Nicolson’s book is a short new book that addresses one of the favorite academic products researchers love to hate.
(...)
As academic conferences have both been an aspect of my research and my blogging, I want to take this opportunity to add a few aspects from my ethnographic and media and communication background.

We are accepting applications for our programs until 15 April! Study online & join our digital Glocal Classroom! https://t.co/6KPMHPpXXopic.twitter.com/IXUJK5Ammt

— ComDev Malmö Univ. (@mahcomdev) March 20, 2017

The paper, which was reviewed by Foreign Policy, urged Security Council members to “consider whether current peacekeeping operations continue to be the best-suited mechanisms for meeting the need of those on the ground and achieving the council’s political objectives, or if changes are needed. That is, are current missions ‘still fit for purpose’?”
The proposed U.N. cuts, which were drafted by the White House Office of Budget and Management, show that the Trump administration is seeking far deeper cuts to the U.N. in the international affairs budget than to the State Department or USAID. Last week, the White House released a preliminary budget projection — known as the skinny budget — that called for cuts of 28 percent to international organizations in the 2018 budget.

Some Security Council diplomats say there is room to make missions work better, and that could mean some cuts in funding – though such efforts may now be associated with the White House, where top officials have shown contempt for the UN as an institution. "There is an opportunity to have a tougher approach with the UN on where they spend their money, using money as an incentive for reform,” insisted one non-American Security Council diplomat. If the US approves deep funding cuts without a parallel re-assessment at the UN, diplomats may be less sympathetic.
US reviews of peacekeeping missions, noted de Coning, “will probably prompt the UN Secretariat to also do its own internal reviews, and other member states, especially those in the Security Council, will also need to form their own opinions, and have a basis for doing so.”
“This is not necessarily a bad thing. It is always good to be under pressure to review your goals, objectives, effectiveness, and efficiencies,” he added. “The proposed cut to 25 percent will be politically symbolically important for the US, but the real reduction in costs would come from pressure to bring down the overall $8 billion budget.”

And the specialists are glad to hear about the campaign's change of plans: "More and more as opposed to flying in goods, we're looking for local areas" to get food, said Paul Spiegel, a professor and the director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at Johns Hopkins. What's more, transport by truck is less costly than by plane and so would be a better long-term model if the Love Army campaign continues.
But the source of the food is just one issue. There's also the matter of protecting food before it is handed out so it isn't looted, says Challiss McDonough, a World Food Programme senior regional spokesperson based in Nairobi, Kenya.

The glorification of poverty is intrinsic to the wider perception that this generation’s trendmakers have never actually endured any kind of palpable struggle. Taylor Swift’s girl squad and the Kardashian family’s Instagram photos are too clean and neat, and all celebrities can do to earn “authenticity” is to co-opt the visual signifiers of struggle — a yellow stained wall, blurry photos, ripped jeans and dirty hair. Essentially, the socioeconomic barriers that preclude people like Kardashian from being viewed as “genuine” or “empathetic” can’t be dismantled. The best she and her peers can do is to attempt to appear like the every person.But the rich acting poor isn’t emulation or flattery. Indeed, the aesthetic Kardashian is glamorizing is a daily reality for many — often born out of cyclical patterns of institutional bias, social stigma, cultural abuse, and a whole system that is rigged to ensure that those poor stay poor, while the rich jealously guard their privilege.

As a result of their ability to enter places that were off-limits to non-Syrian organizations -- including besieged and hard-to-reach areas —these Syrian groups were often taken on by the UN agencies and INGOs as partners that would do the actual delivery of goods and services and implementation of programs. With very few exceptions, these groups could not receive funding directly from international donors or the United Nations because they did not have the organizational and operational history that would make them eligible. In fact, for the first several years of the conflict, many of these groups survived primarily on private donations from their own networks, which allowed them to deliver aid to locations that the bigger groups could not reach.
These operational Syrian groups were--and still are—taking on risks to life and limb in order to provide assistance to their own communities. They are daily witnesses to events inside Syria and to the humanitarian needs of the people they serve. But for several years, few international partners engaged with these groups as a way to learn about what was happening on the ground within Syria on a daily basis. Instead, INGOs often demanded the implementation of projects that donors insisted upon but that were not always useful to the population they purported to help.

Today I visited Otodo-Gbame, a waterfront community the Lagos State Govt partially demolished Friday in violation of a court injunction. \1 pic.twitter.com/AdWZfpTfWX

— Shelby Grossman (@shelbygrossman) March 19, 2017

It’s difficult to pin responsibility for the mine’s failures on any individual because it’s hard to identify the successive true owners of New Liberty Gold. Aureus is part of a long list of shell companies named in the Panama Papers leak, many of them registered in opaque jurisdictions.

While there are similarities between Sikkim and other states with high suicide rates and drug abuse, said Nancy Palmu Chankapa, a clinical psychologist in Gangtok, stressing it wasn’t possible, yet, to pin a single reason for the state’s high suicide rate. Several cases that she has dealt with have been related to family problems, alcohol abuse, mental illness, and extra-marital affairs. My investigations–focussed on the link between drug abuse and suicide–across South and East Sikkim districts show that suicide and drug abuse were indeed linked.

Brandon Stanton, as well as all the donors who donated this money, had placed their absolute trust in this NGO as well as “Pakistan’s Harriet Tubman”, Syeda Ghulam Fatima. It would be a tragedy if it turns out that they have betrayed this trust.
In Pakistan, NGOs receive hefty donations with little or no oversight, with the result that very few projects exist beyond documents and photographs. Neither the government nor the press follows up on these grand projects, and foreign donors are shown lengthy but misleading reports or fabricated photos, in attempts to satisfy them. When some donors insist, they are fobbed off with excuses of “security situation”, and those who swindle these foreign donors are easily let off the hook. It is shameful that, despite the best of intentions, a great campaign and a huge fundraiser, HONY has been unable to put a dent in the slavery situation in Pakistan.

We saw cell towers high in the mountain passes ostensibly to facilitate the overseas remittances that these communities so depend on, but also facilitating digital communication amongst the villages themselves. Although the gender digital divide in Nepal is high (as it is throughout most of South Asia), there is a urban/rural divide at work there: women in Kathmandu are much more likely to own and use a phone regularly than those in the rural districts of Ramechhap, for example.
But the economic situation has potentially paved the way for an educational or development one. These remittances have fostered greater infrastructure investment for mobile, which in turn can be used to create entrepreneurial activities, educational opportunities and more. Some went so far as to make mobile repair the focus of their efforts creating women entrepreneurs along the way. The point is ultimately that if we can spot these underlying developments in other fields (remittances and finance, for example), we should be able to track a parallel path to some sort of development opportunity as well.

Teachers of refugees demonstrate the fine and crucial balance between actively harnessing innovative technology to support refugee education and leveraging what is already in use in refugee communities. In particular, our research finds that relationships are at the core of how teachers of refugees use technology for support both in and out of the classrooms. Teachers for Teachers is an exciting new model that reflects this idea. Peer supported learning and a mobile mentoring component of the program assist teachers in Kakuma to strengthen their relationships among teacher cohorts locally and to expand their relationships globally; these networks offer an exchange of experiences to develop new pedagogies and approaches to curriculum in multicultural and transnational refugee settings.

The letter focuses so unwaveringly on foreign aid that you’d be forgiven for believing that charity is all that’s needed to address poverty. We hear nothing of the systemic forces that drive poverty and inequality in the first place, such as – to name just two relevant examples – tax evasion and avoidance, and intellectual property rights.

Though Attiah says that sometimes it can be toxic to be a women of color in online news (because internet trolls), as a mentor, she still encourages young women from the continent and diaspora to assume the role of “warriors for diversity” in the global media landscape. For her, it comes down to this, “It’s my purpose and who else is going to counter that flat, one-dimensional narrative that I don’t like?”

A Fiverr press release about “In Doers We Trust” states, “The campaign positions Fiverr to seize today’s emerging zeitgeist of entrepreneurial flexibility, rapid experimentation, and doing more with less. It pushes against bureaucratic overthinking, analysis-paralysis, and excessive whiteboarding.” This is the jargon through which the essentially cannibalistic nature of the gig economy is dressed up as an aesthetic. No one wants to eat coffee for lunch or go on a bender of sleep deprivation—or answer a call from a client while having sex, as recommended in the video. It’s a stretch to feel cheerful at all about the Fiverr marketplace, perusing the thousands of listings of people who will record any song, make any happy-birthday video, or design any book cover for five dollars. I’d guess that plenty of the people who advertise services on Fiverr would accept some “whiteboarding” in exchange for employer-sponsored health insurance.

The report titled “Besieged Universities: A Report on the Rights and Freedoms of Students in Egyptian Universities from the Academic Years 2013-2014 to 2015-2016”, documents and analyses cases of violations that pertain to students’ right to assembly, organisation, education and freedom of expression. We were able to monitor legislative and security violations committed by the Egyptian state, as well as administrative violations committed by university administrations in the form of disciplinary sanctions against students.
Additionally, the report analyses the effect such violations had and continues to have on the Egyptian student movement.

Using a theory of change, we identify nine barriers to the use of data and corresponding operating principles for funders and producers to make demand-driven investments in the next generation of development data and statistics.

These requests are now not just part of tenure-track job ads, but applications for visiting assistant professorships, postdoctoral fellowships, and (gasp) sessional positions. When search committees ask for more documents -- for more time-consuming, carefully constructed, well-proofread expressions of one's commitment to the academy -- they are asking for more unpaid, unseen academic labour that yet again falls more heavily on those already bearing the burden of disability, responsibility and precarity.

Finally, science needs to stop relying so much on journal publication as the only recognised credential for researchers and the only path to career progression. Tools exist that report how often a preprint has been viewed, for example, or whether a clinical data set has been cited in guidelines for doctors. A handful of firms are using artificial intelligence to assess the scientific importance of research, irrespective of how it has been disseminated. Such approaches need encouragement. Journals may lose out, but science itself will benefit.

SERIOUSLY?! Fenwick of Elsevier says research infrastructure orgs (e.g. SSRN) are "lifestyle companies." Absolutely not. #acrl2017

— Nick Shockey (@nshockey) March 23, 2017

When German #Anthropology advertises #PhD positions, some major problems of #highered comms become obvious... pic.twitter.com/DYuNihLOGF

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) March 20, 2017

Today, conversations about poverty alleviation and development are much more focused on evidence than they were before-a shift due, in large part, to the radical drop in the price of data and the growth of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) (p.2).

Bottom line, a bad RCT can be worse than doing no study at all: it teaches us little, uses up resources that could be spent on providing more services (even if of uncertain value), likely sours people on the notion of RCTs and research in general, and if believed may even steer us in the wrong direction (p.11).

(I)ntegrating technology is more of a hurdle that the researchers had initially thought, and future efforts will likely require a bigger investment to lay the groundwork for success. Not only must the educational content be high quality, but there are prerequisites, too: well-trained and charismatic trainers, functional equipment, power, and reasonably tech-savvy users, to name a few (p.82).

Fixed on an idea, with a grant disbursed and partially spent, and a project team ready to go to the field, the dissolution of the original sugarcane plan triggered a similar loss frame: We are going to lose our opportunity to learn, balk on this grant, and disappoint our funders; what can we do? (pp.112-13).

Cultivate buy-in from senior management down to front-line managers and employees (p.134).

And while the short and very well written text provides some practical insights into how to learn from failure in development field research, the further along the book I read, the uneasier I grew about some of the underlying discourses of the book.
First and foremost, the book is about randomized controlled trials (RCTs), surely the authors’ expertise, and at no point in the book is the view on field research broadened.
(...)
At the same time, this is the biggest achievement of the book as a conversation starter about better and good enough field research and doing a research job ethically and well.
Failing in the field is a great primer for students and non-academic researchers who are embarking on the exciting journey of data collection and fieldwork. But while getting research design and implementation right, we should remember not leave the ‘the field’ to the political scientists and economists alone ;)!

Is it hypocritical for an aid agency to come to a developing country looking to improve local lives, yet economically discriminate against local staff within their organisation? Or is there a line that separates extremely poor citizens targeted as beneficiaries from the average working citizen? Are their needs, such as equal treatment in the workplace, irrelevant?

Now a study of online workers in the developing world has found there are far more people seeking work than there are jobs available, which drives pay downwards.
(...)
But over two-thirds of respondents said that “gig” earnings were important to their household income. And over half said their work involved complex tasks – a sign of stimulating work. Some said they preferred it to working in a business outsourcing setting, such as a call centre.
Graham told the meeting that “platforms give little back in the way of taxes but make use of a nation’s resources”. He called for more thought to be given to regulation, market-based solutions modelled on fair trade organisations and new ways of approaching labour rights.

The Economist gets schooled on schools in Liberia by Liberian ActionAid director @LakSMani. No, they shouldn't be handed to corporations. pic.twitter.com/OKFs9lnul4

— Ben Phillips (@benphillips76) March 24, 2017

Let’s assume you’re smart, talented, hard-working. You’ve traveled a bit and you think you know how the world works. I have some terrible news for you. The problem isn’t even that you’re wrong in what you know. The problem is that the world is infinitely more complex and nuanced than you imagine. Your knowledge is correct, but it barely scratches the surface. That will always be the case. Never forget it. Stay humble and stay hungry.

After half a century of rampant oil extraction, the Niger Delta is one of the most polluted places in the world. The oil companies’ pipelines are outdated and rebels keep blowing up the pipes. A battle has erupted over oil – and it is taking away thousands’ of people’s water.

"Misdiagnosis is a reasonable hypothesis. But it's not clear that this explanation accounts for the whole story," says Ko, an epidemiologist, who is studying mothers and babies born with Zika in the northeast part of Brazil.
Ko think's there's another possible explanation: When a pregnant woman contracts Zika, that might not be enough to cause microcephaly in all cases. In other words, Zika might not be working alone.
Since the surge in Brazil's microcephaly cases in 2015, many scientists began to wonder whether a second virus could be involved. Maybe another infection combines with Zika to make the disease worse and increase the risk of birth defects.

In all of those conversations with friends, colleagues, policy makers, and students all kinds of difficult and pressing development questions have arisen that research could address. Never, ever, ever has “chickens versus cash” arisen as an issue at all, much less as the remotely possible “best investment” in research.

It shouldn’t be afraid to talk about the triumphs of African nations as much as it does their challenges, even if those successes aren’t always the result of western charity. Comic Relief retains a narrow perspective that fails to convey the bigger picture of progress in the continent, which is that life expectancies are up by over 10% in 37 African states
(...)
Those that want to hide in the sanctuary of the charity’s “non-political” status should ask what solutions aren’t political when famines never take place in a functioning democracy.
Comic Relief should have higher expectations of itself and its audience – we can still be charitable even when the message is laden with politics.

Leadership equality isn’t about simply having the same number of women and men in positions at the top or in the organisational structure, it is about ensuring that there is equal opportunity for both women and men to get there – and that when they do, they are equally supported, valued and remunerated.

One of the key questions from the WHS is how does the humanitarian community make the Grand Bargain a reality? The Grand Bargain’s purpose is to leverage off the diverse expertise and experience of the global humanitarian community so we can anticipate and prepare for a crisis. The Grand Bargain’s core is the need to ‘work together efficiently, transparently and harmoniously with new and existing partners...’ so we can deliver assistance and protection to the world’s most vulnerable. Is this possible to achieve if the worlds super powers are continuing to ignore the necessity of foreign aid and working collaboratively to achieve global peace and security?

A nuanced discussion of aid matters because a hurricane is threatening the consensus on international development. The crisis of faith in globalisation threatens to disrupt traditional routes to growth and poverty reduction, especially via labour intensive manufacturing, supported by free trade. Automation and the deployment of robots will disrupt and restructure the global jobs market. And the imperative of climate action, in all countries, will reconfigure markets and prices around the world. Aid had better be ready to deal with these: to take on future challenges, not relive those of the past.

However, I cannot help but be a little disappointed in how poorly this meeting was geared towards people attending remotely. While, from what I have seen, the conference was blessedly free of Powerpoint presentations it would have been nice to have slightly more supporting material for people who could not be there in person.

I read somewhere that burnout occurs when passionate, committed people become deeply disillusioned with a job or career that has previously provided them with identity and meaning. This work has defined me for nearly a decade.
I have spent my entire working life chasing after opportunities, jumping into new job after new job and spending a lot of time in difficult places with significant responsibility. Stuck on a base, often working late, an early evening curfew, and sleeping just a few metres away from your office, you have no choice but for this to become your life. As a result, your personal life back home suffers and, as it can feel, your sanity.
There’s no ‘cure’ exactly, for burnout, but the good thing is it can take just a short time to recover if you put the right things in place.

But to stick to social good, the new personal fundraisers can only span six categories: education (like tuition and books), medical (like procedures and treatments), pet medical, crisis relief (like natural disasters), personal emergency (like house fires or theft), and funeral and loss. As the product rolls out, however, Facebook hopes to include more categories and evolve them over time.

This kind of rhetoric reveals the seedy underbelly of “benevolent” capitalism. When capitalists play the do-good card to squeeze more performance and loyalty out of their employees, and then conveniently cite business necessities when it benefits them, then doing good becomes little more than their latest exploitative tool.
But Agrawal’s rhetoric also reveals the inherent conflict between the needs of companies and the needs of workers. And that is the structural reality of capitalism, no matter how personally altruistic individual capitalists might be.

