If you’re feeling despair about the fate of humanity in the 21st century, you might want to reconsider.
In 2017, it felt like the global media picked up all of the problems, and none of the solutions. To fix that, here are 99 of the best stories from this year that you probably missed.

But more than three-quarters of the Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar feel they don’t have enough information to make good decisions, and almost two-thirds said they are unable to communicate with aid providers, according to Internews’ interviews with individual refugees and focus groups.

What is more, The Tribune team paid another Rs 300, for which the agent provided “software” that could facilitate the printing of the Aadhaar card after entering the Aadhaar number of any individual. When contacted, UIDAI officials in Chandigarh expressed shock over the full data being accessed, and admitted it seemed to be a major national security breach. They immediately took up the matter with the UIDAI technical consultants in Bangaluru. Sanjay Jindal, Additional Director-General, UIDAI Regional Centre, Chandigarh, accepting that this was a lapse, told The Tribune: “Except the Director-General and I, no third person in Punjab should have a login access to our official portal. Anyone else having access is illegal, and is a major national security breach.”

In my “Card Crusaders” paper, I advise for critically questioning the hype around digital financial inclusion, and checking how plausible the narrative linking cashless payments to pro-poor development really is. More broadly, as Maurer writes, this is also about recognising the questions that the push for digital money raises about the “democracy” of money, and its “publicness”: “Something else is afoot here. And that something is a focus on generating revenue from the privatization of the means of value transfer.” So while digital, cashless systems may look like a technical fix for including the “next billion,” there’s more at stake.
Clearly, as money moves into the digital age we can’t turn back the clock, but neither should we naively allow those who have a particularistic interest in new monetary forms to set it to whatever time they want. This is particularly important given the increasing pressure on governments to cull cash, and hurry up the digital turn by “demonetising.”

I was making two faulty assumptions here: one, that credibility would lead magically to business. I imagined that like other groups I admired, we’d just have to visibly know our stuff and people would beat a path to our door. I had no idea how hard other groups like ours are having to hustle; how much leader profiles and networks are leveraged to bring in money; the institutional work they have to take on to keep passion projects going; the compromises and the endless chasing after grants. No-one funded our learning products. No-one wants to pay people to think.
And two: that the people who read and liked resources like the Frameworks would be able to use them in their work. I thought all we had to do was point out, helpfully, which way lead to a better world and everyone would excitedly start commissioning evaluations and context analysis missions, and investing in research phases in tech projects. The world does not work that way. It is possible to know that there are gaps in practice in your organization and not prioritize fixing them over the many, many other things there are to do. And many, many people know that these practice problems exist, and are prevented from fixing them by systemic challenges like the chronic underfunding of NGO infrastructure.

Kleinschidt, who spent 25 years working for the United Nations and managed refugee camps in Africa and Asia, said the humanitarian sector was still building "storage facilities" for displaced people in the false expectation that they would one day return to where they came from.
"The logic that displacement is something temporary has created these camps," he said. "The logic that only a refugee returning home as fast as possible is a good refugee."
(...)
"The design community and the planning community, especially in Western Europe, are largely overlooking this whole topic of the need of thinking about how to plan cities, how to organise, how to manage cities and urban areas in the quickly-growing parts of our world," Provoost argued.

Yes. It‘s all the designers‘ fault. And the urban architects‘. They just don‘t think. No, wake up guys, it‘s politics. Politicians, governments, they don‘t WANT refugees. They do everything they can to have refugees moved away, out of sight. Refugees are a threat to our complacent societies that have become numb and indifferent to human needs. And everything that takes place to help refugees happens in the narrow confines that governments allow organizations and volunteers to work in.

Challenging inequities, even in a field of people committed to human rights, takes time. Changing the field will not happen in five years. Even as the largest international human rights NGOs are decentralizing or moving headquarters to the South, this is not shifting the balance of power. To move the needle, international organizations need to stop working “on” the problems of the global South and instead use their immense financial resources to empower local and national organizations to shape their own agendas, in particular advocating to funders to provide direct support to such groups. And funders in the North and South need to focus their attention on ways of building the confidence and competence of philanthropies in the global South to support human rights work.

Their story -- one of driven citizens braving the storm to help their most vulnerable neighbors -- is an inspiring one. But it also speaks to the dangers of what can happen without adequately-funded public institutions and infrastructure. Heroic as they may be, citizens' outfits like the Cajun Navy can't be expected to compensate for severely underfunded emergency prevention and disaster response systems.

Africa On The Blog was started 5 years ago, It was an idea that I had and other people in the diaspora wanted. I actually thought it would only engage the women in the diaspora to talk about their Countries, experiences, and stories but the thing took a life of it’s own. *laughs*, So We ended up getting many people who wanted to be contributors from allover Africa including Men.
some of the contributors we had were lecturers at universities who started sending their students to us as a resource, it’s pretty much started a life of it’s own.

This may not be easy — following through on New Year’s resolutions rarely is. Like junk food, junk news is more readily available, cheaper, and yummier, at least in the short term. But proper journalism does exist — I’m talking about journalism that challenges our pre-conceived notions; journalism that gives us more than one side to a story; journalism that teaches us something about the world in which we live. But it is our responsibility to seek it out, consume it, and where possible, support its production.
By doing so, we will not only be looking after ourselves a little bit better; we’ll also help improve the state of the world. As global citizens, if we are informed, we can take part in the decisions that shape our world; we can put pressure on our governments to act; and we can mobilize. Only when we properly understand our complex world can we begin to change it for the better.

Infused with massive venture capital, these firms seem to pursue skyrocketing growth at all cost. In contrast, platform co-ops aim to reinvest in their users, employees, and communities, and value positive workplace practices in tandem with profitability. Getting platform cooperatives to scale will not be easy, however. Deep-pocketed firms like Uber have raised billions of dollars and have a first-mover advantage. Moreover, one of the biggest challenges with platforms is that name recognition is highly powerful and there is a tendency toward monopoly. That said, a growing number of grassroots efforts around the globe are challenging this dynamic.

In truth, this latest political upheaval across the world has brought to light not just how unprepared philanthropies were, how reactive, how little we knew about these possible scenarios. But journalism was also taken by surprise. We, philanthropies, we, the journalists, weren’t curious enough.
The current media environment is not good news for anyone in civil society, and that includes philanthropy. The information base of democracy, its norms and its operating mechanisms are ‘threatened by a storm that takes everything on its path’, as Sievers and Schneider describe.
(...)
The trap would be to believe that philanthropy is the answer to sustainability. It is not and it must not be. As journalist Gustavo Gorriti notes, ‘there is a great disparity between the consensus on the importance of free, investigative journalism for the health of democracy and the very small percentage of philanthropy allotted to support it’.

Denise-Marie Ordway, JR’s managing editor, has picked out some of the top studies in digital media and journalism in 2017.

We’ve just published an e-book compiling all of our reportage and analysis of how climate change affects smallholder farmers in Africa https://t.co/FSw4WOalhB

— IRIN News (@irinnews) December 29, 2017

Recent developments in trial design and conduct have been accompanied by changes in roles and relationships between trial oversight groups. Recognising and respecting the value of differing priorities among those involved in running trials is key to successful relationships between committees, funders and sponsors. Clarity regarding appropriate lines of communication, roles and accountability is needed. We present 10 evidence-based recommendations to inform updates to international trial guidance, particularly the Medical Research Council guidelines.

Finally, we recommend the utility of immediate, open and honest debate. The existence of perverse incentives and ideas of how to deal with them needs to be openly discussed. This means, internally and publicly, that donors (including the World Bank) need to engage in honest discussions about how they can manage their existing disbursement pressures, for example, in a way that does not limit the functionality of reform efforts. And the Government of Malawi can show willingness to be publicly challenged on their tendency to “signal reforms” while maintaining behavior as normal.
Though both donors and government are likely to be reticient about airing their dirty laundry in public, Malawians deserve a reform approach that is honest and accountable about the existence of perverse incentives. We have enough evidence over the past 20 years of reform that things are not working.
But hope is to be found in the fact that we are increasingly aware of the drivers of those failures and, if sufficiently motivated, we can address them.

Had I properly asked myself whether there were women in the department that would have been as or more qualified to participate in the panel as the manel members the answer would have been yes. But I didn't ask that question, at least not in time. Had I a practice of mentally double checking who the full set of authors are on a paper before citing it, I wouldn't have left one out. But there is a deeper issue. While I believe that such mental checks can be useful correctives, the deeper problem is that I didn't feel it necessary to ask myself these questions or respond in any other helpful way, even after women brought concerns directly to my attention. The hubris of my position seems obvious looking back, that I would so easily rely on my own assessment of the effects of my inaction and dismiss the concerns of smart people that were closer to the issue.

Across the world, we tend to venerate men as knowledgeable authorities. These gender stereotypes are self-perpetuating: by paying more attention to their ideas and analysis, citing their work more frequently, we reinforce widespread assumptions of male expertise. We also blinker ourselves to alternative perspectives. This is self-defeating – if we’re trying to understand complex problems.

⚡️ “The Peril of Male Bias”

Highlighting widespread resistance, and demand for reform.https://t.co/iPSAJRlvVr

— Alice Evans (@_alice_evans) January 11, 2018

This is all still very disappointing & really the story of #globaldev: Discourses are dominated by Northern male economists-and then everybody else has to prove why they shouldn't be ignored, e.g. female scholars, indigenous approaches, sociologists, anthropologists etc etc :( https://t.co/4IL5D8lGlS

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) January 10, 2018

Lawmakers now say orphans and other vulnerable children should be cared for under locally available support mechanisms in order to protect them.
But some MPs said that the country has insufficient local services to cater for vulnerable children.
More than 15,000 Ethiopian children have been adopted in the US since 1999.

The U.N.’s statement — that its officers were stationed only at the perimeter of the school — contradicts the statements made by Louis, who told me he was handcuffed by a U.N. agent on campus. The U.N. insists that it was uninvolved because its officers were not in the courtyard, but the entrance where they say they were stationed is set just below the scene of the massacre.
The new U.N. mission is ostensibly focused on justice, but Apollon noted that Haiti has seen many international missions throughout its history. “They all failed,” he said, because they do not understand the Haitian reality.
In Haiti, he said, impunity reigns.

Very relevant for #globaldev discussions on poverty, $2/day measurements & more: Numbers are political, negotiated constructs that often rest on simplified & outdated assumptions; we make them "objective" through orgs, reports & continued uncritical sharing! https://t.co/npZq1P73MM

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) January 11, 2018

One of the most rigorous efforts to understand the political conditions that made the Rwandan model possible has emerged from the African Power and Politics research project led by David Booth, Tim Kelsall and others. They argue that Kagame’s government is an example of “developmental patrimonialism”. In this system, the potentially damaging aspects of patrimonial politics are held in check by a leader who enjoys tight control over patronage networks. These include jobs for the boys, waste and inefficiency.

These findings have important implications for the "let's make everyone an entrepreneur" brigade. The challenge still remains how to create lots and lots of jobs with decent wages (and to keep those wages globally competitive).
cc @pseudoerasmushttps://t.co/dzztoijzeH

— Ken Opalo (@kopalo) January 6, 2018

The volunteering that has greatest impact is done upstream and has a measurable outcome. Volunteering works when the aim is to change a broken system, to change a law or policy. This law or policy could be one that sees a requirement for volunteers, fundraising and charities abandoned, so there will be no expectation that the next generation will keep inefficient systems. It could be a change to policy about homelessness or refugees or international aid, or school funding or hospital funding or reducing environmental damage. It doesn't create waste or waste time. Raising awareness is what happens along the way.

African think tanks are challenged to ensure tangible impact via effective engagement of policymakers and the public. Barriers to impact include limited ability to communicate, limited media exposure and networks, low interest of and access to policymakers, misaligned priorities, limited responsiveness to immediate demands, and a lack of trust.

"Under new rules, people in NY prisons can only receive books from 5 certified vendors. They offer 5 junk sex novels, 14 bibles & religious books, 24 drawing/coloring books, 21 puzzle books, 11 guitar/chess/how-to books, 1 dictionary, 1 thesaurus. No other books can be sent in"

— Molly Crabapple (@mollycrabapple) January 8, 2018

FUN FACT: Uber lost about $5B last year. If fares were set high enough to just break even they would cost more than a traditional taxi. Every rideshare you take is subsidized by the finance industry in a ploy to profit off the destruction of unionized companies and public transit

— Post-Culture Review (@PostCultRev) January 6, 2018

Facebook’s unusual status as a hybrid public/private space is really crucial to understanding these interactions and campaigns. The opportunity for “Maids” and “Madams” to speak outside traditional one-on-one employment relations is unprecedented and provides a platform for domestic workers to voice their dissent. But despite the endless talk of its ‘democratising’ potential, Facebook does not, in fact, automatically give everyone an equal voice.
(...)
Much has been made of the potential for Facebook to amplify the voices of marginalised groups such as domestic workers. But as this example shows, the internet does not naturally favour the oppressed over the oppressor. Deep socioeconomic divides still exist in the production of online content and activities such as surveillance and blacklisting provide new mechanisms for employers to exercise power over informal workers. Public and private groups where membership and activity is governed by internal guidelines or rules arbitrarily established by admins also serve to legitimise constructed hierarchies and categories based on class, race and gender.

My book assumes that the beneficiary, whose self-interest would seem to entail maintaining that life, might also have an interest in abandoning it. In making this assumption, I try to point toward an as yet unarticulated zone where politics (assumed to stop at the nation’s borders) might combine with humanitarianism (allowed free rein in the zone outside those borders) to produce a politically aware humanitarianism 2.0. It’s my hope that this self-critical body of thinking can help inform the increasingly self-critical philanthropy now in operation.

Oprah is appealing precisely because her stories hide the role of political, economic, and social structures. Instead of examining the interplay of biography and history, they eliminate it, making structure and agency indistinguishable. (p.100)

Here's the paper by Erin Hengel that's tearing up #ASSA2018https://t.co/uJupAySs7Tpic.twitter.com/92b3Y9WvNA

— Emily Liner (@MsEmilyLiner) January 5, 2018

Many institutions still see MOOCs as an inexpensive way to do education at a large scale. That’s not realistic in anthropology. A great MOOC may be relatively inexpensive for the scale, but it is not without substantial ongoing cost.
Still, MOOCs have a serious benefit: A huge population of people in Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and rural areas of many other countries are underserved by local and regional educational institutions. MOOC-like courses can reach people where they live, on the devices that they use.
I dream of bringing those populations into the study of human evolution, where new discoveries are being made. Tomorrow’s generation of paleoanthropologists must represent the areas where tomorrow’s fossil discoveries will be made.
How can we empower people to be a part of this science? To me, that’s the big problem. My instinct is that we can build communities to make this kind of learning possible for people around the world.

Günter Ziegler, a mathematician at the Free University of Berlin and a member of the consortium's negotiating team, says that German researchers have the upper hand in the negotiations. “Most papers are now freely available somewhere on the Internet, or else you might choose to work with preprint versions,” he says. “Clearly our negotiating position is strong. It is not clear that we want or need a paid extension of the old contracts.”

Sheesh! it's been a busy week for #globaldev Twitter. We're asking @NPR's audience to share their thoughts on points made by @owenbarder@DinaPomeranz: Does the way that we talk about poor countries feed into the idea that they’re “hellholes” or worse? https://t.co/H8kBdsGm41

— Malaka Gharib (@MalakaGharib) January 12, 2018

Aid workers, NGOs and aid agencies: if you paint developing countries as potential sources of terrorism, disease and unwanted migration to justify your budgets, don’t be surprised if politicians join you in denigrating those countries.

— Owen Barder (@owenbarder) January 12, 2018

Unpopular opinion:
When wellmeaning people describe poverty as a hellhole, we shouldn't be surprised that people end up thinking of poor places as "shitholes".

When I share positive news about low income countries, I regularly get criticised for "undermining impetus for action."

— Dina D. Pomeranz (@DinaPomeranz) January 12, 2018

The problem isn't about being positive v negative. It's simplistic v complex.

— Dave Algoso (@dalgoso) January 12, 2018

As imperfect as the offerings of the aid industry are, blaming them for a changing political climate where ‘holes’ become a topic for discussion seems unfair. Public and political perceptions are often rooted in long-term myths and short-term political discussion around ‘fixing’ a problem, a country or a complex issue like migration. At the same time the aid industry has become more self-reflective and self-critical and nuanced campaigns and advocacy by far outnumber alarmist stories or the denigration of people and places as a fundraising strategy.

"As a communications person working for a small global health NGO, this is a balance I'm constantly grappling with. We need to emphasize that it's the situation we are addressing that is problematic, not the people. We must portray those who receive our services with dignity, as whole people with whole lives, whole families, whole jobs, hobbies, hopes, challenges and joys. We must not reduce them to just a hopeless victim. We strive to weave all of this throughout our messaging."

Data specialists contacted by IRIN were alarmed but not shocked at the report. “This set of findings screams ‘accident waiting to happen’, as well as a lack of understanding by senior [WFP] management of WTF is going on with their data at country level," said one.
(...)
Among the many issues, grouped under five high-risk and five medium-risk headings, the audit found that extraneous information was being gathered. In more than one case, WFP and its partner organisations collected more personal information than was needed, “without a specified and legitimate purpose”, and again, contrary to policy.
(...)
The report also said beneficiaries did not give their informed consent to the use of personal data, and data was routinely copied without encryption or password protection.

Alex Haines, a barrister, said the UN’s internal justice system routinely fails to protect against glaring conflicts of interest. He cited a 2015 case that took place in central Asia, where a man accused of sexual harassment was allowed to interview the woman who brought the complaint against him. Such practices are not uncommon, he said, adding that victims are also prevented from reading the final report produced by investigators.
(...)
The UN and its senior managers have the equivalent of complete diplomatic immunity, while many other UN managers have functional immunity, exempting them from legal process for acts performed in their official capacity. The UN said that when there are “credible allegations that acts of sexual harassment may amount to criminal conduct”, cases will be referred to national authorities.
A woman who works on a UN peacekeeping mission in the Middle East fears the situation facing victims has worsened. She pursued a complaint a decade ago, which resulted in the perpetrator being disciplined. She is unsure the same would happen today.

Not only this; experience has shown me, and I’m sure many others, that no matter how much we feel we are being mistreated in the sector, employers will carry on as they have done for years. We can feel like we are easily dispensable; we have to put up with what we are subjected to in the knowledge that someone would happily fill our role anyway, such is the attraction of working in a sector where people are viewed so heroically in the public eye. This allows organisations to get away with treating their staff in a way that is completely at odds with the ethics and ethos they loudly proclaim in their marketing material. The attitude is – if you don’t like it, get out and we’ll find another willing foot soldier.

French news reports say the investigators concluded they didn’t have enough evidence to bring charges.

Great news!
Norway reinstalls the position of Minister of International Development.
Nikolai Astrup is a very competent and dedicated politician - even a nice man. Congrats, pic.twitter.com/0mDO77yOST

— Erik Solheim (@ErikSolheim) January 18, 2018

Regarding this latest scandal, it's kind of funny to think the Doing Business project was somehow exposed this week for secretly trying to undermine progressive governments. That ideology was baked into the design of Doing Business from the start. But now is a good time to change course. In response to the latest debacle, World Bank management has announced a new independent review of Doing Business. Hopefully they’ll use this opportunity to develop a more balanced and constructive stance on how developing countries should regulate markets—beyond a simplistic message of cutting red tape and letting the market rule.

A dark and foggy Middle Eastern city? Check. A sad, white victim of this distant and dark city? Check. A bombing? Check. Little, brown kids running around with toy guns? Check. Sad music that apparently never stops playing on loud speakers across the Middle East? Check. A historically inaccurate portrayal of events that occurred? Check.

The China-Africa story isn’t just about saviors or oppressors, and framing it that way is a disservice to all the interesting and enterprising people that form these links. I’ve learned that the topic of China in Africa is fraught with questions of representation. These stories can easily reek of exoticism, essentialism, and at times, racism. Africa isn’t one thing. Neither is China.
To me, the most interesting part about these connections is that they form a new kind of globalization, one that a lot of the world isn’t paying attention to, what one researcher described as a form of “globalization from below.” In Guangzhou, in southern China, you find entrepreneurs from Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Somalia running factories, logistic services, and other companies that are truly globally connected businesses.

The initial rapid growth of the giants in the collaborative platform economy was powered by billions in venture investment and enabled by regulatory environments that helped the disruptors to grow. Imagine what the models above would be like if they had received even a fraction of the billions in investment that have supported companies like Uber, Task Rabbit or AirBnB.
However, supporting this new wave of innovation is not just about investment in individual companies, it is about creating conditions for wider, distributed participation in the collaborative economy. We also need to ensure that regulatory frameworks anticipate such models, and that open licensing and a free and open web is maintained to allow the new wave of disruptors to grow and thrive, unfettered by incumbent interests.

4 predictions for the future of work from the CEO of the the world's largest freelancing platform. Thus, no surprise that it ignores endemic issues of misclassifying workers as freelancers, and how this can negatively impact on worker job quality. https://t.co/CuTYKpZCdr

— Mark Graham (@geoplace) January 15, 2018

A number of the women I spoke with, had, like me, experienced a ‘moment’ of burnout, or a recognition that, having invested very significant energy in their work in their teens and twenties, perhaps into their 30s, they began to reach a point where they knew that working so hard and pushing themselves so significantly was unsustainable for them, their health and if they had one, for their families. The women I spoke to tended to emerge from these “burnt moment’s” better equipped in some ways, having identified some strategies to manage this. I also noticed that they tended to emerge from them having side stepped in their career, so there was often a very real sacrifice implied in coping with these realisations. A sense of not being able to continue to do this kind of work, to this intensity, in this direction and that “something had to give”. This leads us to question whether things have to be this way. Is our sector setting women up for ‘burnout moments’ that they emerge from, while better equipped, less willing to progress in their leadership? What change do we need in our internal cultures to help us build a different kind of resilience, one that allows us to focus on structural change within ourselves that supports the structural change we are working towards in the world?

“Automation poses a disproportionate threat to the economic well-being of black America because this social group is predominately employed in low-skilled occupations that are vulnerable to workplace technological innovations—like those employed in the manufacturing, trucking, retail, and the telecommunications industries,” Davis said. “Now, workers employed by public transit authorities, their unions, and their patrons must contend with the introduction of driverless coaches.”

We wrote this book to provide a basis for discussion of this rapidly evolving area. We conclude that digital ID has the power to do both tremendous good and to inflict serious harm depending on how it is used. On the positive side, not only is “legal identity” now recognized as an SDG in its own right, but the ability to assert one’s identity is also important for the achievement of at least eight SDGs and 19 targets, from enabling access to economic resources to financial inclusion, gender equality and empowerment, social protection, and clean elections. Together, identification and enhanced payments systems, especially through mobiles, have the potential to greatly strengthen state capacity.
On the other hand, there are also examples that illustrate the potential downsides. Some of the systems in use today to help deliver social payments or underpin engagements between citizen and state have their origins in repressive or exclusionary policies; examples include Spain and South Africa.

Of the 40 million people trapped in modern slavery today, 70 percent of them are women and girls. Every day across the globe, millions of women and girls are used, controlled and exploited for commercial or personal gain. They are trafficked into the sex industry, kept in servitude as domestic workers in private homes, forced to work in exploitative conditions in factories and bonded into agricultural labour. They suffer terrible violence and are denied their basic rights and freedoms.
Our report, “Her freedom, her voice: Insights from the Freedom Fund’s work with women and girls“, draws on insights from our last four years working in countries with a high burden of slavery. The report identifies promising approaches to tackle this scourge, and highlights priorities for further research and investment.

We as anthropologists – we as the AAA – have the opportunity to lead on this front, just as we led on anti-racism and anti-colonialism in the past. We can set an example that other disciplines and professional associations will follow. Climate scientists are already taking this step. We should be right behind them.
The ethical imperative is clear: it’s time to end the annual meetings in their present form and come up with a safe, just, and sustainable alternative. Paperless programs simply aren’t going to cut it – not in the face of climate emergency. I have no doubt that this shift would attract landslide support among anthropologists eager to help usher in a better world.

First-round interviews via Skype, Zoom or other videoconferencing services have been on the rise for some time, but they’ve become especially popular within the past several years. And they may have gotten an assist this month, with meetings of major disciplinary associations happening during the near-national deep freeze and accompanying storms.

But the leaders of Elsevier have now decided that the epoch of journals will soon be over. They are not buying or starting journals. They now describe the company as a “global information analytics business that helps institutions and professionals progress science, advance healthcare, and improve performance.” They are a “big data company.” Instead of buying journals they now buy software that scientists will need. They have, for example, bought Mendeley, “a free reference manager and an academic social network.”
The company recognises that science publishing will become a service that scientists will largely run themselves. In a sense, it always has been with scientists producing the science, editing the journals, peer reviewing the studies, and then reading the journals. But innovations like F1000Research and Wellcome Open Research have shown how the services can be provided much more cheaply—in part by dispensing with editors who make (often arbitrary and wrong) decisions on what’s important and what is not. Elsevier have recognised the importance of this trend and are creating their own software platforms to speed up and make cheaper the process of publishing science.

few people read blogs anymore. Including me. I no longer feel the pressure to write often, because the person who comes directly to the page daily or weekly in search of something new is a dwindling breed. Most people reach blogs by twitter and facebook. This has taken the pressure off of me and, what can I say, I respond to incentives.

I was apparently the first blogger for The New York Times, most recently using this “on the ground” space for my own ruminations and those of others. But this technology platform is no longer going to be maintained, and we’ve decided that the world has moved on from blogs

So is development blogging dead then – and is it about shorter attention spans, the rise of videos or podcasts - or perhaps something about men?

Three alleged victims said they had lost their jobs, or been threatened with termination of contract, after reporting sexual harassment or assault. Two cited concerns with investigations, and said there had been errors in transcripts, or that key witnesses had not been interviewed. Alleged perpetrators were allowed to remain in senior positions – with the power to influence proceedings – throughout investigations.

Save the Children has a reputation in the industry for in-depth background checks. The group said its recruiter conducted interviews and background checks on Anderson, as well as receiving the positive reference from the Red Cross.
Save the Children said there have been no allegations of misconduct about Anderson during his time there. Anderson has since been promoted and is now associate vice president of humanitarian response.
For many years, the aid industry has been beset by scandals in which workers committed sexual abuse against vulnerable people in war and disaster zones. But it wasn’t until recently that the industry began to look inward at the problem of harassment and violence by staffers against other staffers.

There are forty-four most senior positions in the United Nations system, excluding the Secretary General himself.
As of this week, twenty three are held by women.
On Tuesday, Nahla Valji, the UN senior advisor for gender equality, announced on Twitter that half of the 44 members of the Secretary General’s Senior Management Group are women. Full gender parity among this group had been achieved.

Great talks by @PMaurerICRC , @HebaJournalist& @SaraPantuliano!
important points /1:
attention to conflicts is not distributed according to severity; mainstream media highly selective while at the same time influential; many low-visibility, yet dramatic humanitarian crises. https://t.co/QdEsEBPqf1

— Elvira Rosert (@ellie_ro) January 23, 2018

They are loath to pay a living wage, but they will fund a philharmonic orchestra. They will ban unions, but they will organize a workshop on transparency in government.
So in a year, they will be back in Davos and perhaps a new record in dollar wealth per square foot will be achieved, but the topics, in the conference halls and on the margins, will be again the same. And it will go on like this…until it does not.

For years, in determining this spending, the needs of poor Americans (or poor Europeans) have received little priority relative to the needs of Africans or Asians. As an economist concerned with global poverty, I have long accepted this practical and ethical framework. In my own giving, I have prioritized the faraway poor over the poor at home.

You have got to be kidding me. Poor Americans do deserve attention - but ODA is not the only funding source for fighting poverty. The answer isn't to pit poor Americans against poor Liberians, it's to shift more of the non-ODA budget to poor Americans. https://t.co/CWs9zgZMkhpic.twitter.com/ooa05AeXvZ

— Matt Collin (@aidthoughts) January 25, 2018

“We are trying to break this thought-pattern that Africa is poor; they can’t afford (new) cars,” he told a news conference.
Volkswagen will produce three models; the Hatchback Polo, the Passat and possibly the Teramont, a large sports utility vehicle, it said in a statement.
The carmaker said it had registered a local company to run its ride-sharing service and signed up a local software firm to develop a smartphone application to hail rides.
Global ride-sharing companies such as Uber have not yet moved into Rwanda.
Volkswagen said 500-1,000 jobs would be created in the first phase of the investment, including the drivers of the first batch of cars for the ride-hailing service.

Under the new law, the General Data Protection Regulation, individuals in the EU can demand to know what data an organisation holds on them and why, and insist on removal or changes. It also puts particular limits on the use of biometric data, like fingerprints or eye scans. The legislation sets up stringent standards and imposes severe fines.
But it’s not just European aid agencies that will need to get up to speed quickly on data protection. A wide range of interviews conducted by IRIN confirms that, as it lays down standards for transferring personal information into and out of Europe, the GDPR will push most international aid organisations and non-profits to change as well.

“Blockchain is being thrown around like mHealth was five or six years ago … No one seems to really understand it, but everyone wants in,” said James Michiel, mHealth innovation lead at University of California Davis. “When will ‘methodically designed interventions using proven technology with a clear plan for sustainability’ be the new buzzword?” he asked.

It’s hard to tell how much of the controversy surrounding Bridge arises from entrenched players feeling threatened (which they clearly do), and how much stems from Bridge being single-minded about its mission to the detriment of its own cause—a familiar malady in Silicon Valley. Part of the conflict is the model itself: To scale, it needs a highly replicable approach like scripted learning. But automating such a large part of teaching is necessarily fraught.
Some argue that Bridge is simply being punished for being a first mover in an institutionally conservative space. “I have an affinity for Bridge and I will scream that from the mountaintop,” said Gbovadeh Gbilia, head of the education delivery unit, set up to continue the implementation of the education ministry’s reforms with the new administration (Liberia just elected a new president). “When you want to do something first—an innovation, something disruptive—and you are the first entry, you get the biggest hit.”

“We have been forced to lock the gadgets in a cupboard since we cannot expose them to dust. Moreover, how will the pupils operate the laptops with no desks?” he posed.
Chomil said the school had only three classrooms which were incomplete and also too dusty. The other mud-walled structures are in decrepit state.

Improsexual work with an eclectic mix of scientists, magicians and actors. The audience are asked to suggest titles, themes and answers to questions such as “What do you most want to know about sex, but are afraid to ask?” The narratives of the shows are then formed from their responses. After a magic show, a health presentation and three short sketches, a presenter takes to the stage to discuss the stories, clarify uncertainties and promote safe and consensual sex.
Because of the company’s unique approach to education, Urbina says the number of consultations in local sexual health clinics has “increased significantly”. The productions have proved popular with teenagers: “Some like it so much that they come to watch the plays several times.”

And that feeling of powerlessness is what greases the machine. So ask yourself: What is one thing, however small, I can do today to throw a bit of sand in the eyes of the colonial zombie?
Then, get louder. Break the silence, name what no-one else around you is naming and give others the space and encouragement to do so, too.
Then, get bolder. Break the rules of this game that we all play so well.

Ahad then shared the video to his Facebook page, pointing to it as an example of how prizing-hunting photographers have been descending upon Bangladesh during major annual Muslim holidays in recent years to try and capture award-winning “photojournalism”.
“For the last couple of years, during the Bishwa Ijtema and Eid al-Adha time, there are hundreds of Malaysian and Chinese tourists carting cameras and doing things,” Ahad tells PetaPixel. “They are all around making images and ruining things for professional photographers.”

Another thing that needs to be done in any discussion of the purpose and impact of photographs is to think about the journalistic frame in which they appear. Often that frame is negative and focused only on problems. In this article, I want to argue that it is time for visual journalism to more thoroughly incorporate a “constructive journalism” or “solutions journalism” approach into its way of working. I will be arguing that this approach can provide better reports and significantly help the level of audience engagement with difficult stories.

Is the new @tuneyards song Colonizer the new anthem for the (mostly white) #aid worker set? Lyrics: https://t.co/RwFhBjRUDq Song: https://t.co/DLvw9NC0ri cc @bjrigby@intldogooder@MalakaGharib@_alice_evans

— Tom Murphy (@viewfromthecave) January 19, 2018

Uber is buying 24,000 cars.
Facebook is spending $1 billion on original TV shows.
Alibaba is spending $2.6 billion for physical stores.
Airbnb is opening branded apartment buildings. https://t.co/pne2nKGcVv

— Nick Srnicek #FBPFALC (@n_srnck) January 24, 2018

If this is the case, then social media executives are simply following the rule of pushers and dealers everywhere, the fourth of the Notorious BIG’s Ten Crack Commandments: “Never get high on your own supply.”
“Many tech titans are very, very careful about how they privately use tech and how they allow their kids to use it and the extent to which they allow their kids access to screens and various apps and programs,” says Alter. “They will get up on stage, some of them, and say things like: ‘This is the greatest product of all time,’ but then when you delve you see they don’t allow their kids access to that same product.”

So what will the future of big data analysis and AI bring for the humanitarian field? In my view, we should imagine a future where we have understood how to augment (and not replace) the human condition by leveraging technology. Data-driven benefits can certainly help reduce inequality. This will require a new research agenda where scientists and technology companies work to solve problems that apply to a wider range of social groups and that include the 17 global goals we have vowed to achieve by 2030. To serve humanitarian practitioners, the current deep learning revolution should pay increased attention to methodologies that can work in data-scarce environments, that can learn quickly with few examples and in unknown crisis scenarios, and that are able to work with incomplete or missing data (eg. “one-shot-learning”).

Apart from the lack of reliable or comparative statistics, the lack of critical and Africa-specific academic research also severely constrains both the macro-and micro-level understanding of the desirability, dynamics, promise and means to elevate digital labour into a means for development. Although the overall macro-level barriers and issues to leveraging digital labour have been enumerated and are widely understood, ways of addressing these through theoretical contingency models or pragmatic policy recommendations relevant to specific country contexts have not been forthcoming. At the micro-level, we have an even larger knowledge gap and our little empirical data is almost purely anecdotal; often biased by the researchers’ objectives.

Online education is still in its youth. Many approaches are possible, and some may ultimately benefit students with deep and diverse needs. As of now, however, the evidence is clear. For advanced learners, online classes are a terrific option, but academically challenged students need a classroom with a teacher’s support.

Convivial scholarship confronts and humbles the challenge of over-prescription, over-standardisation and over-prediction. It is critical and evidence-based. It is a scholarship that sees the local in the global and the global in the local. It brings them into informed conversations, conscious of the hierarchies and power relations at play at both the micro and macro levels of being and becoming.
Like Tutuola’s universe, convivial scholarship challenges us – however grounded we may be in our disciplines and their logics of practice – to cultivate the disposition to be present everywhere at the same time. It’s a scholarship that cautions disciplines, their borders and gatekeepers to open up and embrace differences.

