As a kick-starter for more discussions, my post will focus on three aspects: the (American) hero narrative, the responsibility of media organizations to engage with content from such combat organizations and implications for volunteering/voluntourism and the humanitarian project.
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No matter how many times they try or who bankrolls their efforts, an American guy shooting at people in a far-away land will not be the solution to end war and conflict…

"How much more can you squeeze out of Scandinavia?" - @NRC_Egeland says the conventional funding cake is maxed. #ECOSOC

— Ben Parker (@BenParker140) June 22, 2017

The coming days will see a flurry of publications and announcements as the humanitarian community takes stock of commitments made at the World Humanitarian Summit last May and assesses reforms. The diary includes a formal UN consultation and a blizzard of panels, launches, and side events in Geneva.

Rather, the key conclusion is that newspaper headlines are not an accurate reflection of what people think about aid. Nor do they appear to have an immediate, direct and mass effect on public perceptions. If government officials do interpret public attitudes towards aid through media headlines, they are wrong to do so.

Finally, evidence tells us that NGOs work where they have more freedoms. The more that Kenya moves away from democracy, the less likely NGOs are to concentrate their efforts there — be it for education, health care or providing humanitarian assistance in war-torn neighboring countries, like Somalia and Sudan. Nairobi could lose its appeal as a hub for NGOs throughout East Africa, which would also mean a loss of jobs and income for Kenyans involved in these services, in the NGO sector, and for global organizations based in Kenya.

Going forward, I would like to see the WHO do more to address financing issues, both for its own budget and the health budgets of low- and middle-income countries. Member states keep asking the WHO to do more with the same budget, while resisting proposals to “sunset” some areas of work that fit the mandates of other UN agencies. Such a full-menu approach impairs strategic leadership. Overall, the tendency in international public health is to move away from official development assistance towards greater reliance on domestic resources. I worry about this. In large parts of the developing world, especially in Africa, small-holder farmers in the informal sector remain the backbone of the economy, severely limiting domestic resources derived from taxes.

Going further than this, towards a transformation into knowledge economies, will need far more concentrated effort than simply increasing internet connectivity. One barrier highlighted by our findings is the short supply of locally produced knowledge.
Without investing to shift the trends shown in our research, Sub-Saharan Africa is facing a worryingly diminishing role in the world’s digital knowledge economy.

This is what Zuckerman has been up to in Uganda. He’s evangelizing community-owned and community-sustained spaces within the settlements. And he sees this kind of open, bottom-up approach as a template for building not just the future of refugee settlements, but also the future of cities worldwide.

Indeed, the main flaw I found in the book lies, somewhat perversely, in its underlying optimism. The persistent critique of humanitarian actors neglects an acknowledgement that humanitarians are more often than not acting in spite of a wider political and legislative environment on immigration that is largely designed to discourage (im)migration entirely.
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The authors state towards the conclusion, in reference to these policies, that ‘few people want to feel they are a mean bastard’, whilst neglecting to mention that acting like a ‘mean bastard’ is implicit in the British government’s hostile environment around immigration. Indeed, the current British administration is likely to welcome the recommendations of the book, emphasising as they do solutions not much further beyond the borders of the country of origin.

It is disillusioning for all of us, and particularly for our ‘partners’ in the developing world, to have business as usual re-badged as partnership.
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How many of us are working in partnerships where the more powerful partners genuinely make themselves accountable for the quality of their partnership practice, to their less powerful partners? Do we build in time to explain our organisations, drivers, incentives, risks, to each other, or are we too busy for that? Do we conduct regular relationship management health checks alongside our project management assessments? Do we plan standard processes like annual plans, reports, monitoring and evaluation, communication, to reinforce partnership principles, or do we run these processes the way we have always run them? Do we cherish the diversity which draws us to a partnership in the first place, or crush it by applying standardised monitoring and reporting requirements?

So the statistics about Rwanda’s economic growth published by the World Bank, and then by most media outlets, are based largely on a single source: the Rwandan government. Few Rwandan journalists, economists or analysts dare to question the government. This is how the government’s statistics become the truth, in Rwanda and abroad. Such statistics are supported by images of Chinese-made buildings in Kigali, and Transparency International surveys of Rwandans who say that their president and government are not corrupt.

Drawing on a long Anglo-American tradition of economic warfare and blockade, the counter-humanitarian trend in London and Washington is both morally distasteful and practically stupid. When international aid fails to feed the hungry and treat the sick, extremist projects flourish. If security strategists and xenophobes think that humanitarian crises will burn themselves out at a safe distance they are mistaken: the biggest demographic outcome of famine has always been migration – the Gulf countries are learning this lesson, as millions of Yemenis cross their borders. The threat to the values of the humanitarians coincides with dramatic demands on their knowledge and skills. Their best strategy is to take the initiative and propose that starvation be added to the list of crimes against humanity.

The report shows that humanitarian community continues to grapple with the problem of its ability to stay and deliver effectively and responsibly in highly insecure environments. Progress has been made in a number of areas. Humanitarian leaders consistently talk of their commitment to staying and delivering where at all feasible, and we have seen notable instances where UN agencies, NGOs, and others have stayed and delivered at great risk. Yet despite these improvements, this study also broadly finds that not enough has changed, particularly at the field level, since the publication of To Stay and Deliver in 2011.

In addition to our annual analysis, the 2017 report introduces salient topics to support the reform of crisis-related financing. This includes analysis on the links between poverty and crisis, risks and resources and across several of the Grand Bargain commitment areas such as transparency, localisation, earmarking, cash and multi-year funding.

However, the report finds that there are significant socio-economic and gender norm constraints influencing a woman’s decision to participate. Accordingly, the report introduces a comprehensive framework to address the drivers of these gender gaps and outlines a series of policy recommendations to improve the labour market outcomes of women.

3) social media monitoring of violence should be undertaken in conjunction with other reporting systems that seek to overcome inequalities in digital access and use

By this measure, most countries are not enforcing the laws on their books and enforcement is not getting better over time.
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We conclude by arguing that better laws must be accompanied by better enforcement and monitoring in to delay marriage and protect the rights of women and girls.

There is limited evidence on their effects on a range of intermediate and final socioeconomic outcomes for agricultural producers and wage workers. There are positive effects on prices. But workers’ wages do not seem to benefit from the schemes. Income from the sale of produce is higher for certified farmers, but overall household income is not. Context matters substantially for the causal chain between CS interventions and well-being.

But when looking outside of their direct grantees, the perspective of program officers changes. Only about half of program officers who responded to our survey believe that nonprofit organizations, in general, are well run. Even fewer think that nonprofit organizations are well equipped to assess their performance. Just 39 percent believe that nonprofit organizations have the knowledge necessary to assess the results of their work, and fewer than 10 percent believe that nonprofit organizations have the resources necessary to conduct such assessments.

Even as a growing number of wealthy donors step up to give, many are holding back and the far upper class as a whole is only parting with a tiny sliver of its wealth. Some of the very richest Americans—like Jeff Bezos and the Mars family—give barely anything all.
Why don’t the rich give more? There are various reasons, including that giving away money wisely is harder than it looks. It takes time, focus and energy—which can be in short supply for busy people still involved in their careers. Also, many wealthy people may simply care more about preserving and growing their family's assets than about helping out others.

But their universal fascination with charismatic leadership shows that behind the tech economy’s democratic façade beats a deeply authoritarian heart. For Horowitz, while the “culture” of a company or a nation is embodied by its employees and citizens, it can always be channeled by a wise leader to specific ends. The enslaved people of Haiti could never shape their own culture—only L’Ouverture, CEO of the Haitian Revolution, could.

"Going viral: real world vs academia"#oai10pic.twitter.com/Jwtmo4cYHp

— FuzzyLeapfrog (@FuzzyLeapfrog) June 22, 2017

With some exceptions noted previously, MOOCs are mainly a technology business, focused on providing a return on investment (even for nonprofits like edX) by targeting the large nondegree professional development and technology training market. Though the MOOC experiment over the past five years has resulted in many positives, this era also reminds us that when it comes to degree attainment, there really is no magic bullet. The hard, in-the-trenches work of helping the students of today get and remain focused, learn, and stick it out to degree completion remains the province of mainstream higher education -- MOOCs or no MOOCs.

The point is, institutions have been calling for public scholarship for the obvious reasons. Attention can be equated with a type of prestige. And prestige is a way to shore up institutions when political and cultural attitudes are attacking colleges and universities at every turn. And, faculty are vulnerable to calls for them to engage. We’re all sensitive to claims that we’re out of touch and behind on neoliberal careerism. And some of us actually care about engaging publics (shocking, I know). But the prestige chase on one hand and eager faculty on the other means we haven’t asked what institutions owe its constituent members for public engagement.

The question of open access is “much broader and more complex” than just access to research, Beauchamp said. The shared objective of open access is, according to Beauchamp, encouraging users to take the content and share it without any technical or licence barrier.

Tomorrow's news: "Under-paid, under-trained, un-professional peacekeeping soldiers commit horrible abuse during mission-UN to blame" :( https://t.co/uJAh1Zwqfu

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) June 29, 2017

The UN said the review of the Congo-Brazzaville deployment found "the nature and extent of existing allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse, in their totality, point to systemic problems in command and control".
"These problems have also been compounded by issues related to the preparedness, overall discipline, maintenance of contingent-owned equipment, and logistical capacity of these troops," it added.

Resolution adopted @ #ECOSOC humanitarian segment weaker than hoped. Key western states pushed aid access while G77 emphasized sovereignty.

— Heba Aly (@HebaJournalist) June 23, 2017

Linton’s memoir about her surprisingly harrowing gap year in peaceful Zambia, “In Congo’s Shadow: One girl’s perilous journey to the heart of Africa,” was ridiculed by Zambians and the literary world for relying on untruths and cliches, with some comparing her to the satirical Instagram creation White Savior Barbie. The self-published book has since been withdrawn from Amazon. Yet, the hashtag #LintonLies hasn’t affected Linton’s career—unsurprising in the current White House.

While humanitarian grants do play a vital and principled role, they are not the right tool to tackle the underlying risks, causes and long-term consequences of crisis that these ‘left behind’ populations face. This demands a much fuller toolkit, which we begin to map out in the GHA report – one which contains everything from insurance to contingency funding and long-term concessional loans. Understanding these and other instruments, and tracking how much is going where and how, is crucial for effective, context-specific responses. So, as the minutiae of Grand Bargain commitments are negotiated, those who care about saving and improving lives also need to become adept at watching this bigger picture.

The charity says it has 40,000 excess boxes of donations, some of which will be available for Grenfell families, some of which will be sold through its shops and some of which will be sold for recycling

The move follows a decision by the six-nation East African Community – Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and South Sudan – to fully ban imported second-hand clothes and shoes by 2019, arguing it would help member countries boost domestic clothes manufacturing.

Buriticá has had a taste of gold, and how the riches it provides carry their own price to be paid. But there is no going back, not when the secret is out. One of the richest gold deposits on the continent lurks just beneath the surface. And if the Buritiqueños do not exploit it, then the outsiders, whether in the form of a multinational company, mafia mining magnates or young miners with little regard for even their own futures, will.

Now, say advocates of transparency and global tax reforms, it appears that many large corporations, with the backing of the International Monetary Fund, are pushing the U.N. to alter its definition of “illicit flows” to only limit illegal activities and ignore legal means corporations avoid paying taxes.

PDF files are readable to the naked eye, but stripping the formatting and layout to get to the words and numbers on the page often results in messy data. Aidan McGuire, of SensibleCode, which runs an online service to convert large PDF tables, says that for open data, PDF is “not an ideal format and should be avoided”. (IRIN has used the service on this and other PDF documents).
PDFs may attract scorn from open data advocates – they’re known sometimes as “data graveyards”, but choosing a format and type of report depends on who the audience is. The ASR report may be trying to be too many things to too many people, according to Simons. National government officials in aid-recipient countries may be well-served with narrative reports in PDF format, but NGO and civil society users often want the ability to sift and analyse data, he explained. UNOPS confirmed the report had a “wide audience with different needs and demands”.
Another loophole is that vendors can be anonymised at the discretion of the UN agency – more than $1.7 billion of contracts have an “unspecified” vendor. Tens of millions also have the vendor withheld for security reasons – a legitimate practice in high-risk countries.
UN managers may not relish opening their books so that civil society and journalists can pick holes in their spending.

Isn't it interesting that there are wonderful empty places in this beautiful Kenya waiting for someone to fall in love with them? That you can land in a place you have never been, where “falling in love” gets you 88,000 acres of prime ranch land? The casual erasure of the colonial violence that made Gallman's acquisition possible, and the human and social cost of it, is striking.
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This is not to say that the conflict in Laikipia is not complex, or that there are easy answers. Climate change is leading to more frequent and more punishing droughts. Add the mix of demographic pressures and politics is an explosive one. But we have to tell the story right. Framing the conflict as between a noble conservation queen and a savage mob of impoverished locals is not only irresponsible and cruel. It is also simply not the truth.

Behind all this there was an underlying anxiety that framing all this as the ‘global civil society crackdown’ could be somehow overly Western. I have yet to see a comprehensive ‘Voices of the Poor’ type piece of research that asks different forms of civil society (including CSOs but also grassroots organizations, sports club supporters, cultural groups, faith organizations) how they see the current threats and opportunities, but one participant described the feedback his organization received as ‘you frame this too negatively – there are huge opportunities in disruption as well as negatives’.
As for how to respond:
Big focus on the limitations of global narratives. Problems and solutions are deeply local, with INGOs and other outsiders having only a limited role (and having to be careful about their actions making matters worse – eg by highlighting the aid dependence of their local partners). Outsiders need to make it a priority to canvass the opinions of and be led by local civil society organizations, and be cautious about launching into generic global campaigns.

All the teachers I spoke to appreciated the regular paycheck. But they chafed at how they were managed, often by unseen bosses communicating with them via text or robocall. Some Bridge staff members described what they saw as a stark contrast between their hopes for Bridge and a grittier reality. One school administrator, an academy manager, described how the pressure to ensure that parents made their payments on time was disheartening. ‘‘I didn’t realize how hard it would be to talk to parents,’’ he said. ‘‘They’re ill, they’re out of work, they had a fire. No one is in the house who’s making any money. How can they pay when they have no money for food?’’ And working at Bridge, teachers said, can disrupt a career: Instructors are required to sign an employment agreement that includes a noncompete clause that prevents them from working at other nearby schools for a year after they leave.

“I won the public vote, I won the social media scene, I won the staff votes – all of that, but it didn’t matter at all,” says Clark pragmatically, without bitterness. “Clearly, the security council wasn’t looking for someone like me, from a small, independent-minded country, having been an independent-minded leader, who looks at the evidence and makes decisions accordingly.
“That’s fine. That’s the outcome.” Clark’s experience of the process is the subject of a documentary, My Year with Helen, that screened last weekend as part of the Sydney film festival.

Were the civil rights, feminist or LGBT movements seeded by small grants? What about democracy or human rights movements overseas? Can small grants really make a big difference? I’d like to see more evidence. That said, putting money and power into the hands of poor people and communities makes more sense than the old-school, top-down approaches. The bottom-up style of grant-making has also influenced others in philanthropy to become better listeners, so that today’s clean-water or cookstove projects are more likely to succeed than past efforts. Supporting grass-roots groups also strikes me as more likely to be effective than starting yet another NGO or “social enterprise.”

CRS Madagascar contacted the spatial analysis company ESRI, to estimate walking times for project constituents to figure out where they could better place food distribution. ESRI estimated walking times based on steepness, streams, and walking speed in different conditions.
This process created a distance map that told CRS where were the best sites to place food distribution. New locations were based on an optimal walking distance that was no more than 5 kilometers for most participants. Once CRS moved the distribution location based on walk times (not proximity to roads as most of us do), they recorded a 30 percent increase in participation.

These particular concepts have helped me not only to frame problems in a particular lens, but to also guide the process for how to move forward. Or just fun conversation.

Victor Orozco, a World Bank economist deeply involved with a multi-partner evaluation of MTV Shuga, has come to praise edutainment as one of the most cost-effective ways of getting people to do things differently. Conducted in Nigeria with 5,000 young people, the evaluation found that those who had watched the show in community screenings were twice as likely to go for an HIV test half a year later. Viewers were 43% more likely to think that HIV is a punishment for having multiple partners. Among women, chlamydia infections dropped by 58%.
However, the study also highlighted that viewers felt sympathy for a character who committed domestic violence. This finding demonstrates the importance of media development organisations systematically checking audience responses to their programmes.

In development banks, the appraisal of projects should include a comparison of the proposed solution with alternative options. Only: in practice that hardly ever happens. And, I do believe that an update to the evaluation criteria could incentivize the evaluation practice to address issues of importance to decision-makers. For instance, an evaluation that would evolve from an assessment of project relevance in its policy context to one that produces evidence whether the most impactful development challenge was addressed – as suggested in our blog series – would be a step towards answering questions in a more complex and uncertain world.

I do not think of myself as a huge risk taker. A lot of planning goes into travel outside Kabul: we do not just jump in a taxi and head for the hills. I was inexperienced and a bit ignorant in Badakhshan, and probably pushed my luck more than I would these days. Now, working with colleagues, I’m often the one who questions going here or there and often I’ll be the one telling journalists to wrap up their interviews because it feels like we have been in one place too long; but at the same time, I think I have a better sense of what is reasonable risk than someone sitting behind the desk in New York, or London, or even Kabul. It is something you can only learn from experience, and I trust my instincts and those of most of my colleagues on that.
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Then Zahra and her mother kneeled by the grave, it was probably more confronting, for me, than when I took the picture of their dead father and husband on the operating table in the ruins of the hospital. Photographing children in pain, I find, is the hardest thing to see. And it’s so intrusive to be that close in moments like this. I suppose I try to diminish myself – make myself small and quiet, take the minimum number of photographs necessary.

For example, know-why is essential to humanitarian action as it tries to understand the causality of things like why people are hungry or sick, why violence is taking certain forms and why people are displaced. Know-who is important if humanitarians are to understand who is affected, who is responsible, who is vulnerable and who is capable. Know-that in humanitarian action is the base knowledge of certain facts, particular humanitarian disciplines and the laws and rights that govern armed conflict and displacement. Know-how represents the art of practice in humanitarian action – the skills, practices and expertise which help to protect, assist and respect the human being in extremis. All these different types of knowledge come together to form humanitarian knowledge – a body of knowledge that is the opposite of ignorance in humanitarian action.

How is inequality politicised?

Why has it fallen in Latin America?

And what can we learn from this?https://t.co/1DOUrUb8r0

— Alice Evans (@_alice_evans) June 29, 2017

But many remember him as a principled advocate for downtrodden nations throughout the world, unafraid to seize the floor of aloof international bodies to advance local struggles. This readiness to repurpose imperial institutions in the service of anticolonial objectives was on full display in 1986, when he had faced down the United States in international court — and won.

