Six months since the launch of the Activism, Influence and Change Programme at LSE, Duncan Green shares an update on the course and what will be coming next.

Millions of women across the globe farm and look after land – yet are excluded from owning it, hurting their incomes, depriving them of wealth and undermining their other basic rights. Anandita Ghosh and Shivani Satija on a wide-ranging issue of the Oxfam-edited Gender and Development journal that not only examines structural obstacles to women owning land but also looks at broader themes, including the way deprivation of land rights adds to women’s care workload – and, crucially, how securing women’s land and water rights will be essential for global food security and climate resilience.

Here in Nigeria, and around the world, programmes too often fail to deliver the diet that children aged 5-19 need to thrive, says Tolulope Jayeola, who is a Youth Partner of the NGO Emergency Nutrition Network. She introduces a new paper that sets out how they can get better food and a real voice in programmes, with a core demand of at least one nutritious meal a day.

Should rich countries focus aid on fragile states? Drop development and just fund humanitarian work? Make aid a tool of soft power? The current debate on how to spend dwindling aid budgets is a depressing read, says Neil McCulloch. Let’s stop thinking about how to “buy results” and instead look at how best to support domestic initiatives for progressive change.

What does it take to persuade policy makers to make real progressive change? Kath Ford explains how Oxford University’s Young Lives study found success with a combination of robust longitudinal data, translating research into policy influencing and, crucially, relationships built painstakingly over many years.

Our Blogger Emeritus Duncan Green on a new guide that draws on work in the US to influence policy on tobacco and health to identify five roles for research in policy change.

After decades of delay, the move from burning fossil fuels to renewables is firmly underway – but the fairness of this unfolding transition is not inevitable. In fact, there is a real danger the world will simply swap one exploitative and unjust system for another. Natalie Shortall introduces a new Oxfam paper that calls on the UK to get wholeheartedly behind a “just transition”.

If you want to be rid of aid that advances US interests, don’t celebrate now: that aid isn’t going anywhere, says Terence Wood.

Alex Maitland takes us through the number-crunching behind the headline prediction from this year’s Davos report: that there will be five trillionaires within a decade.

The world looks set to see five trillionaires within a decade — and more billionaires are now being created through inheritance than entrepreneurialism. Anjela Taneja and Harry Bignell introduce Oxfam’s 2025 Davos report, which reveals the scale of unearned wealth — and how those riches are built on a colonial legacy of exploitative global systems.

Shruti Patel shares her new advent calendar of success stories.

Theory tells us that democracies should become more equal. So why are they still so unequal? Gideon Coolin, Emanuele Sapienza, and Andy Sumner on their new UNDP paper that unpicks the politics of inequality.