
This post is co-authored with Irene Guijt If we agree that evidence-informed policy and practice are good things, we need to think about what kind of research gets commissioned. Some kinds of research are definitely more useful than others. We’ve been discussing the urgent needs in Covid research with Heather Marquette (after her great April FP2P posts on this) and
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Will Patents stop Covid drugs from saving lives?
June 11, 2020
Guest post by Ken Shadlen of the LSE The Covid-19 pandemic has sparked a global race of public- and private-led research to develop vaccines and treatments. Will patents hinder access to the products it generates? My summary? With regard to treatments (the dynamics around vaccines may differ), access problems will mainly affect middle-income countries. While low-income countries will likely receive
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How can Covid-19 be the catalyst to decolonise development research?
June 4, 2020
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
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Beyond the Western Gaze: How should we talk about Covid and Africa?
June 3, 2020
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
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