Add the fact that in INGOs and NGOs there are usually more women employed in the first place – although, despite all the proclamations and commitments to women’s rights – often there are still more senior men – and you begin to see a pattern where our change making sectors are actually reliant on woman working over-hard and not thinking too much about their own needs. There is irony here of course as many of our organisations also work on women’s rights but working on these things at a distance without really thinking about the radical things we could do internally to make these commitments a reality is an example of the values disconnect I was talking about. Where our values are not being fully lived and that again contributes to burnout and a sense of frustration for us, for staff, in not-for-profit organisations.

My time in the field and comparison with my own phone really made me realize, that even though statistic screams that South Africa has 100% mobile penetration, it is not even so. South Africa is a majority poor country. Yet, although there are many mobile interventions deriving from policy, pushed into South African programmes, it seems that end user was not considered, basically, the people of South Africa. In almost every interview I did, or people I met throughout fieldwork could not afford the phones imagined for the mobile interventions.Going back to my drama, my fieldwork really showed me that a phone is not everything, and one can actually live a happy content life without it.

The idea of “disruptive innovation” caught fire in Silicon Valley, Drezner argues, because it “conformed to a plutocratic worldview in which success favors the bold, risk-taking entrepreneur.” Atop this enthusiasm, Christensen built a lucrative brand, producing eight books and founding the Forum for Growth and Innovation at Harvard, his own consulting company, and a boutique investment firm.In 2014, however, nearly two decades after Christensen debuted disruptive innovation in the Harvard Business Review, historian Jill Lepore eviscerated the theory in a widely read essay in The New Yorker. Lepore found that Christensen’s case studies were ambiguous and overblown:
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What intellectuals need is the same as what everyone else needs: a society that prioritizes human flourishing over private profit, and strong political networks that guard public goods against the prophets of an atomized, high-tech future.

Why do you think reflective practice is important to philanthropy practitioners generally?
JR: It helps us gain insight into what we’re doing and what we need to pay attention to. It’s not magic. It’s intentionality. When we were planning the reflective practice workshop, I took the concept to my book club of women who have worked with funders. From their experiences working with funders, they were really excited about it for organizations, not just individuals. How do you move philanthropic organizations to a state of reflection? We can be so full of ourselves and oblivious. It’s the failing of our field. How do we listen better, reflect on what’s working and what’s not, get out of our protective place, and recognize that our voice isn’t the only one in the room?

Scores of innovative digital projects were created to coordinate this engagement and support the process of refugee integration. Two years one we asked – what has happened to these projects? And what potential do digital approaches have for refugee integration? This report is a product of our research, comprising 78 interviews with digital projects, refugees and volunteers.

The definitive guide to how to optimally show off at seminars HT @JustinWolferspic.twitter.com/BHZrHCCjVi

— William Easterly (@bill_easterly) June 23, 2017

1. **Warning**; this is the start of a political-science inside-baseball [thread]. It's about self-promotion.

— Daniel Nexon (@dhnexon) June 24, 2017

This is thoughtful straight talk, a must read. I have a few contrary thoughts, but you read this first... https://t.co/kh0zYd5aqI

— Tom Pepinsky (@TomPepinsky) June 24, 2017

The other issue of course is that there are not many women willing to self-promote. So those of us who do get called on A LOT.

— Stephanie Carvin (@StephanieCarvin) June 25, 2017

But history shows that betting against science publishers is a risky move. After all, back in 1988, Maxwell predicted that in the future there would only be a handful of immensely powerful publishing companies left, and that they would ply their trade in an electronic age with no printing costs, leading to almost “pure profit”. That sounds a lot like the world we live in now.

The governments backing Radio Okapi (…) were using the rich world’s tax dollars to buy high editorial standards in a country flooded with mediocre private and community-based radio stations, all trying to pick up the slack for the dud that had become the state broadcaster (…). A national radio in the locals’ indigenous languages (pp.51-52).

“I mean…How do you know what’s going on every day?”
“We live here,” said Rigobert, his voice taking on a higher-pitched lilt of confusion.
“People in the community talk and we pay attention,” said Tumba (…) (p.63).

Still, no one could tell me for one iota of a second that out lives in Kindu were any less real than any other. Come 9 or 10 PM, the journalists and I would pick ourselves up and slump out the door, same as anyone else after a long day’s work (…). Mamy had managed to pick up typhoid fever. Matthieu fell sick with malaria. I knew Rigobert was midway through dusty cement piles of home renovations (…). So we had real-world problems. And not just real-world gripes, like never having enough paper for the printer or always having to rely on UN dispatch to get anywhere. Because in the Congo, in Maniema, the real world was also full of cruel, unforeseen events that had a way of making our everyday problems seem at once luxurious and trite.
(…)
“That was a friend on the phone. Just now,” said Gabriel. “He says they’ve found two Rwandans. And a mob is stoning them. They’re killing them.” (pp.190-191).

In an eyeblink – that fast – three soldiers gripped him steady as a vice while another took out a long wooden baton. They stripped him down and started lashing. The strikes where rhythmic. They struck the spine in the small of his back where there was bone and stinging skin. They hit is buttocks and keep on coming, one after another (p. 266).

Once out, Mamy shook her head and laughed. It hadn’t been so bad, she said. The best part of it was that she’d left with a ton of stories. She first quipped to her father, then later to Rigobert: “They really hadn’t been thinking, putting a journalist on the inside like that!” (p.338).

One final word on Radio Oakpi: when recognizing the network with its Free Media Pioneer Award, the International Press Institute lauded it professionalism and success in drawing in a full third of the country every day, calling it a shining example not only for media in other conflict or post-conflict areas but for radio stations around the world (p. 342).

Unlike some aid worker memoirs, Jennifer Bakody manages right from the start to frame her story around the team of Congolese journalists, thereby avoiding the stereotypical pitfalls of a young Western woman going to ‘find herself’ in a remote place in the deepest and darkest and most dangerous part of Africa that all too often provides the backdrop for these books.
Her story is essentially about good journalism and good radio in a remote place-and that remote location happens to be in DRC in 2002.
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Radio Okapi Kindu is definitely among my favorite aid worker memoirs now and a great addition to this emerging genre that continuous to surprise me with fresh voices and approaches to communicating development in engaging and different ways!

A great addition to #globaldev memoirs! @JenniferBakody on her time with @radiookapi in #Congo! https://t.co/PGxBDNjI1hpic.twitter.com/G2aOiJTAAq

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) July 7, 2017

Last week I spent 24 hours with with Susan and her 5 kids in her homestead in Kuria, Migori County. This was a chance to immerse myself in the life of someone living well below the poverty line and reflect on what it means for my own efforts to tackle poverty. Despite the potential shallowness of a privileged expat like me dropping into a poor person’s life for 24 hours in the full knowledge of returning to my nice house and comfortable life, it was an incredible experience, raising more questions than answers.
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How do we approach development through the eyes of people like Susan? When we talk of development, we often focus on helping the government deliver services to poor people, making sure there are health services, schools, and water. But people like Susan can’t even get to them, even if they are physically close. What more can we do more from the individual upwards rather than the service down. We’d see the deep socio-cultural barriers more clearly — like the practice of Nyumba Mboke — and how it holds families like Susan’s back even if there are reasonable services available.

Analysts say the growing role of cash-based aid and the juggernaut of the World Bank moving into the humanitarian space are the two most visible areas of change. In other parts of the ecosystem, disputes and inefficiencies continue: The humanitarian community has not yet shown it can put “egos and logos aside” to forge other fundamental changes, one senior analyst summarised.

The working group is currently unpacking the meaning of the term “refugees” — and whether it should cover, for example, asylum seekers, refugees distributed under the European Union’s agreed quota system, migrants or some combination. It is considering the period within which sustenance costs are eligible and whether the timeframe should be changed from the current 12 months.
The DAC is also examining the methodology used for assessing costs and whether it can be based on estimates per refugee — as is currently done by some donors, Harcourt says — or whether it must be based on real individual costs attached to individual people.

My experience is that too many INGO’s are not confident of their status in regard to modern conflict. They rely too much on external guidance, encouragement or pressure from major donors, peer agencies, affected community representatives or perceived public pressure reflected in the media. Syria’s war has shone a powerful spotlight on the importance of organisational skill sets: the experience of operating in insecure, low-intensity or post-conflict environments are not qualifications to operate effectively in a hot conflict. Nor do they equip organisations with the ability to negotiate the delivery of aid across asymmetric battlefields. In Syria, where the civil war has spawned multiple combatant armies and militias, domestic and international, with overlapping and shifting objectives, even defining the conflict is difficult. The complexity of Syria’s asymmetric war has provided lessons that must be recognised and understood by humanitarian organisations.
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I would also argue that the inflexible cooperation architecture currently favoured by UNOCHA and other agencies has no place when responding to the humanitarian needs of civilians trapped in asymmetric conflict. Coordination systems that distract from the business of delivering vital assistance and do nothing to enhance the impact of humanitarian response will inevitably cost lives.

Breaking Leaks: World Bank approval of Ivanka Fund is bureaucratese for "not sure what this does, but try to do it right somehow"pic.twitter.com/etJ6BAiXQZ

— William Easterly (@bill_easterly) June 30, 2017

Senator Reynolds also argues orphanage tourism should be a category of modern slavery because around three-quarters of the children are not orphans — they have at least one living parent.
"Some of these orphanages are well intentioned but most of them are for profit and some of them are run by organised crime because ultimately children in these facilities are a commodity," she said.
Sinet Chan, who grew up in a Cambodian orphanage, has pleaded with Australians not to donate to or volunteer at orphanages.
"The support of orphanages has created a thriving industry in which children are separated from their families and subjected to terrible abuse and neglect, as I was — being used as a commodity to generate funding," she said in a submission to a federal parliamentary committee investigating if Australia should have a law against modern slavery.

We cannot expect that US institutions will embrace a more radical project of reciprocity without pressure. If UW and other institutions of higher education really want to build more equitable global partnerships, we suggest treating our partners as co-faculty with appropriate titles and compensation; supporting reciprocal exchanges and opportunities for students from host countries to participate alongside our US students in their home countries; and finally, situating reciprocal study abroad squarely in university efforts to address diversity and equity. This final step would not only address issues of access for US-based students, but begin to engage with the neo-colonial power relations that continue to benefit US institutions of higher education, often at the expense of our “global partners.”

And so genuine activists get frustrated and seek escape. They seek ways to block out the disempowerment process. They refuse to participate while the senior manager is doing a staff performance appraisal and are indifferent to organisational rituals like one-to-ones, meeting the press or quarterly reviews with the donors. The movement-turned-NGO rebels by not sending reports to the donor within the stipulated time and saying “the computer crashed”, even if that means the donor giving you a red mark and threatening discontinuation of funding.
A good leader is sensitive to the disempowering ecosystem created by a large, process-driven NGO/donor. That leader provides the emotion that donor-pleasing NGOs are incapable of having. They have the power to bring joy to the team, discuss their issues, vent their frustrations and encourage their ideas. More importantly, a leader protects the interest of the movement, not because that is the expected “professional” leadership process, but because they are an empowered human being and knows why they are a leader.

Interesting parallels between development studies fieldwork & voluntourism -Sharon & Rochelle. Reinforce inequitable relationships?#ctd2017pic.twitter.com/Z38s7qxbhs

— Sally Everett (@DeputyDeanARU) July 4, 2017

The analysis reveals important information about job creation and wage trends. It demonstrates that the number of middle-income earners, who are likely to comprise a substantial proportion of a middle class, is small and not expanding any faster than gross domestic product (GDP) growth. This has important implications for Kenya’s economic and social development.

In short, Humanosphere’s hiatus is important because it represents a further narrowing of the already limited range of sources of information about humanitarian issues – just at a time when it is needed most.
(...)
News about humanitarian and development issues is generally ‘not commercially viable’ because it is both expensive to produce and rarely attracts mass audiences or significant advertising revenue. As a result, donor funding is one of the few – and often the only – substantial source of funding available.
Despite its importance, though, there are ‘significant limits’ to a donor-funding model – as Humanosphere’s experience illustrates.

I’ve also been through enough mission-born-but-eventual-long-distance relationships that have failed because of my ‘passion’ to continue helping the world’s children (read: spending hours in a sweltering office staring blankly at excel spreadsheets to fulfil student loan obligations) that I can’t help but laugh at the naivete of my lustful 24-year-old colleagues. But at the same time, I can’t picture myself in my forties or fifties in a small village with bucket-showers and movement restrictions that force me to take a car for the 100 metres between my house and office so I can have lunch.

Evidence is an important part of the decision-making picture, but it is only one element. As evidence advocates, we need to be conscious that even where there is reliable, relevant evidence, and demonstrable change – it’s not necessarily evidence that brings about change

I needed to update my CV so I did it all through google autocomplete and soon I will have every job pic.twitter.com/pjCBtUhtmw

— TechnicallyRon (@TechnicallyRon) June 29, 2017

A new paper by Yeganeh Rezaian, Joan Shorenstein Fellow (fall 2016) and Iranian journalist, shines a light on the difficulties women reporters face while working in Muslim countries, as well as the importance of the stories they tell.
Rezaian, who formerly worked for Bloomberg News and The National, was imprisoned in Tehran along with her husband Jason Rezaian of The Washington Post. She shares her own stories of being silenced and harassed, as well as those of other women reporters. In addition to imprisonment, women journalists in Muslim countries can experience online harassment and blackmail, defamation of character, unwanted advances in exchange for access, and the expectation to ask softball questions of officials, among other problems. Rezaian writes that such tactics not only oppress journalists, but are also part of a “larger goal of silencing women and defusing grassroots attempts at gender equality.”

A great many people in finance have now reached the point where they would like a way to identify Fintech technologies which are unlikely to solve real problems, work any better than existing technologies, are generally impractical or simply need a lot more explanation.

That’s interesting work that reveals the clear existence of glass ceiling effects on Twitter. “We show that the Twitter glass ceiling effect, typically applied to females, also occurs in Twitter for males, if they are Black or Asians,” say the researchers.
This has significant implications for the way inequality can be tackled. A first step is always understanding the nature of disparities, and this work goes some way to achieving this.
But the next stage of working out how to level the playing field is a much more difficult task.

Ten of the 70 CEOs who committed to sleeping out call it quits before McDonald’s breakfast is served at 5am – although one does return at 4:50am in a fresh new suit ready for the day ahead.
One by one, cabs come to collect the dignitaries and by the official 6am finishing time only half a dozen CEOs are left.
Virtues have been signalled. Connections have been made. Money has been raised, and, of course, people will be helped.
Sure, $5 million could have been $6 million if those CEOs who signed up but didn’t fundraise had of followed through. And $6 million could have been $10 million if the rest of the actually participating CEOs had hit their targets.
And perhaps a bigger impact could have been made if the media, the homeless and the general public were allowed to cross paths with the decision makers in any real and meaningful way.

But the truth is that running a platform for culture creation is, increasingly, a charity operation undertaken by larger companies. Servers are expensive, and advertisers would rather just throw money at Facebook than take a chance on your weird, problematic network. Generating and incubating internet culture has little market value in and of itself.
Which means Tumblr has to hope for patience and kindness from Verizon while it seeks a way to make money. It’s not an impossible task (though Verizon’s hope that Yahoo will be the content arm of a major advertising operation is not promising for the company). There are signs that the internet-culture machines are finding ways to make themselves sustainable: YouTube is not shutting down anytime soon, but pre-roll ads weren’t doing the job, and now it has a premium subscription service in order to collect revenue directly from users. The next hubs of internet culture will learn from the mistakes of the past decade, hopefully by doing one of two things: developing a way to collect revenue directly from its audience, like Twitch or Patreon allow now, or by eschewing the notion of a sustainable business at all. It can be easy, in the era of just a handful of megaplatforms, to forget that the internet used to be a much more decentralized place, where things went viral across disparate platforms and websites and forum threads, rather than within a single one.

You know if all the major news organization didn't rush to cover the exact same thing all the time "distractions" wouldn't even be an issue.

— Jonathan M. Katz (@KatzOnEarth) July 3, 2017

We commissioned research in the UK, Jordan, Bangladesh and Niger, to listen to and learn from those who contribute their images and stories, as well as members of their communities. The research explored:
what motivated people to agree to Save the Children filming or photographing them or their children
how people experienced and perceived the image-making process
how people felt about their portrayal in the resulting Save the Children communications.

This working paper is intended as a primer – outlining current global polling data on public attitudes, and analysing what the literature has to say about the drivers influencing these attitudes.

“In every instance in which you can make a difference, take personal responsibility to be inclusive and fight back against implicit gender bias,” the authors conclude. “Remember, women also know stuff. You should ask them about it.”

In the slimy version of networking, one connects with others in order to gain opportunities to publish or otherwise disseminate one’s scholarship. A model based on sincerity, depth, and generosity, however, inverts that logic. Networking doesn’t enable scholarly achievement; instead, scholarship itself is the most important form of academic conversation — i.e., networking. The second act of generosity that every scholar can engage in is service. As academics, we perform a tremendous amount of unpaid labor. We serve on the boards of scholarly organizations and journals, review manuscripts and grants, work on committees. We do this labor because our profession would collapse without it. But we also do it to contribute meaningfully to our scholarly communities.

My 15 tweets argument for building cooperative open access & data infrastructures in academia before its too late. https://t.co/bDzWIQpSPe

— Alberto Corsín (@acorsin) June 30, 2017

The analysis disentangles the ontological and moral side of these claims, showing how OA changes the meaning of knowledge from a good in the economic, to good in the moral sense. This means OA can be theorized as the moral economy of digital knowledge production. Ultimately, using Boltanski and Thévenot’s work on justification, the article reflects on how this moral economy frames the political subjectivity of actors and institutions involved in academic knowledge production.

At the end of the day, when all ‘white Land Cruiser’ jokes are told, all ‘white elephant’ projects are evaluated and all voluntouristic photos by white people are uploaded to Instagram, development in general and development communication in particular will continue to have an important role as witness to injustice and marginalization, as an amplifier of dissent and as a connector between cultures, stories and those who need a virtual or physical hand that reminds them of humanity

So my first question from the headline remains frustratingly unanswered: Can we transform the repetition of virtual development debates into something bigger? I have yet to find evidence.
(...)
Be generous, be the anti-troll you want to see online and be gentle with those who reach out and make an effort to better understand the complexities of development.
(...)
I am grateful for all the critical discussions and engagements I can enjoy through our digital community and the latest link review I am finishing now is one regular proof that a lot of good, albeit not always new, stuff is happening all around us!

When South Sudan’s civil war broke out in 2013, much of Equatoria – the country’s breadbasket ­– managed to stay out of the conflict. But that respite was short lived. As the government army began purging the region of perceived opponents last year, it triggered the world’s fastest-growing refugee crisis, with the United Nations warning of a potential genocide.

Nigerian authorities have mastered the habit of ignoring the cries of marginalized groups or subtly fueling the maltreatment of their members, giving rise to public sympathy for demagogues who ultimately resort to violence to gain optimum attention for their grievances.

It is RICH for a French president to criticize Africa this way. Rant forthcoming. https://t.co/QCOZ14bWne

— Laura Seay (@texasinafrica) July 10, 2017

Longer-term programming enables community-driven development to take place in practice, not simply in theory.
“What I find appealing about the Aga Khan Foundation is we are working farther upstream and we are working towards root causes of poverty and social tension and try to do something about it before something happens – whether it is the provision of health services or education,” Kocher said. “Many of these problems are not simple issues and are not able to be fixed in the course of a short-term grant cycle.”
The work may be secular, but the religious roots of AKDN provide a kind of organizational stability that enables AKDN to invest using time horizons that are rare in international development.

Even if the grants aren't big, they are high in trust, connectedness & social capital. @hodgsonjj on role of community foundations #hrfn2017

— (((zohra))) (@zohramoosa) July 13, 2017

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame has insisted that Rwanda will proceed with its plan to phase-out importation of second-hand clothes despite threats from the U.S. that the move could lead to a review of his country’s eligibility for duty-free access to the American market. President Kagame recently made the remarks while addressing a news conference moments after submitting his nomination papers to the National Electoral Commission (NEC).
Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and South Sudan decided to fully ban imported second-hand clothes and shoes by 2019, arguing it would help member countries boost domestic clothes manufacturing.

The DRC’s precarious political and security situation is not solely or even primarily due to UN failures, but it does not reflect well on MONUSCO or its predecessor mission, MONUC, which have cost UN member states almost $18 billion since 1999.
(...)
The challenge in financing negotiations is to find a balance between national political priorities and the operational imperatives in peacekeeping missions, given the mandates set by the Security Council and the strategic realities facing the missions. For MONUSCO, at least, this year’s negotiations tipped perilously toward cost-cutting as an end in itself, rather than reflecting a clear vision for a more effective mission, or a more peaceful DRC.

Now in Philadelphia, Sumo is still grappling with the psychological impact of the time she spent working with the burial team. Zio says that he'll often find her alone on the couch, curled up into a ball and crying. But Sumo isn't an American citizen, and he hasn't been able to find affordable insurance for her to see a specialist.
She says that her worst moments come when she thinks about the orphaned children she saw, crying alone in the homes where their parents lay dead, with neighbours too afraid to take them in or bring them food.
(...)
At one point, while interviewing Foday Gallah, he made a comment that resonated deeply with my own experience. "It felt like my identity couldn't be anything other than a survivor. I was just a survivor," he said. In some ways the attention the illness brought me was more overwhelming than the disease itself, something I try to remember every time I've interviewed someone since then.

A heartwarming story in Kenya that will challenge your ideas on aid with a new experiment that hands out out cold hard cash – and what the villagers do with it, is up to them.

Four of Madonna's six children have been adopted from Malawi. The hospital ward is named after her 11-year-old adopted daughter, Mercy James.
She described her legal battles to adopt Mercy, comparing them to her fortitude in pushing for the hospital to be built.
"I fought for Mercy and I won. So I am here to say, 'never give up on your dream.' Love conquers. If you do things with love in your heart, you will conquer."

And though Beyonce herself has not indicated that she's visited Burundi, her representatives have. Ivy McGregor, director of philanthropy and corporate relations at Parkwood, was part of a Parkwood team that traveled to Burundi in April to plan for the new initiative.
"We traveled throughout the provinces to uncover the need. We asked one question: How can we help?" McGregor told a crowd at the Global Citizen Festival in Hamburg, Germany on Thursday, in a video posted on YouTube. "And there was always one resounding answer — safe, clean water."

Kutcher hosted the conversation on Facebook on Monday, in which he immediately pointed to the fact that many people on the internet berated him for the questions he originally posted.

On this flawed basis, the report’s conclusion is what the World Bank wanted to hear: the districts receiving funds for World Bank projects are, according to ILO, not affected by forced labor. The remainder of the country remains at risk of forced labor, yet not a single specific case could be identified.
The ILO monitoring report gives succor to one of the most oppressive regimes in the globe today, and buttresses the façade essential to continued labor abuses and corruption in Uzbekistan’s cotton industry, which occurs sadly with international complicity.

The anonymity and distance helped Philip Morris approach delegates covertly. On the second day of the conference, a white Toyota van pulled away from the front of the Hyatt Regency hotel – where Philip Morris had its operations room – and headed for the FCTC treaty venue.
(...)
The Delhi conference ended as it began, with treaty Secretariat officials not knowing where Philip Morris had been or what it had done. The company had flown in a team of executives, used a squad of identical vans to ferry officials in New Delhi, and then left town without a trace.

Their fight for a toilet inside their home - which is considered unclean according to social norms - quickly becomes a struggle for social change as they campaign for functioning toilets for the local community.
The film's promoters said the movie in particular spotlights women's safety, basic dignity and privacy.
"The film is the true story of millions of women in rural India who ... walk a few kilometres away from their homes just to be able to relieve themselves," said the statement.
"At break of dawn or fall of dusk, these women face the risk of rape and/or kidnapping – an inconceivable threat for most of us when routinely going to the toilet," it added.

“We’re doing our very best to limit the exposure of marine habitats to the analyses of sub-Saharan energy infrastructure, universal basic income, and automation in the labor market, but it could be months before we know the full extent of the damage.”

When I asked the 40+ Philippine farmers how many of them were using Facebook Groups to improve their farming techniques, every hand went up. I asked them how they used the group, and all the normal uses came up: reading others’ posts, sharing pictures of their own progress, and following links to outside sources.
When I asked about impact, all the farmers reported learning something useful on a regular basis from their farming group, and many of them were actively finding new business partners through Facebook Groups as well.

700 posters from the archive. Gold for students of charity history/changing use of images (both good and bad).

Electoral participation is a requirement for any serious socialist project. The Left, however, faces a set of strategic dilemmas that do not apply to parties and movements aligned with the current system. In the midst of the global crisis of the 1970s, Ralph Miliband identified the dual mandate of socialist movements in bourgeois democracies: they must be both “parties of government” and “parties of struggle.”
(...)
a compelling account of the rise of right-wing politics in the US, one that concentrates its fire on the leading culprits: business elites and their political functionaries. Together, they remind us that power under capitalism is ultimately located outside the electoral arena, and must be defeated at its source.

In this sample, in nearly every significant finding, women of color experienced the highest rates of negative workplace experiences, including harassment and assault. Further, women of color reported feeling unsafe in the workplace as a result of their gender or sex 40% of the time, and as a result of their race 28% of the time. Finally, 18% of women of color, and 12% of white women, skipped professional events because they did not feel safe attending, identifying a significant loss of career opportunities due to a hostile climate. Our results suggest that certain community members may be at additional risk of hostile workplace experiences due to their gender, race, or both.

The survey shows that women and men are equally well prepared when entering the UN, but there was a drastic discrepancy in career progression among men and women. In fact, it was found that women who left the UN progressed further in their career paths than those who stayed.

We investigate whether having an advisor of the same gender is correlated with the productivity of PhD science students and their propensity to stay in academic science.
Our analysis is based on an original dataset covering nearly 20,000 PhD graduates and their advisors from U.S. chemistry departments. We find that students with an advisor of the same gender tend to be more productive during the PhD and more likely to become
professors themselves. We suggest that the under-representation of women in science and engineering faculty positions may perpetuate itself through the lower availability of same-gender advisors for female students.

New working paper:

Q. Do refugees impact voting behavior in host countries?

A. Maybe a little, but not really.https://t.co/Tky9Hts0Typic.twitter.com/Ujr7eLV9bg

— John Holbein (@JohnHolbein1) July 11, 2017

In offering personalized content geared toward users’ individual interests, recommender systems are assumed to reduce news diversity and thus lead to partial information blindness (i.e., filter bubbles). We conducted two exploratory studies to test the effect of both implicit and explicit personalization on the content and source diversity of Google News. Except for small effects of implicit personalization on content diversity, we found no support for the filter-bubble hypothesis. We did, however, find a general bias in that Google News over-represents certain news outlets and under-represents other, highly frequented, news outlets. The results add to a growing body of evidence, which suggests that concerns about algorithmic filter bubbles in the context of online news might be exaggerated.

What does it mean to be a project lead – a principal or co-investigator?
What must you know before you take on such a role?
What problems or issues should you anticipate in applying for and running or co-running a project – problems that are not akin to anything you would have experienced in doing smaller or independent work (e.g., your PhD)?
How do you successfully navigate these problems?
How does project leadership abroad differ from project leadership done in one’s own home country/region?

None of this is to deny that if you have strong primary research to report it is better to push it out in journals wherever feasible. But book chapters can have valuable exploratory, discursive, synoptic and review roles. And they can carry new findings too, especially in start-up fields and with good editors and editing. The old problems from the early digital phase, when for a while chapter texts became literally unfindable, and authors passively left things to publishers to promote their work, no longer apply with much of their previous force. However conservative your editors and publishers may be, you can get your chapter noticed, read and cited in the communities that matter to you.

I've just heard a new term for international actors repositioning their business as usual to be seen as localisation #localwashing. Luv it!

— Anne Street (@AnneCAFOD) July 19, 2017

Networks of traffickers are suspected of recruiting and deceiving children into orphanages to gain money from abroad, the Haitian state research authority (IBESR) believes. Indeed, Lumos found evidence of parents believing their children would receive a better education in orphanages, orphanage directors paid “child finders” to recruit children to the orphanages, and in some cases families were paid $75 to give their child away.
“Many parents are deceived into giving up their children, purely so that unscrupulous individuals can make a profit,” said Lumos’ CEO, Georgette Mulheir.

"They … challenged the local mafia by presenting real arguments against the benefits of being recruited as a pirate. They are the pirate conflict’s unsung heroes. Unlike many Western-led awareness campaigns, they were both matter-of-fact and unpretentious," Yusuf says.
The director himself says he showed illiterate young men in the coastal cities videos of how pirate ships were blown up and statistics proving how few pirates actually struck it rich.
(...)
Puntland's smuggling gangs collaborate not only with pirates and terrorists, but also with some of the region's politicians. These politicians are dependent on shady arms deals because the UN has had an arms embargo placed on Somalia since 1992.

A leader like this is needed at the helm of the WHO. Dr Tedros will understand that Africans can be included in partnerships rather than dominated in the quest to find solutions to the unique challenges that the continent faces.

Its macroeconomic framework – fiscal policy discipline, privatisation and deregulation – smacks of the neoliberal ‘Washington Consensus’ that was thought to be a thing of the past. The CWA has no room for nuanced recommendations that take Africa’s particularities into consideration. It does not distinguish between emerging economies and conflict-ridden poorhouses; countries that export and import raw materials; coastal states or landlocked countries; states in West and East Africa; or nations that are heavily indebted and those that are not.
The CWA is heavily influenced by the Anglo-Saxon financial model, which is based on stocks and bonds. In contrast to that, East Asia and Continental Europe financed their successful development models through retained corporate profits, commercial bank corporate credits, and taxes and mandatory levies for public sector investment.

In recent years, friction and antipathy within the UN team have been something of an open secret in Myanmar. Humanitarians, who see rights abuses at the root of crises that involve displacement, hunger, violence, and statelessness want to raise the alarm, according to several insider sources. They voice resentment about development people who keep quiet for the sake of relationships with the government, which they have to work with to improve people’s lives. Each thinks the other is morally bankrupt, naive, or both.

“Most of the urbanisation was in the last three years, now more than 70% of paddy fields are gone, and even the remaining land has been bought up by real estate developers,” says Ward Committee Chair Kamal Bahadur Thapa, who blames the lack of local government for the unplanned growth.
The irrigated fields of Pokhara and Lekhnath used to be famous for their rice diversity, with famous varieties like Jetho Budo, Jhinua, Ramani and Sili, but many of them are now on the verge of extinction.
“Even on the remaining fields, most of the rice is of the hybrid or imported varieties, our own rice is being lost,” says farmer Sabitri Bhandari, 54, whose father sold all the family's land to property developers.

Today in the workshop, Pushpa Raj Shilpakar, one of the project’s most gifted carvers, is bent over a statue of a two-toned goddess: half old, half new. She has gone stub-nosed, details having blurred through the centuries. Flicking away woodchips, Pushpa Raj carves her new hand into a plain block, shaping fingers, and with his finest chisel, her minuscule nails.
Asked if he had worked on similar designs before the earthquake, he gave a wistful smile. “Nothing like this,” he says. “These designs – it’s like they were made by a god. I still can’t understand how they did it.”
(...)
Many Shilpakars feel indentured to the trade, unable to pursue better-paid jobs because of their truncated schooling, Surya Bahadur says. He would rather his children not join their ranks. Several of the craftsmen’s younger relatives, seeing the precarious finances they would inherit, have shunned the grueling apprenticeship to qualify as a carver, a rite that can take upwards of a year. This trend could spell the end of traditional woodcarving.
Tirtha Ram is buoyed only by the significance of temple restoration, which he frames as his “actual” work, as opposed to his “commercial” work.

Perhaps an alternative way to view this issue is not to consider architects as designers of individual living units but instead as professionals able to provide expertise at various timescales of temporality, carefully considering the economic suitability of proposed design solutions while helping to steer global funds more locally. Looking towards the future, to really address the issue of mass displacement, we must prepare for the next generation of ‘global cities’ and leave behind the idea of developing out of town camps—by definition unable to sustain themselves long-term—and instead look at how we might revise low-cost and collective living in our existing urban centers.

One variant of these meetings is the dreaded "lunch and learn" - one of my pet hates. There are many reasons why I dislike "lunch and learn";
- they assume that community meetings can't take place in "real working hours" and need to be held at lunchtime (thus perpetuating the idea that "KM is not Real Work";
- they assume you can eat and listen - that you don't need to pay full attention;
- they assume you don't need to take any notes (with your hands full of sandwiches);
- they assume that the people who turn up will be passive listeners and not active contributors. After all, how much can you contribute with your mouth full of food?
This is the worst way to transfer knowledge - a one-way presentation to a bunch of people who are busy doing something else.

Conference Call Bingo pic.twitter.com/XZYgAWGfyL

— Boing Boing (@BoingBoing) July 14, 2017

As we expected, people who are more easily disgusted are more likely to support bans on public sleeping and panhandling than those who are less easily disgusted. But they are just as likely to support policies providing aid or housing to homeless people. We also found no evidence that disgust sensitivity predicts more negative attitudes toward homeless people in general.
(...)
These findings suggest that when media coverage mentions concerns about cleanliness it amplifies the effects of disgust on exclusionary attitudes. Policymakers who want to combat homelessness should bear in mind that much of the public supports their efforts — but only from a distance.

Don’t shut them out because their politics are outdated or they don’t wield the same language. If we are interested in building mass movements to destroy mass oppression, our movements must include people not like us, people with whom we will never fully agree, and people with whom we have conflict. That’s a much higher calling than railing at people from a distance and labeling them as wrong. Ultimately, according to Garza, building a movement is about restoring humanity to all of us, even to those of us who have been inhumane. Movements are where people are called to be transformed in service of liberation of themselves and others.

Weekend thoughts: Can we transform the repetition of virtual #globaldev debates? Do we have to anyway? https://t.co/P0TY7eNU5spic.twitter.com/pk8fBduhmI

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) July 14, 2017

First, there’s this expectation that the writing must be universal, it must fit everybody in. At the same time, you need to be Black and feminist and all the other labels, and perform those identities in a way that makes you digestible too. Also, on top of that, you can’t alienate white audiences too much. I’m very aware of this, while also trying to write outside of these expectations and be truthful and honest. Which is difficult, because there are too many people watching you, and once you speak, they won’t allow you to change your mind about some of the things you’ve said. I want to be allowed to change my mind.
(...)
I guess in my dream world, the work is sitting with people who have influence and power to shift things. They are people who make decisions that impact the rest of us. But more than that, the work is in the hands of people who think or believe that they don’t have the right to access imagination. I want those people to have the space to dream, sit, read, and indulge in joy and pleasure. In my dream world, the work is shifting something. And not in an airy sort of way, but in a tangible way, which goes back to my answer.

But, as she explains, "we don't need more social businesses, we need more social change" and that requires more than just starting new businesses. It requires system change leadership. Daniela explores the difference between being a social business founder and a system change leader and then unpicks how we talk about, fund, and educate for social entrepreneurship, as well as what needs to change in our education and funding systems to fuel more system change leaders.

And the data that May earlier described as “robust?” They are up for sale. At least, that’s what a leaked Bridge presentation, meant for investors, from 2016 suggests. In this presentation, Bridge outlined new profit-making opportunities, including the sale of customer information to lenders and insurance companies, and increased profit margins on school lunches and student uniforms.
What has happened to May and Kimmelman’s dream? Opposition from governments, non-governmental organizations and trade unions seems to have slowed down Bridge’s growth considerably. It also looks like the company is not going to reach its planned target of two million pupils by 2018. The company wrote me that it currently has just over 100,000 pupils.
Not all of Bridge’s innovations are bad, of course. Absenteeism among teachers appears to be lower at Bridge schools than at state schools. Juul says that other schools could also take Bridge’s electronic payment methods as an example as a way to tackle corruption.

In India, a Tesla is literally from the future. An Indian future that’s coming, but one built upon a universe of customers that need to own a moped first, then a Kwid, then something else while they wait for infrastructure to catch up.
Indian driving culture may take a lot longer.
The Indian and American markets may be half a world and many decades apart, but human nature is fundamentally the same. Understand it, and Tesla’s appeal here is obvious. So is that of the Kwid over there, where for $4000 you can also buy a piece of the future. It won’t have the Model 3’s bells and whistles, but it will have a lot of things you haven’t seen before, at a price you can afford.
And there’s nothing more disruptive than that.

How does a journalism student that doesn’t have faith in American journalism, answer what they’ll do with their journalism degree? You could have an hour long debate about the merits of journalism and journalistic systems, the viability of journalism outside of economic and political influences and devoid of ulterior motive, and your solutions to the current media system…. check, check and check.
Yet with this comes the startling but expected realization that I have no solution. How does one remove the deep ties to political influence and market viability? Can you exist outside of the media system and still become as successful as those working within it? How do you reconcile your increasing nihilism about American systems and societal systems in general with your idealised view that someone needs to fix it?

Although we would all prefer to die a hero rather than a victim, the heroising of aid workers raises
at least two problems.
The first is that it produces a being set apart from the rest of the human race – better, more worthy.
The second –and the most problematic for the professional sector we are concerned with here – is that treating aid workers like heroes can also lead us to believe that death is an integral part of the system, an occupational hazard. It seems to us that this is where the real danger lies: setting sacrifice up as a virtue within a sector that has made “humanity” one of its cardinal principles.

We argue that, while blockchain-based solutions have the potential to increase efficiency and improve outcomes dramatically in some use cases and more marginally in others, the key constraints to addressing these challenges often fall outside the scope of technology—and that these constraints need to be resolved before blockchain technology can meet its full potential in this space.

We find that Twitter and Facebook users differ substantially from the general population on many politically relevant dimensions including vote choice, turnout, age, gender, and education. On average social media users are younger and better educated than non-users, and they are more liberal and pay more attention to politics. Despite paying more attention to politics, social media users are less likely to vote than non-users, but they are more likely to support the left leaning Labour Party when they do vote. However, we show that these apparent differences mostly arise due to the demographic composition of social media users.

Through the various ethnographic cases they explored, participants were able to highlight the tensions, contradictions and paradoxes that bureaucrats encounter when seeking to implement ‘good governance’ principles (such as ‘transparency’, ‘accountability’, ‘participation’). Their contributions also underlined the ubiquitous presence of audit and other measurement techniques in the global governance of the world, forcing the various actors interacting in this field to develop administrative skills in order to preserve their audibility and remain relevant. What these trends seem to highlight is the increasing reliance on ‘techno-legal devices’, to use Ballestero’s notion, (reports, indicators etc) to solve big world issues and to ‘neutralise’ politics. But shouldn’t we rather conceive these dynamics as another expression of politics, the mere ‘gloss of harmony’ (Müller 2013) covering inherently political – and therefore controversial – issues?

Lastly, not only direct relevance to policy is important, one should also keep in mind that influencing practice can in turn be relevant for policy makers. Without denying that policy does have an impact on practice, it has long been recognised that the policy cycle does not work in a linear way, or is even starting with policy. Hilhorst: ‘In reality, practice is shaped by many factors outside of policy. Practice has a life of its own, and it is often the case that the policy cycle happens in a reverse way. Interesting work on innovation shows that innovation usually starts in practice, and it is therefore equally - if not more - important to target research uptake at communities of practice.’

I think there are many ways we are asked to rush over things that are hard—in politics and in life—and the writers who have taught me most, including Audre Lorde, especially Audre Lorde, have taught me to stay with what hurts however much it hurts, until you have worked something out about yourself and the world. Audre Lorde also says that sometimes to survive we have to become stone. Sometimes to survive the weather you have to harden yourself. She invites us to embrace our imperfect broken bodies with bits and pieces missing. I think when the project is to survive heavy, hard histories, we do need multiple tactics; sometimes they are in tension with each other. Sometimes we need to lighten our loads, to laugh. Sometimes we need to be weighed down, to stop under the weight.
We are not going to get it right when we are living with wrongs. We are not going to build a house that is light enough to accommodate everyone. It is an ongoing, unfinished project because it is a question: how to build a feminist world when the world we oppose is the world we still inhabit.

The toughest question in terms of career building is the question of the slowly changing ethical framework of international development: How can I justify my engagement?
Duncan writes: ‘I loved writing; I was (broadly) on the left; I wanted to understand social and political change and if possible contribute to it.’
Is this still enough to build a career given our global Northern/ Western, male etc. privileges?
Since social change usually happens slower than we anticipate my tentative answer is ‘yes, to some extent’-but the more important questions for which I have no good answer at this stage is, to put it more provocatively, who should have a career in international development in the future and at what cost will they happen in a globally accelerating labor market?

If true, confirms most celebrities don't walk #globaldev talk, have little knowledge beyond PR & should'nt work "in the field" unsupervised https://t.co/Lb9bynUY3I

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) July 27, 2017

The OECD’s statistical directives, including tables and annexes, already come to 294 pages, many about reporting ODA.
Closed-door committee meetings at the OECD regularly update the definitions of what’s allowable as ODA and how it should be calculated. Last year, for example, the members agreed new guidelines allowing certain types of military and security assistance to count. The debates tend to roll on: discussions continue on what support to the private sector should be included and how to measure it, while peacekeeping and security spending are attracting another round of attention.

The UN “needs to be nimble, efficient, and effective. It must focus more on delivery and less on process, more on people and less on bureaucracy,” he said after taking the oath of office before the 193-member General Assembly of UN nations. Looking at UN rules and regulations, he said, “one might think some of them were designed to prevent, rather than enable, the effective delivery of our mandates” to secure global peace and prosperity.

Back in Arlit, the stories of French former employees standing up to Areva are well-known. But the struggle for Nigerien workers to get recognised is even steeper than in Europe. “Both the legal system and the financial means to stand up for our rights are lacking”, says Dan Ballan. “In a couple of years, the uranium reserves will be depleted and Areva will leave, however the pollution and underdevelopment will stay behind.”
He may be right, but Areva will not be going far. About 80km away, a third and enormous new Nigerien uranium mine called Imouraren is being developed. “Lacking any perspective of another job, the workers will eventually move wherever the mine is”, says the local activist.
In our last hours in Arlit we drive around in town. It’s the afternoon, the sky is dark red, and a harsh wind is blowing. A new sandstorm is gathering. We try not to think of the particles it carries from the radioactive hills.

“We don’t know what it is to feel like every individual aid recipient,” he said. “We don’t know their priorities. Instead of giving people objects, which they often sell to buy things they really need, why not give them cash in the first place? Give people a choice on how to spend precious resources.”
So if you really want to help, instead of shipping off your baby carrier, maybe sell it on Craigslist and donate the proceeds to a well-rated charity. And if you prefer donating items, keep it local. Maybe there’s a homeless shelter or teen mom home in your community that could use a baby carrier.

This new face of civic activism is challenging the old-style, conformist, traditional forms of organizing. This change will likely have wide-ranging implications for civil society generally and the struggle for social justice. If the new forms of activism are nurtured, they could have a greater impact than any traditional civil society organization (CSO) has recorded in Uganda in recent times. But the so-called big ego and logo CSOs view the new activism as a distraction, if not a threat, and still need to strike a constructive partnership with it.

Despite the current objectives of the international community on social protection, the IMF continues to maintain and pursue an opposing policy position. The IMF appears to operate within a self-referential dialogue that is cut-off from the international policy consensus. A look at the paper’s reference list strongly supports this idea: out of the 22 studies cited in the paper, only one is not conducted by its own staff.

Firstly, the slum population keeps growing. Secondly, houses are useless to the poor without land tenure, security and infrastructure. Resident Michael Arunga, who represented Kibera civil society in the KENSUP planning committee, feels that the project was doomed from the start. “How can people without any income even afford decent housing? People have no livelihood.” He believes the scheme was started for “political reasons” and not genuine in assisting Kibera people to build better lives. Some former Kibera residents who did move in the new houses now sub-let them in order to make a living, he says, and still stay in shacks.
(...)
All this just to attract donor funding for the politically-connected? Yes, said the official: “The real intention of authorities in the slum upgrade is to milk Kibera dry and sustain its misery.”

Kony — like Museveni in some ways — has never been rigid about anything except his own survival. I came to see Kony as a pragmatist of the first order. Kony has used bits of religion, including Catholicism, Protestantism and Islam, to advance theories that were all designed to prolong his rule. He has done the same with regard to traditional Acholi beliefs and even select Marxist theory.

You can skip meals in private for days on end, or walk home for half an hour because you couldn’t even afford a bus ride, as long as no one knows about it. At the precise point when the lack hits your pride and there is no solution in sight, does the debt become the trap, and you begin to feel hunted.
Inasmuch as this book is a confession by many of that sense of wounded pride, it’s also, in their candidness and insistence on using their real names (some names have been changed on request) and details of their intimate financial dealings and fall from grace, a breaking of the pattern.
The refusal to live this lie, sit with a false sense of social achievement that in many ways society forces them to live up to. The fear of being unable to pay for drinks, dress a certain way, be seen at certain places, and be subsequently rewarded by the system for that behaviour. The insistence on being told and being seen is a lifting of the curtain of silence that surrounds it. This generation isn’t as broke or bereft of courage and integrity as it looks.

At one point Ms. Theron’s character asks, in voice-over, “In this place of so much war, had I found peace?” The script, by Erin Dignam, doesn’t get much deeper than that. The romantic chemistry between Ms. Theron and Mr. Bardem feels forced throughout, never more so than in a scene of mutual seduction in a cutesy context of brushing teeth. Mr. Penn is more than competent in recreating the noise, gore and panic of war zones, but far less so in simulating the atmosphere of alienated romance common in 1960s European art films.

Caste remains hugely important in India today, especially in villages where there are denser traditional networks and occupations,which are at their thinnest in the city. While there are Dalit millionaires, who prove to be exceptions to the rule, there are very few Dalits among the country’s new middle classes.
This absence of low castes among India’s better off means that Hindi cinema is caste- blind, rather than caste- neutral. Usually, everyone who mixes socially in such circles is upper caste. This is their version of a caste-free society, while lower castes perhaps dream of a caste-free society where everyone is so well off that caste no longer matters.

Nestled inside that essentially indisputable claim, there are several more controversial implications. For example: that since things have so clearly been improving, we have good reason to assume they will continue to improve. And further – though this is a claim only sometimes made explicit in the work of the New Optimists – that whatever we’ve been doing these past decades, it’s clearly working, and so the political and economic arrangements that have brought us here are the ones we ought to stick with.

"Third World America"-I guess #globaldev"at home" can really become a thing :( https://t.co/6JJLVfYwu9

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) July 25, 2017

“Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become emails. Watch your emails; they become meetings. Watch your meetings; they become more meetings. Watch these meetings; they become your destiny.” Lao-Tzu

When done poorly, he cautions, community network maps can undermine community work by being an empty distraction, offering the seduction of a silver bullet, institutionalizing the misuse of power, and by using limiting language - language that closes down possibility, exploration and creativity, instead of opening them up.
But when done right, these kinds of maps can be powerful catalysts for empowerment and emancipation.

Additionally, rather than “follow the money” or “follow the lies,” she says “follow the policy.” Policies are changing rapidly, and the impacts on poor communities are often obscured. Instead of just gravitating to the aberrant, which is our journalistic instinct, Boo suggests also thinking about ways we are interconnected.

There's various stats, and I have to look up the one I used in the book, but I think it's maybe 15 percent of content creators make more than $100 a year. It's a huge disparity. In terms of fixing it, one of the problems, again, is that people who already come from a position of privilege can afford to work for free, just like unpaid internships. So I think the most important resolution is one of two things. One is collective advocacy in recognizing this as a profession rather than a hobby, and also, calling attention to who pays and the amount. And so there was that ... I don't know, it was Who Pays Influencers website? Do you remember that? That was maybe a year and a half ago? I loved it, and it kind of disappeared.

In an era of cost-cutting and layoffs, ongoing technological disruption, lack of public trust in our work, and a hostile political climate, newsroom environments still matter. It’s precisely because of these uncertainties that news organizations need to be smart about how to keep talented, diverse groups of journalists, including mothers with young children, in our ranks, doing the vital work that needs to be done. Paid family leave, inclusive, flexible work policies that benefit everyone, and improved office cultures are not tangential priorities; they are crucial to fostering a pipeline of young, innovative thinkers—the future leaders of our industry.

The Lab and this issue focus our attention on squarely on technology and change. That includes slow change and fast change; small change and transformational change; change that we create; changes we want to make; changes we must make; and change that happens to and around us. It includes changes in the home and changes in our social and political lives; and changes in the Global North and changes in the Global South.

Kelsky said that if she had to predict the future of academic conferences, she’d anticipate a further shift toward virtual conferences, with more interviews via Skype, in recognition of the financial constraints facing many participants. At the same time, she guessed there would be a continued reliance on in-person conferences for those who can afford them.
In other words, she said, it’s “the continued feudalization of academia, where those at the top occupy a more and more isolated enclave of privilege and opportunity hoarding, at the expense of everyone else. Virtual options will mitigate this to some extent, but as you know, some of the deepest human engagement remains face-to-face, so that option will exist for, and benefit, those with funds.” Financial concerns notwithstanding, Reed, writing for Inside Higher Ed, said he wished academic conferences were a bigger part of community college life and cautioned against writing them off too quickly

To understand why prestige still marks a publishing system founded on the rhetoric of meritocracy, we’d need to not take that rhetoric at its word but instead understand how it has functioned discursively, and often nefariously, in an institution whose entire existence is predicated on keeping the channels narrow.And in doing that, we’d have to ask whether such a system is worth redeeming, and why. That is: to what end do we want to diversify the “four leading journals in the humanities”?

Most graduate schools admit students to fill specific labor needs. One of the core functions of graduate programs is to enhance flexibility, always presenting just enough labor, just in time . . . The academic labor system creates holders of the Ph.D., but it doesn’t have much use for them . . . The system produces degree holders largely in the sense that a car’s engine produces heat—a tiny fraction of which is recycled into the car’s interior by the cabin heater, but the vast majority of which figures as waste energy that the system urgently requires to be radiated away.

Jolie said in a statement Saturday that the audition scene had been taken out of context. According to the actress, there were parents, guardians and non-governmental organization partners, as well as medical doctors, present throughout the entire filmmaking process, including auditions. She emphasized that no one was hurt by participating in the recreation of the film’s scenes.

A $3.25 million donation from the Clooney Foundation for Justice, Google and HP will pay for transportation, school supplies, computers, content, curriculum and teacher training.
A spokesman for the Clooneys' foundation, Max Gleischman, said the organization had decided to support education for Syrian refugees through the public school system, instead of investing in private schools operated by SABIS, an international company which has prepared students for college and high school exams.

In the past five years, the story of one failed sewage treatment plant project offers the clearest example of the good intentions, poor governance and bad luck that contributed to Haiti's current sanitation crisis. It began with a young woman and a huge earthquake.

Optimists often suggest that society will adapt to warming. But Carleton searched for evidence that communities acclimatize to high temperatures, or become more resilient as they get richer, and found none in the data.
“Without interventions that help families adapt to a warmer climate, it’s likely we will see a rising number of lives lost to suicide as climate change worsens in India,” Carleton says.

As affluence in Indian states grows, there is likely to be a slight rise in crimes against women, but as the female to male ratio has already begun to rise, it is in turn likely to dampen the rise in these crimes. The efficiency of the judicial and police systems may be the deciding factor – and unfortunately, going by recent evidence, it may be optimistic to surmise significant improvements in these systems in the near future.

Hyde explained that there are different ways of interpreting the reasons behind the results. For example, it might suggest that information needs to be provided to voters earlier on, she said, adding that her takeaway is that it is difficult to make voters more informed, not that informing voters is a worthless task.
The findings confirmed what many democracy and governance practitioners have observed in their work in transitioning countries, that information in and of itself does not lead to political accountability, said Linda Stern, director of monitoring, evaluation and learning at the National Democratic Institute.“It served to put an exclamation point on the idea that exposure to information alone is not enough to change citizens’ political preferences and behaviors,” she told Devex via email.

While the paper is not a counsel for despair, it is a call for realism. Evidence-based policy making remains an admirable aspiration; but it may just be a long way away. Of the constraints addressed in our paper, the one most susceptible to immediate influence by both domestic governments and donors is the state of universities and think tanks in developing countries.

The fact that this ends up on the front page of the NYT is maddening. "Africa itself has a land problem." What does that even mean?! pic.twitter.com/9cGMMNCgCy

— Laura Turner (@lkoturner) July 30, 2017

A Canberra law student has been ordered to pay the legal costs of a Cambodian philanthropist after her defamation defence was struck out in court.
Juanita Zankin must now rethink how she will fight allegations she defamed Geraldine Cox in a February Facebook post.

Ms van Doore coined the term ‘paper orphaning’ as the active recruitment of children into orphanages or residential care institutions in developing nations for the purpose of ongoing exploitation through orphanage tourism and funding.
(...)
“Orphanage tourism and funding creates a demand for children to be available in orphanages to volunteer with, which ultimately drives recruiters to traffick children into orphanages,’’ Ms van Doore said.

Why is Ushahidi’s board not independent, particularly given the amount of local and international public and foundation funding it receives?

Any employee who has been at the company for at least one year and participated in payroll giving for at least six months (that could be donating between $2 to $150 per paycheck) is given the opportunity to travel to Nepal, Bolivia, Kenya or Ecuador on the company's dime. On these trips, Experticity volunteers could be working on a number of different projects depending on the needs of the place they visit, including building classrooms, community water systems, health clinics or personal hygiene workshops or training locals in micro-enterprises.

J: What I generally see is an explosion of volume and style over substance. Professional looking websites, lots of team blogs and “communities” (maybe like this site), but also a lot of what feels to me like overly earnest self-indulgence (not this site). I miss some of the older blogs like Hand Relief International and La Vidaid Loca. It doesn’t all have to be funny or sarcastic. Aid Leap is excellent, but sadly The Pillar is no more. But even so, I miss the days when it was all a bit more fun and snarky and to the point, and a bit less “here’s 1,000 words on what I pondered as I savored my morning tea while overlooking Machu Picchu.” I feel like much of what passes for aid writing in general in 2017 is as much, or maybe more cultural performance than anything else, without actually exploring any kind of new territory in terms of ideas or issues.

Do I want to ban white men from #globaldev work? No, my piece on privilege & career advice is far more boring ;)! https://t.co/LbMcSSP1Jqpic.twitter.com/2ZDC4Dbu0Z

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) July 28, 2017

The first thing to note is the largely inhospitable environment of the G4S AGM for democratic, rational dialogue and debate. The atmosphere and space of the AGMs have not, at least since 2014, delivered on openness or a guarantee of personal security necessary for a genuinely democratic forum.

Thus, rather than focusing on who the social entrepreneur is, a much more interesting question is why and how do various stakeholders come together in pursuit of socially entrepreneurial ends? How might philanthropy change its image of entrepreneurialism from an individualistic notion to a collective one, so that what we see at the end of the capitalization of new ideas is sustainable shared ownership or stewardship enterprises that have been and are continually fine-tuned to fit a system?

Well-off parents have access to the infrastructure that supports breastfeeding: longer maternity leaves, jobs that allow for pumping breaks, the ability to hire outside help to support a new mother, and—perhaps most importantly—immersion in a culture that unconsciously views breastfeeding as a desirable status symbol and pressures them to continue to that hallowed six-month mark and well beyond.
Breast milk has become a luxury good, another example of what the sociologist Elizabeth Currid-Halkett calls inconspicuous consumption: the investments in intangibles like health and education that increase social capital for the modern wealthy. And because these costs are largely invisible, it’s easy to frame breastfeeding as a free good equally available to all. The truth is much more complicated.

“I expect some people will find an internship that enables them to do the job they really want to do and that will have the big labour-market return but, on average, an internship you take won’t lead directly to a job in the profession you really wanted or the profession you did the internship in.”
The study also found that those who took internships were less likely to go on to professional or managerial roles or be satisfied with their career compared with those who had gone straight into work.
(...)
Holford said that one reason for the earning disparity could be that graduates who took an internship were delaying the start of their careers which could often see them end up in entirely different occupations from the ones in which they did their work placements.

Perspectives reflects the shared conclusion of SACC, the authors, and editors that open access publishing is one way to engage a new generation of students and, particularly, the diverse students who attend community colleges. If nothing else, we are hopeful that Perspectives can bring anthropology to a broader audience of students and general readers outside of our classes.

I just don't want an OA that's five people at Harvard writing the definitive accessible text on everything

— Tressie Mc (@tressiemcphd) July 28, 2017

I always ask myself if my dear devoted daughter in England would be alarmed by this (reporting). If she’d be alarmed, however true, it shouldn’t be reported (p.59).

In practice, however, newsreel self-censored because they understood that their role within the cinema programe was to avoid alienating audiences and support the main film. Newsreel editors also realized the power of government to control access to locations and to film stock, and anyway naturally saw themselves as contributing to the patriotic war effort (p.84-85).

essentially reporters were imagined as an archetypal cliché-resilient, hard-drinking, hedonistic, churlish, and cynical. Let us call it the Hemingway syndrome-the celebrated machismo (p.140)

Censorship set firm limits on what they could report and the pressures of the media market meant that positive, exciting and timely tales of military actions were the stories that editors, the military, politicians and the general public wanted from them, and the temptation was always there to take shortcuts to provide them (p.146).

Philip Woods’ book about ‘the six-month, one thousand-mile retreat of the British and Chinese armies from Burma in the first half of 1942’ is a very well researched historical case study of journalism, news media and the work of foreign correspondents. The book looks at a group of twenty-six correspondents who reported from Burma for newspapers and weekly newsreel broadcasts and, equally important, about half of the group wrote memoirs shortly after their assignment in South Asia.
The discrepancies between their daily work, always impeded by military censorship, and their frank book-length accounts are a vivid reminder that there never were ‘good old days’ when it comes to war reporting and that many of today’s challenges have remained through time, new (digital) media and many different war theaters.

This is super interesting. Support if this makes sense to you. https://t.co/n7myoCPS8a

— Mark Duplass (@MarkDuplass) August 8, 2017

The humanitarian situation in South Sudan is the worst I’ve known in two decades, and unless assistance can be predictably and safely delivered, the return of famine cannot be discounted.
However, the insecurity of the operating environment, coupled with the direct targeting of humanitarian action, and predatory bureaucratic processes, compromises the pace, scale and effectiveness of the overall response.
This is of course entirely unacceptable. Humanitarian partners deserve the protection and support of those they are seeking to assist, and government and opposition forces have responsibilities under International Humanitarian Law to both protect civilians, and facilitate the delivery of lifesaving assistance.

The economic effects of the new wave of asylum seekers and other migrants will be complex. The International Monetary Fund projects that this wave will raise economic growth over the long term by providing Europe with young and energetic workers. The labor market effects and fiscal effects are likely to be negative and small in the near future for some countries but more positive in countries with more flexible labor market regulations.
But the greatest determinant of these effects will be the extent to which continuing flows are shunted to just a few destinations or broadly shared. This depends less on migrants’ decisions than on the policy decisions of the recipient countries and their allies.

That recipe of top-down, foreign-funded feminism did not work, because while the funds position women as benefactors, they have been unable to produce the grassroots-level changes that are required for crimes to stop and girls’ schools to flourish. Instead, local women, those cherished allies of foreign funders, have been deemed traitors by local populations who see them as having colluded with invaders. Shuttering shelters and closing schools in turn has become political theatre, a reclamation of pre-intervention authenticity.
Feminist foreign aid, however, does not only fail because of conflict-related resentment and an inability to engender grassroots moral change. It also fails because development aid in general continues to be administered and disbursed along colonial-era models. Decision-making around programmes is largely, if not exclusively, in the hands of donor governments and grant-makers rather than recipients; expat staff sometimes make 900% more than locals with identical jobs.

"When it comes to the UN, justice is extremely rare," she adds.
"The UN's gut reaction is always to cover up, to handle in-house, to make the problem go away," Lindstrom says.
"Yes, of course, rape happens everywhere, but there is no system where you have this type of legal protection for such crimes. These are people being sent to protect others, after all."
But Stephane Dujarric, a spokesperson for the UN secretary-general, disagrees, saying: "I don't think anyone is trying to bury these cases and trying to make them go away."
The spokesperson for the UN's peacekeeping operations, Olivier Salgado, describes the fight against sexual exploitation and abuse as "a top priority of the secretary-general and the entire leadership of the organisation".

As I have said before, there can be no ‘one size fits all’ approach to staff care. But at least acknowledging and working with these alternative forms of healing and self-care could serve two related purposes: of understanding better the spiritual lives of aid workers – as multi-faceted human beings rather than mere aid delivery robots – and of providing them with support that is grounded in their own cultures and belief systems.

So often tech solutions not generalisable due to wider social and political factors. Technology projects are so rarely about the technology! https://t.co/nZeKlqOtUS

— Tony Roberts (@phat_controller) August 9, 2017

She spent the entire summer recruiting, but convincing parents to let their kids be a part of her school’s unique and unfamiliar model—which includes flying the students to Thailand and Laos for several months for a study-abroad program—is more difficult than it seems.
“I had one girl who was like, ‘black people don’t fly,’ so yeah, it's has been the struggle,” Hui says, “but I am getting through to families.”
(...)
“My objective is to build qualities of a leader, so when the student goes back to their home-based school, they will be successful,” says Hui. "One of the qualities we are teaching them is to be self-directed learners."
Students who went through Thrival World Academies’ pilot program in Oakland, California last year say that both traveling abroad and being encouraged to direct their own learning online made them more independent, a change their parents also noticed.

Why do folks on the margins need money and multiple college degrees in order to be taken seriously as an authority on their own lived experience within their own community? Because it makes the privileged folks who make the rules feel more comfortable with the idea of us having a voice? Probably. We’ve jumped through their hoops and they give us a treat and a pat on the head. These nonprofit organizations need to be made accountable not just for making more opportunities available to folks on the margins, but also for re-thinking how we choose to value voice and authority both on and within marginalized communities. It is the difference between talking ABOUT social justice and BEING about social justice. There needs to be effort made by these organizations to acquire more funds. Additionally, these organizations need to actually seek out hidden voices- voices who have not had the chance to be heard, let alone made popular. I know so many brilliant fellow trafficking survivors and sex workers who have immensely valuable things to say but because they are homeless, transient, destitute and barely surviving — they don’t get these opportunities.

The UN Social 500 is a success tracking program that recognises current UN staff and contractors who are promoting the work of the United Nations via their personal social media accounts, so helping to connect the work of the UN with the general public.

“Monsanto continued to produce and sell toxic industrial chemicals known as PCBs for eight years after learning that they posed hazards to public health and the environment, according to legal analysis of documents put online in a vast searchable archive.”
The Poison Papers archive has been analyzed by Bill Sherman, the assistant attorney general for the US state of Washington. Washington state and various west coast cities are suing Monsanto for PCB contamination. Sherman is quoted as saying that Poison Paper documents provide “damning evidence” that was previously unknown to the state.

Two of the central challenges in building accountability for marginalised people are how to reach and meaningfully involve the most excluded, and how to establish the kinds of relationships that mean they can achieve, influence and expect government responsiveness. This report explores how participatory video – an existing methodology for engaging marginalised people – can be adapted and strengthened to inclusively engage citizens and foster responses from decision-makers. It presents four propositions for achieving this.
Proposition 1:
Ensure inclusive engagement during group-forming and building.
Proposition 2:
Develop shared purpose and group agency through video exploration and sense-making.
Proposition 3:
Enable horizontal scaling through community-level videoing action.
Proposition 4:
Support the performance of vertical influence through video-mediated communication.

Formerly unemployed adults who transitioned into poor quality work had greater adverse levels of biomarkers compared with their peers who remained unemployed. The selection of healthier unemployed adults into these poor quality or stressful jobs was unlikely to explain their elevated levels of chronic stress-related biomarkers. Job quality cannot be disregarded from the employment success of the unemployed, and may have important implications for their health and well-being.

Little Lilly would also be proud of Superwoman Lilly because, as the first ambassador from the digital realm, UNICEF is giving her free reign to create the kind of videos she knows viewers would want to watch. "They've really been collaborative," Singh says. "They said, 'Hey, we have never had an ambassador that does what you do. You tell us what you think is going to work.'"
Singh's biggest challenge will be figuring out how to weave UNICEF's education message into her own brand of comedic, visual storytelling — and getting her fans to engage. "Any time you reach out to an audience that wasn't cultivated for the purpose of advocacy, you're going to run into followers who are less interested than others," says Simmons. "If I had to place a bet on whether she will figure it out or not, I would bet on her."

Leng, a Rambo-style lone wolf fighter who miraculously dodges bullets and uses a mattress to stop a grenade, is charged with getting the adopted African child of a slain Chinese doctor to safety. He’s the first to survive a disease called “lamania” that has killed many locals, thanks to the doctor who discovered the cure before his death.

Street begging is not allowed in Vietnam, and the rule applies to locals as well as foreigners, Tran Chi Dung, the Kien Giang tourism chief, told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper on Tuesday.
“No exception was to be made for foreign street beggars in Vietnam no matter how polite they appeared to be,” he said.
Dung was referring to a recent photo posted on Facebook of a foreign woman meditating on a pavement on Kien Giang’s Phu Quoc Island, with a note written in Vietnamese placed in front of her that reads “meditate for luck, need money.”
According to Dung, foreigners have long come to Vietnam seeking short-term jobs and even resorting to begging on the street to fund their trip.

“I work more and more with the World Bank or the African Development Bank,” says scientist Holly Dublin, “and I see what their plans and what they are giving loans for to these governments. It is like there’s a total disconnect. So what you are going to see is that of course, elephants come last. In fact, anything to do with wildlife comes last.”
(...)
The companies in the valley all worry about this too and have all employed their own techniques to try to stem the losses. The rice plantation has run education courses on modern agricultural techniques in order to help local people grow more rice in a smaller area; the teak plantation, in some places, has alternated teak and miombo to try to give the wildlife some space. The sugar plantation is trying to build up a forest area in one part of in the north of the valley where elephants are still sometimes seen, so that the elephants will continue to pass that way without stumbling into the plantations (a beehive fence to keep them in the forest has been strung along one point). But they agree that the problem is just getting worse.

Remember that home is not your little project. Home is not waiting. Home is not frozen in your absence. Should you decide to do so, the home you left behind is not the one you will return to. Do not expect to be at home in all the same spaces. Feel your way in. Fall into place where you’re meant to. Home has changed, and so have you. Return as much as you need to, for as long as you must. Settle as necessary. Never count yourself greater for having left. Remember that the greatest experts are, to use this tired phrase, “on the ground”.
So, whenever it is that you come home, do so with your head bowed, with your ears sharp and attuned to listening. Take your shoes off at the door, be confident to speak and share the perspectives you’ve learned, but be quick to listen and learn how exactly it is that home needs you.

Rather than function as instruments of ethnic violence for politicians and ethnic chauvinists, young Nigerians as primary producers and consumers of popular culture can be at the forefront of this national re-orientation. As 21st century citizens of a global world, youth in Nigeria can channel their energy, education and digital literacies to bring about this change. This pan-Nigerian sensibility was on display during the brief Occupy Nigeria protests concerning the removal of subsidy and increase in the price of petroleum products by the Goodluck Jonathan administration in January 2012. Young Nigerians were at the forefront of this struggle and utilized social media platforms to coordinate the various protests.

Finally, we realize that we must prepare to manage all of the unstructured information that Food Bot will collect. Colleagues in the field are already weary of collecting yet more data that won’t be analysed or used. As a result, the team is working on setting up the infrastructure that is needed to process the large volumes of free text data that we expect the bot to produce. This is where our work with automated data processing and dashboards should pay dividends.

The arrest warrant against Mr. Al-Werfalli is the latest indication from the ICC that it is keeping up with developments relating to conflict, crime, and communication technology. The OTP noted in its Strategic Plan for 2016-18 that technology has led to a rapidly changing environment in which witnesses, victims, and perpetrators have access to smartphones and the internet. The Court has hired cyber investigators to conduct online investigations. Perhaps the arrest warrant from the 15th August is the outcome of these efforts. However, much work remains to be done to carve a way forward with regards to open source/social media evidence. Practitioners and academics are, in many ways, entering unknown territory. The approach taken to this type of evidence will prove crucial for any future proceedings in conflicts such as Syria and Yemen, where open source material abounds.

On the one hand, the government show commitment to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, on the other hand they want more control over internet. Can Indonesia’s government accomplish these ambitious goals and targets without giving more freedom for citizens online?

It was clear to us, through our attendance of side events and formal sessions of the HLPF, that governments are not working enough with their civil society partners to research, monitor and deliver on the SDGs. There needs to be space for civil society both to put the spotlight on the disaggregation of government data, and to illuminate the realities and knowledge of those people who, in the official data, remain invisible.
There is also a role for the United Nations, which needs to push its Member States harder to ensure that there is active civil society engagement in this voluntary reporting process.

It is striking that the percentage of Americans thinking the U.S. spend too much on foreign aid hit what was then a post-Vietnam low in 1985, largely in response to President Ronald Reagan’s decision to offer food aid to Ethiopia as its Marxist government struggled with a calamitous and self-inflicted famine. As Reagan declared, “A hungry child knows no politics,” the public responded to a clear and specific use for assistance: feeding starving children. This uptick in popularity for assistance under Reagan is also notable in that it was counterintuitive: Reagan, as a small government conservative, expanded the aid budget and the overall program became more popular.
The next great shift in public opinion toward the assistance program came in the early and mid-1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The foreign aid program was suddenly bereft of its primary justification as a bulwark against communist expansion, and USAID had been scandal-plagued and badly mismanaged at the end of the President George H.W. Bush administration.

Talk about stating the obvious

"We found that simply presenting evidence to policymakers doesn’t necessarily improve their decision-making"https://t.co/dewhIftb45

— Craig Valters (@craigvalters) August 14, 2017

To sum up: there is a lot of research showing that Facebook makes people feel like shit. So maybe, one day, people will stop using it.
What if advertisers don’t rebel, governments don’t act, users don’t quit, and the good ship Zuckerberg and all who sail in her continues blithely on?

The young people I talk to for my research suggest that Facebook’s broad appeal and easy design presents a unique experience for them. Facebook is a field of potential social landmines, with the fear that the diverse user base will see everything they post – causing anxiety, hedging and inaction.
Having to negotiate this broad audience means young people seem to be less likely to use of some of the public aspects of Facebook, choosing instead to rely on aspects such as groups and private messaging. This explains why they seem to be increasingly relying more on platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat to interact with their peers, a trend also noted by other researchers.
In this light, the attempt to encourage teenagers to use the same features as they do on Snapchat when Facebook’s brand is so associated with a more public and socially difficult environment seems inherently flawed. We can’t say where the company will go in the future but it seems likely it will struggle to ever be as central to young people’s online social experiences as it once was.

"Democratic capitalism" - marked, above all, by the ideology of homeownership - was just a prelude to the rise of "democratic rentierism"pic.twitter.com/Md1vrUwJFo

— Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) August 18, 2017

The editors, Siri Eriksen, Ruth Haug, Lars Otto Naess, Aditi Bhonagiri and Lutgart Lenaerts, question whether or not humanitarian aid should remain focused on ‘saving lives in the time of crises – or also engage in longer-term concerns, including climate change’.
They argue that ‘humanitarian crises appear dramatic, overwhelming and sudden. Aid is required immediately to save lives. On the face of it, linkages to longer-term climate change and adaptation appear far-fetched. However, the causes for humanitarian crises – such as the current food shortages in Ethiopia and on the Horn of Africa – are rarely sudden’.
Political and financial frameworks are needed to facilitate longer-term actions; alongside taking into account the experience and knowledge of local communities, and those directly impacted by climate change.

Contrary to recent studies suggesting that participation in online protests is only token support without any substantive effects, our results show that online protests do hurt. Firms can expect to suffer financial, reputational, and sales damage when an online protest campaign mobilizes consumers successfully. We also show that online protests are more likely to take firms by surprise than offline protests.

The article identifies three key ways in which Nkrumah shaped the law of self-determination in Africa: first, by actively campaigning against ‘tribalism’ in Ghana; second, by enlisting the UN to prevent the secession of Katanga in 1960, thereby creating a crucial precedent; and, third, by playing a leading role in establishing the OAU in 1963, which went on to endorse the legal validity of colonial frontiers. In this way, Nkrumah helped settle arguments around the authentic self-determination unit in Africa, forging an unintended legacy that continues to shape the legal and political contours of the continent to the present.

sometimes I like to play a game called 'Routledge publication or the cover of 50 shades of grey?'pic.twitter.com/48FTg6ivXg

— Siobhán 🥔 (@wigglymittens) August 17, 2017

¨I’ve been troubled by this idea of performance in meetings. On the one hand it seems straightforward, meetings are sites where professional (and other) identities are performed. And yet I know that the health managers I worked with would scoff at the idea that they were performing ‘status’ or ‘hierarchy’ – they would say that they were just doing their jobs. Some of the reviewers of our JRAI contribution also helpfully pushed us to question the way that we were using notions of performance in our analysis. I think for these reasons (and here I am echoing Tom’s point somewhat), also because of the influence of Annemarie Mol and other science studies scholars on my work, I am more drawn to terms like ‘enactment’ and ‘production’ in trying to make sense of what is made through meetings. I think this kind of move is important – I am not sure that Maia and I could have made the argument that we did in our JRAI article, that contemporary international development is a system of meetings, without this kind of subtle shift away from the performative.

We find that established publishers have a strong motivation to hype claims of predation as damaging to the scholarly and scientific endeavour while noting that, in fact, systems of peer review are themselves already acknowledged as deeply flawed.

"Reporting the Retreat" from #Burma-75 year-old case study w/ relevance 4 #globaldev& more by @HurstPublishershttps://t.co/56PTZPNRFhpic.twitter.com/CAYGmxUNSN

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) August 11, 2017

Hi all,

Development news: Louise 'In Congo's Shadow' Linton is back! Bill Easterly admits that he was wrong! A special section on a 'Reading The Congo'; quitting Peace Corps; how to get into the conservation industry? Reality TV & humanitarians; global health & men - and so much more!

Our digital lives: Uruguayan Barbie; do advocacy documentaries work? The UK Home Office 'disrupted' NGO data; how men are shaping our contemporary cities.

Publications: Agribusiness in Latin America.

Enjoy!

Development news
In the line of fire

Finally, we must provide better duty-of-care to all staff on the frontlines, particularly national staff. International aid agencies are increasingly providing aid remotely in highly insecure environments. This means they are delivering relief through local partners and transferring the risk to them. Local and national partner organizations face an inadequate level of security and support from their international partners. We must provide better security training to equip them in the field, as recommended by the recent Presence and Proximity report on aid workers. Donors and international partners should ensure that national partners’ security needs are factored into proposals and budgets, so they have the resources needed to protect their staff.
(...)
Wars have rules. It is time to enforce these rules, rather than have brave aid workers needlessly risk their lives, and too many of the most vulnerable to be left alone in the crossfire and lose theirs.

Looks like @JeffDSachs got it more right than I did on effectiveness of mass bed net distribution to fight malaria in Africa pic.twitter.com/krMMqKExpP

— William Easterly (@bill_easterly) August 18, 2017

The BBC got in touch with one buyer, who wanted to be known only as Mr Zhang, who said he paid 200 yuan ($30) for a video featuring African children for his bike business. He justified it by saying the ad was a good marketing trick and had attracted more customers.
When asked about whether the money reached the children in the end he said: "Why should I care that much? I only care about the marketing effect."
Customers on Taobao appeared to be delighted with the services while they were on offer and there appeared to be to be little consideration by vendors and customers of the risk of cultural insensitivity or even an awareness of China's chequered history with regards to race and advertising.

Thank you, Treasury Barbie! Alas, it seems that other Instagram users couldn’t quite enjoy the post as the reach-out to the left behind that it was clearly meant to be. “Glad we could pay for your little getaway,” remarked another user, Oregonian mother of three Jenni Miller. “#deplorable.”
Did Louise realise that it would be smart to rise above this off-brand comment from one of her husband’s average Americans? I’m afraid she didn’t. Instead, she shot right back, and at some considerable length:

This is an embarrassment for everyone involved. https://t.co/A15CwXJfwE

— Laura Seay (@texasinafrica) August 19, 2017

.@africasacountry, you'll appreciate @KarenAttiah's take on @Harvard_History Prof Maya Jasanoff's Congo River cruise https://t.co/TTeeWK4oDypic.twitter.com/nTZLVYFGzi

— Kate Woodsome (@kwoodsome) August 24, 2017

The point here is not necessarily to call out Prof. Jasanoff, but to highlight what seems to be an insatiable demand at the Times for orientalist pieces on Africa and Africans.

But it is likely that a more self-aware, self-critical version of Gettleman would not have come to occupy such a plum position within the hallowed halls of journalism. Gettleman is a great story teller. His prose is light and engaging. Handsome and photogenic, he is able to tell seductively simple stories about a continent that seems so overwhelming to most Americans. There will always be an audience for this type of work.

Humanitarian workers have a prescribed identity and Thurlow does not conform. She’s most commonly seen in a bikini, on a show that is perceived as ‘lowbrow’ and she’s publically talking about her work on a platform that is not a conference – the Spanish villa had no trees to hang pledges and no communiqués were handed out. Tradition and a dour, do-gooder identity is holding back the sector.

“Foreign researchers and students arrive, conduct a project, publish a paper after returning home, and never go back again; is this conservation?” said Seth Wong, 26, who’s working on a graduate degree at Mississippi State University.
To help globalize conservation, Milner-Gulland called for more grants for students from developing countries to study conservation as well as for disadvantaged students at home. She proposed a program that would sponsor graduates to go to other continents for conservation training in a one-to-two year paid position, which she compared to the “type of fast-track graduate-level training that the big firms and civil service offer to their best and brightest.“
For Lucas Ruzo conservation is stuck in a non-profit model that is limiting.
“We need to move beyond the charity model, and embrace different legal operating structures,” he said. “Let’s fund innovation, innovation of the kind that doesn’t have a publication attached to the end of it.”

if I feel strongly about the changes that need to be made in PC, I should stay and work towards it internally. On the other hand, I feel I am taking up space when other voices have already been decentralized. PC and most PCVs have been co-opting HCN spaces since 1961, centering their reputed mission to help while crowding out the voices and efforts of HCNs, inadvertently prolonging neocolonialism. After a great deal of deep reflection and counsel from those who have dedicated their work to social justice, including RPCVs and others who have had experience in international aid, I feel it is more meaningful for me to do this work alongside my social justice-driven community back in the US. I have recently reconciled that my criticisms of PC are fair – that I do not agree with this work and I do not feel that choosing to stay and improve it will be productive. Furthermore, my criticisms of PC and this work to undo oppression (such as neocolonialism) is not just about PC, it is about a broader social justice mission and it is also personal (i.e. my experience as a female Asian American). Decidedly, it is wiser for me to leave PC and return to Baltimore.

Our resilience may erode slowly overtime if we are not bouncing back from normal stress and pressure. Or, it can drop quickly after experiencing a significant emotional event or a particularly stressful period. Knowing your current state of resilience can help you determine whether to carve out extra time for resilience enhancing activities.

Generation Men in global health extends beyond multilateral and funding institutions. While the editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal is a woman, both The Lancet and Science have men in this post. Of the top pharmaceutical companies, only one has a female chief executive officer.1 Furthermore, at least in the USA, most global health academic leadership positions are also dominated by men.2 These leaders are unquestionably fine men––but also unquestionably men.
There is much speculation about why this is the case. One explanation is that this is an area of work that favours those who do not serve as primary caregivers because working in global health requires spending extensive time in the field and travelling.
When I directed health programmes for the Open Society Foundation and was the acting Chief of Health at UNICEF, I travelled 75% of the time. For anyone serving as a primary caregiver, this much travel is simply impossible

This is not to mention that “the computers have plastic over them half the time. Electricity, computers, literacy, there are all these issues. And the TelCo infrastructure! We have layers of capacity gaps to address,” said one person.

“NGOs and nonprofits for years have been able to have a transactional relationship with the public. What that means is that they’ve always had such high levels of trust with the public, with the government, etc that they’ve been able to tell a one-dimensional story,” Walkom says. “The way I look at it is, we’ve told you the story of need for so long that we haven’t actually stopped and started telling you the story of how we’re responding to that need.” She adds that the crisis in trust in business, governments and NGOs, that research like the Edelman Trust Barometer, has been indicating for years, means that one-dimensional storytelling isn’t working anymore.

Exciting news: New York has innovated itself to Nairobi. Brooklyn, meet the matatu: https://t.co/lOA5AU5FDM#KOTpic.twitter.com/WZrSxyN2JQ

— Ben Parker (@BenParker140) August 18, 2017

Advocacy documentaries should also be coupled with other behaviour change techniques to increase their chances of success. For instance, they should ask viewers to publicly pledge to change their behaviour or to set goals, give them tools to help form a new habit, or tell them exactly how to petition organisations and governments to make structural changes.
(...)
Documentaries can be a useful instrument in the behaviour change toolkit. But lasting change needs more than an engaging story on its own.

A chain of emails sent by senior Home Office immigration officials show how they used information that was designed to protect rough sleepers to target vulnerable individuals for deportation. The internal correspondence shows the Home Office repeatedly requesting and finally gaining access to a map created by the Greater London Authority (GLA) that identified and categorised rough sleepers by nationality.
The secret arrangement meant frontline outreach workers tasked with helping the homeless by collating data for the GLA were inadvertently helping the Home Office to remove people who were from the EU or central eastern Europe. In May 2016, the Home Office introduced guidance enabling immigration enforcement teams to deport EU nationals, purely on the grounds that they were sleeping rough.

Are we not – like those well-meaning natives in San Sebastian, Venice, Barcelona and Berlin – also suffering some of the brunt of cosmopolitanism? (...), renting an apartment if you do not have a job in i-gaming is now near impossible, and waste volumes have increased exponentially with evening-time collection hours rendering the streets a right dump.
It is a brusque gentrification that is hollowing out the community’s old haunts, now replaced with the vanilla blandness whose main consumer is the short- and long-stay tourist. Those with money dream of smoothening out the rough edges of the old towns to build waterfront properties. Those without the cash just see their streetscapes change, powerless.

Not only are these four books by men, they’re largely about men. According to the books themselves, the factors that have contributed to gentrification—displacement of marginalized communities, systemically ingrained racism, unequitable housing policy—have been largely implemented by powerful men over the last century.
(...)
Even if we fantasize about cities that foster racial equity, or a matriarchal society-within-a-city, instead of our status quo of cities designed for and by men, the reality is that the shift towards just and equitable cities will only happen when a more diverse group of Americans are in positions to make policy decisions that shape our neighborhoods.

The notion that creativity could solve these urban problems — either from above, with monumental art galleries, or from below, with bearded clusters of hipsters, is a symptom of this profound transformation.
Richard Florida was right when he said that the “creative economy” is the new way of the world. But its development didn’t happen how he imagined. Rather than launching humanity into a new phase of prosperity, the new economy simply holds the different elements of late capitalism together — making it palatable for some but deepening its crises and contradictions for others.

Despite these trends, the study of the ‘everyday’ of agricultural policy-making, production, commercialisation and consumption have recently garnered attention in Latin America, as a result of the rapid industrial agricultural expansion, and the consequent resistance by local communities that have attempted to reclaim their agricultural sovereignty. More than ever, the fields of Latin America have become conceptual and direct battlefields, where ideological, economic, political and cultural positions clash. The expansion of the agroindustrial frontier, fuelled by technological advances in genetically modified crops and the large-scale use of pesticides and fertilisers, is one aspect of the intensification of extractivist activities that have dominated the region’s recent political economic model, further increasing tensions surrounding environmental issues and land use (...).
Counterbalancing the advances of industrial agriculture, some rural communities and environmentalist groups have sought to promote and strengthen alternative agricultural models through practices as diverse as polycropping, seed saving, agroecology schools and judicial resistance.

Anzalone: For better or for worse, when people look at the U.S. response system, we have a very mature federal disaster response system, starting with FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency]. It's a machine. Immediately before landfall of Hurricane Harvey, the governor of Texas requested aid for long-term recovery projects.
You don't see that in Nepal, Bangladesh or India. In Nepal and Bangladesh, the government simply doesn't have the resources. There is no tax base to support that robust response and recovery system. Their process to rebuild is complicated by underlying development issues that are inherent in those countries.

Some people get personally offended by talk like this. They are seeing pain, they are being generous, and they hope it might help—just like I did watching the pictures from Indonesia from my cubicle years ago. The people suffering in this storm deserve all of that and more. But what you learn when you really dive into these situations is that momentary intentions, no matter how kind, are not enough—not on this scale. Those past, ineffective, and opaque disaster responses, from Haiti to New Jersey to the Gulf Coast, have created a legacy of mistrust, not only of the Red Cross but of the entire humanitarian aid apparatus its iconic brand represents. We can’t afford to do that again.

“People want their money used in real time,” said the senior aid worker. “That’s what killed the Red Cross in Haiti. They were sitting on tens of millions of dollars years later.”
A disaster fundraising expert gave a mixed reaction. He said that Google was showing a “welcome sign of belated humility”, by not attempting to pick how to spend the money itself. Familiar with the work of CDP, the expert said they were “sensible folk”, and the use of an intermediary made sense. However, he also questioned the charity’s capacity and its experience to handle the expenditure and monitoring of “quite significant” sums of money. The expert noted that many disaster relief groups had tried and failed to form fundraising relationships with Google and there may be some “sour grapes” among them.
The senior aid worker agreed, adding that other NGOs will be wondering: “Are you serious? Center for Disaster Philanthropy got the button on Google?!”

.@Google is fundraising for Hurricane Harvey with a charity few have heard of. Why? https://t.co/ETvGcZct7D

— IRIN News (@irinnews) August 30, 2017

Melania Trump has bravely opted to survey the Harvey damage in aviator sunglasses, a flawless blowout, a silky olive green bomber jacket with what appears to be limited water repellant capabilities, and actual stilts. The president, meanwhile, has had his khakis pressed in preparation for a light drizzle on the golf course. I am trying to imagine something less appropriate and cannot, although something will surely happen tomorrow to give me new ideas.

But to dismiss all this as merely much ado about heels, or an example of the pettiness of our divided electorate, is to ignore the reality of the current conversation around the president — to pretend not to notice how sensitized everyone has become to his unpredictable reactions to major events, and to deny the power of the telling detail to invite applause, condemnation or misinterpretation.
It is precisely the superficial nature of clothing, the fact that garments are immediately accessible to all, that makes them the go-to stand-in for more nuanced, complicated emotions and issues.

The thinking is that these people have lost everything, so they must NEED everything. So people SEND everything. You know, any donation is crazy if it's not needed. People have donated prom gowns and wigs and tiger costumes and pumpkins, and frostbite cream to Rwanda, and used teabags, 'cause you can always get another cup of tea.

The original #SWEDOW post from years back (migrated to another site). Seemed like a good time to repost.... https://t.co/FSeKPgHGxD

— Evil Genius (@EvilGeniusPub) August 28, 2017

That’s what models — and in this case also presidents — do: They inhabit anonymously temporary, unreal worlds born of the realm of luxury logo goods. The devastation in Houston is a tragedy, but so too is this administration’s blank, model’s stare — its mirrored shades in the face of human sorrows. This is not just about fashion. It’s about the urgency of recognizing a certain genre of hypnotizing, dehumanizing spell, and snapping ourselves out of it.

Did the rest of the world's media do a little better at keeping an eye on Asia?
Yes.
So far, the GDELT data suggests that non-American media have kept up some coverage of the Asian flooding, despite throwing resources at the Harvey story.
The gap here is smaller – when Harvey was drenching Texas, it got three or four times as much coverage as the Asian disaster.

There are new, relevant articles that have started to link Harvey to broader questions of international development and humanitarian aid and that are interesting food for thought in 'our' industry.

The supply chain project is implemented by a consortium led by Chemonics International, which has grown to become USAID’s largest implementing partner — in large part because of the Washington, D.C.-based contractor’s surprise takeover of U.S. global health supply chain programs two years ago. The USAID contractor leased a 50,000 square foot office space in Crystal City, Virginia, to help accommodate the new project.
When USAID issued a request for proposals to implement the GHSC-PSM project in January 2014, many assumed the coalition of organizations already implementing USAID’s supply chain projects would maintain their hold on them.
USAID’s announcement in April 2015 that Chemonics had submitted the winning bid — effectively unseating a partnership of organizations led by John Snow, Inc. — sparked a contentious flurry of award protests, delaying the project’s transition by several months. The Partnership for Supply Chain Management filed protests with both the Government Accountability Office and with the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals, both of which were denied.

On 23 August Angolans went to the polls to elect a new parliament, and for the first time in the lives of a great majority of the population, a new president. José Eduardo dos Santos, who ruled the country for 38 years, did not run this time as his party’s top candidate.
(...)
Despite this, it’s likely that the elections will bring more of the same, and only slow and gradual improvements — if at all — of the lives of most Angolans. Lourenço is very much a product of the system. He has the backing of the party and the armed forces, which is an improvement over dos Santos’ previous intended successor, (former) vice-president, Manuel Vicente.

No one questions when humanitarians prepare food, tents or medical supplies in advance of a typhoon, expecting these supplies will save lives. The same logic must apply to programmes that prevent and address gender-based violence. It is unethical to wait for proof of wide-scale abuse; action must take place at the earliest moments of a crisis response.

One of the things we try to do in the new Strategic Plan is to talk directly about the importance and value of our network, not just for UNDP but for the whole UN Development System and for our partners. Part of this is our substantive expertise on various issues covered in the Sustainable Development Goals: our work on poverty, governance, resilience and climate, gender, etc. But the second part, just as importantly, is the tremendous value we provide as a result of our physical network and presence: our country offices, our infrastructure, our local knowledge and our presence on the ground.

The dashboard showed that among those in the 18-70 age group eligible for the Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana (a subsidized insurance scheme), only 90 out of a total of 631 people were covered. The village also drew a blank on health insurance—none of the 174 eligible people (classified as below the poverty line) were covered under the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana.
Almost a year later, the results are strikingly visible.
A sub-divisional officer in Mul is using the dashboard to find villages where she should conduct Aadhaar camps. She hovers over the red dots in the map to zero in on areas with the lowest use.
The block development officer in Mul wants to track how his block is faring on the Open Defecation Free parameter. The snapshot shows what percentage of households don’t have toilets; he clicks again to find out which villages in particular are lagging behind.
The electricity department can now find out exactly which households are still not connected to the grid. And being the only such database on LPG use in the country, the ministry of petroleum now knows which households to target for providing cooking gas connections.
That’s not all. The district collector, Ashutosh Salil, will now be able to rely on the data dashboard to cross-check in real time what officials claim needs to be done, and also to appraise villagers’ development priorities during his field visits. “Earlier if I had to budget Rs100 for 10 sub-districts, I would distribute them equally,” he says. “That can’t be correct allocation if a block has been covered before and does not need more resources.”

Another Zipline story with no journalistic enquiry whatsoever... https://t.co/FFKPMSmNE4

— Ben Parker (@BenParker140) August 28, 2017

And, yes, people are huge users of social media like Facebook and to some extent Instagram. Nigerians in particular are very active on Twitter. Besides business people, many others do not have a laptop. In urban areas, a lot of people have smartphones, especially young people, and if they don’t have one, they desperately want one.

I can imagine someone with little familiarity with Africa or Gettleman's reporting to be enthralled by "Love, Africa." Gettleman comes off as a fearless, risk-taking journalist who gets kidnapped and detained just often enough to have great stories while not losing his life. And it is obvious from the way he writes about her that he is deeply in love with his wife and has been since they met. But the overall effect of the book for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the continent is to wonder why media outlets like the New York Times insist on continuing with the tired old tradition of having foreign correspondents cover the world rather than hiring the many competent local journalists who have far deeper contextual knowledge and are just as adept at translating complicated situations for Western audiences as are their American counterparts.

Interestingly, all five senior female leaders I talked to had field experience and combined their work with family life. In talking about their time in the field, they characterized it as having put a strain on their families, but they identified individual coping strategies. This juggling reflects the complex functioning of gender biases in the UN: female leaders are confronted with biases, find strategies to deal with them but still identify field experience as “problematic” for women.
Pervasive gender biases can help explain why so few women move to the higher echelons of the UN. But overcoming these biases is even more difficult than marshaling political will, especially in an international environment where gender biases are more rampant than ever.

The world, however, and the Western democracies in particular, refused to take her at her word. Governments, international organisations and activist groups of all kinds raised her high on a pedestal, as a living symbol of the peaceful struggle for democracy and human rights in Myanmar — indeed, everywhere. For many, she was seen almost as an ethereal being, remote, pure and beyond reproach. Buddhists in her own country considered her a near-bodhisattva, whose enlightened work and suffering deserved the utmost reverence. She counted US President George W. Bush and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown among her most ardent fans. “Star struck” celebrities like the singer-songwriter Bono took up her cause. When she was not under house arrest, others flocked to her door, seeking a photo opportunity and the right to say that they had met her.
There were other factors that made her seem special. To stay in Myanmar and pursue her political calling, she sacrificed her personal life, her UK-based family rarely being able to visit her. In 1999, when her devoted husband was dying of cancer, she did not go to his bedside for fear of being refused entry back into Myanmar. Her commitment to the cause of democracy and human rights was total. She was also intelligent and well educated. It was relevant too that she was a striking woman, always impeccably dressed in traditional Myanmar costume, with a command of the English language, a quiet dignity and a winning smile. While hailed by feminists as a “warrior woman”, she made a strong personal impression on many statesmen.

There are many effective solutions we might consider. One would be to democratize the institutions of global governance—like the IMF and the World Bank—so that nations of the global South have a real voice when it comes to decisions that affect them. Or, alternatively, we could shift the development-related functions of the IMF and the World Bank to a more democratic institution, like the United Nations.
A second move would be to aggressively reduce the debts of countries in the global South. This would roll back the remote-control power that rich countries exercise over poor countries and restore sovereign control over economic policy at the national level. It would also free developing countries to spend more of their income on health care, education, and poverty-reduction efforts instead of just handing it over in debt service.
Third, we need to put an end to structural adjustment conditions so that developing countries can gain access to finance while retaining the right to use tariffs, subsidies, capital controls, social spending, and other measures they might need to manage their economies and reduce poverty. In the South, some hope that the New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank—both capitalized largely by China—might provide alternative sources of finance that don’t demand painful economic conditions, but it is too early to tell.
Fourth, we need to shut down illicit financial flows out of developing countries. There are a number of ways to approach this. We could stop trade misinvoicing by fixing the WTO’s customs rules. We could close the tax havens or roll out financial transparency rules that would put an end to shell companies and anonymous accounts. We could require multinational companies to report their profits in the countries where their economic activity actually takes place. Or we could impose a global minimum tax on corporations, which would eliminate their incentive to evade national taxes altogether.

