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. 

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.

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.

I’ve been banging on about the ‘Doing Development Differently’ movement for a few years now. Initially driven by big bilateral donors frustrated with the failure rate of old school project approaches, especially in trying to ‘build states’ and reform governments , DDD advocates ‘politically smart and locally led’ approaches, avoiding cookie cutter ‘best practice’, while staying sufficiently aware and adaptive

‘Has social protection in sub-Saharan Africa lost its way?’ asks a brilliant new paper from a consortium of thinktanks, including IDS and ODI. Their overall finding is that donors’ preference for evidence and pilots, and lack of engagement with national political realities, have undermined their impact. Hard to summarize – it’s a treasure trove – but here are some highlights: