Measuring well-being: what can international development learn from the health sector?

June 26, 2012
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Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding. Review of Charles Kenny's new book

March 21, 2011
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An evening with Bill and Melinda Gates and the decade of vaccines: is this the future of aid?

October 21, 2010
On Monday night I joined the besuited masses of the UK development scene to sit at the feet (OK, in a crammed 400 seat lecture theatre) of Bill and Melinda Gates as they promoted the ONE campaign’s ‘Living Proof’ project on effective aid. It was great to hear an optimistic message on aid and development for once, especially when it
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Brazil’s boom; Africa’s pentecostals; food fears and more reasons to invest in health: highlights from this week’s Economist

July 6, 2010
Another bumper issue of the Economist this week. Here are some snapshots from my four favourite articles: Politics: A three page feature on Brazil, as its election campaign kicks off today. Constitutional term limits means that Lula is stepping down, despite 75% approval ratings (amazing, after eight years in office), but the country’s success means his chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff,
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How important is growth to improvements in health and education? Not at all, says a new UN paper

June 25, 2010
The first batch of background papers to this year’s big Human Development Report has just been published. The one that caught my eye is by George Gray Molina and Mark Purser. “Human Development Trends since 1970: A Social Convergence Story” crunches a big dataset of Human Development Indicator (HDI) numbers and comes up with some pretty heretical conclusions. It finds
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What is the impact of aid on overall health spending?

April 23, 2010
Fungibility makes aid complicated. Where does the money go? The Lancet has put the cat among the aid pigeons with its recent piece on the arcane, but important issue of ‘aid fungibility’. This claims that for every $1 given in health aid, the recipient government shifts between 43 cents and $1.14 of their own spending to other priorities. (If the
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108 countries now malaria-free. What’s happening in the rest of them?

May 13, 2009
The Financial Times recently published an excellent special report on Combating Malaria (can you name any other newspaper that would do that?). It pulls together a really good overview of the disease, including the science, politics, examples of successful eradication in Mozambique and elsewhere, the role of community health workers, the debate over bed nets, impact of climate change, and
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Medical myth-busting: Why public beats private on health care provision

February 12, 2009
Today Oxfam publishes Blind Optimism: Challenging the myths about private health care in poor countries, written by my colleague Anna Marriott. She summed up the arguments in this op-ed on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website, and was in Washington this week driving the message home to the World Bank, whose default position of ‘private good, public bad’ has so far proved remarkably
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Some killer facts (and some life savers) on Health in Malawi

December 18, 2008
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Health is social, not medical

December 16, 2008
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What has Obama said about aid, development and climate change?

December 10, 2008
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