Despite the commonly held belief that only teens should or do work for the minimum wage, the fact of the matter is that millions of Americans of all ages, a/genders, and educational levels support their families on hourly low-wage jobs. That includes seniors, disabled people, and women of color.
The answer, then, is not that poor people live differently, but instead, that we create a society and an economy where people who work full time can live in the community where they work.
No amount of cutting back on luxury spending or driving extra hours for Uber can change the fact that there is literally nowhere in the country where a minimum wage job can support a family, that good union jobs have been in decline for decades, or that housing costs have priced people out of their homes. Cutting coupons, commuting by bike, and enjoying outdoor activities can’t really fix that.

In Rennard's world, compounds don't burn, they degrade. Chemicals don't explode, they combust. The smoke is noxious, but he won't say if it is toxic.
This may be appropriate in a chemistry class, but a concerned public expects straight talk, which it's not getting.
If we learn nothing else from Harvey, let it be the danger of hubris. Despite claims to the contrary, executives will decide that mitigating a risk costs too much, and subsequent events will prove that they made a horrible mistake.
That's why regulators, journalists and citizen groups have a role to play in demanding accountability and revealing the risks taken. Because when it comes to chemicals, the public shares in the consequences of a bad decision and often pays the highest price.
Let's be honest, Harvey is not causing accidents. The storm is revealing the risks executives willingly took. No one has the right to shrug their shoulders and say, "C'est la vie."

From the beginning of the training period an artificial system of ambivalent social relationships is built between employees, and between employees and their superiors. On the one hand, the operators are fed the lie that they are part of a team where hierarchy is irrelevant and everybody works towards achieving maximum productivity, which will ensure the welfare of everybody involved. The competition between different teams is efficient since the stakes are high for everybody: the losing team loses their jobs. On the other hand, every individual is encouraged to be competitive: there are internal competitions between members of the same team. The metric lists are displayed for everybody to see, which leads to constant reproach or glorification from your peers depending on individual results. There is an actual walk of fame in companies, the entrance corridor where every model employee gets a floor tile with their name engraved on it.

In my PhD research, however, I argue that when it comes to making a point, comedy does not come naturally lower in the pecking order than seriousness. In some places and times, they have been equally important and the division between them is blurred.
(...)
Like everything in a neoliberal society, humitas could be reduced to a commodity whose only role is to sell things such as dodgy political ideas or friendlier business brands. But it can also be a way of acknowledging and embodying the world’s absurdity while still trying to change it for the better.

Google’s willingness to spread cash around the think tanks and advocacy groups focused on internet and telecommunications policy has effectively muted, if not silenced, criticism of the company over the past several years, said Marc Rotenberg, the president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. His group, which does not accept corporate funding, has played a leading role in calling out Google and other tech companies for alleged privacy violations. But Mr. Rotenberg said it is become increasingly difficult to find partners in that effort as more groups accept Google funding.

Regardless of how woke any cis straight rich white man is, the fact is that he will have severe blind spots if he lives in America because his experiences are so fundamentally different from minorities. Maybe it’s time to consider that a management team heavily dominated by white men would make situations like the ones Jeffries describes nearly inevitable, and that the solution would ultimately be not only to hire more minorities, but encourage a culture where they can speak freely, then actually and consistently listen to them.

How does a book with such a low Amazon ranking that’s ‘temporarily out of stock’ suddenly become the most read book in YA? How does something that has next to no organic blogging coverage or even Twitter buzz do this? If the only Twitter gossip for your book is variations of ‘Seriously, has anyone heard of this book?’ you’ve got problems.
If you have actually heard of or even read this book, please get in touch because we are baffled.

The ideal that tweeting about scholarly articles represents curating and informing about state-of-the-art appears not to be realized in practice. We see much presumably human tweeting almost entirely mechanical and devoid of original thought, no evidence of conversation, tweets generated by monomania, duplicate tweeting from many accounts under centralized professional management and tweets generated by bots. Some accounts exemplify the ideal, but they represent less than 10% of tweets. Therefore, any conclusions drawn from twitter data is swamped by the mechanical nature of the bulk of tweeting behavior. In light of these results, we discuss the compatibility of Twitter with the research enterprise as well as some of the financial incentives behind these patterns.

This book is comprised of one study and three field evaluations of civic tech initiatives in developing countries. The study reviews evidence on the use of twenty-three information and communication technology (ICT) platforms designed to amplify citizen voices to improve service delivery. Focusing on empirical studies of initiatives in the global south, the authors highlight both citizen uptake (yelp) and the degree to which public service providers respond to expressions of citizen voice (teeth). The first evaluation looks at U-report in Uganda, a mobile platform that runs weekly large-scale polls with young Ugandans on a number of issues, ranging from safety to access to education to inflation to early marriage. The following evaluation takes a closer look at MajiVoice, an initiative that allows Kenyan citizens to report, through multiple channels, complaints with regard to water services. The third evaluation examines the case of Rio Grande do Sul’s participatory budgeting - the world’s largest participatory budgeting system - which allows citizens to participate either online or offline in defining the state’s yearly spending priorities.

Of note is the fact that the early roots of participatory research were found in the global South, specifically in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Of further interest is the fact that for the first 20 to 25 years, participatory research was a discourse located almost entirely outside formal academic circles but rather in social movement structures and civil society circles.

Indeed, none of the interviewees saw themselves as journalists, although one referred to a colleague as one. Despite the journalistic features of some of their work, the NGO members still see themselves strictly as advocates. Thus, in the case of Cyclone Pam, the members of 350 Pacific became “unintentional journalists”, producing a form of “hybrid journalism”, Spyksma concludes.

Looks good but what's the journal equivalent of an #allmalepanel? https://t.co/0WX9PNtUwb

— Kate Cronin-Furman (@kcroninfurman) August 25, 2017

By showing that learning is a skill within large-scale digitally mediated programmes, the research will help to develop both the quality of programmes and the capacity of learners to make the most of them.
In a society categorised by fast-moving technology, business disruption and multiple career changes, knowing how best to learn will be a critical skill.

Oh dear me! 'Travelers fighting poverty' by becoming 'Not Just Tourists'& take unwanted medical supplies abroad 1/nhttps://t.co/ApkvyeVcdH

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) September 6, 2017

For now, SoftWear Automation only sells its automated t-shirt work line in the US. Santora says the company needed to start local because it would be too difficult to service all its technology if it opened up internationally. They still need time to scale. (The home-goods robot is already available internationally.) But if foreign firms, like Tianyuan Garments Company, want to produce in the US, SoftWear Automation is happy to supply them with their sewbots.

Not enough attention has been given to job creation. The South African economy has for a very long time experienced jobless economic growth. This meant that the country’s jobless rate remained stubbornly high for many years. Recent figures of unemployment touching 27.7% are indeed worrying. Youth unemployment is said to be 52%. Any plan that addresses only economic growth without the creation of job opportunities will be found wanting.
The South African government’s priority should be to boost employment, by focusing on sectors that can easily generate jobs. I welcome the suggestion to boost the small, medium and micro-enterprises sector by giving them a share in public procurement. Small enterprises have been recognised for their potential to aid sustainable economic development and to create jobs.
The plan does not give details of overhauling the most important sectors of the economy: mining and agriculture. These sectors are key to generating growth and employment and can be used to drive economic transformation and empower communities that are at the margins of the economy.

“I think with this ruling, the Supreme Court has redeemed itself.”
The same, unfortunately cannot be said for international election observers, according to Wanyeki. “It shows there’s a problem with the election observer industry. They focus too much on the pre-electoral process and the process of voting. The problems are always with the counting and the tallying. They don’t focus on that enough, they don’t have the resources to look into that,” she explained.
(...)
“I feel a real anger about the way they treat us. I’ve had diplomats say to my face that, speaking in the light of history, this election was an improvement [from past elections]. I’m sorry we do not live in history, we live in the here and now and we have a right to free and fair elections,” said Wanyeki. “Their attitude in condescending, neocolonial and by saying things are improving, they’re treating us like small children. Hopefully this ruling is like egg on their face.”

In between trips to Mosul in Iraq, the Syrian city of Raqqa under the control of so-called Islamic State (IS) and the Gaza Strip, Eduardo Martins enjoyed surfing.
He shared glimpses of his life with his almost 125,000 Instagram followers.
Until it all came crumbling down when a BBC Brasil investigation found out that Eduardo Martins was a completely fictitious character.
For years, someone using that name had been stealing pictures taken by professional photographers who had risked their lives in conflict to get them.
Eduardo Martins fooled journalists and picture editors by making slight alterations to the images, such as inverting them, just enough to elude software that scans pictures for plagiarism.

Despite these implementation challenges, the scariest parts about the program for privacy advocates are its ubiquity and lax security. According to the technology engineer Anand Venkatanarayanan, when biometric information is used to access a service via Aadhaar, such as purchasing a new cell phone, the service provider receives that person’s demographic data (name, address, phone number), and the government receives the metadata—specifically, the date and time of the transaction, the form of identification used, and the company with which the transaction was carried out. That information can paint a fuzzy but intimate long-term picture of a person’s life, and raises concerns about both government surveillance and private-sector abuse.
(...)
Over the last few years, Russia, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria have all expressed interest in the Aadhaar program, and according to reports, representatives from Tanzania, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh recently visited India to learn more about implementing an Aadhaar system of their own.

Instead, ordinary Indians are more focused on how Aadhaar has changed their lives. “I think it’s a good idea because before this, my two children and I had no identification, no passport, only a ration card,” says Anita Pereira, a domestic helper from the city of Pune. “The Aadhaar card supports so many things—if I want to do a passport, go to the bank, book a railway ticket.”The Aadhaar card has allowed millions to finally be included into the formal economy. They can now open a bank account, borrow money from the Reserve Bank of India (the country’s largest lender), send and receive remittances, and purchase SIM cards. It’s also enabled mobile payments and other cashless transactions, crucial in light of last year’s disastrous demonetization drive

Our problems are not restricted to shrinking ad revenues, rapacious duo-polies and dwindling circulation. One of our biggest problems is our inability to tell the story of the person in Freetown calling the names of her relatives across the debris in such a way that she is heard as loudly as US First Lady Melania Trump in stilettos at the scene of a hurricane.
Our thoughts are with all the victims of flooding and mudslides in Texas, in Sierra Leone, in Niger, in Yemen, in South Asia. And our thoughts are also with all those whose suffering will never truly be acknowledged because the rest of the world has failed to realise humanity as a unified entity.
We need to talk about the multiple biases underpinning these inconsistencies. But it is not enough to talk. We must demand better of our media, of our governments, our aid agencies, ourselves.

And there were many innovators at TED. Bright young things whose eyes glistened as they spoke about how they were “excited and humbled” by the opportunity to help. It was all very virtuous, and all very useful, so why was my pulse throbbing in my temple?
What sat so uncomfortably with me was that not only does the narrative of the white saviour in Africa seem untarnished, it is now celebrated as the entrepreneur creates much-needed jobs, solves seemingly intractable problems and is clad in a T-shirt and not a dog collar. Our wide-eyed adoration ignores that success is only partly down to ambition and graft. There are cultural and economic impediments for the African innovator.
The economics are fairly obvious. As the journalist and author Aimee Groth wrote in 2015: “Entrepreneurs don’t have a special gene for risk – they come from families with money.” Access to capital, and to the collateral to put up, makes all the difference. The cultural explanation is, as always, far more nuanced, but equally debilitating. I suspect it to be pan-African, but can only speak for the parts of south, west and east Africa where I’ve lived. There, I’ve seen a system that privileges everything foreign and white.

In the interview accompanying the photo spread, Linton offers a compelling apology. She takes all the blame onto herself, she says she learned her lesson, she says she’s growing as a human being. She pauses, “overcome with emotion.” She realizes the irony of apologizing while wearing a ball gown. She’s not a spoiled rich girl lording her wealth over others as though it imbues her with moral superiority; she’s a sweatpants girl! A nearby caption reads, “Louise Linton, seen here in her living room, wears the Easton halter neck trumpet gown with exaggerated bow back detail by Ines de Santo.” That particular line of dresses tends to cost from the upper-four to lower-five figures.

This animated presentation provides an overview of the drivers behind aid reform and what the process and timelines for change look like. It also presents a summary of key changes expected, and introduces some of the implications for policy and practice, and for anyone who works with ODA data.

Chart of the day pic.twitter.com/ZGbew0CNnI

— Nick Diakopoulos (@ndiakopoulos) September 5, 2017

Peak LinkedIn pic.twitter.com/WfPoBFtrCs

— Tom Goodwin (@tomfgoodwin) September 1, 2017

But I think the larger problem remains: Are they going to use that foundational support to figure out ways to extend their reach to new audiences and to audiences that aren’t already getting a lot of high-quality news? I think that’s one of the big questions.

Platform capitalism is restructuring labour markets and social relations in such as ways that opting out from it is becoming an option available only to a privileged few. Moreover, we found teenagers whose parents prohibited them from using social platforms often felt socially isolated and stigmatised. In the real world of messy social reality, platforms can’t continue offload their responsibilities to parents and schools. We need some solutions fast because, by tacitly accepting the terms and conditions of platform capitalism – particularly when it tells us it is not responsible for the harms its business model facilitates – we may be now passing an event horizon where these companies are becoming too powerful, unaccountable, and distant from our local reality.

We managed to bring in our own examples of ensuring that diverse perspectives and backgrounds exist in our work, both in front of and behind the lens. We also delved into the essential benefits of working with cast and crew members of all orientations, genders, cultural backgrounds and abilities. In my own work, this is extremely important when working in local cultural contexts, or with vulnerable women and children, just to give a few examples. Wherever possible, I believe we should be working with local crews and supporting women in the industry— not only because they have greater knowledge and access, but also because we can then invest in more meaningfully developing those ecosystems.

This paper assesses the role of social media and digital technologies in the reporting of violent events, and evaluates their relative strengths and weaknesses as compared to other means available. It seeks to understand how social media and digital technology data are collated, how reliable the data are, and what practical and ethical issues are associated with their collection and use.

Such initiatives have thereby addressed some of the non-financial and structural barriers that poor people face and have reinforced the positive effects of cash transfer programmes. In design of such programmes, further attention should be paid to the constraints faced by the most vulnerable and how such constraints can be overcome. We conclude with recommendations regarding the provision of complementary support and cross-sectoral linkages based on lessons learned from the case studies. More research is still needed on the impact of the many variations of ‘cash plus’ programming, including evidence on the comparative roles of individual ‘plus’ components, as well as the knowledge, attitudes and behaviour pathways which influence these impacts.

I sometimes worry that people misunderstand the case against bureaucracy. People imagine it’s Big Business complaining about the regulations preventing them from steamrolling over everyone else. That hasn’t been my experience. Big Business – heck, Big Anything – loves bureaucracy. They can hire a team of clerks and secretaries and middle managers to fill out all the necessary forms, and the rest of the company can be on their merry way. It’s everyone else who suffers. The amateurs, the entrepreneurs, the hobbyists, the people doing something as a labor of love. Wal-Mart is going to keep selling groceries no matter how much paperwork and inspections it takes; the poor immigrant family with the backyard vegetable garden might not.
Bureaucracy in science does the same thing: limit the field to big institutional actors with vested interests. No amount of hassle is going to prevent the Pfizer-Merck-Novartis Corporation from doing whatever study will raise their bottom line. But enough hassle will prevent a random psychiatrist at a small community hospital from pursuing his pet theory about bipolar diagnosis. The more hurdles we put up, the more the scientific conversation skews in favor of Pfizer-Merck-Novartis. And the less likely we are to hear little stuff, dissenting voices, and things that don’t make anybody any money.

This radical reduction in wages has been justified by claims that transportation is a deskilled profession and that service providers are merely acting as extensions of technologies (such as GPS navigation and customer-driver pairing algorithms). However, I found in my research on the ride-sharing industry in China that such characterizations are misleading. Firstly, ride-sharing services depend upon the knowledge, skills, and social relations of drivers. After joining the platform, drivers learn which smartphones work best with the app and which telecommunication networks offer the most reliable service in the areas that they operate. They develop strategies for making customers happy and boosting their user ratings. The drivers form online communities to share tacit knowledge about things like earning subsidies and promotions and avoiding getting caught by the police in places where the app is still illicit. Though these processes of enskillment, knowledge-making, and socialization often go unacknowledged by ride-sharing firms, they constitute an indispensable human infrastructure that enables the smooth functioning of technological platforms.

Why don't we publish more on our teaching? #UACES2017pic.twitter.com/GSfmTQjR53

— Simon Usherwood (@Usherwood) September 3, 2017

Welcome from #Tallinn! I'll be tweeting about #DigitalisingDevelopment today; lots of #ict4d& some #globaldev stuff! pic.twitter.com/jmykSjs5za

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) September 12, 2017

And would it be possible, he asked, for such future public investments to be conditional on the tourism industry ploughing back profits into public funds used for development? In this way, the taxpayers who propped up tourism could also benefit from reinvestments into areas such as health, education and transport for all.
While some may cynically dismiss this question, raising concerns about corruption of public finances in poor countries, the question Browne asked, even before the hurricane hit, was a good one: how should those extracting value from a place contribute to it?
But the questions are complicated and perhaps even uncomfortable for those asking them. The relief efforts needed are larger than they should be due to how these countries have been starved of tax revenue precisely because they have chosen to be tax havens.

“The response would have been just as large and swift regardless of the aid rules,” he said. But he added: “The prime minister is frustrated with the rules as they stand.”
The Conservatives have said they are thinking of changing the legal definitions surrounding the use of the protected aid budget, and have already stretched the envelope to include security and peacekeeping measures.

Location, or the severity of hazards, cannot sufficiently explain why Irma had such a severe impact. There needs to be an acknowledgement of why Caribbean nations are far more vulnerable to natural hazards than the US.
This requires a long hard look at the political and economic situation of these islands. For example, several reports have raised worries over the heavy reliance on a handful of sectors, such as agriculture and tourism, which will be severely impacted by Irma in the long-term. Countries with diverse economies are better able to recover following a disaster; but Caribbean countries will find recovery far more challenging, given their low economic diversity.

Some quick internal conversations via WhatsApp between the UNICEF Regional Advisor and U-Report LACRO Coordinator in Panama and it’s agreed that we should use U-Report to provide vital information. We need help from the Global Innovation Centre. A quick email or two later and the Bangkok office gets things going and gives the green light to promote with U-Report Global via Facebook in the countries in the path of Hurricane Irma – from St Kitts to Antigua, Haiti to Barbados, we want people to know basic life-saving information. And in this part of the world, that means having everything available in English, Spanish and French.