This pairing of interest with ignorance has created a perfect storm for a misinformation epidemic. The outsize demand for stories about AI has created a tremendous opportunity for impostors to capture some piece of this market. When founding Approximately Correct, I lamented that too few academics possessed either the interest or the talent for both expository writing and for addressing social issues. And on the other hand, too few journalists possess the technical strength to relate developments in machine learning to the public faithfully. As a result, there are not enough voices engaging the public in the non-sensational way that seems necessary now. Unfortunately, the paucity of clear and informed voices has not resulted in a silent media. Instead, the void has been filled by charlatans, bombarding the public with incessant misinformation, much of it spread by opportunists, eager to seize upon the public’s interest.

With regard to the use of technology and social media for the resolution of today's armed conflicts Tom cautioned against hyper-optimism. The Iran deal was not tweeted live, traditional diplomacy carries on far away from the screen. Where social media can be very important is in mobilising public constituencies behind peace which then forces elites to make compromise. On balance we can remain positive as each time there has been a technological leapforward in the quality of democracy this has promoted coexistence and reduced conflict.

While I can’t provide recommendations about what kind of system should replace student evaluations, what I can say is that based on the feedback that I’ve received and conversations I’ve had with other female instructors, gender bias in the classroom, and academia, is a serious problem that needs to be addressed openly, with honesty and compassion. Not only do these biases end careers, but they also deprive students of superb instructors.

A mere € 232.40 per open access article might seem like a fairly good price for an open access article, but there is more. The ‘pilot’ comes with major restrictions on who can publish where.
The first requirement is that the corresponding author, typically the first or last author on a paper, should be affiliated with a Dutch institute. A fair requirement perhaps, for this is a Dutch deal, but not very open minded for a multinational such as Elsevier. Also this restriction is anything but accommodating for researchers working in international partnerships.The second devil is in the seemingly long list of details: the journal titles eligible for open access.

concerning university policies there are at least two communities and they don’t come together, they don’t even talk to each other.
We tried with the report to bring together the global community and the competitiveness community. These are two separate sets of academics and politicians and we have tried from the beginning to have this mix in every chapter. But I must confess that they had different opinions and did not reach a common view. That is interesting in itself. People – researchers of higher education – are studying universities and university policies from each perspective and coming together as a community but not talking to the other community.
It shows how difficult it will be to attain the dual engagement we are talking about. There is a dominance in the day-to-day work of universities of local demands. They are on the table of rectors every day, the demands of society. So that is prevailing and the discourse about the global needs, if there, is present in a softer way.
It should not be like this. And that is why our final conclusion is making a call to universities to include the global perspective in their mission, not just bring it into their day-to-day work, but into the definition of their work.

"A career-defining experience"- @SDeffor talks about her @mahcomdev study experience https://t.co/mnLhu0J1V9

— ComDev Malmö Univ. (@mahcomdev) April 5, 2017

Review of @deankarlan's Failing in the field by @aidnographyhttps://t.co/EzeubxUgB1

— Tom Murphy (@viewfromthecave) April 3, 2017

Evidence is power. All evidence shows it pays 2 invest in the health, rights +wellbeing of girls + women. No #UHC without. Enjoy #WCPH2017pic.twitter.com/GloH9MrUnm

— Katja Iversen (@Katja_Iversen) April 3, 2017

"Diabetes is now one of the biggest problems in the health system in Mexico," he says. It's the first cause of death. It's the first cause of disability. It's the first cause of early retirement. It's the main cost for the health system."
Diabetes costs the Mexican health care system billions of dollars each year.
The disease can lead to serious eye problems including blindness, nerve damage that requires amputations and kidney failure, among other issues.

There is a huge opportunity cost to failure. When you do something stupid, you either a) wreck something that is working or could have worked, or b) or blow the people’s one chance to get anything ever. Once a well is drilled, a clinic built, or a program delivered, an NGO or government official checks a box, and future resources go somewhere else. Failure is worse than nothing.

Producing 360 films is getting cheaper, but I did overhear someone say they produced a film for around $35,000 which is cheap. Is it cheap? What is the return on investment? Maybe it’s more to do with training opportunity cost as I genuinely don’t believe that NGOs will recoup the costs of producing a 360 film with donations. One of the panellists claimed that VR increases the conversion rate for NGOs by 100%, another panellist estimated 80%. I didn’t challenge this or ask what they meant by conversion rate – I should have done. Are they talking about donations? Are we due to see an army of street fundraisers armed with VR headsets in the future? Scary thought.

First, it turns out financial growth is not a proxy for growth in impact — it’s just financial growth. The “more awesome” bit didn’t work out; at best we just got bigger.
Second, influence works both ways. In trying to influence others, you can be influenced yourselves. You can unwittingly become part of the status quo, even become its very instrument.
And, third, mediocrity at scale is worse than low-level or isolated mediocrity. Large organizations, well-intentioned or not, can become over-confident. And when compounded by immense financial pressures (bills to pay, and growth needs growth), they can move further and further away from the customer: refugees and people in need.

“The biggest takeaway for me has been that the humanitarian community is way behind the status of technology in the field,” said Anahi Ayala Iacucci, senior director of humanitarian programs at Internews. “The reality is that the humanitarian technology landscape is ... advancing really fast and we are late.”
She attended the conference to get a sense of the humanitarian ICT sector today, after three years working away from this community in Liberia and South Sudan, she said. Walking away from the conference, she advised humanitarian professionals to approach the private sector with clear asks; but also to realize that it is not an NGO, and is not there to serve the humanitarian community.

DFID and ECHO should now find a way urgently to open this tender up to other service providers—including private sector organisations such as Mastercard and PayPal—to take on the role over which the UN agencies are squabbling. (This may need some tweaking of procurement rules.) That kind of competition would push the UN agencies to improve their offer, or be driven out of this market. And in the long run, that would be better for everyone.

The threat to forests is largely influenced by the move of harvesting for export-oriented commodities from South America and Southeast Asia to Africa. An abundance of land, lax land regulations, and cheap labor has contributed to large-scale landholders acquiring 22.7 million hectares of land across sub-Saharan Africa in the last decade. From 1980-2000, 95% of the cropland expansion in Africa replaced forest.

The FARDC does not have much more trust in the blue helmets. Reflecting conspiracy theories that have widespread currency in Congolese society, many officers believe the U.N. mission perpetuates the country’s lack of security to prolong MONUSCO’s presence. This allows U.N. personnel to continue to benefit from their generous salaries and risk allowances. These beliefs have given rise to the popular expression “no Nkunda, no job,” referring to one of DRC’s most notorious ex-rebel leaders.
These negative mutual perceptions are both a cause and a consequence of weak interoperability between the two forces. Many officers interviewed for my research were skeptical about the “jointness” of joint operations, stating that MONUSCO has limited influence on drawing up operational plans. Such weak interoperability hampers MONUSCO’s capability to protect civilians and circumscribes the possibility for knowledge and skills transfer.

At the center of this divergence of views were also different visions of the UN and its potential and utility in managing the process of decolonization. The ending of the secession by UN forces in 1962 reflected that African and Asian countries could implement anti-colonial policies through the UN, even when this was contrary to the interests of European colonial powers. By destroying Western consensus, highlighting the agency of anti-colonial actors and demolishing the last vestiges of Belgian colonial rule in the Congo, the UN action thereby represented the first important defeat of imperialist internationalism in Central Africa.

Enter our new Data Portal (view on desktop), which brings together data, reports and visualisations from surveys conducted in 13 developing countries that there aren't a lot of statistics about. Over five years, we asked more than 75,000 (rarely polled) people about what they think, feel and want. The portal covers a range of issues from what they’re most worried about to how interested they are in politics.
We want these insights to help development leaders, practitioners and researchers better understand ordinary people in the developing world so they can produce more effective strategies, projects and communications.

Perhaps the most important learning I have taken from this experience is the rarity of these conversations. Most participants say that this is the first time they have ever had this discussion in a work-related context. The absence of discussions about gender security among aid workers is a security problem in itself. Unless men and women can become comfortable talking openly about the varying security risks they face, there is less that can be done to mitigate the likelihood of the events or the impact that they will have.
In closing, I would like to challenge you to do two things.
First, ask yourself, what are the security issues that concern you the most in your work context? And, what are you personally doing to mitigate the chance that you might be involved in a critical incident?

At the core of the research were 14 case studies from 10 countries that looked at the impact of drones in situations ranging from search and rescue, to damage assessments and camp management to transporting medical samples.

Scientific, ethical, and economic reasons make it essential to conduct a systematic review of existing evidence before considering a new study. Failure to do this is simply poor practice. This recent survey shows that there is still work to be done to ensure that this principle is clearly and demonstrably supported. Given their large budgets and major influence on what does and does not get financial support, funding agencies have a particular responsibility to lead this initiative.

I worry that the endless workshops and brainstorming sessions and NGO checklists have left us with very few resources to imagine ourselves.

— keguro' (@Keguro_) April 2, 2017

So, that "millennial men, stay-at-home wives" story was based on a sample size of 66 dudes? https://t.co/HDwCyEjm4r#confirmationbias

— David Beard (@dabeard) April 1, 2017

The secret is to deliver a stream of digital content so valuable that users simply can’t do without it. That meant taking a close look at exactly who Echelon is targeting and what really makes them tick, from the fund manager or entrepreneur to members of the Sri Lankan diaspora keen to reconnect with their home country.
“While we expected to be updating skills, discovering processes and sharpening awareness, we didn't expect to be confronted with challenges about understanding our audiences and breakthroughs around our own products,” Echelon Editor-in-Chief Shamindra Kulamannage wrote.

But from another perspective, the constant need to put on a good face and charm others can look dystopian. The first episode of Black Mirror’s latest season, “Nosedive,” shows a not-too-distant future where every person has an individual score, made up of ratings given by every person they encounter throughout the day. This rating doesn’t just affect their ability to get a cab ride, but what property they can rent or jobs they can have. It’s a world of constant, forced optimism and no genuine emotions.

“I feel like what we keep in our minds is more important,” he wrote to me over WhatsApp recently. “The accuracy of it is…mah.” This is his disdain for this digital accuracy, and it captures something. There’s an obvious, almost legalistic veracity of moment-to-moment logging, but that loses a truth that the impressionism of memory catches better. I didn’t fall in love with him word by word or sentence by sentence. I fell in love with him slowly and steadily through time, in the spaces between the words, held up by the words. Losing the words sometimes feels frustrating, but that forgetting also removes the scaffolding from a finished past—a past that was never really containable in a logfile.

.@JosephEStiglitz in new freely available @UNUWIDER book "Market failures are pervasive in all economies"https://t.co/oqXWAy92hk#globaldevpic.twitter.com/yvp9hrblZT

— James Stewart (@deveconwatcher) April 6, 2017

But great ideas, and brilliant framing, still make change – and this book is a classic combination of both. If only 10% of the ideas get implemented, the world will be a much better place. And I’m always happy to help if Kate wants to write a follow up – Doughnut Politics anyone?

The first peer-reviewed open access textbook for cultural anthropology courses. Produced by the Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges

This study aims at understanding the role of ICT in realising women’s rights, gender equality and women’s economic empowerment in order to identify the challenges and opportunities for women and girls to partake in ICT education and employment. The following presents a two-fold approach, consisting of a desk study and biographical interviews. The 22 portrayed women work in different roles in ICT and come from developing as well as emerging countries from all continents

In reviewing Nepal’s peace process, this 26th edition in our Accord series takes a special focus on the function of power on inclusion, and the role of the peace process as a means to facilitate transition from negative to positive peace, or from horizontal (elite) to vertical (societal) inclusion.

.@icahdq leading the way, making #ica17 digitally accessible; reminder 4 other assocs that Internet belongs in #highered conference rooms! pic.twitter.com/n0kntTrVjR

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) April 6, 2017

Blogger Tania Lombrozo is an academic — and a mom. Here, she gives a window into what that's like day-to-day.

Op-eds and blogs are a great way of offering an informed, but provocative perspective. If there’s a topic in your area of expertise in the news, you should write about it and use your knowledge to offer a novel perspective, particularly if you expect most columnists to stick with rote points. You can also use op-eds and blogs to put new ideas out there. If you’ve got a hunch about something based on your expertise, then you can use these venues to test the waters. In both cases, however, it’s imperative that you tell the reader that you’re being exploratory or that you’re making an educated analysis, not representing the findings of a research project.

As researchers and academic knowledge producers, we should not forget the parameters of knowledge production. We need to think about and reflect on the methodological underpinnings of new digital methods. To begin, we should reflect on who and what the “crowd” is and what this means for our particular study. To do so, we can draw on a pragmatist methodology that requires us to be candid about what we do and why, in relation to our end goal. We should remember that crowdsourcing stems from business and the structure of many commonly used platforms will shape our data.
With crowdsourcing come great opportunities, but also great responsibility.

This is as true on campus as it is on the factory floor, in offices, in retail establishments. Professors routinely acquiesce to employer demands that they be repeatedly assessed, with techniques that imply that student performance and even success in life can be correlated directly to what a teacher does in the classroom. Really, it is no different than when college administrators urge faculty to tighten their belts because better times are coming. Like sheep, they comply, year after year, but those good times never come. Faculty just continue to lose weight. The professor who says, wait until I get tenure and then I will activate my radical heart and soul, is lying.

U.N. officials went to Haiti to investigate, but the Pakistanis abducted the boy to keep him from detailing the abuse that had gone on for more than a year, according to Peter Gallo, a former U.N. investigator familiar with the case.
Finally, the men were tried in a Pakistani military tribunal, and eventually sent back to Pakistan. In theory, the tribunal could have allowed for better access to witnesses, but it's unclear whether any were called. The Pakistani authorities also refused to allow the U.N. to observe the proceedings. In the end, one man was sent to prison for a year, according to Ariane Quentier, a spokeswoman for the Haiti mission.
"It's an indictment of how the whole U.N. system works," Gallo told the AP.
Pakistan's military has refused several requests for comment on the case.

Equally culpable are the development investments and political processes that have failed to resolve the protracted conflicts that push countries and communities to the brink.
So, rather than using fear and pity to raise awareness and funds, why not use social and mainstream media to tap into public outrage and activism and address what put these countries in crisis in the first place?
This means putting pressure on politicians to invest political capital and energy into ending conflicts. It also means pushing aid agencies and their donors to act early and with a substantial injection of funds to prevent loss of life and human suffering where we know it is likely to occur.

But the voice that we perhaps most need to hear in this debate is the voice of women who work as surrogates. As governments scramble for answers, both in developed and developing countries, it is this voice that is missing from policy debates. Parents seeking surrogates to carry their children have mobilised and organised in many countries – including in Australia, where they advocated successfully for a parliamentary inquiry. Western feminists are debating and disagreeing on this issue. But it is not our bodies and livelihoods that are on the line.
Civil society and development actors may need to consider how best they can support the raising of surrogate voices, so they are not marginalised in debates that centre on their own protection and exploitation.

First, Southern African economic growth has not and is not expected to trickle down to the most vulnerable members of society. Southern Africa has the highest level of inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) of any region in the world and is expected to see a slight increase in inequality over time.
Second, Southern Africa has not and is not expected to register economic growth that is high enough to both provide for its rapidly growing population and pull up those already in poverty. The region as a whole is expected to average 3.5% annual growth (see Figure 3 for regional variation) to 2040, which is lower than every other region on the continent save for Central Africa. Meanwhile, population growth is expected to average 2% over the same time period.

The new age of #humanitarianism is over: Insights from Skoll World Forum https://t.co/zflCdlLnfC#SkollWFpic.twitter.com/uE06ablaes

— Humanosphere (@TheHumanosphere) April 13, 2017

So if I haven’t made it clear: The terminology in this community is incredibly fuzzy and fraught. It’s not just at the Skoll forum where well-meaning people use terms that sound wonderful and then seem to vaporize into thin air (the meaningfulness of the terms, that is; not the people) when you ask for precise definitions or specifics. This is a semantic ailment that afflicts the entire humanitarian community.

Grassroots groups like CRP also stress the importance of proximity and detailed local knowledge when designing programmes. Those backing tech projects from afar often don’t fully understand the needs they’re trying to serve, or how they fit into the broader context.
(...)
Critics say while RBK has proven its model works, for it to make a real difference, it must be able to reach more young refugees.
“The big question is, is this model scalable?” asked one aid worker familiar with the programme. "If it doesn’t scale, this fantastic, high-quality solution risks being a drop in the ocean.”

Traditionally, organisations have provided care and resilience training for staff sent on mission to work on the physical frontline, which is obviously important. There is a need, however, for this training to be extended to those working with distressing social media imagery—those working on the digital frontline. Managers and organisational structures need to be sensitive to vicarious or secondary trauma and the associated risk of post-traumatic stress disorder. While staff working in danger zones do, to some extent, have their mental health needs recognised, a stigma connected to mental wellbeing and viewing distressing imagery in the main headquarters of an organisation exists. Lifting this stigma—and the associated barrier to seeking help—is required so that those researchers who find and verify content sourced from social media can effectively raise awareness of human rights abuses.

Our current research in the Philippines is beginning to provide support for this statement. As you can see below, most -77%- agreed that “Filipino aid workers generally get paid less than expat (non-Filipino) aid workers doing the same or similar jobs in the Philippines.”

We find it extremely strange to ask other people for money to help you travel. Selling things in the street or begging isn’t considered respectable. People who do so are really in need: they beg in order to buy food, pay their children’s school fees or pay off debts. But not in order to do something seen as a luxury!
(...)
This turns our continent into a caricature, a mystical land full of adventures or, in other words, a playground for white people. People come here on a journey of self-discovery, eager for exotic experiences. Sometimes, I want to ask them: what makes you think that this kind of behaviour is normal in Asia? Why don’t you do the same thing at home?

A new version of the #allmalepanel - the 'spread-men-out' interpretation, Madrid-style ;)! pic.twitter.com/IB2p7Yi7ok

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) April 12, 2017

Unfortunately, throughout our work at GenderAvenger we’ve found that nothing works quite as well as a little shame to motivate an organization to take action and be accountable. An old GenderAvenger friend, Ron Fournier, has a policy that when he finds himself on an all-male panel for work he will then immediately call the organization out publicly on social media. This draws attention to the problem, rallies people to support, and more often than not makes conference organizers think a little harder about their all-male panels for the next event.

All three of these constituencies have a claim to a grain of truth about fake news, and have forced it onto the agenda. It should also be acknowledged that the historical circumstances of 2016-2017 have been rather particular: a US election and an EU referendum involving very polarized choices in the context of a collapse of deference. So many promoting the concept of fake news have an axe to grind, but at the same time it cannot be denied that structural changes in media systems are transforming the procedures for verifying and distributing news.

We want to start important conversations, and add to others in a meaningful way. We want to showcase more people with stories, rather than stories with people. That could mean more mini-docs, more in-depth stories, more Facebook Lives from places and people that our audience can only find on Al Jazeera English, and a greater focus on markets such as India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

Florida devotes just 18 pages to the megacities of the developing world. Most of his suggestions, like so many of the glittering renderings and fantastical maps that populate contemporary discourse about cities, are both theoretically appealing and practically infeasible. The right ideas at the wrong time.
(...)
It’s indicative of the tenor of this book, which is heavy on studies from sociologists and economists (at one point, there’s a page where more than half the sentences introduce a new ratio), but addresses history only in short anecdotes, and politics hardly at all. This blindness to the perversity of American politics (which Florida otherwise follows closely) weighs heavily on the book.

The most significant C4D approaches that are used  are behaviour change and advocacy; followed by media development, social change communication and social mobilisation.
C4D contributes to many different programmeareas or themes in development, as determined by country  context; key areas are health, education, and agriculture.
Many varied C4D areas (strategies, channels and tools) are used; and while social media and broadcasting are dominant channels, approachesand strategies are highly varied, but with a prioritising of participatory and edutainment methods.

Whenever anyone preaches to educators from 'the real world', their conception of 'the real' is invariably what education exists to transform https://t.co/4s5d0IStj4

— Rokewood (@Rokewood) April 7, 2017

Together with faculty from the departments of Philosophy, Political Science, History, Geography, Economics, Education, and Environmental Studies, as well as a visiting photographer, representatives from two NGOs, and a Syrian refugee scholar, students study different aspect of the crisis to explore ways in which we, as global citizens, can contribute to alleviating this crisis.

The danger of these kinds of conferences is that the feel-good vibes could hide some much-needed critique. In a space like oer17, many of us are already struggling as dissenters on our f2f contexts and just delighted to be in a space where others understand us without us having to defend our ideas from A to Z. However, we may be missing opportunities to be more self-critical, as Simon Ensor’s blogposts suggest (he participated virtually, but was a huge part of the conference experience for me). We may also consider the space harmonious and friendly, but we may not be aware of how it feels to others.

“We find strong evidence that, on average, women faculty perform more service than male faculty in academia, and that the service differential is driven particularly by participation in internal rather than external service,” the study says. “When we look within departments -- controlling for any type of organizational or cultural factor that is department specific -- we still find large, significant differences in the service loads of women versus men.”
All that matters because service loads “likely have an impact on productivity in other areas of faculty effort such as research and teaching, and these latter activities can lead directly to salary differentials and overall success in academia,” the paper says. “In the urgency to redress not only differences in time use but compensation imbalances, as well, the service imbalance is one that deserves to rise to the forefront of the discussion.”

The corporatized university, like corporations generally, is an uncontrollable behemoth, absorbing greater and greater quantities of capital and human lives, and churning out little of long-term social value.
(...)
The corporatized university serves nobody and nothing except its own infinite growth. Students are indebted, professors lose job security, surrounding communities are surveilled and displaced. That is something dangerous.
Left professors almost certainly sense this. They see themselves disappearing, the campus becoming a steadily more stifling environment. Posturing as a macho revolutionary is, like all displays of machismo, driven partially by a desperate fear of one’s impotence. They know they are not dangerous, but they are happy to play into the conservative stereotype.

“The simple truth is that most aid workers do not have generous UN or diplomatic housing, or moving allowances” https://t.co/FCktXh1xQS

— Development Pros (@GuardianGDP) April 21, 2017

One issue that seems to get lost in the salary discussion is the risk of aid work being reduced to a capital city-centered endeavour. The global elite is as much present in Geneva or London as it is in Bangkok or Nairobi, but the bulk of aid work takes place in the field and we need to ensure adequate benefits for local and expat aid workers in different environments.
So how can we ensure that frontline health workers or drivers in the regional hubs are included in the conversation rather than focusing on who should have the right to send their children to the private American school?

In my experience even a little effort goes a long way-imagine the one journalist who comes across your blog post or the curated link review that takes up your article because it can be read and shared relatively freely.

The reality is that much more can be done. I’ve come to gradually reduce my guilt by doing something for each social cause I tag. It may be donating, volunteering, marching, or directing and producing a documentary like the one I made about the Chibok girls. I’m not a filmmaker by training. In fact, as a Nigerian(born)-American(naturalized) former educator, Waiting for Hassana mostly began as a passion project I pursued with friends to bring the story of these girls back to the forefront. It’s through the strength of Jessica’s narrative — a Nigerian woman, now age 20 — that we hope audiences leave feeling linked to her life and her story. She is no longer an unknown under some now-defunct hashtag.

Media outlets and journalists warned not to ask Kendall Jenner about Pepsi Ad at #Coachella. They will be "blacklisted" if they ask anyway. pic.twitter.com/KZqP3BWd60

— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) April 16, 2017

This sanitization is not only lazy and rooted in inaccuracies, it’s dangerous, as it silences the cries of revolutionary [Black] people. Moreover, it creates the false and damning sense that if your form of protest is not equivalent to that of a Care Bear hug, it is not legitimate.
And no surprise here: Whitewashing has also long played a role in all this.
(...)
Simply put, the goal of Pepsi’s ad was…to sell Pepsi. They’re in the business of making money, and in this case, they attempted to make money by getting you to associate resistance with Pepsi. The subtext was both evident and icky: Grab a Pepsi, and you could become a revolutionary, too!
Riot gear, pepper spray, tear gas, and Black and Brown folx being beaten and disappeared into police vehicles by sadistic cops are missing from this representation because no sane capitalist would want to buy into that side of resistance. Nor is that something Pepsi would like to associate itself with.

“The earthquake shook people’s houses, but did not shake their mindset,” says Dinesh Pathak, another Tokha Municipality engineer. “They are trying to save some money, but their greed could cost them their lives next time.”

Overall, total net ODA rose in 22 countries in 2016, with the biggest increases in the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovak Republic, Slovenia and Spain. For some the increases were due to higher refugee costs. ODA fell in seven countries, with the largest declines seen in Australia, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden. Of the several non-DAC members who report their aid flows to the OECD body, the United Arab Emirates posted the highest ODA/GNI ratio in 2016 at 1.12%.
2016 saw Germany join five other countries – Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom – in meeting a United Nations target to keep ODA at or above 0.7% of GNI. The Netherlands slipped back below 0.7% to join 22 other donors under the threshold.

We really can make a difference by thinking twice before putting postage on material stuff, and instead putting money we'd spend on postage directly into a local organization's coffers. Ask your neighbors, members of your religious community and your social networks what organizations or initiatives are already doing good work. Organizations on the front lines of the emerging famine crisis need our help, but they also need us to think critically before providing it.

Have the lofty ideals of development to reduce global inequality and give all people a decent quality of life been abandoned in pursuit of making the very, very poor only very poor? The bar for success has been lowered so far, I’m afraid all of us in the aid sector just walk right over it. And in doing so, we have side-stepped our humanitarian calling.

Now, LL3: South Sudan takes readers to the world's newest country to meet just a few of the 4.9 million South Sudanese people impacted by food insecurity and learn about the lifesaving efforts to help them.

We’re working within a logic that has, so far, been that governments are in charge of hosting displaced people, but they shift that responsibility to humanitarian agencies. None of these structures have the right reflexes and the right skill set to develop a functioning system that is ecologically and economically sustainable. That responsibility needs to be handed over in order to ensure sustainability, innovation and change.It’s basically building a new city, and that is not done by the development agency. That is done by, for example, a public private partnership. It's not about a tech provider helping a [nongovernmental organization]

However, one result of these two shifts – the rise of the tick-box, combined with a diluted version of decentralised observation – is that scrutiny of elections has become heavily focused around the day of voting itself.
Observers are dispersed to their stations just a few days prior to the vote, and governments and electoral commissions concentrate their energies on mounting an Election Day that conforms to international norms, precisely for the benefit of international officials.
This means that the preceding weeks of campaigning around the country get much less scrutiny. Yet it is in this period that systemic violence, widespread bribery and unjust infringements on freedoms of movement and expression can ensure that an election is far from “free and fair”, even if voting day itself is exemplary.

Governments must do more to build up local digital sector institutions which act as key intermediaries both within the local digital economy and between local and global digital economies.
Digital start-ups must self-analyse the constraints and freedoms imposed by their embeddedness. And they must customise models and methods from the global North; for example, rescoping the Lean Start-Up methodology to take a broader bi-sectoral and socio-political remit.

At last, the hardest part in the process is the presentation. For a full profile description, go back to the subject and read them what you wrote. This might be uncomfortable, but you should do it anyway. They lived it, so they’re the best person to edit it. Let them tell you where your facts go astray or where they feel you’re misrepresenting them in the story. It is time consuming and nerve-racking, but it’s the right thing to do, and who ever said that was easy?

So while it seems admirable to get more people to read works that address cross-cultural experience all the while shoring up a dwindling book-publishing industry, as is so often the case with literary celebrity, the choice of Americanah may have less to do with aesthetic merit, in the end, than with the narrow geopolitical space allotted to African fiction in the West. This then swiftly undermines Adichie’s celebrated caveat about “The Danger of a Single Story.”

One of the central ideas of ‘Communication with Communities’ (CwC) is that information — both its provision and collection — shouldn’t be a standalone activity; rather, it should be something that occurs continuously and is integrated into programming no matter the sector. Aid workers focused on health, nutrition, community and should all have a role in the ‘information ecosystem,’ as face-to-face communication is a widely trusted means to receive information and give their feedback.
(...)
An emergency response isn’t meant to be a static pillar; it’s a mutable organism that should adapt to the ever-changing needs of a population in crisis. And those needs are often readily expressed by affected communities. We just need to be there to take them seriously.

Researchers, including Monitoring and Evaluation specialists, face a crisis of access in many conflict and post-conflict areas. Often it is too dangerous to conduct on-site research and so researchers have to be innovative in the methodologies they use and may have to investigate proxies for the phenomenon they wish to observe. This webinar was based on a case study of following material objects (the social life of things) as a way of narrating conflict, peacebuilding and humanitarianism. It will illustrate how 4x4 (SUV) usage in Darfur can be useful in putting together a conflict analysis. It draws on an on-going research project that engages in methodological scoping in relation to peacekeeping data and humanitarian information systems.

I don’t know how to tell my parents that I won’t be subscribing to this twisted mating ritual. I want to find someone who’s going to love me for me. Someone who wouldn’t run because they found out I used to have sleepovers. These ideas are an issue. For my parents they represent a barrier between me and the perfect Arab life they have planned. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t like this. That I could just follow the rules, not ask questions and just accept things the way they are. But I have to remind myself of all the girls who grew up in households less permissive than mine, of all the girls that wouldn’t have been allowed to even think these things, let alone discuss them. I have to recognize my privilege and use it in a way that will benefit them. The fights I have are not for me alone; they’re for my sisters, my cousins, my friends, and every girl who’s ever been told not to wear that outfit lest Auntie thinks she’s one of those girls.

Gone, or at very least going, are the days of communications teams' primary functions being press related. The days of churning out press releases, cutting out articles and chasing our tails at the behest of journalists are making way for dynamic, responsive and engaging campaigns, with perhaps a whole lot of tail chasing at the behest of the general public, who won't wait very long for our responses on social media.
And everyone seems to agree that also gone are the days of silos and specialisms within a communications team, partly because even the mammoth councils are being forced to reconsider their familiar way of working in the face of budget cuts.

People still appear willing to give to organizations–and repeatedly–if they can mimic the level of supposed transparency that makes crowdfunding appealing. Such groups may even offer an additional benefit at a time when more sites seem to catalog almost every type of human suffering. “You see all those cases and they keep coming,” adds Nilsen at AFP. “Giving to a charitable organization is one way to feel like you are a part of something bigger.”
It’s probably not a coincidence that GoFundMe and GiveDirectly both operate extremely lean and clearly show where each donation will wind up. Both are enabling person-to-person transactions with trust that recipients themselves will know how best to use the funds. Even in the cases of a specific GoFundMe going viral, there’s no mandate for campaigns to have to explain how the overflow will be used, beyond the fact that lots of people are obviously now watching.

“The Moderators” explores the answer, going inside on office in India where the process happens. Directed by Ciaran Cassidy and Adrian Chen, a journalist who has written about the moderation process, the documentary is a window into a largely hidden part of the internet work force: employees who sit in an office and make decisions about whether to remove explicit photos, or who examine dating site profiles to weed out fakes.

In this work, we have developed a systematic method to discovering scientists who are recognized as scientists by other Twitter users through Twitter list and self-identify as scientists through their profile. We have studied the demographics of identified scientists in terms of discipline and gender, finding over-representation of social scientists, under-representation of mathematical and physical scientists, and a better representation of women compared to the statistics from scholarly publishing. We have analyzed the sharing behaviors of scientists, reporting that only a small portion of shared URLs are science-related. Finally, we find an assortative mixing with respect to disciplines in the follower, retweet, and mention networks between scientists.

Attending a conference? Please carefully study this flow-chart and act accordingly. pic.twitter.com/K1RGhtJblE

— Jake VanderPlas (@jakevdp) April 14, 2017

Statistics is a useful tool for understanding the patterns in the world around us. But our intuition often lets us down when it comes to interpreting those patterns. In this series we look at some of the common mistakes we make and how to avoid them when thinking about statistics, probability and risk.

One problem is that expectations anchor students. The minimum becomes the maximum, and limits what students achieve. "I've got three economics journal articles. That's enough, time to move on."
Also, overly explicit expectations are an inadequate preparation for the real world. In a work environment, no one will say "I expect your research report to be spell checked and have page numbers. And, by the way, it should not be plagiarized". Part of the human capital gained in a university education is knowledge of the unwritten rules, the social norms and conventions, of intellectual life.
A related point is that part of understanding the course material is understanding what's important and what's not. When students are told precisely what will be on the exam, their ability to identify key concepts - to figure out what matters - is not tested. Instead, what's tested is students' ability to read and follow instructions. The students who succeed are the ones who are able to successfully imitate the model answers posted on the website, not the ones who come up with creative and innovative ideas.

I have heard early career graduate students or undergraduates considering academia say things like “I wouldn’t mind starting out at a place like the University of Kansas,” or some other institution they perceive to be of similarly low prestige. Let me be clear: you probably won’t get a job at Kansas. Getting a job at Kansas would be fantastic and is therefore exceedingly difficult. For nearly all students outside of the very top graduate programs, a job at Kansas (or similar institution) is almost certainly your best-case scenario. If you have family ties that prevent you from living outside a certain area, or a partner with an inflexible job, you will be very unlikely to find an academic job.

Secret vote (likely incl UK) gives world's most misogynistic state SaudiArabia seat on UN Women's Rights Commissionhttps://t.co/UC1VivVtkD

— Charles Shoebridge (@ShoebridgeC) April 24, 2017

Under its current methods of work, (...) at each session the Commission:
Holds a ministerial segment to reaffirm and strengthen political commitment to the realization of gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls as well as their human rights and to ensure high-level engagement and the visibility of the deliberations of the Commission;
Engages in general discussion on the status of gender equality (…)
(…)
Addresses emerging issues, trends, focus areas and new approaches to questions affecting the situation of women, that require timely consideration;
Plays a catalytic role for gender mainstreaming in the United Nations system
(…)
Agrees on further actions for the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women by adopting agreed conclusions and resolutions

There are many things you can and should be critical about when it comes to Saudi-Arabia – but electing them as a member to the Commission on the Status of Women is actually the right thing to do within the context of UN diplomacy.
Other members should put pressure on Saudi-Arabia-especially behind the scenes, but the UN is not the right scapegoat for messy international relations and hypocritical relationships that include money, oil and weapons…

If the aid industry were to listen to its critics, it would have to conclude that development aid ought to be less about money and more about collegial discourse, with “us” admitting that we really have very few answers. By far the most important conclusion to draw is that if the goal of development aid to poor countries is to be met, our agencies need to become smaller, not larger; we need to take a back seat and “do” less. Indeed someday soon, we need to prepare to go out of business. No industry wants to hear this, but aid is not like the auto industry. It was meant not to last.

Less infusion of external expertise might make more way for people with embedded, grounded knowledge. Maybe less “expertise” could make way for leaders, organizations, and movements, led by people of color, who are not in the business of aid to build careers and income, but are heading the call of needed social transformation to save their own communities. They have been doing less with more for ages – literally.

Advocates of a USAID merger make two basic arguments: that USAID is poorly managed and can’t be trusted to carry out U.S. foreign policy objectives, and that significant savings can be achieved by bureaucratic consolidation. Both are based on outdated information and faulty logic.
(...)
Dismantling USAID is the bad penny that keeps on turning up to distract attention from the real challenges to U.S. foreign aid and diplomacy. Those who want to see measurable progress in reducing global poverty and hunger and preventing conflict and crisis ought to stand up for the agency best placed to achieve it.

The richest large economy in the world, says Temin, is coming to have an economic and political structure more like a developing nation. We have entered a phase of regression, and one of the easiest ways to see it is in our infrastructure: our roads and bridges look more like those in Thailand or Venezuela than the Netherlands or Japan. But it goes far deeper than that, which is why Temin uses a famous economic model created to understand developing nations to describe how far inequality has progressed in the United States. The model is the work of West Indian economist W. Arthur Lewis, the only person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in economics. For the first time, this model is applied with systematic precision to the U.S.

For poor countries to develop, we simply do not know of any alternative to industrialization. The sooner that happens, the sooner the world will end extreme poverty. As we look at our results, we are conflicted: We do not want to see workers exposed to hazardous risks, but we also worry that regulating or improving the jobs too much too quickly will keep that industrial boom from happening.

Aid groups still operating in Turkey were reluctant to comment openly on the matter for fear of their own licenses being revoked. But off-the-record interviews with IRIN suggest a shrinking operating space for international NGOs, many of which are based along the country’s southern border, providing cross-border relief to the northern Syrian provinces of Aleppo and Idlib.

Aw, damn. Another interesting shoe company goes the unfortunate way of giving shoes & promoting poverty tourism... https://t.co/hHB1Bx0wMw

— Lauren Bateman (@batemanenroute) April 23, 2017

That means it is not sufficient for World Bank staffers to rely on computer models or second-hand reports about a bank-funded project’s efficacy, panel members said. Those responsible for ensuring a project does not cause undo harm to the environment where it functions can fall into a mode of accepting the reality described in project designs, instead of getting their boots muddy and examining it for themselves, said Fuggle.

Refugee consultant Killian Kleinschmidt told Dezeen that colleagues had told him of further issues including lengthy assembly time, narrow doors with a raised sill that prevents wheelchair access, and draughtiness.
"It takes four hours to assemble, it doesn't have a groundsheet and it's not modular as it should be," he said. "There have been complaints about the wind going through. It doesn't take into consideration that people like to adjust the space themselves and that is part of their dignity."

“The reconstruction slowed down because our government acted as if it was a routine period. This was a time of crisis,” said Kattel, who along with his wife, were recently named "People of the Year" by a local magazine.
“The role of the government should be to speed up the recovery, but there’s no coordination among the government ministries,” he said.

Ethnographer and photographer Laura de Reynal has been documenting the work of organisations, such as Mozilla and One Laptop per Child who are helping communities to get online for the first time.

This is not just about national borders. A vast country like India is a collection of several mini-Indias. All with distinct contexts.
(...)
Supply side interventions such as making toilet construction easy, wouldn’t be enough to raise toilet coverage in Rajasthan. Demand generation efforts focused on the key need of the local population (which isn’t convenience, but may not be health either) will likely play an important role.

So does my hypothesis – that local aid workers can do most expat roles better in the Philippines – prove true? TBC, needs further research! But I definitely think it’s high time to acknowledge the changing, increasingly stronger existing capacities in countries like the Philippines, and have a frank, honest and constructive discussion about the international development and humanitarian sector’s way of working in the future.

The gig economy was supposed to ‘disintermediate’ – putting northern clients directly in touch with southern online workers, but that didn’t last long. Because of the heavy role that reputational feedback scores play in online gig work platforms, work tends to flow to intermediaries/middlemen who already have a high score. These intermediaries then re-outsource that work, keeping a part of the client’s fee for themselves.

It is important to take on board that women and girl’s empowerment, whether through use of digital ICTs or other resources, is multidimensional and non-linear. The use of digital ICTs may therefore empower women in some areas of their life while reducing their power in others –as when women have more public voice but are subjected to increased violence.
The digital divide also means digital ICTs may increase the power of some women while reducing the power of others. For programming to be better informed by learning on the conditions under which (different groups of) women and girls are able to use digital ICTs to increase their power, voice and influence, there is a need for more research grounded in established social and political theory, including development and gender studies.

We know that learning levels in poor countries are abysmally low. In an earlier post, I showed that in half of the fifty or so developing countries where we have data, fewer than 50 percent of women who left school after fifth grade could read a single sentence.
Sending kids to school has huge social returns, particularly for girls. Not only are the wage returns to a year of schooling generally estimated at around 10 percent per annum, but more educated women have fewer children and their children are less likely to die. This is somewhat puzzling if school isn't even teaching them to read.

Looking beyond UNHCR to WFP and UNICEF, among other UN agencies, it concludes that there is currently little evidence that the UN has fully embraced innovation as an essential part of efforts to reform the system and the entities within it, so that it can adapt to the new realities it faces. Neither is it clear that efforts to introduce innovation have spread far beyond the dedicated units that have been set up. The case study also suggests that the UN is not keeping up with the international public sector, which is increasingly recognising that it needs to find new ways of working if it is to cope with the rising demands being placed on it. At the moment there is a very real danger that, for the UN, innovation will remain something practiced by the few – typically, younger Programme staff – in ways that have limited potential for driving change within the UN.

In 2016 I wrote about the irony of "inclusive #globaldev"#AllMalePanel @ #InvestInInfra-oops, they did it again! https://t.co/dKIej8TajUpic.twitter.com/4DFzcMsK5d

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) April 25, 2017

All this to say, counting is powerful. Time and again we’ve seen organizers shocked to find that their own panels or organizations have failed to include women in any substantial way, all because they never actually took the time to count. Often, just pointing out the numbers can lead to real change. So what are you fighting for in your own communities? What are you counting? Let the GA Tally app connect you to an entire community that is just as passionate as you are about promoting women’s voices and that will continue to have your back and make some noise until we see results.

In a white paper authored by the company’s security team and published on Thursday, the company detailed well-funded and subtle techniques used by nations and other organizations to spread misleading information and falsehoods for geopolitical goals. These efforts go well beyond “fake news”, the company said, and include content seeding, targeted data collection and fake accounts that are used to amplify one particular view, sow distrust in political institutions and spread confusion.

This new model for healthcare financing could be revolutionary. But rolling out an untested, unproven, and currently unsustainable model in low-income countries that will have a hard time saying no to externally-funded solutions could do more harm than good for patients.

You can think of this as the nonprofit sector’s inequality problem. The rich get richer: Well-established, brand-name organizations see spikes in donations, especially during crises. Smaller groups, including those that are deemed to be more effective than their better-known peers, and especially those serving the extreme poor, are left to muddle along.
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That said, we can’t let donors off the hook for the inefficiencies of the nonprofit sector. While most individual donors say they care about nonprofit performance, nearly two-thirds do no research at all before making a donation. Nor do they demand evidence of effectiveness from charities. Until that changes, we can be certain that some nonprofits do great work and others do little or no good at all. But wouldn’t it be nice to know which was which?

Looking at the content of the emails, I did not have the impression that many organisations were trying to build a relationship or have a dialogue with me. One of the reasons that telephone and face-to-face fundraising have worked so well for charities over the years is because a representative of the charity has a conversation with a supporter or potential supporter, and builds and establishes a rapport.
The emails I received were heavily skewed towards being donation asks. Over a third of all emails I received were donation asks, and in fact I only ever received emails with donation asks from 6 charities.
The organisations with the best and most engaging content took the principle of having a dialogue with me as a potential donor – but adapted it to email and the longer timeframe needed compared with face-to-face or phone conversation. I was sent surveys, quizzes, case studies, and made to feel like I was part of the organisation. And only then was I sent a donation ask. Fewer than 10 charities adopted this approach from the 98 I signed up to.

The primary talent demonstrated by the “thought leaders” who rise to the top of this stew—people like Thomas Friedman, Niall Ferguson, and the heavyweight champion, according to Drezner’s own poll (in which I participated), Henry Kissinger—is to somehow flatter great wealth even as they pretend to challenge it. Should they pull it off, they get to feel good about themselves as enormously well-remunerated and highly respected public servants. The truth, however, is that by comforting the comfortable, they end up further afflicting the afflicted.

Some argue that within 20 years, blockchain will disrupt society more profoundly than the internet has disrupted communication and media. With the reported potential to replace powerful financial institutions with a new form of cheap and secure banking globally, could it also transform development? It has the potential to offer new ways to track aid and tackle corruption, facilitate smart-aid contracts and cut costs for international payments, but experience suggests it is through adding value to existing development processes that it could have the most benefit.

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The aim of the of this publication is to highlight and fuel journalist safety as a field of research, to encourage worldwide participation, as well as to inspire further dialogues and new research initiatives.

If those actors who do journalism are important enough to be protected, including so they may enjoy digital security, then they are surely also important enough to merit the associated conditions of freedom, pluralism, independence and gender equality. In this way, attention to safety – a topic that is proving to be a powerful concern in its own right – can be a key to opening other doors, both politically and practically, which can improve the condition and contribution of journalism in the digital age (p.42).

This collection of articles can also be read as a showcase of different solutions regarding research settings, methodologies and other factors to be considered while conducting research in this field. As a whole, these articles demonstrate that a new important interdisciplinary research field is emerging (p.144).

The threats have become such a common occurrence that journalists rarely mention the perpetrators of violence or the state’s responsibility for their protection. In the face of significant threats, tribal reporters’ dependence on group solidarity is based on the principle of reciprocity – the expectations and obligations that bring tribal journalists together as they work to navigate the complicated and dangerous intersection of state, militant and foreign interests (p.157).

The study also found that economic risk stemming from the financial position of a media firm compounds physical risk and promotes censorship. These findings should raise the priority of Mexican initiatives to strengthen public and non-profit media and make government advertising transactions more transparent (p.313).

There is an urgent need to mainstream gender into existing frameworks and to develop additional media policies with strong gender perspectives (p.183).

One of the most traumatic aspects of the photographers’ lives is the demise of their profession, the collective loss of colleagues and mentors and the greater reliance on freelance photographers devoid of support. It is deserving of greater consideration not only of the historical neglect, but the newspaper industry is experiencing seismic institutional change, and the safety of photographers has become more compromised and precarious (pp.233-234).

Many topics of this edited volume resonate with current debates in humanitarian aid and the aid industry more broadly, for example mental health, staff safety, new forms of local-expat collaborations and the chances and limitations of digital tools. Many of the chapters also suggest to me that issues around journalism and ‘media development’ may become more closely aligned with other core areas of ‘real’ development. This is not just about ‘communicating development’, but about engaging with inequalities or injustices that often are the root causes that development tries to tackle.
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This is a great open-access collection that goes far beyond journalism safety and highlights many important issues in communicating development and social change topics in our mediatized world!

Nigeria is a nation of paradoxes. Crime and corruption, Boko Haram and Niger Delta militants. But Nigeria also has one of the largest movie-producing industries in the world, Nollywood, and Nigerian culture is spreading all over the world. Nigeria’s glass is half empty, half full, as today’s guest Eromo Egbejule describes it.

A further look at the numbers shows that the value of horticultural — and specifically cut flower — production went down after 2012 for three consecutive years and only rose last year. During those three years, some companies were so adversely affected that some closed shop.
No wonder experts have poured cold water on job availability and the sector’s potential to create job, with floriculture the worst affected. In fact the industry is haemorrhaging jobs as flower farms go through a rough patch or are entirely shut down.

When it comes to children, one of the most powerful of these is that they are all inherently vulnerable and thus in danger when at work or on the move. The result is that many migrant working children are automatically assumed to be victims of trafficking when they are away from home, with the blame put variously on irresponsible parents, weak states, or abstract poverty. UN staff are taught to think like this, and the journalists who interview them are inevitably taught to think the same.
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Almost overnight, thousands were laid off, with many ending up in far worse conditions - on the street, in sex work, or in dangerous factories even further under the radar. Surely it would have been better for him to address the power of US corporations buying from Bangladeshi factories, demanding an extension of labour rights and good pay all the way down to the young workers in question?

Today, Thousand Currents is focused on addressing our shared global challenges, not just the issues faced by a marginalised community or a poor country. That requires new approaches from donors in acknowledgement of this complexity – unrestricted financial support, multi-year timeframes, and new skills and personnel that reflect the world we want to see.
We dropped “international development” from our name, because when small, yet formidable pockets of people power come together, that’s when Thousand Currents sees results.

“It is not unusual that when there is a ramp up in U.S. military engagement and a bombing campaign somewhere — as is now signaled by the White House with the Somalia announcement — that USAID would reach out to humanitarian partners to get deconfliction information to ensure that the military campaign doesn’t inadvertently target humanitarians,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, director of the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance during Obama’s second term.

Social accountability is recognition that there exists a lack of engagement with the public institutions that are so critical to our daily lives, a lack of influence in decision-making and more importantly, a lack of voice for expressing our needs, concerns and demands. We believe that social accountability approaches enable citizens, especially the voiceless and the powerless, to engage with state institutions in a proactive and constructive way to demand and exact accountability and responsiveness.

Done right, deploying the talents of famous people to raise awareness and funds can bring advantage to both celebrities and people hit by humanitarian disasters. But without firm evidence, my gut tells me that in the triangular relationship between celebrities, aid agencies and affected people, it is the celebrities who come out on top.

Young Americans and Brits in particular have a role to play. They can no longer chalk up bad policies to politicians backed by their parents. To those who say, we have enough problems at home without taking on these international challenges, we say, let us address both by tackling both. It’s ‘both and’, not ‘either or’. Our international policies, after all, are reflections of the state of our society’s soul. Let’s demand that our leaders represent our interests abroad by acting in the interests of those in need abroad.
Not to act is to act. Not to speak is to speak. Inaction can be a unique version of cruelty. We are at risk of abandoning the major achievements of the 20th Century - the widespread recognition that rights of protection extend to all people by simple fact of being human.

A) because it meant not only living with your colleagues, which is bad enough, but also turning your home into an office. As an aid worker told me “it drives you crazy” B) because by the time you settled into the job, it was time to leave. On top of that it could have had serious legal consequences like this situation illustrates:
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But what happens when you don’t have a home to go back to and when your home is a dangerous war-zone? It’s time that INGOs realise that staff care does not simply mean a session with a psychologist pre or post deployment, or a training on psychosocial support. It’s about caring for your staff by complying also with legal matters. That’s maybe why some prefer to call it “duty of care”.

A second question probed for an additional dimension of this same topic. Nearly half -49%- of the respondents noted, regarding interactions with their foreign colleges, that, “They listen to the advice of local people and try to understand the local context/culture sometimes (emphasis added).” Another 8% indicated, “They rarely listen to the advice of local people nor try to understand the local context/culture.” In sum well over half -57%- responded in a way that indicates they feel less than fully respected by their expat counterparts.
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So here’s what I am seeing from the quantitative data. Filipino aid workers believe they are getting compensated far less for doing the same job, many sense that expats feel they are superior to them, feel less than respected by their expat colleagues, and yet, tellingly, the vast majority have a positive experience working with expats.

I remain optimistic about the potential for using digital technologies in social justice and human development. We found initiatives in Philippines that genuinely inspire optimism, but we also need to be mindful of the potential for technology to exclude the most marginalised.
There are always imaginative ways to secure the participation of marginalised groups, including blending offline and online activities and using analogue as well as digital technologies. The main take-away from the research so far has been underscoring the lesson that if we intend digital development initiatives to include the most marginalised, then we need to design for equity from the outset.

We also need to be conscious consumers and harness the democratic function of the market economy to signal demand for vertically integrated ethics in the economy.
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We also need good people working in business. Business is the normative way in which people rise out of poverty.

For Anglophone readers and students, Dance is an ideal way to enter the world of colonial Saint-Domingue and the Haitian Revolution. The novel does not focus on the uprising of the enslaved in Saint-Domingue’s Northern Province, depicted in Carpentier’s well-known The Kingdom of This World. Instead, it focuses on Port-au-Prince and the colony’s Western Province, where planters battling one another first armed their slaves. Vieux-Chauvet brings this complex and swirling political and military conflict to vivid life, with many key revolutionary figures, including Vincent Ogé and Alexandre Petion, appearing as characters in the novel.
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Dance on the Volcano, like Vieux-Chauvet’s other works, disrupts and disturbs, in part because of the counterpoint between moments of softness and of harshness, possibility and terror, dreams of change and the reality of a system that closes in and traps us. At the center of the stories she tells in Dance, and in all of her novels, is the idea that art is a way of refusing the silencing, cruelty, and destruction of life at the heart of any social order based on exclusion and violence.

Telling the story of life for female cocoa farmers in Ghana, the film uses participatory video - whereby female farmers used video cameras to chart aspects of their lives – to highlight how access to land, capital and markets often remains the preserve of men. Despite their efforts, this shows how women’s ability to reap the financial rewards of their efforts is often limited.

One of the biggest mistakes of the western world in recent years has been to underestimate the long term formation of Islamic State’s ideology and state, military capabilities and brutality. By learning from this mistake we must now increase and share knowledge about the issues above, collaborate on preventive measures and find ways to deal with the upcoming and long-term threat towards western societies, but maybe even more important a major social development dimension in the region with a growing generation of children who have lived under Islamic State ruling and indoctrinating tentacles of “education”.

How to get the left to burn itself out and become a complete non-threat to anything:#bestpracticespic.twitter.com/LXsb2K0i2c

— Maximilian Forte (@ZeroAnthro) April 30, 2017

Converting Facebook data into money is harder than it sounds, mostly because the vast bulk of your user data is worthless. Turns out your blotto-drunk party pics and flirty co-worker messages have no commercial value whatsoever.
But occasionally, if used very cleverly, with lots of machine-learning iteration and systematic trial-and-error, the canny marketer can find just the right admixture of age, geography, time of day, and music or film tastes that demarcate a demographic winner of an audience. The “clickthrough rate”, to use the advertiser’s parlance, doesn’t lie.

to be clear: lists aren't the solution. action is. pic.twitter.com/sGenLgZIoM

— Melanie Ehrenkranz (@MelanieHannah) May 2, 2017

A few weeks ago, I Tweeted about wanting academia to stop focusing exclusively on the exceptional outliers (esp. in grad programs).

— Dr. Lucia Lorenzi (@empathywarrior) April 30, 2017

These data from our study suggest that a sample size of two to three focus groups will likely capture about 80% of themes on a topic — including those most broadly shared — in a study with a relatively homogeneous population, and using a semi-structured guide. As few as three to six focus groups are likely enough to identify 90% of important themes.

In any case, in one of those predictable ironies of academic history, ethnocentrism can afflict not just the “traditional” disciplines, but also the more contemporary interdisciplinary fields that have emerged alongside them. One would think, for instance, that Science and Technology Studies and the more recently-inaugurated Critical University Studies would be closely linked together. I would certainly hope so, since that my own work focuses on the links between French university politics and the epistemic culture of a left-wing French philosophy department. And yet I find, to my considerable dismay, that these two little worlds are deeply segregated from each other, as if we faced an “ethnocentrism of interdisciplines.”

The core self-worth of the typical American academic is deeply invested in the notion that we’ve spent most of our lives rising to the top through determination and intelligence. And as a reactionary and masochistic correlate to that faith, we harshly link each other’s professional failures and our own to some presumed lack of such qualities. We feel like it would diminish our life’s work to admit in public that, actually, the system is rigged, that many of our successes are due more to luck than anything else, that most of the “best work” is not being produced at all because the collective, variable talents of our community of thinkers and teachers and partners are being wasted in the competitive pursuit of individualistic success that our livelihoods depend on.
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It’s also true that loving something means you will fight for it—and that’s increasingly the only option we have left. But this struggle is vastly complicated by the realization that what we’re actually fighting for—an independent, communal, decently compensated life of the mind—has been taken hostage by the very thing we’re now fighting against: the ever more corporatized and compromised higher education scene.

Ben Ramalingam, leader of the Disasters and Development group at the UK university think tank, the Institute of Development Studies, says Lowcock is a “great choice”, pointing to his technical and financial background. Ramalingam told IRIN Lowcock would be most tested by the charged political landscape and “re-casting the role of OCHA for a changing world.”
Another observer pointed out that Guterres had appointed few women to the critical senior positions in the areas of political, peace and security, nor had there been visible progress in breaking the lock the Security Council’s five permanent members hold on them.

The irony is that never has medical science been so productive and yet health inequalities so wide. That is why continuing to do more of the same is not an option. While extra funding is always welcome, much more necessary is a revolution in mind-sets and attitudes. This means organisational innovation to drive universal health coverage, foster collaboration, strengthen national health capacities, and forge partnerships that respect health as a fundamental human right. Hence, the centrality of WHO.

But the essential complaint that has driven animus in parts of Africa remains very much alive: Is the ICC capable of administering impartial justice in a world of vast inequities? Some aspects of the African critique are easily dismissed. Most of the African investigations that the court has pursued were explicitly requested by the governments themselves, including in Uganda, Congo and the Central African Republic. And the court lacks jurisdiction in many non-African countries where crimes and oppression are endemic, including Iraq, Syria and North Korea. Nor has the court been completely motionless outside of Africa. In January 2016, the court launched an investigation in Georgia, although it has not yet brought any cases there.
Those realities don’t entirely absolve the court of regional or political bias. In several non-African situations where the court could investigate, it has dragged its feet. Most notable is Afghanistan, where the court has had a “preliminary examination” open for more than a decade.

How private companies recruit former child soldiers for military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The informal system makes it possible for industrious camp residents to make a living, and the income from shelter and business sales can make it easier for refugees to fund repatriation or ease the transition to resettlement countries.
But the black market in refugee real estate also foments disputes and corruption.

Today, Eastleigh is home to at least 50 malls, each housing hundreds of stalls selling often identical merchandise from manufacturing hubs like Guangzhou or Yiwu in southern and central China. “The business is too slow and the malls are too many. You can see it from the stores, all selling the same things, the same quality,” says Mohamed Ali, who owns a menswear store in Amal Plaza, a five-story mall on Eastleigh’s main road, First Avenue.
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Still, local entrepreneurs and business people think something has to change. “Africa will have to rely on itself and rely on local industry, local factories. That’s a long-term solution,” says Hussein, of the Eastleigh business association. He’s considering opening his own garment factory in Kenya. “This,” he says, referring to the import of goods from China, “is a short-term solution.”

It is important not to overstate the impact of aid. Foreign aid has not been the major driver of development progress over the last 20 years, nor will it be in the future. Long-term development progress depends primarily on the economic and political institutions that are built over time in low-income countries, and the actions taken by those countries themselves. Aid programs (alongside diplomacy and other tools of international engagement) are not the driving force behind development, but they can help support development progress along the way.
So don’t let the skeptics fool you with their shouted and erroneous claims that there is no evidence that aid works

The high rate of entrepreneurship in the developing world should not be celebrated or encouraged but lamented. Self-employment is a response to the environment in poor countries. Not their golden path out of it.
When most Americans graduate college they go get jobs. The vast majority do not start businesses. They have options. Ugandans and most other Africans don’t. Ugandan are reluctant entrepreneurs. They are not there by choice but out of pure survival.

Working with local organizations, it is important to understand what those gender identities and sexual orientations are — many of which don’t fall neatly into the LGBTIQ+ boxes that aid agencies might be more familiar with. It also allows those organizations to understand what might be possible within the local political, cultural, social, and legal environment with which they work. It’s really important to take advice, take leadership from, and engage with those local organizations. Of course that’s not an easy thing to do. It involves a longer term trust building between those organizations and within the communities that those organizations work with. But starting with the local organizations is a great place to start.

The discussion of localization is beginning to deepen. Here (summarized) is an opening salvo from Charles Lwanga-Ntale, director of the Kenya Academy Centre: localization often seems to resemble ‘deconcentration’, a process whereby the systems and structures of the existing humanitarian sector are exported downwards.

"This is the elephant in the room: how we view the suffering of distant others," says human rights activist Robert Godden of Rights Exposure, which helps nonprofits and governments create effective and ethical campaigns. "What if this photo series was taken in the U.S. or the U.K. — would the girl have been presented this way?"
He adds, "Another good question to ask is: If this was a family member of mine, would I want them portrayed like this?"
Amid a barrage of protests from readers, photojournalists and human rights activists, LensCulture took down the photo hours after it was posted.
"But at this point, the magazine said nothing," Chesterton says. "There was no statement, no acknowledgment of the absolute human rights abuse of that young woman, of that child."

This is about what we are doing in response to Somalia famine. These guys from lovearmyforsomalia gave done such a great job. Without them we couldn't be getting to the places shown in this video

In “From a Refugee Perspective” UNHCR has now summarised their findings from the ten-month project. The main thing I really liked about this project is that UNHCR invested the resources for proper qualitative social media monitoring, as opposed to the purely quantitative analyses that we see so often and which rarely go beyond keyword counting. To complement the social media information, the team held focus group and other discussions with refugees who had arrived in Europe.
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But in the end, the team did not engage online. Why they decided to only be a fly on the wall, rather than share information of their own, is not discussed in the report. My guess is that they were worried about being inundated with questions, while not having the capacity to respond.

Writing a list of good campaign ads? That was a little more difficult.

A recent conference at the University of Edinburgh went “Beyond the Hashtag” to explore the impact of social media in Africa. Don’t worry if you missed it, because Brooks Marmon has written this great summary of the key findings to bring you up to speed.

Over the next few weeks, we will publish a series of detailed, do-it-yourself articles on how to create engaging content for both offline and online platforms.
In the meantime, here are three things that you can adopt immediately to help with your organisation’s communications.

What appears to be a light-hearted and entertaining comedy on how Ugandans screw mzungus over and over again (in all aspects of life) is at its core a deep critical reflection on the exponential growth of NGOs in the country – if not the sub-Saharan African continent.

The U.S. has the worst rate of maternal deaths in the developed world- we found 450 deaths since 2011. This is one: https://t.co/n8IiDz8MSw

— ProPublica (@ProPublica) May 12, 2017

Someone @UN must have accidentally leaked their super-secret insiders guide on how to get a job-now you finally know how to impress HR! pic.twitter.com/bs6l4Rc9qS

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) May 11, 2017

Her shoe tumbled from my trembling fingertips
I always attempted to put it back onto the slender foot
But I realized that it was no use
I was powerless over this plastic girl

And so I went to my computer
Where I entered into a world
Where I could manipulate everything
With only a blank page
And a keyboard

I knew nothing about blogging. But I did know that all communities have their own unique culture and through a combination of trial and error, generous mentors and reading several really good guides to WordPress, I found my footing here.

The short version of Tufekci’s argument is that social media provide powerful ways for activists to organize and to get their messages out, but that the types of activism have their own drawbacks. Ad hoc movements can assemble quickly, both in physical space (Gezi Park) and online (#BlackLivesMatter), and they can deploy powerful viral messages (the Battle of the Camel). This helps them leapfrog over repression, interia, and mass media censorship – but also over much of the institution-building work that allows protest movements to enforce message discipline, switch up their tactics, and lever their momentum into other realms. Their heavy use of platform-based social media also leaves them vulnerable to algorithmic fragmentation, pervasive surveillance, and disinformation campaigns.

Although this evaluation assesses past performance, much of which predates the 2013 World Bank Group strategy, with its twin goals of eliminating extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity, the evaluation is intended to be forward-looking. Although higher education can contribute to the twin goals, it is by no means guaranteed.

By analyzing a unique dataset of more than 270,000 scientists, we discovered substantial gender differences in scientific collaborations. While men are more likely to collaborate with other men, women are more egalitarian. This is consistently observed over all fields and regardless of the number of collaborators a scientist has.

The special issue presents new analysis and case studies, which aim to challenge and refresh the established policy consensus around violence reduction and security. They are distinctive in focusing upon the vernacular or local understandings of those at the receiving end of direct and structural violence; and in analysing the insurgent margins where violence and insecurity are most concentrated.

Following his initial post on this topic in 2015, Wasim Ahmed has updated and expanded his rundown of the tools available to social scientists looking to analyse social media data. A number of new applications have been released in the intervening period, with the increasing complexity of certain research questions also having prompted some tools to increase their data retrieval functionalities. Although platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp have more active users, Twitter’s unique infrastructure and the near-total availability of its data have ensured its popularity among researchers remains high.

In democratization and revolution studies, the outcomes of the Arab uprisings can be placed in already well-established categories. We have successful transition processes leading to democratic consolidation, as in Tunisia. We have entrenchment of liberalized autocracies, as in Morocco. We have situations of authoritarian status quo, as in Algeria. And we have situations of state failure and conflict, as in Libya. None of these outcomes are particularly novel in terms of long-term institutional equilibria, nor are they particularly surprising as historical occurrences for these polities. The Arab uprisings point to a set of processes that led from one known institutional model-in this case, more or less open authoritarian regimes-to other institutional equilibria (p.172).

In all cases, protest episodes end in a formal return to institutionalized politics, usually in the shape of an electoral democracy-be it as a substantive system of governance or as a front for continuing authoritarian rule (p.5).

The first stage corresponds to the implosion of the ruling authoritarian system. (…) The second stage corresponds to the reconstruction of practices and discourses around the demands of the protestors and counter-propositions of the regime (…). The third stage involves the reconstruction of routinized behaviors in and by this new system of governance (p.7).

The reversion to ‘normality’ was the result not so much of the Algerian regime using the ‘correct’ combination of repressive and cooptative measures to diffuse unrest, as of behavioral and ideational shifts that unfolded without sufficient speed and directionality. As a result, new arenas of contention and protest dynamics failed to become self-reproducing (p.87).

Protestors developed local self-help networks in order to cope firstly with repression, and then in order to deal with the withdrawal of the security forces and the progressive shutdown of state institutions and public services. (…) These local rearticulations of power-outcomes of protests that developed relatively independent of one another-began to create an ideational and material challenge for the regime at the national level (p.92).

In informational terms, the (new) media helped raise the profile of the revolt and articulate a perspective that countered the official version given by the regime at home and abroad. As before, a combination of old and new media outlets proves most effective at conveying counter-discourses (p.101).

Instead of trying to prevent protests as much as possible, the security forces targeted those protest actions that the regime found most subversive of the authoritarian status quo (p.124).

The identities and behaviors of the actors of the uprising had co-evolved with those of the regime to produce a situation in which they could coexist and conflict with each other within the symbolic and institutional order imposed by a ‘reformed’ monarchy (p.152).

In Algeria and in Morocco, the early winding down of the unrest ensured that that cohesiveness of the security forces was not tested in the same way that it was in Tunisia and Libya (p.164).

For scholars and policy-makers alike, the ability to explain routine politics becomes the main objective of the analysis. The political causality of extraordinary episodes is discounted, and so are the interactions at work at the time (p.154).

Things could indeed have happened otherwise, and other continuities could have been showcased (p.173).

There were a couple of reasons why I selected Frédéric Volpi’s book for review.
First, Volpi is looking at Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia-four diverse societies and political systems that experienced very different ‘revolutions’/revolutions in 2011.
Second, he is adopting a macro-analytical perspective and is less concerned with ethnographic details of ‘the streets’. And quite frankly, the third reason was that books published by Hurst are usually interesting, readable and well-edited contributions to shape my own thinking and teaching.
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I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It provides plenty of food for thought and discussion and will certainly make a very good introductory text for students before they start discussing the countries, societies and revolutionary dynamics in more detail. Volpi’s book also makes a very important contribution to the emerging debate on how ‘we’, particularly in academia, need to continue with nuanced and careful analysis as mediatized events gain momentum and sound bites replace complex reflections.
Especially the political science and international relations community also needs to admit how limited their power of prediction really is when contested spaces are re-negotiated.

Nonetheless, researchers have tried for decades to connect the dots between aid and growth, says Glennerster of the poverty lab at MIT. But results have been mixed. "I can show you 40 papers that have appeared in economic journals in the last 10 to 15 years saying that there's been no relationship," says Kenny. "Twice the number that say there is. Some say it's a mix. All those stories are plausible."

Still, the challenges to independent journalism in Afghanistan are immense and growing. Reporters face physical attacks and intimidation from the Taliban, warlords, criminals and the country’s own U.S.-backed government, which has imprisoned at least 60 journalists, according to media watchdog groups. And funding for media from the United States and other Western governments, is dwindling, leaving many radio stations with aging equipment sorely in need of repair.
“Afghanistan’s is a donor-created media, that’s the reality of it,” Maimanagy said. “There is no advertising market of any significance and there isn’t going to be for a long time. There is this adamant enemy that considers media a promoter of values they don’t believe in, like women’s rights and democracy, and they are not timid about attacking journalists.
We don’t know what this all means for our future. But we know that the media here is one of the greatest tools of democracy, and we need to fight for it.”

Although funded for many years by the German development agency GIZ, RENATA receives small grants from international donors, but is no longer fully sponsored by anyone.
So the aunties work as volunteers, often holding down second jobs as hairdressers, shop-stall owners, teachers, restaurant managers to make ends meet.
Some of their revenue is under threat following President Donald Trump's order to reinstate the global gag rule that bans U.S.-funded groups around the world from discussing abortion.
Aba, the RENATA spokeswoman, said despite their dwindling resources, she and the other aunties are determined not to give up.
"We won't lower our arms - we will continue, we will find other revenues. We will continue our fight," she said.

How austerity policies and microfinance can bankrupt rather than empower women. Professor Girón discusses why microfinance cannot replace development banks.

I posted beautiful pictures of my trip to the islands, with an incredible jungle trek and a beautiful sunset. But I didn't show you how my friend and I were left stranded on a ferry port after the bus took our money and left. I didn't show you the tears I shed while trying to negotiate with a boda driver to take us to the city. I didn't show you the pain of the motorcycle digging into my lower back as we tried to fit three people and two luggage bags on an hour-long ride along a dusty, dry road.
Facebook is a fraud.
No wait, scratch that. I am a fraud.
Uganda is a beautiful country with beautiful people with incredible stories who gave me so many opportunities as a dancer and international worker. You'll find all of that in my photos.
But that's not the whole picture. It's all too easy for me to post the highlights, to watch the "likes" pop up one after another in my notifications, and to read comments like "Girl, I'm jealous!"

Empirical data about the medical voluntourism industry is sparse. The most-cited figure estimates up to 10 million volunteers travel abroad annually, spending approximately $4 billion. Volunteers are predominantly young women; the number engaged in international medical volunteering is unknown.
(...)
Ultimately, patients and local health systems need foreigners’ good intentions to be re-directed towards the people on the ground, already doing the meaningful work in the long term. Putting the safety and needs of local health systems and patients first will ensure help doesn’t harm.

Similarly, we decide (sometimes using RCTs) that people save too little. Perhaps they even said so in a survey. However, did that survey ask whether they would also like to spend more on their children’s education, or dietary diversity, or better doctors, or any other specific reasons? No. But we researchers “know better.” So when we find we can nudge them into saving more, we think we are helping when, perhaps, we are doing them a disservice because of our tunnel vision.

The One Belt, One Road Initiative may indeed lead the world towards its “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, but the lack of other truly competitive sources of foreign financing is what ultimately reinforces China’s monopolistic advantage over foreign-financing of infrastructure and connectivity projects. It should also serve as a prudential warning for developing countries, to be vigilant about their own regulatory environments and institutional capacities and to avoid “neocolonialism” achieved through negotiating disparities in bilateral arrangements. Directly internalizing international economic, social, and cultural rights, international labor agreements, and international environmental agreements – (to many of which China is already a State party) into the long-term domestic regulatory frameworks governing One Belt, One Road projects is one way of redressing the bargaining imbalance for developing countries and ensuring mutual accountability for all global partners in China’s push as a ‘responsible power’ driving ‘Globalization 2.0’ bilaterally through the One Belt, One Road initiative.

But when private security enables the rich and even the middle class to bypass the state, this can intensify a country’s inequalities. Regarding the expansion of private security in Latin America, the UN Development Programme has warned: “This phenomenon further increases inequality, as social groups have different capacities to deal with crime.”
(...)
Speaking to the Guardian from Bangalore, where he teaches at Azim Premji University, Jayadev observed that India has witnessed a broad “succession of the rich from the rest of the economy”.
Many people there, he said, already “rely on private services in every facet of their lives” to provide “all of the things the state might [otherwise] ... including security”.

And it doesn’t help that developing countries have the deck stacked against them at the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO. Because rich countries have all the power in these institutions, they get to make the rules that shape export prices and wages in the rest of the world.
The point is that wages are not somehow naturally low in the south – they have been made low by design. Wages are an effect of power.

Blogging has been a major part of UNDP Eurasia’s outreach for at least 5 years now, before I started working here. We call this part of our strategy to Work Out Loud – don’t share only your success, but your failures as well. There’s as much for people to learn from your failures as from your successes – and they’re almost always more interesting. Blogging allows us to share results from the field without having to go through the formalities of finishing a project and producing an 80-page report. Blogging also allows us to reach younger crowds or those coming across our content on-the-go because of its more conversational tone. Finally, blogging helps put a human face on the work that we do. If we’re doing our job right, then it’s personal and fresh and interesting and brings in audiences who wouldn’t normally tune in

David Girling interviews interview with Mehmet Erdogan for Social Media for Development with insights into UNDP social media strategies.

The Comprehensive 'Communicate to Vaccinate' Taxonomy of Communication Interventions for Childhood Vaccination in Routine and Campaign Contexts

Without a comprehensive framework integrating communication interventions from routine and campaign contexts, it is not possible to conceptualise the full range of possible vaccination communication interventions. Therefore, vaccine programme managers may be unaware of potential communication options and researchers may not focus on building evidence for interventions used in practice.

In the United States, our approach to solving Appalachian poverty doesn't differ substantially from our approach to solving African poverty. In both cases, outsiders came in to exploit resources and left generations of poverty in their wake. While the process was substantially more extreme, racist, and violent in Africa, in both cases conservative political leaders think those left behind economically should just make better decisions and stop being poor. That approach will not work in either instance. Neither will sending food and secondhand clothing. And don't even get me started on the idiotic and theologically-flawed thinking that leads fundamentalist Christians to think they can solve poverty by evangelizing the poor folk.
While we must not approach any instance of poverty, whether in Kinshasa, Congo or Frakes, Kentucky, with the flawed notion that we fully understand it, we must understand that the solutions will be found in action both by those who are impoverished and by those who are not. This is not a problem to be fixed by condescending outsiders, but neither is it a problem to be fixed only by those who are impoverished. Neither group can fix it alone.
The process starts, I think, with taking time to listen. Then, we can try to understand. I might understand it a little better than most because I grew up white trash. I have seen my mother and my family members and my neighbors be forced to make impossible choices between a limited number of shitty options. I have at times had to make those impossible choices myself. Even having grown up poor and having spent my academic career researching and writing about poverty, I do not claim to understand it fully. We must realize that there exists no single narrative about Appalachian poverty. Not all poor people are the same. Not all impoverished families fit into a single category even if they are united by similar demographics.

Flipped and switched - perspectives on race (photos from O Magazine) pic.twitter.com/i7e5vPH6T8

— Jae (@jaeralde) May 14, 2017

For the photographer, the baseline intention of the project was to bend race expectations. "When you see an image of someone from a different background, what is your expectation of them?" Buck asked rhetorically over the phone. "When you see an image from someone [of a different race], what is your expectation of them and are we challenging it? Why do we expect a certain thing from someone of a [certain race] and expect them to be serving another [race]?"

Overall, Drezner leaves a troubling impression about the state of policy deliberation in American politics and the influence of wealthy patrons. His argument also helps to shed some light on the polarization that has developed within education policy between a reform movement supported by many wealthy philanthropists and thought leaders (such as Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton family) and a populist reaction involving teachers, unions, and scholar activists like Diane Ravitch.

Many of the contributions point to how management is entangled in contemporary economics that engage in managerial micro-control. In particular, the management of public institutions, cultural or educational, is under attack, and so are its workers (and if not existing under the threat of closure, they operate under enforced austerity and self-monitoring, especially but not only in the West). The result is a hyper-individualised isolated student or worker who is addicted to work and pathologically tired and numbed. Such an individual is expected to contribute to the current economy, rather than maximise their interests, or, and more importantly, engage in productions of solidarity that mobilise critical thinking and creativity.

The Death Gap presents a Marxian view of inequality as a societal disease that in turn produces biological disease, dispersed differentially across the sociopolitical hierarchy. Although he is a physician, Ansell uses metaphorical language that may stump readers in biomedical fields. Moving beyond epidemiological frameworks that model what would happen to an individual exposed to a single causal factor, Ansell weaves a much more complicated story, in which structures of disadvantage affect every step of the process of survival. The Death Gap provides an overarching framework for understanding the root cause of ethno-racial and economic disparities in illness that seamlessly weaves together the very best research in epidemiology, public health, medical sociology, health policy and psychology.

What MOOCs can’t do is mentor, coach, guide, and connect. The role of the professor is in part to profess - but in much larger part to educate. The educator / learner relationship at the heart of all high quality postsecondary education can no more be scaled than any other crucial human relationship. MOOCs have thrown into sharp relief just how valuable an education is that is built upon relationships. If a MOOC replaces a course, then perhaps that course should be replaced.

Active learning continues to emerge as practice and we are going to find it hard going at times, precisely because there will not be any one path. Students need to be part of helping make this happen and the most profitable way of doing that is by making them genuine stakeholders in the process. That means bringing them in at the curriculum design stage, talking with throughout the delivery phase about running adjustments and debriefing afterwards.
If post-truth has taught us anything, then it’s that passionate commitment counts for a lot. We’re passionate about making L&T work better, so let’s use that together all the other academic values we hold, to effect change.

The killings have also stirred a sharp debate over the United Nations’ responsibility to prepare and protect the people it hires to investigate wrongdoing around the world. Ms. Catalán and Mr. Sharp belonged to a panel of six experts authorized by the Security Council to investigate rapes, massacres and the exploitation of Congo’s vast natural resources.

There is abundant evidence that these murders were premeditated and that no amount of training could have altered the outcome.
No member of the United Nations Group of Experts on Congo had been killed before, and there was no reason to expect abduction or murder. For this reason, we are pressing the secretary general to appoint an independent international criminal investigation team to identify the perpetrators and their chain of command and to help ensure that those responsible face justice.

There is no doubt that the United Nations can do a much better job supporting the various groups of experts and panels that are in charge of monitoring the sanctions regimes (North Korea, Somalia/Eritrea, Sudan, Central African Republic, etc.). When I was coordinator of the DRC group in 2008, we never received any security or investigative training, we had to use our private Yahoo! and Gmail email addresses, and we didn’t have any analytical software to organize our notes or do network analysis.
On the other hand, the Times article takes some pot shots. Yes, we did not have health insurance––but the experts have the status of consultants and as consultants anywhere are expected to purchase their own health care, and all of the current members are insured. Yes, we did not have security escorts, but the UN peacekeeping mission in the Congo is perceived as a party to the conflict (they conduct joint operations with the Congolese army) and the experts would not be able to access many of the armed groups if they went with a UN escort. And yes, better training on many issues would be great, but the current members of the group of experts do have considerable experience and are not “woefully unprepared.”

WHO said Sunday that nearly 60 percent of its travel costs were spent on sending outside experts to affected countries and for national representatives to attend WHO meetings.
During the Ebola disaster in West Africa, WHO’s travel costs spiked to $234 million. Although experts say on-the-ground help was critical, some question whether the agency couldn’t have shaved its costs so more funds went to West Africa . The three countries that bore the brunt of the outbreak couldn’t even afford basics such as protective boots, gloves and soap for endangered medical workers.
Dr. Bruce Aylward, who directed WHO’s outbreak response, racked up nearly $400,000 in travel expenses during the Ebola crisis, sometimes flying by helicopter to visit clinics instead of traveling by jeep over muddy roads, according to trip reports he filed.

Romer asked for shorter emails and insisted presentations get straight to the point, cutting staff off if they talked too long, said another person familiar with the matter. He canceled a regular publication that didn’t have a clear purpose, one of the people said.
But researchers didn’t like the curt way Romer often conveyed his message, said two people familiar with the matter. Staff were upset by what they saw as his abrasive emails, and they didn’t feel Romer listened to their concerns, these people said. Researchers were flummoxed by some of his stylistic hangups, including a distaste for the conjunction “and.”
Romer was frustrated with what some see as the dense, convoluted style of many of the department’s reports. He pushed researchers to write more clearly, using the active voice to be more direct.

A contemporary dilemma : #NGO and #hospital stucked in #war zone: forced clandestinity or risked exposure ?#Syria#Yemen#Iraq#Kunduzpic.twitter.com/Q5mCeJ6gqS

— rashbrax cartoon (@rashbrax) May 22, 2017

So, my least favourite report ever in the genre of 'big arrows on an outline of Africa' has been updated. https://t.co/FfkGVexdNjpic.twitter.com/WWAqpz7tt2

— Maya Forstater (@MForstater) May 24, 2017

Here we go again, another attempt to net flows to/from Africa https://t.co/0v0ppbXo17 ....... so:

— Matt Collin (@aidthoughts) May 24, 2017

Forstater said: “There are 1.2 billion people in Africa. This report seems to view these people and their institutions as an inert bucket into which money is poured or stolen away, rather than as part of dynamic and growing economies. The $41bn headline they come up with needs to be put into context that the overall GDP of Africa is some $7.7tn. Economies do not grow by stockpiling inflows and preventing outflows but by enabling people to invest and learn, adapt technologies and access markets.
“Some of the issues that the report raises – such as illegal logging, fishing and the cost of adapting to climate change – are important, but adding together all apparent inflows and outflows is meaningless.”

The findings show differences in general donor behavior in fragile and stable countries. Donors are more likely to provide aid through another organization in fragile states rather than directly, but are less likely to work jointly with other donors in fragile states. And fragile states receive less aid from multilateral donors, like the United Nations or World Bank, than stable states, but receive more “multi-bi” aid, a mechanism wherein individual donors can pool funds in a trust which are then administered by a multilateral agency.

How do young people in Sierra Leone cope faced with staggering rates of youth unemployment of over 50%? Umaru Fofana talks to young people in the capital, Freetown, as they struggle to make a living.

Striking slide from Peter Redfield’s @MSFSci Days Keynote. World military spending is ~60x world humanitarian aid spending. pic.twitter.com/qjYoP4XsqZ

— Paul Simpson (@pjsimpso) May 24, 2017

“These days, I can’t even look at my calendar without cringing—it’s pretty much all tech execs,” said Salazar, adding that he had thought the developed world’s interest in the ayahuasca tea ceremony was generally a positive until it became his full-time job to provide celestial guidance to Bay Area venture capitalists and app founders who had learned about the practice through a Viceland special. “I believe this source of healing should be available to everyone, but lately it seems like the people I guide toward a vision of cosmic wholeness are all 32-year-old billionaires hoping to gain a deeper insight into their SEO strategy or whatever.”

America was the place where nearly 4,000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined ‘separate but equal’; where Freedom riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp.
So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth.
And it immediately begs the questions: why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame … all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans.
So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission.

The smart slum is still a peripheral idea, but we can speculate on the likely impact of extending this ‘smartness’ to slums and make two competing claims. Firstly, that development professionals should be wary of smart slums repeating some of the negative impacts of ICT4D; and secondly, that a push for smart slums could be appropriated for social justice.
(...)
It may also be that sensors and smartness paradoxically limit citizenship rather than extending it, if citizens just participate by generating data and real resource decisions are made elsewhere. This is a dystopian version of smart slums as a way to subdue and control.

The sort of philanthropy required to make progress on challenges like these is very nearly the opposite of that being pushed by big bet enthusiasts. It takes money, to be sure. But it also takes time and patience—a great deal of both, in fact—and a commitment of human as much as financial resources. It takes willingness to learn from others and to develop real partnerships with grantees, while hearing from (and listening to) intended beneficiaries.
It is not about pushing lots of cash out the door while looking for speedy results, but about becoming part of and helping to nurture an ecosystem of grantees, beneficiaries, and other funders whose efforts, cumulatively and over time, help make progress. It is about coming to understand a problem deeply, developing a thoughtful approach to address it, observing what happens, changing one’s understanding based on evidence and experience, and—most important—being willing, if need be, to take these same steps over and over again.

In political deployments of big data analytics and inferential modeling, what is at stake is the ability of the powerful to see and meaningfully engage with a consenting electorate. A claim could be made that if current trends continue, and big data psychographic methodologies become a primary means of electioneering and governance, actively attempting to reduce the effectiveness of that dataset would be an unethical move. But there are other ways for governments and campaigns to encounter their electorates, to figure out how best to represent their constituents. A town hall may have the potential to be messy, loud, and unpredictable, but it allows an encounter between the people and their elected representatives. Referendums on specific issues, given to the public for a direct vote, can’t reveal private information: your vote on medical marijuana legalization won’t reveal if you’re gay.
As a modern democracy, the US excels in developing new mechanisms to distance the individual from the power of their vote. Big data methodologies and the inferential analytics they power as deployed in elections present yet another move to push people, in all their loud, messy, demanding changeability, out of politics. But unlike gerrymandering or the electoral college, this move can be actively resisted on the individual level.

The question is whether current organizations and structures that are called to solve these gigantic tasks are truly equipped to do so, or whether it might be necessary to restructure them. Why is this vitally important?
- In charitable organizations, “business models” based on donations are often no longer competitive and are thus no longer viable.
- In recent years, while many organizations have rapidly grown and have often multiplied their “business volume,” their capacity has not kept pace, nor have they been able to keep up with the trends of digitalization and networking.
- Internal / external reporting and evaluation systems designed to meet the requirements of financial institutions have ballooned into administrational “monsters” – with many organizations now expending more energy on producing reports than on fulfilling their mission statements and thus impacting the world around them.
Successfully transforming NGOs to meet the needs of the 21st century means developing up-to-date and cooperative networks, adopting the Internet-of-things (IoT) as a concept, enabling decentralized and direct collaboration with units of competence, and developing synergies with partners.

Taking a range of examples from across the world, this report will examine how new arrivals are received and integrated into cities within formal and informal spaces; how cities address everyday issues relating to housing and shelter, health and education; how urban citizens build socio-cultural communities of solidarity in periods of uncertainty and transition; and the role of civil society in these processes to support and engage with displaced populations. It examines the idea of cities as humanitarian actors, highlighting good practices and initiatives in different urban contexts that address current humanitarian challenges relating to migration and forced displacement.

This paper shows that development co-operation from emerging providers – i.e. countries beyond the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) – significantly increased in recent years, reaching 17% of total global development co-operation in 2014. It also presents a rough estimate, of USD 300 billion, of broader international co-operation by emerging providers and it sets out what types of instruments are used to provide this broader international co-operation.

Focusing on the region’s economic development, the evolution of the international development agenda, and the story of ADB itself, Banking on the Future of Asia and the Pacific raises several key questions: What are the outstanding features of regional development to which ADB had to respond? How has the bank grown and evolved in changing circumstances? How did ADB’s successive leaders promote reforms while preserving continuity with the efforts of their predecessors?

