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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Development Nutshell: round-up of FP2P posts, w/b 25th May
May 30, 2020
No excerpt
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What are the weak signals of Covid-driven transformation, and will we hear them?
May 28, 2020
The Covid pandemic is bound to be a game-changing critical juncture for some issues in some places – maybe in all places, who knows. But what kind of transformations and how soon will we know? The problem with detecting these kinds of ‘weak signals’ is that our heads and organizations are already full of noise – especially the noise of
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Can we understand COVID-19 fast enough – and well enough – to make a difference?
May 27, 2020
Guest post by Lavinia Tyrrel, Linda Kelly, Chris Roche and Elisabeth Jackson In Love in the Time of Cholera Gabriel Garcia Marquez plays on the themes of love and passion, comparing them to a plague like cholera. Referring to the two lovers in the story he notes “…if they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us
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Links I Liked (mainly Covid, natch)
May 26, 2020
ICYMI, put this wonderful post by Robert Chambers up yesterday afternoon. Humour, Postcolonial Irony and Covid-19 in Africa, by David Mwambari and Laura S Martin Serious about shifting norms as a pathway to change? Why Sesame Street Was a Revolutionary Force for Children’s Television ht Ranil Dissayanake What if some African governments are doing a better job than our own
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A Call to Action on Open Budgets during the COVID-19 Response
May 20, 2020
Guest post by Sally Torbert of the International Budget Partnership, who has a very different take on how to tackle Covid Corruption from yesterday’s post by Mushtaq Khan and Pallavi Roy Vast sums of public money are being mobilized and diverted to fund COVID-19 emergency measures. Governments need to identify, approve, and implement emergency funding urgently. While speed does not
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Rethinking anti-corruption for COVID-19
May 19, 2020
Guest post by Mushtaq Khan and Pallavi Roy of the SOAS Anti-Corruption Evidence Consortium (SOAS-ACE) Why the COVID-19 response is undermined by corruption ‘Flattening the curve’ and lockdowns have sadly become part of our new vocabulary. That this is not just about limiting patient numbers temporarily but primarily about using the opportunity to scale up COVID-19 testing and treatment capacities
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Covid and Development Nutshell: Audio summary of the week’s FP2P posts
May 16, 2020
No excerpt
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How will Africa have changed one year from now?
May 15, 2020
This was the title for my first experience of Zoom-chairing last week, in a panel hosted by the LSE’s Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa. The star-studded panel comprised Degan Ali, Alex de Waal, Kiran Jobanputra and Vanessa Moungar. They were all great, and you can enjoy the full 80m video here, but to give you a flavour, I’ve skimmed through the
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How adaptive are ‘Adaptive Management’ programmes in a crisis like Covid?
May 14, 2020
I wrote this with guest bloggers Jane Lonsdale and Rosita Armytage – I’m an adviser to their governance project in Myanmar, which provides the subject matter for this post. The Coronavirus has provided the perfect natural experiment, buffeting aid programmes of every stripe and testing their ability to respond. Here’s some views directly from an Adaptive Management programme, Myanmar’s Centre
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Five ways to have better data after COVID-19
May 13, 2020
Guest post by Dr. Claire Melamed, CEO of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. Most of the time data is a boring backdrop to the real stuff that people care about: will my child get into university with those grades? Which party is likely to win at the next election? Who will win the World Cup? Most people are
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