But in the wake of these disasters, there is some surprisingly good news: Millions of dollars of relief finance are already being paid without fuss, social media campaigns, or photo-ops. What is this remarkable “innovation”? The answer is dull: it’s insurance.
(...)
None of these financing arrangements are silver bullets. They can‘t substitute for risk reduction, solid preparedness planning, and informed decision-making.
But they can help to provide the glue that holds it all together, making sound planning beforehand worthwhile.

De Niro and billionaire James Packer had bought the former K Club Resort on Barbuda last year but had yet to begin construction on the property; their original proposal faced controversy with the island's residents, who legally have ownership of all land in Barbuda and a right to vote on all proposals.

The world's biggest school-based volunteer travel company, World Challenge, will no longer offer trips to orphanages in the developing world after research showed the practice was harming vulnerable children.
Advocacy agency ReThink Orphanages said a revolving door of volunteers was making abandonment and attachment issues even worse.

Well we've done ethnographies with people between 2013 and 2016 including people who have been part of the violence, for example with people who are hit men or people who are involved in gangs or mafias. And what we realized through working with them is that nobody really wants this lifestyle. And often it's the case that, due to their marginality or due to lack of opportunity they end up going down these avenues which they don't necessarily enjoy.
So I have faith in people and I think that we just have to try and focus more on listening to the voices of the people at the ground level and creating positive interfaces for them with each other so that the city doesn't become an area of competition — it becomes an area of co-operation.

Finally, the man who keeps the money coming in, who gives this entire neighbourhood its raison d’être, the de facto mayor of what is effectively an entirely new piece of city, takes his place on the vast stage and picks up the mic. The 75-year-old Daddy GO wears a grass-green short-sleeved suit, bow tie and gold watch. After praying on his knees at the lectern, he climbs to his feet.
“Will somebody shout Hallelujah?”

They want us to stand with them in pulling together the knowledge they need, the evidence they need. They need our global power to be able to hold their leaders accountable to them. So we need to be on the ground with them.

Can outsourcing improve Liberia's schools?https://t.co/CPSpjyCq12
We've just posted our preliminary RCT results, w/ @marome1& @wsandholtz. pic.twitter.com/okQzgWB5Ay

— Justin Sandefur (@JustinSandefur) September 7, 2017

Seen in this light the experiment is a sort of side-benefit to the main objective — a way of making a virtue out of the vice that not everybody can be covered. Given that Niehaus can't provide every single poor person in Kenya with the payouts, he argues, isn't the most ethical course to at least make the effort to measure how much of a difference cash aid makes for those getting it compared to those who do not? After all, if researchers find that cash aid has a big impact that kind of evidence "increases the chances that some of the other villagers might get a decent income in the future too" if governments and other charities are inspired to give out more cash aid.
What's more, says Niehaus, GiveDirectly's use of a lottery to decide which villages get the payouts isn't just ensuring that the data from its randomized controlled trial is as accurate as possible, it's distributing the cash aid in the fairest possible way.

Unlike in other sectors of development, such as governance and public health, media development has no cohesive community of scholarship that can help us understand and address new challenges or develop new ways of thinking in the quickly evolving and complex media space. The weak linkages to scholarship around media development issues are not because such scholarship does not exist, but rather because the scholarship is scattered across academic disciplines. One can find important research related to media development at academic conferences for communications, political science, anthropology, and many more.

‘Useful abbreviations for the time-pressed online reader’ (for @guardianreview) pic.twitter.com/Kr9dGbobrg

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) September 11, 2017

Without exception, men were more likely to choose positive attributes to describe themselves (e.g., intelligent, comfortable, entertaining) and women were more likely to choose negative attributes (e.g., nervous, awkward, terrified). In fact, men were much more likely to choose positive attributes — eight attributes generated differences of 10 points or greater.

For the women who are still deliberating whether to sign up to the database or not because they doubt their own expertise, do not underestimate what you already know! You probably know more than you think and at this time in your career it’s more important to improve your speaking and presentation skills than your expertise.
While there are certainly etiquettes and unwritten rules about how to organise conferences in Brussels, it doesn’t mean things can’t change. People in Brussels seem to have mixed feelings about going to conferences.
Some consider them a waste of time unless they get to speak. Yet, others go – for the free food, the connections one can make, or to actually learn something new.

Simonton recently took a deep dive into the community and minority-owned media landscape of the American South — so deep, in fact, that she spent over a year researching and reporting her findings in a 62-page report called Out of Struggle. Her report takes stock of the independent media landscape in the 13 states of the traditional South, from Texas to Florida to West Virginia, and was commissioned by Project South.
“We have good stuff that people are doing, [but] it’s very localized. How do we strengthen that and expand that impact?” she told me. “That’s what we think we can bring to the mix: finding some ways to offer services, support, training, et cetera, to increase the amount of journalism that’s going on in these already existing media outlets.”

We suggest that because modern white feminist interventions retain this implicit orientation towards rescuing non-Western women from their own societies, cultures, and contexts, they also retain many of the same dynamics of these early exercises in white saviordom. Specifically, they center the intervenors rather than marginalized women, and favor the abandonment of complex narratives in favor of simple stories of abject victimhood. These dynamics are further entrenched by the drive to capture the attention of the Western public, generating a feedback loop between donor priorities and media coverage. What gets lost in the process is politics. Consequently, these interventions often inadvertently reinforce, rather than combat, one of the main drivers of women’s marginalization and injury: their depoliticization by the state.

Reliance on vigilante groups often is a faute de mieux solution for states facing a threat they cannot address alone. But as the cases in this report illustrate, there are better and worse ways of doing so, and of ensuring that a short-term expedient not turn into a long-term headache.

This analysis focuses on the 258 incidents (24 per cent of those recorded between 2011 and 2016) in which it is known that an organised group was responsible. We recognise that the small sample size limits the strength of quantitative analysis. However, even though the ‘unknown’ category is large, we can safely say that most of these unidentified perpetrators are neither state actors
(because military operations of state actors are relatively easy to identify) nor members of global NSAGs (such as IS and Al Qaeda, who have incentive to claim credit and thus self-identify
most of the time). In other words, most perpetrators in the ‘unknown’ category are likely to be national- or sub-national-level militia, un-affiliated individuals or small criminal groups.
Moreover, the results from the subset accord with qualitative findings from interview evidence and document review, increasing our confidence in the validity of the sample.

This paper analyses the myriad terminologies that have arisen in relation to the digital economy and digital labour. In detailed tables, it assesses the prevalence and currency within research literature of nearly 30 different terms. It then provides a definition for each and summarises the typical content of literature using the term. It also summarises current popularity of related Twitter hashtags.

On why female faculty receive poorer teaching evaluations | @jansauermann@uZoelitzhttps://t.co/uOHqlxvRdCpic.twitter.com/toJeBpOCL0

— Shit Academics Say (@AcademicsSay) September 11, 2017

For starters, conferences are getting more and more expensive – see above – and that’s unjust; I don’t like the disparities that this creates. And yes, I do try to help PhDs and contract-research folk get to conferences – and yes, that means allocating money from my research budgets for that purpose. But an individual action hardly addresses the problem. We really do need to do something about the costs of getting together to do our jobs.
But even if conferences were cheap, I’d still hate them. I find it hard to simply be at an academic conference – rushing from room to room – or worse still, venue to venue – for papers where presenters never have enough time and where there is often no time at all to discuss. I often can’t manage a full day of sitting and listening. I get very antsy and have to skip a session just to break up the monotony. (And don’t start me on enduring hour after hour of crappy powerpoints.)

There is the danger that an emphasis on public engagement could lead to the neglect of communicating with academic audiences. However, the main academic contribution of the WWP project is not just the open access book series, but also journal articles that are specifically designed to engage in academic debate. In addition, the team felt that the skills they developed by writing content for the MOOC and website were valuable, not only for communicating with the public but also for developing their academic arguments. We should not be limited by narrow conceptions of dissemination or indeed by the apparent divide between public and academic anthropology, especially when it comes to producing ethnographically-nuanced modes of education. Teaching an appreciation of the richness of diversity around the world by presenting learners with topics as familiar as social
media, but appropriated in vastly different forms, can be a tool for both personal and societal transformation.

And this is not only about numbers, although numbers are very important. But it also has to do with being able to attract and retain and motivate women. It also has to do with special, temporary measures when situations need to be corrected because of this parity gap. It also has to do with creating an enabling environment because there is a cultural aspect to it. And we also need a cultural shift. So as I said, I think this time we have targets that are bold but are realistic – that parity at the senior level should be reached in 2021. In most of the [UN] system, [parity] should be reached by 2026, and there will be a few outliers that will go until 2028. That is the ultimate target.

Up to 11,000 children may have been sold to European families, with both parties being given fake documents.
Some were reportedly born into "baby farms" that sold children to the West.
Sri Lanka's health minister told the Dutch current affairs programme Zembla he would set up a DNA database to help children find their birth mothers.
About 4,000 children are thought to be have ended up with families in the Netherlands, with others going to other European countries such as Sweden, Denmark, Germany and the UK.

Giving out pads is only part of what needs to be done to help girls manage their periods. It's not a "silver bullet solution," says Bethany Caruso, a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University.

White Saviour Barbie is so popular that they’ve now made a movie about her, starring Alicia Vikander. True, they’ve called the movie Tomb Raider for some reason, but anyone with half a brain can see from the trailer that it’s really about White Saviour Barbie.
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Perhaps the film will have a bit more depth and all this gap-year malarkey has only been forced into the trailer for the purposes of exposition. After all, we’ve yet to hear her say either of the two sacred gap year mottos – “They don’t value life as much here” and “These people have nothing, but they’re so happy”.

It is that presentation that inspired the Laws of War DLC. In it, players take on the role of an international humanitarian aid worker. They are tasked with clearing unexploded ordinance from the same battlefields which they fought over in Arma 3’s base game. In the roughly five-hour mini-campaign, players see that fictional conflict from all sides, including from the perspective of civilians caught in the crossfire.
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By creating prohibited cluster munitions as an in-game asset, and by also teaching the controversies surrounding their use, Rouffaer believes that gamers have a more complete picture of modern warfare for the first time. “Everyone on the forums says, ‘Yes! Thank you! Give us civilians and humanitarian workers and cluster munitions and we will use these new guns to eradicate as many of the first group as possible,” Rouffaer said. “But by saying that, it means that they will have consciously been saying, ‘We are going to break the law.’

Digital communication is more engaging and meaningful to the individual. It allows communication participants to effortlessly be part of and influence the dialogue, and to contribute and be recognized through co-creation and visibility. This explains the rapid growth of social media users worldwide.

Today’s blog is a guest post from Fahim Safi. Originally from Afghanistan, Fahim is now seeking asylum in Belgium and acts as one of the administrators of the mind-boggling group, “Mobile Credit for Refugees and Displaced People.” This volunteer-run organization has already provided over $750,000 of mobile credit to people on the move. No this isn’t yet another effort to build “apps for refugees” here — it’s simply a question of topping off their phones, and it’s one of the smartest solutions we’ve seen.

But it’s hard to see how they expect the bank to meet this commitment if it continues to place more emphasis on speed in project implementation than on identifying and managing the adverse environmental, human rights and social effects of its projects. To fulfil their commitment to promote a more just and equitable global economy the BRICS will need to up their game.
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There are reasons to think the BRICS leaders could be persuaded to adopt a human rights based approach to making global economic governance more democratic and responsive to the needs of developing countries and for a more just, equitable and sustainable global economy. They, and their colleagues in other developing countries, are governing societies with continuing, and some cases worsening poverty, inequality, unemployment and environmental degradation levels. And they don’t seem to have an effective strategy for meeting this challenge.

GDP since 1 AD

1. Viral graph of global shares
2. Then fixing the weird X axis
3. Then using an absolute Y axis

all via @MForstaterpic.twitter.com/T1MexXqMvm

— Justin Sandefur (@JustinSandefur) 17. September 2017

The answer is "yes"! Compliance with legal minimum wage pays off for exporting firms, esp in apparel. https://t.co/lAfAQ1Z4dC

— Günseli Berik (@gberik) 17. September 2017

Tavneet Suri spent time in the communities in Akuapim in Ghana that Markus Goldstein and I had surveyed five years previously. She documented remarkable changes in the external environment facing pineapple exporters, driven by the introduction of sea freight routes that substantially reduced transportation costs. This, in turn, changed the relationship between farmers and exporters in important and subtle ways that Rahul Deb and Suri model in their JDE paper. This is a great example of a light touch “re-interview”; it did not depend on access to individual level data from the earlier research, but by building on the original survey was able to observe institutional changes that would otherwise have been obscured.

So what I would dearly love to see is the two of them forming a dream team to swap countries (or methodologies), because I want to know more about the missing ‘why’ in China, and the ‘how’ in Bangladesh. The traumatic chaos, bloodletting and famine of Maoism must have had at least as profound an impact on China’s decision makers as the events of the 1970s in Bangladesh. And Ang could help Hossain more fully explain the alchemy by which a chaotic and ineffective government somehow gets officials to do good things (or at least not get in the way). I’d also like Hossain to take a look at the gender aspects of China’s rise – almost entirely missing from Ang’s book.

Whether female leaders foster gender equality depends on both the individual leader as well as the nature of the organization’s structures, processes, and norms. In a blog post on the gender dynamics of knowledge organizations, Priyanthi Fernando, former Executive Director of Sri Lanka’s Centre for Poverty Analysis reminds us that “A discussion of women’s participation and ascension to leadership roles in think tanks [assumes] that think tanks are also gendered organizations, and that somehow women led think tanks could behave differently, and that there are organizational practices that might ‘relieve some of the barriers to inclusion and promotion that women face in think tanks.’”
As a starting point, it is essential to look at both the organization and how gender is integrated across its policies and practices, as well as the leader’s style and characteristics. This is an essential next step for anyone interested in understanding why and how female leadership should be fostered, the difference it can make, and the importance of supporting organizational approaches to gender equality.

Underneath every shiny new megacity, there's often a story of communities displaced. In this moving, poetic talk, OluTimehin Adegbeye details how government land grabs are destroying the lives of thousands who live in the coastal communities of Lagos, Nigeria, to make way for a "new Dubai."

His hypothesis is that the transition from military to democratic system of governance unwittingly hurt the status quo. “Pandora’s box opened over the land with the allocation of resources and political positions as democracy came in 1999. Abacha was no longer there to keep a lid on things with his iron fist so underlying tensions and rivalries that could not erupt under military rule, came to the fore. That year, we were running all the time. If it wasn’t Kano, Kaduna, Lagos. Democracy had become demon-crazy.”
Has democracy been an enabler of violence? The jury remains out on that; in the meantime, there have been repeat episodes of the crisis in 2002, 2008 and 2010. The trauma remains for survivors and their families even as the Middle Belt remains a potential hotspot for violence. Even more scary is the fact that both indigenes and settlers used weapons they kept in their possession from the first crisis — and those tools of trade remain dormant but ready.

Elena had never been a typical gang recruit, or a typical gang member—her social class, her relationship to the boss, and even her sexuality reserved for her a rare position as an insider-outsider. But she could have just as easily become a typical victim.
When she saw those dead bodies in the dirt that day, Elena had kept her cool. As soon as the car rolled past the police and the caution tape, she told her friend to drive, just drive, to keep on driving. Then, one of the lucky ones, she engineered a way to disappear herself from El Salvador altogether.

Beginning this semester, Chongqing Institute of Engineering, a private university in southwestern China, is offering a three-month course for aspiring internet celebrities, Beijing Youth Daily reported Thursday. The program is run in cooperation with a local company, which will be in charge of teaching the first crop of 19 students how to be better livestreamers.
“They said that after graduation, the school will arrange for us to sign contracts with the company to be wanghong,” one of the students told Beijing Youth Daily, using the Chinese word for such online celebrities. “I think it’s great — if I do well, I can become famous.”

“These companies that sell relaxation tools and techniques are kidding themselves if they don’t understand this is part of an acceleration of our economy and expansion of work into all aspects of our life,” says William Davies, a lecturer at Goldsmiths University and author of The Happiness Industry. “It’s a cruel mentality where everything can be used or should be useful, and if it isn’t, I’m not trying hard enough. That’s one problem. The other problem, of course, is that where you once had things that added intrinsic value for people, they’ve become captured in some way.”

When I was an outsider, an Obruni, I belonged to universities and jobs and professions—the necessary, easy belonging of adulthood. But I found little satisfaction there. Jobs change, classes end. Now, as I tug on my heavy yellow gear and try not to trip over my own feet, I realize it is the excitement and camaraderie of service, of answering the pager-bomb, that has made this rural Nova Scotia village more of a home than any other place I’ve lived.

Despite this, few of these artists would have referred to their work as “feminist.” Instead of a desire to advocate for women, their sensibilities were heavily shaped by the revolutionary struggle and the widespread resistance of their respective countries—even if their works did reflect a repertoire of issues addressed by feminism, such as motherhood, civil rights, and sexual violence.
“Many of these artists were active in left-wing movements,” explains Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, co-curator of the exhibition “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. “But for them, the rights of women were secondary, and the Left considered that feminism was bourgeois and imperialistic.”
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Beyond Latin America, crucial to this dialogue are the Chicana and Latina artists who were working in the United States at the time. “Usually the Latin American and the Latina / Chicana art worlds are kept separate, which is an artificial, colonial construct,” Fajardo-Hill argues. “Latina and Chicana artists were responding not only to patriarchal politics that were as oppressive as those faced by their counterparts in Latin America, but also to a second-wave feminism that was often indifferent to the issues faced by women of color.”

This guest-edited issue is titled ‘Hip Hop Constellations’—a title the editors Nanna Schneidermann (Oslo and Akershus University College) and Ibrahim Abraham (University of Helsinki) use in order to highlight the idea of popular music as significant but contingent social practice. The articles published here hence cover various values and significations that hip hop culture takes on in Denmark, Mexico, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and between Sweden and Chile. The broad sweep of this issue ranges from
neo-liberal socialist ‘gangstas’ to the nostalgic sampling of ‘national culture’, all the way to hip hop as the ‘outsourced’ vehicle of the Scandinavian welfare state’s projects. It is through the breadth of the material analysed in this issue that one begins to appreciate the special character of hip hop as both inseparable from certain key ideas and imagery that approaches universal
recognisability, and as a field that remains susceptible to the significant revaluation of constituent symbols or ideas.

Robert Chambers contrasts a Newtonian paradigm in which the world is seen and understood as controllable with a paradigm of complexity which recognizes that the real world of social processes and power relations is messy and unpredictable. To confront the challenges of complex and emergent realities requires a revolutionary new professionalism. This is underpinned by a new combination of canons of rigour expressed through eclectic methodological pluralism and participatory approaches which reverse and transform power relations. Promising developments include rapid innovations in participatory ICTs, participatory statistics, and the Reality Check Approach with its up-to-date and rigorously grounded insights. Fundamental to the new professionalism, in every country and context, are reflexivity, facilitation, groundtruthing, and personal mindsets, behaviour, attitudes, empathy and love.