Can I justify eating or drinking during Ramadan to protect the integrity of my research process? Will this make me a lesser Muslim? Maybe. Probably. To most — definitely.
I struggle with how to reconcile these thoughts in my head. The goal of my work is to uncover hidden truths, latent needs, and undiscovered barriers that percolate through people’s lives. But I can only do that work if I’m perceived as neutral, objective, and unassuming — or at the very least, worthy of trust and respect.
I choose to abide by the things I admire about my faith and that align with my values. Fasting, at its core, is about understanding those who have to live day in and day out on an empty stomach. And the ultimate goal of my research is aligned to that same goal — of understanding how people live, think, and survive. This is my workaround. It is not the neatest workaround. But if my ultimate goal is understanding, for that I can choose to eat.

The corridors of the hallways in the institution where I currently work embodies this faux-solidarity in posters about conferences, colloquiums, and trips in the Global South or about the Global South that cost an arm and a leg. As long as you have money to pay for your airfare, hotel, meals and transportation, you too could add two lines in the CV and speak about the new social movement and their radical strategies to dismantle the system. You too can participate in academic dialogues about poverty and labor rights as you pass by an undocumented cleaner who will make your bed while you go to the main conference room to talk about her struggles.

So it can work. Productive engagement online is possible. But be acutely aware of the many pitfalls and pratfalls that can befall you, not least those listed above. To engage as productively as possible, follow Wendig’s advice and regularly tend to those weeds.
And don’t be surprised if many of those who publicly “critique” your efforts don’t even read past the title of your post/video/article before they vent their spleen. You’ll find that nothing is quite as irritating as those who want to engage without engaging.

From an outside perspective, it certainly looks as if the World Bank is an institution in need of great change. And the problem goes far beyond poor communication.
(...)
Morris and Gleave suggest a number of other roles the Bank could step into, including disease response, funding scientific research, making municipal loans or simply acting as a think tank. But this isn’t very encouraging -- it paints the picture of an organization shambling onward out of sheer momentum, an expensive bureaucracy looking for a purpose.

“Looking at the list, we found a large number of duplicate entries – so the same household being mentioned multiple times,” Avani Kapur, Accountability Initiative’s lead researcher in public finance, told Humanosphere. “We also found households and even villages misclassified – a household that’s supposedly in this village is actually in another village.”
Because the reporting system is bottom-up – households reporting to local leaders, who report to national ministries – Accountability Initiative found a “big disconnect” between the number of villages that have been declared open-defecation free and those that have been verified as such.

She agreed there’s an argument for humanitarians having a seat at the table where the power brokers are – including those who play a part in causing the crises. However, her concern is that major international NGOs “are not really there to shine a light on the political deadlock and how it is negatively impacting the humanitarian situation, and it just becomes hobnobbing with the elites. It doesn’t become a space where we are the conscience of what’s happening.”
Far from “holding power accountable”, she worries that nobody is even discussing how to prevent protracted crises from starting in the first place.

The alleged abuses committed by its troops abroad stem from a culture of impunity that arose during Sri Lanka's civil war and has seeped into its peacekeeping missions. The government has consistently refused calls for independent investigations into its generation-long civil war, marked by widespread reports of rape camps, torture, mass killings and other alleged war crimes by its troops.

Demons in Paradise, which is premiering at the Cannes film festival, tells of the bloodbath that drove some Tamils to take up arms in the three decade-long insurgency that tore the island apart.
But the documentary also shatters a taboo by insisting that some of most horrific violence the minority endured was at the hands of their supposed defenders, the Tamil Tigers.
And the “hard truth” comes from the mouths of former Tamil fighters themselves.
“By making this film I know that I will have to face harsh, perhaps even hateful criticism from both communities,” Ratnam said.

Local councils, seeking to grab the biggest possible slice of the pie, began to push forward new projects, leading to rapid and uncontrolled expansion of the health system.
(...)
Rather than continuing to pursue the uncontrolled proliferation of poorly equipped and operated health-care facilities, policymakers should consider a more measured approach. Of course, people living in remote areas need access to quality health care, without having to navigate rough and dangerous roads that can become virtually inaccessible during some periods of the year. But outreach services and community health workers could cover these areas much more effectively. The value of such an approach has recently been demonstrated in Ethiopia, where health outcomes have improved.

Haiti would be better off without aid. Or at least, without the bad kind of aid that allows the administration and the elites to continue without changing. It would be better to create the conditions in which change could happen. If we get involved, we should do so in an intelligent way, even if that is less visible in terms of the value it brings. I am not saying that all aid is bad. For example, the international presence should allow us to put pressure on the corrupt state.
Rather than funding road building, which is very expensive in Haiti, we should ensure the laws are in place to look after the roads that are built using international aid. That is even more important than building the road itself.

Afwerki enjoys and never misses the endless commemorations of major battles that the nation celebrates with great fervor. All top government officials are expected to suspend their work and leave town for days to accompany him. During these junkets, in the midst of his endless jokes and ridicule/praise, officials get a feel for their current status with the president.
In addition to the routine public ridicule and humiliation most officials undergo, President Afwerki is known for physically assaulting top government officials including ministers or national figures, such as journalists. His character is taken as the model and it trickles down the lowest ranks.
Having effectively demolished all public institutions and structures, Afwerki’s character and his legacy will take a generation to fix. As he frequently utters in some private occasions, however, is unfazed. The “country is his sole creation whose existence depends on his personal whim.”

Among those who have returned to Timor-Leste there is an overwhelming sense of having achieved a better place or status in life than they had before they went to the UK. That is because the money they earned in the UK enabled them to improve their conditions in Timor-Leste, either through starting or improving a business, or by earning the cash required to get married and/or build a house. Not only did this improve their family’s economic circumstances but often increased their status in the community as well. Those that have become fluent in English and achieved a greater understanding of western workplace culture have an advantage in obtaining higher paid work in offices with international links when they return home.

The digital divide is thus not simply a question of access to digital technologies but about the capacity to make meaningful use of the access to technology. In Madhya Pradesh, as in many parts of rural and semi-rural India, this capacity is directly shaped by gender biased belief and value systems that impose restrictions on the education and free mobility of women.
(...)
While digital economy allows opportunities for ‘flexi-work’ and diminishes the reliance on physical workspaces, digital literacy must not aid in reinforcing the traditional gendered segregation of private and public. Unless accompanied by broader shifts in social and cultural belief systems, it can lead to further restrictions on the mobility and autonomy of women. Therefore, unless these digital skilling programs are grounded within a broader education curricula, they will create a generation of young people that are essentially only application operators, capable of specific tasks

An Indian soap opera whose themes include acid attacks, domestic violence and high rates of abortion of female foetuses has quietly become one of the most-watched programmes on the planet.
India’s public broadcaster announced in April that the audience for Main Kuch Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon – I, a woman, can achieve anything – had, in two seasons, exceeded 400 million viewers “and counting”.

At its very core, this story can help us unpack ethical, practical and theoretical issues of humanitarian assistance and global development. At the same time, it is an accurate reflection of the current state of these industries. Simply solutions are continually offered to complex challenges, girls and women are largely excluded and so-called beneficiaries are seen and treated as powerless, uneducated and poor.

This is a disastrous prospect for our economies, which have been designed to grow – or perish. But it is also a window of opportunity for change. With the disappearance of growth as the silver bullet to success, political leaders and their societies desperately need a new vision: a new narrative to engage with an uncertain future.
In my new book, I argue that as we begin to recognize the madness behind growth, we start exploring new paths. These include: forms of business that reconcile human needs with natural equilibria; production processes that emancipate people from the passive role of consumers; systems of social organisation at the local level that reconnect individuals with their communities and their ecosystems, while allowing them participate in a global network of active change makers.

And I am willing to be crazy and say that a poor farmer, pregnant mother, or caring parent couldn’t care less about yet another peer-reviewed journal article, or its citation.
(...)
Sadly, too many research organizations fail to connect their research to actual impact. They consider impact the work of others, even thinking of it as less important than their scientific discovery.

More recent, and complicated, revolutions have not been as clear cut, as Stallabrass exemplified with Tim Hetherington’s coverage of the civil war in the Congo. He explains that in situations like this: “the ideological issues at play are far murkier, if they are drivers of war at all. The competing sides are generally composed of small, informal militia forces, which may suddenly shift allegiance, and what these forces want from photojournalism is far from certain. These militia groups usually avoid direct combat with each other, preferring to conquer and hold territory by terrorising civilians, and then exploiting their captive populations and land to the hilt. The resulting wars divide people by ethnicity, tribe or religion as groupings from which to loot an area of diamonds, gold or coltan, funding continuing warfare and enriching militia leaders. Violence is often extravagant and put on display—a dismembered and tortured body is dumped in the street, for example—to frighten people into compliance or drive them away. Usually, a wider display of that violence in the media is unwelcome.”

In other words, about half of our armed forces is outsourced to private military contractors. These contractors, to include the company formerly known as Blackwater, are now increasingly owned by private equity firms. Thus, American and international security is largely in the hands of private equity partners.

Wait pic.twitter.com/HYELS5Av8F

— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) May 27, 2017

Just presented our paper on the organizing of social movements #ica17. Metaphor of iceberg summarizes the results: organizing is hidden. pic.twitter.com/oec91DamM5

— Salla-M Laaksonen (@jahapaula) May 26, 2017

“I speak with a lot of nonprofits in the sector and it’s very easy for them to be swept up in all the hype and think, ‘Great! We’ll set up a social enterprise or a business and within months it’ll be generating income.’ But that’s not the reality—there’s no business that does that, much less a business that’s trying to grapple with a tough social or environmental problem. “Potential to fail is going to be part of the game. It’s just part of what you have to cope with. We don’t do ourselves any favours when we’re not being honest about that.”

Subject to increasing levels of economic competition coupled with hierarchical control, office workers are increasingly choosing to withdraw from their corporate ‘cages’ in pursuit of a new autonomy as independent neoliberal subjects. Psychologically and morally detached from their companies, more and more young employees are increasingly willing to take on the financial risk and losses they may incur in leaving their companies; picking precarity over corporate constraint in a determinedly self-motivated (if not quite positive) manner.

This annotated bibliography presents studies of programmes that aim to bring about changes in gender and social norms, and changes in wider attitudes and behaviours. Much of the literature and some programme designs recognise the need to change social norms in order to change behaviours, such as HIV/AIDs prevention and better sanitation and hygiene.

Who are the youth and what is the problem? Are entrepreneurship and self-employment the solution? And what about youth aspirations? Such questions are addressed in this issue of the IDS Bulletin, drawing from the literature on how development research affects policy and noting that it says little about how young researchers move into policy engagement. Articles consider the evidence on youth employment policy and interventions, the politics of youth policy, the changing nature of young people’s work, and the promotion of entrepreneurship.

Some fantastic paintings from our artist in residence @LynnePencil capturing a flavour of Congress so far #UCU17pic.twitter.com/zYtlvTemAU

— UCU (@ucu) May 27, 2017

The data shows that they publish a lower proportion of articles written by women than there are women in the discipline as a whole.
(...)
Here’s the general pattern we observed: The journals that publish a larger share of qualitative work also publish a larger share of female authors. Conversely, the more a journal focuses on statistical work, the lower its share of female authors.

Hospital spaces exist because of the significance of medical advances, experience and achievements, and their relationship to the environment. Street and Coleman use the notion of Foucault’s heterotopia to describe the complex character of the hospital space. Hospitals are places with inscribed meanings, still part of society, but also detached. Places where people are sheltered away because they are – due to their illness and being in need of support – ‘off the norm’. By looking at the example of the ORCI, we find a largely well-equipped hospital which is infused by local and global health politics, international donor practices, developments in health service provision, lay knowledge, and adapted to local conditions.

Warren’s fascination with schistosomiasis, communication theory, and information systems led him to write two major scholarly bibliographic works chronicling the entire literary history of the disease over a 100-year period (p.22).

Of course, there was no peer-review committee and no consensus; the entire group was selected single-handedly by Warren. (…) He prided himself on his personal network, on knowing everyone (p.34).

the project involved 161 scientists and clinicians and 360 trainees, of which 150 were from the developing world, and resulted in the publication of 1800 papers. This was all accomplished at the cost of approximately 15 million USD (55 million in 2015 values)-a prodigious rate of return on the investments by any standard (p.40).

had a vision for how best to align scientific discovery to the reduction of disease. Coupled with his innate excitement for science, he brought knowledge and creativity to one of the most influential positions in international philanthropy and health (p.134)

24m-high @unicef warehouse, fully automated in #Copenhagen, great excursion as part of #2017HHLCONFpic.twitter.com/FfkCEM3Vps

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) June 9, 2017

From my point of view the book was certainly an unexpected gem for my collection. A traditional biography which opens up some interesting reflections on how our (research, development, policy) world used to work, a glimpse into the life of a big man with big ideas and big impact-yet a subject to dominant discourses and existing power relations. A father who had little time for his children and maintained an impressive global network in the pre-digital age.
Research, philanthropy and development have certainly changed. His self-promotion must seem tame in an age of TED-talk celebrities, his all-male events would not go uncriticized and his work at Rockefeller appears to be traditional in an age of disruptive billionaires.
And yet some of his traits, his enthusiasm and vision to think big for a better world can still inspire in our age of micro-management, impact factors and uber-professionalization in many aspects of our work and life.

Interested in #publichealth& #globaldev history? My review of Ken Warren's new biographyhttps://t.co/WLP81e0RvQ#2017hhlconfpic.twitter.com/18TMtRQolH

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) June 9, 2017

A little bit about @TheHumanosphere and aid/dev journalism 1/

— Tom Murphy (@viewfromthecave) June 6, 2017

Najwa Mekki, a spokeswoman for Unicef, said the organization had contracted with Transoceanic through September 2016 “to provide warehousing services in Yemen,” but was not aware that the company was also helping supply the military.
“We would not enter into contracts that would create risks for Unicef operations or our personnel,” Ms. Mekki said in a statement.

lots of people do support development aid, and we should be listened to as well. But the first step to persuading those who are sceptical probably isn’t convincing them to care about people far away. Many of them do think that people everywhere matter. It’s probably got more to do with showing them that there are at least some big, far-away institutions which they can trust, and engaging them in conversations about global poverty that are deeper than the occasional appeal for famine relief.

The domestic programmes of large charities such as Islamic Relief and Oxfam GB offer new ways of seeing development and thinking about poverty. By working on poverty in the UK, they explode the myth that poverty is something that happens only “over there” and to other people. The reasons why people become and stay poor are present in British society too. Work to address these causes is inevitably political, in the same way that development work overseas is political in Uganda, Myanmar or Afghanistan.

Now a new report published on Tuesday by the Feinstein International Center, part of Tufts University, has confirmed both groups’ findings, but also put forward concrete recommendations for aid agencies and the United Nations to follow in order to prevent, and better respond to, cases of sexual harassment and assault against aid workers.
Furthermore, while the Tufts report states that the majority of the victims are women, it also points to troubling levels of sexual identity harassment, blackmail, threats and assaults against LGBT workers, which can be especially dangerous in countries where homosexuality is illegal, and even punishable by death.

"Some of the lessons [from the study] are that maybe we need to think more about teaching girls about healthy relationships and dating," Stark says. Working with men and young boys is critical, she adds: "Boys grow up in their households observing how to be men and take on these hypermasculine personas. Girls grow up thinking that to be a good partner and a good wife is to do what your husband tells you."

While Syrian groups collecting evidence may help fill the gaps left by international mechanisms, political players and international accountability are the only way to solve the deadlock. For Alkatlaby, the message for international actors is simple: “We are doing our work. Please do something with it.”

Why is it seen as neutral and acceptable to build prominent centers of African studies outside of Africa, managed primarily by people who are not from Africa?

Our logframes are fictions – necessary fictions, but fictions nonetheless. This is, perhaps, the fundamental way in which development differs from the private sector and scientific endeavors. Both are artificially bounded systems, in which it is possible to trace causality with some degree of certainty. At the simplest level, for instance, company-level success is a function of profits and losses – can you sell goods and services for more than they cost to produce?
There’s no way to limit the variables in play when it comes to, say, improving education or health outcomes, or the attempt to end genocide. The closest approach that we have are randomized control trials, yet proving replicability across countries and time remains a significant – and prohibitively expensive – challenge.

They say: “I wish I could be more like you, but I just don’t know if I have it in me.”
What they mean: “When I say have it in me, I mean, I’m not sure if I could give up my lifestyle of free boardroom drinks every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Plus, our company gave us free iPads last year. Have you seen this amazing app which can help predict your wife’s mood based upon the timing of tidal waves? Amazing…”
You should say: “Sure, I had a promising career as an accountant/brain surgeon/plumber once too, but then I started to realize that this is where I wanted to be. How does that app work again?”

But Bangladesh is a very different society, it’s very fractious and competitive, people do resent the closing of the political space. Some say it is directly related to the rise of extremism and that’s been a bit of a shock in Bangladesh. I think that might be true but I don’t know. What is worrying is the closure of the space for civil society and the media could have a real impact on the government’s transparency and responsiveness. So for instance if we were to have a major food crisis somewhere remote now, it’s not entirely clear to me that the media would free to report it, and that the government would feel pressured to respond. It’s something we have to watch.

Number of people who have access to Internet https://t.co/njDUyX6Ig6pic.twitter.com/u8J0kOYC43

— Nick Kumar (@BigNickKumar) May 30, 2017

And you can be forgiven, I suppose, for not really caring about that other Canada. How can you? You don’t see it. You don’t know anyone who lives there. You rarely hear about it on the news, and when you do, the Prime Minister or some other politician is always there to reassure us they really care and they’re making things better. There will even be a few Hoop Dancers on the Canada Day stage, because we’re very inclusive and sensitive in this Canada. So sensitive, in fact, that when someone satirically proposes a cultural appropriation prize, we are collectively incensed. Things like that aren’t tolerated in our Canada.
Meanwhile, in the other Canada, Angela Cardinal was shot and killed seven months after her ordeal in the courthouse. In the other Canada there are 89 communities without safe drinking water. A child is more likely to be sexually assaulted than to graduate high school. The murder rate is worse than Somalia’s and the incarceration rate is the highest in the world. Imagine if that was your Canada. Imagine your rage if your children lived there.

The West is busy manufacturing ‘pseudo reality’. And in this grotesque pseudo-reality, several deprived individuals like starving chess players, street vendors and slum dwellers are suddenly becoming rich, successful and fulfilled. Millions of others, all around them, continue to suffer. But somehow, they don’t seem to matter much.
There is a new celebrity group in making – let’s call them the ‘glamorous poor’. Those ‘exceptional individuals’, the glamorous poor, are easy to digest, and even to celebrate in the West. They are swiftly and cheerfully integrating into the ‘mainstream’ club of the global ‘go getters’ and narcissist rich.

As things stand, capital is misallocated. Nepotism, racial bias, misplaced pattern matching, and so on, have a higher bearing on who gets capital than the quality and soundness of the idea. The local landscape is littered with such examples. Do local founders have to change and be more aggressive? Perhaps, but the investors also need to realise that when you come to Kenya, 48 million Kenyans will behave and act like Kenyans, so perhaps it’s a good idea to adapt to how they think and act and not expect them to behave like Americans (or Europeans) because, after all, the target market is Kenya/Africa.

Remember that if a data-based claim seems too good to be true, it probably is. Conclusions that dramatically confirm your personal opinions or experiences should be especially suspect.

The report records the insights that were drawn from two rounds of an expert panel, in which 30 key humanitarian actors with great experience in the field participated.
The goal of the expert panel was to establish an informed, evidence-based study about some of the most pressing challenges that are currently hampering the effectiveness of aid, as well as to collect observations of highly experienced practitioners on trends and recent experiences in the field.

This report examines the impact of international counter-terrorism frameworks on the work of civil society organisations. In particular, it explains the role of the Financial Action Task Force in setting international standards that affect the way in which civil society organisations are regulated by nation-states, their access to financial services, and their obligations to avoid proscribed organisations
and other entities deemed to pose a ‘terrorism’ risk.

Research in contentious environments often produces stories that wow search committees and make for entertaining conference presentations. But experienced field researchers often view the same stories that impress their colleagues with deep concern. We worry about an intellectual trend that increasingly rewards researchers for “out-dangering” one another (often with dubious scholarly gain). This doesn’t mean scholars should abandon fieldwork; it means that we should take the practical and ethical components of its planning and implementation more seriously. We can start by asking simple questions about first aid, check-ins, transport safety, and data protection.

Evidence is not what you think. Ask a researcher what evidence is, and they’ll likely talk about methodological rigour, randomized controlled trials and systematic reviews. Ask a policymaker, and they’ll tell you about talking to a head teacher at a local school, or inviting an expert to testify before a committee. In order to see research feed meaningfully into policy in developing countries, we need to understand how policymakers in these countries view evidence and what their needs are. Our Evidence-Informed Policy Making Toolkit aims to contribute to this, in part by focusing on four types of evidence used for policy: statistical and administrative data, citizen knowledge, practical experience, and (last but not least) research.

As a result, I find myself wondering how much of the right now people miss due to these patterns. What might academe be like if we were encouraged to celebrate the present moment instead of wishing for the future? What might it be like if we came together against the broader cultural patterns that create such conditions? Until those conditions can be changed, I also wonder what little things each of us can do in our own lives to ease the dreaded should we face and help to lessen the negative consequences of such patterns.

A platform recognises its biggest asset is not the real estate nor the intellectual property, it is the intangible network of people who need services and those who can deliver them.

Are NGOs ready to transform data into our most valuable asset?

NGOs will be valued not only by the amount of cash grants they manage to disburse, but by the size of their networks and the positive connections made between actors in each particular environment while delivering the cash grant (be it beneficiaries, local NGOS, private sector, government, etc.)

imagine if humanitarians responsibly analysed the information we collect anyway on beneficiary needs, and used it to understand them and their contexts so well we would know what beneficiaries need before they need it.

How do we marry data protection, cyber security and humanitarian principles into operational standards?

I would be a bit more careful in predicting a future of the humanitarian sector based on data-driven cash programs where NGOs mimic global capitalistic platforms.
I would also like to see a much more critical engagement with the concept of platform capitalism and the (hidden/outsourced) cost in an ‘industry’ that by definition should work for the marginalized delivery person rather than the Silicon Valley hedge fund manager.
Ideals and practices based on social justice, equality and changing power relations should always guide the work of NGOs-and sometimes those efforts cannot be simply measured by data collected along the supply chain...

@NRC_Norway: NGOs are the best last mile service provider of #cashtransfers& donors should invest in what they do. @GHDInitiative meeting

— Alex Jacobs (@AlexJacobs16) June 15, 2017

Essentially though, the NWOW is about closer collaboration between humanitarian and development response through the pillars of: “collective outcomes”, “comparative advantage”, and “multi-year timeframes”.
(...)
These interventions, like the World Bank’s engagement in Yemen, bring important new funding and capacity to humanitarian crises. But they can also carry significant risk due to the perilous nature of the security situations in the countries in question.
“There is a risk that premature development intervention can be undone quite quickly,” cautioned Nadine Walicki, a senior strategic advisor at the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva. “There have been cases of new housing provided for returnees, for instance, literally being burnt to the ground.”

There's a simple reason why "bridging the gap" between humanitarian and development will never work, which has nothing to do with principles pic.twitter.com/eM0EqnUHWu

— Paul Currion (@paulcurrion) June 12, 2017

Congo has few committed and powerful allies. In fact, a large part of its budget is supported by the very Western governments demanding accountability, and its army is backed up in the east by the largest United Nations peacekeeping force in the world. These paradoxes point to a critical, uncomfortable truth: In Congo, the biggest stumbling blocks can be apathy and a lack of political will. We can find out who killed Mr. Sharp and Ms. Catalán just as we can deliver justice for the hundreds of Congolese who have lost their lives in the Kasais. We just have to care enough.

Canada still only spends approximately 0.26% of its GDP on international aid, compared to the 0.7% benchmark established in 2005, and critics have said that calling for a new era and a fundamental shift without allocating any new funding seems disingenuous. “Feminism should not be used as a buzzword or a way to easily brand a political policy. And if you are going to label it as feminist, it must have real substance. Unfortunately the Liberal budget did not provide a single penny for international aid,” said Robert Aubin, a Canadian MP and international development critic from one of the main opposition parties.
Meanwhile, others have pointed out that Canada announced just last week a dramatic increase in military spending – by approximately $13 billion CAD, or a full 73% – and find it difficult for the government to claim that not even one additional dollar of aid will be available to implement the policy changes. What does this mean about how serious the Canadian government is with their new approach?, critics argue.

The disaster maps may well have value in terms of strengthening Facebook’s brand, but Meier said he had also observed “a genuine interest in making sure this has a measurable impact”.
“I’m hoping that… it sends a bit of a signal to other Silicon Valley companies. I hope these companies realise they actually have an ethical responsibility,” he added. “They’re becoming like the new utilities of our time. When the power goes out… they have a responsibility to get the power back on.”
Microsoft has already been through a process of rethinking its involvement in humanitarian action. Although it has long had a humanitarian action department, “it’s been inconsistent in terms of what we do and where we do it,” said Jane Meseck, senior director of global programmes at Microsoft Philanthropies.

Emergencies are becoming more and more protracted. We’ve seen this in terms of both the conflict itself lasting for many years as well as the forced displacement: A refugee is a refugee for over 10 years now. The [weaknesses of] the Band-Aid approach and the division between development and humanitarian response … are now becoming more apparent. The system is clearly not able to function.
(...)
The coordination system is less of command control, and more of a consensus system. And I think that needs to change. And number two , we have developed systems—the most well-known is the cluster system, which has become far too process-heavy—and what we’re often measuring are not impact or outcome indicators but really simple process indicators. We often don’t know the effects of what we’re providing, but rather only the number and type of medicines have been provided, and that’s insufficient.

Why are these geniuses working on destroying jobs? Well, in part just because it is cool and an interesting technical challenge, but also, at least in part because policy based restrictions on labor mobility make low-skill labor—which is globally abundant and cheap—artificially scarce in the US.
(...)
And, the technologies pioneered and developed in the US and Europe and Japan then blow back into poor countries. Automated pay-for-parking at airports, developed in rich countries to save labor costs at massively distorted prices, creeps into Uganda. As I recently flew home from giving a lecture about promoting economic growth in Tanzania I was confronted with automated check-in at the airport in Dar-Es-Salaam.

On digging about their background, the guys had just gone upto to high school, no one had gone to college, but they had learnt from another guy who had taken an electronic repair course at a TVET college. These guys had learnt organically by observation and tinkering, until they got it right. While I was there, another guy joined, and was given the least expensive gadget to start repairing, I was later to learn he is the apprentice.
Given that they had done something that the swanky Samsung customer care service center up the hill would not do, I asked them, if they would consider employment say by Samsung, there was an emphatic NO! They liked the flexible hours ( that day i had to wait until 2.00pm for the shop to open, generally they show-up after midday and work until 7.00pm). Second reason, is they made more money than they would make at Samsung. Based on the foot traffic in my time there, they would easily be making KES 5000 ( USD50) a day err halfday, even when split three way, it is enough to make a living. Finally, the work culture in the shop, was anything goes, no HR, no dress code and definitely no office drama.

In Myanmar, the gender digital divide is systemic, skills are not keeping pace with access, and local actors are key.
The gender digital divide in Myanmar is systemic. It is detrimental to women’s and girls’ ability to participate in and benefit from development processes, and a brake on Myanmar’s ability to prosper.
Gender is not the biggest challenge related to accessing ICTs. Two issues are more problematic for women and girls:
a. Men and boys often have more control over ICT devices and more opportunities to acquire ICT skills.
b. Women and girls often feel that ICTs and digital content are not relevant enough to justify the time and expense.
There are not enough local actors - whether government agencies or nonstate institutions - championing digital inclusion. Stakeholders often are not aware of how the gender digital divide impedes development.
More stakeholders have incentives to integrate ICTs into their work than to make gender equality a priority.

The United Nations has confirmed that its top official in Myanmar is being moved from her position.
Diplomatic and aid community sources in Yangon told the BBC the decision was linked to Renata Lok-Dessallien's failure to prioritise human rights.
In particular, this referred to the oppressed Rohingya Muslim minority.
Internal UN documents - shown to the BBC - said the organisation had become "glaringly dysfunctional", and wracked by internal tensions.

The findings showed substantial successes in, for example, the empowerment of women, better access to education, and increased economic opportunities. But it also showed that community cohesion increased while local governance structures were strengthened.
The results indicate that climate policies can play an important role in facilitating the growth of local institutions and addressing peoples’ vulnerability and fragility – even if, as in this case, it was somewhat unintentional.
(...)
Kashwan’s research, and my own, shows that reducing emissions through small hydropower development or reforestation can do more than just mitigate the effects of climate change. It can have wider effects that deliver positive returns in all sorts of ways. This includes reducing the opportunity for terrorist groups to recruit vulnerable and marginalised people.

So what are the positive drivers of engagement with global poverty? Three big ones stand out.
Social norms – as respondents increasingly agree that other people are engaging and that other people admire those who engage with global poverty, they become more likely to engage themselves.
Moral case – as respondents become more persuaded by the normative case for aid, i.e. that it is the right thing to do, they become more engaged with the issue. This might not sound all that surprising but, for instance, we do not see a parallel effect when people increasingly agree that UK aid brings benefits.
Personal efficacy – as people increasingly believe that they can make a difference, they are more likely to become engaged.

Social media is increasingly becoming a driver of conversation on several topics including global development. The World Bank’s Public Opinion Research Group conducts Country Opinion Surveys in about 40 developing countries every year and found that the number of global opinion leaders using social media to get information on global development is steadily increasing.

Alongside these stories we urgently need to ramp up our campaigns on the causes of poverty and situate them within this wider narrative. While many aid agencies do campaign on issues such as unfair trade deals, climate change or tax havens, we have failed as a sector to locate this within a bigger story about poverty creation and systemic change when talking to the public. Instead, we have focused on aid and charity – which, though it helps, is no long-term solution – and told people that their donation will end poverty. When it doesn’t, are we surprised that they begin to lose faith?

In return for mentoring/accompanying practitioners, academics could be given access to new sources of data from monitoring and evaluation of aid programmes or other sources – gold dust for any academic career.
And what of the practitioners? Everyone in the aid business says they want time to read and reflect, so the standard answer is often ‘why not pack them off to a university for a week every year so they can do just that?’ But it’s not that simple. The change of rhythm between activism and reflection can be jarring. When we sent our senior advocacy team to IDS for a reading week a few years ago, IDS was horrified by their attention deficit issues – they just couldn’t stay off their blackberries. A mentoring scheme would respond to the needs and rhythms of the practitioner, rather than the need to fit around university timetables (eg by boosting their coffers through summer schools).

It’s in that casual inclusiveness that Everyday Africa finds its voice. The Instagram feed, at 3,762 posts and counting, is catalyzing a new form of journalism that thrives not on the decisive moment but rather on a reality told in small pieces, from multiple perspectives. In doing so, it’s engaging a new generation of African photographers with newfound access to amplify their voices via social media, the internet, and mobile phones. And it’s giving them a platform—an audience nearly 330,000 followers strong, of Westerners and Africans and people of African descent alike—through which to define their own narrative.

My sister just spent £220 and 2days of her life applying for a visa to visit me in Nigeria. Good luck getting tourists to Lagos Lai Mohamed.

— Stephanie Hegarty (@stephhegarty) June 14, 2017

But as more and more designers pour into complex social situations (whether new graduates or seasoned professionals), this unintentional blind spot can be disastrous. Perhaps this would explain why it’s taken the design discipline so long to get a credible foothold within the social sector. Why would an executive director of a non-profit expose their staff to a hubristic designer, let alone to the population they’re serving?
(...)
Should designers get out of social impact design altogether? Absolutely not. Designers are uniquely trained to be comfortable working with ambiguity without losing hope. And that right there is a powerful asset.
But if you shy away from working in the social sector, you’ll miss out on opportunities to change the world and yourself in the process. All it takes is a more reflective approach—one that acknowledges the hidden forces at play in the world around us.

This is about power.
Put another way, these instructional approaches by men are not an invitation to have respectful dialogue; they are an attempt to put me back in my box.
Over time I’ve come to understand that men explaining things to me has nothing to do with what I’m writing about. It’s the fact I’m writing at all. I’m taking up space and having a public voice.
(...)
According to Dr Flood, probably not: “Mansplaining is about power and entitlement, [so] it’s probably less likely to be practiced by men who have other social positions, such as ethnic minority men or gay men or trans men or indigenous men. That means that they’re on the other side of those patterns of power.
“Gender isn’t the only story here. Gender intersects with other forms of social difference and social inequality and that shapes whose voices get heard and who is spoken to in patronising ways and who isn’t,” he says.

In the age of digital development, don’t forget the psychological benefit from slowing down and making something special to drive faster and deeper behavior change.

At a time when the core arguments of the Dependency framework are most pertinent, they disappeared from mainstream debates on ‘globalization’ and the academic curricula…[F]or a new generation of scholars and students, this volume should be a key that opens the door to an archive and a new way of reasoning about the current global order…[W]hat is at stake is more than the economic. What is required is thinking and acting on the multi-dimensional faces of dependence…—as much economic as it is political, social, and epistemic… confronting the different dimensions of domination and dependence.

Focusing on the classification and analysis of expenditure, the paper has not sought to make any judgements about the value or benefit of these expenditures to the aid recipients. While this approach does not capture the quality of assistance provided to crisis-affected populations, the study aims to lay the foundation for further discussions about cost-efficiency, the quality of humanitarian assistance and the added value of each actor in the chain.

In this context, the year also saw journalism facing a crisis of a fundamental nature spurred on by technological advancement, political power play and global inequality — a crisis that challenges basic notions of truth, relevance and trust.

Venkatraman explores the impact of social media at home, work and school, and analyses the influence of class, caste, age and gender on how, and which, social media platforms are used in different contexts. These factors, he argues, have a significant effect on social media use, suggesting that social media in South India, while seeming to induce societal change, actually remains bound by local traditions and practices.

David S. Janzen, professor of computer science at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, is one of them. He has for years taught a Java coding course on Udemy, which his profile shows more than 6,500 learners have taken.
In an email, Janzen said he has no interest in teaching a course on Facebook.
“I am skeptical about Facebook entering online learning,” Janzen said. “I expect they will have some success just based on their size, but I don't expect them to become the dominant player in online learning. There is a lot of healthy competition. Also, I'm nervous about a deep integration of social media and learning. The mix of constant interruption (social media) with a need to focus (learning) seems counterproductive.”

Our current day porters
Have the opportunity
To reapply for their jobs
With this new company
Slash community.
This reapplication process
Will no doubt remind them
How much they belong
To a community,
Just not quite the same community
That they belonged to before.