I would just like to add my thoughts here. Development blogs outside of the mainstream media hold such an important service. It holds the industry accountable (look what happened w @fp2p@_alice_evans, @CGDev and Doing Business. Thread https://t.co/H8iJKqfNn9

— Malaka Gharib (@MalakaGharib) January 29, 2018

In interviews with over 25 Eritrean and Ethiopian asylum seekers in Khartoum and the eastern city of Kassala, as well as local journalists, and lawyers working on behalf of refugees, IRIN has documented allegations of endemic police abuse, including extortion, violence, and sexual assault.
(...)
But the EU and its partners don’t appear to have a viable strategy to mitigate human rights abuses. In the case of the BMM project, the EU and GIZ claim that its steering committee – composed of the European Commission, Germany, UK, France, Italy, and the Netherlands – oversees human rights risks remotely from Brussels.
“The steering committee has a clear view of what is possible and what is not possible,” said Dumond, “and we don’t think there is a big risk [of human rights violations as a result of EU funding].”
He added that EU officials frequently go on mission in Sudan to assess conditions first-hand.
But such visits are tightly controlled by the government and the security services. When IRIN visited Shagarab, for example, police and NISS officers followed, transcribing every interview.
The EU and GIZ also declined to show country specific budgets for Sudan for the BMM programme. That opacity is a way to escape “accountability and scrutiny”, explained Giulia Laganà, a migration specialist at the Open Society European Policy Institute, via email.

“I have met with him many times,” said Mr. Rubenstein, the billionaire co-founder of the buyout firm Carlyle Group, who recently hosted a reception honoring Mr. Kim after the screening of a documentary about his public health work. “Jim has a lot of credibility with private equity firms.”
Some critics at the bank think Mr. Kim has become too dazzled by bold faced names and billionaires. He golfs (very well, by all accounts) with Michael Bloomberg — who has backed several projects at the bank and hails Mr. Kim as a “doer” — and swaps books with President Emmanuel Macron of France, most recently sending him a copy of “Orientalism,” Edward Said’s critique of Western attitudes toward the Middle East and Asia.

America’s wealth also means that it can help the poor within its own borders without cutting foreign development aid — an idea Deaton seems to put on the table — which only amounts to about 1 percent of the federal budget in any case. It can do so by reorienting some of the remaining 99 percent of the federal budget to better help the poor, by reorienting portions of state and local resources, and by raising revenue in ways that lean relatively more on the rich.
In sum, America indeed has very serious problems with poverty and inequality. But it is wildly inaccurate to claim that millions of Americans “are as destitute as the world’s poorest people.”

Beşikçi said Bylock was downloaded roughly half a million times and had 215,000 registered users. About 100,000 of them were identified by the Turkish government as "real users."
Many people downloaded the app willingly, but many who had no traces of it on their phones are also being accused — and Beşikçi and Peksayar have now shown why.
Beşikçi said it was due to a single line of code, which created a window "one pixel high, one pixel wide"— essentially invisible to the human eye — to Bylock.net. Hypothetically, people could be accused of accessing the site without having knowingly viewed it.
That line redirected people to the Bylock server using several other applications, including a Spotify-like music app called Freezy and apps to look up prayer times or find the direction of Mecca. Some people have been accused because someone they shared a wifi connection with was linked to Bylock.

In much of the world, this is a cool and useless heatmap showing where people have jogged with their Fitbits. In the Sahel, it is a militant group's dream, lighting up only Western military bases, diplomatic facilities, international hotels, oil compounds. https://t.co/SZFDvd03Lg

— Ben Taub (@bentaub91) January 28, 2018

The ethical implications, many critics point out, are clear: Intentionally touching down in a country with no financial means to support yourself effectively guarantees you will be a drain on the local economy. It is perhaps distasteful at best and unethical at worst. In addition, consuming food, water, space, and utilities without spending cash also diverts resources away from locals who need (and deserve) them far more.

In its upcoming February 2018 edition, Human Rights Quarterly has agreed to publish a critique of Reydams’ article. Co-written by seven Great Lakes specialists, the authors call his contribution “unreasonable, ill-founded and intemperate”. They go through twelve areas of contention and complain that the author provided “not a shred of evidence for the sweeping and damaging claims he makes”. The co-authors say the piece was unworthy of publication.
(...)
This polarisation affects not just analysis of the current day, but ends up being projected onto the past, diminishing the quality of research on Rwandan history and the genocide. Both Fisher and Hintjens say that they and many other academics have had submissions to journals rejected, based not on the scholarly merit of the articles but on either their perceived disproportionate sympathy or hostility towards Kigali.

The favored foundation responses to inadequate pay have been investments in education and workforce development to equip workers for better jobs. While that’s important stuff, it elides a stubborn reality: Many—if not most—of the jobs that the U.S. economy creates today are in sectors like retail and restaurants, where wages are low and benefits are scarce. In fact, half of the jobs in the U.S. pay under $18 an hour. Upskilling workers can allow some people to exit bad jobs, but millions of other workers will remain stuck in a labor market that inflicts mass hardship and makes a mockery of the core American value that if you work hard, you’ll get ahead.
Why are so many jobs so crappy? A common reason given is that globalization and automation have wiped out many of the well-compensated manufacturing jobs that once paid a middle-class wage. The thing to remember, though, is that those industrial jobs were not inherently “good” jobs. Mainly, they paid decently because of union organizing, public policy interventions, and corporate norms that favored sharing the fruits of prosperity.

Here is a selected round-up of recent research on education in low- and middle-income countries, with a few findings from high-income countries that I found relevant. This is mostly but not entirely from the “economics of education” literature. If I’m missing recent articles that you’ve found useful, please add them in the comments!

All in all, the Chiapas learning exchange was comprised of people committed to transformation. Therefore, the exchange was carefully and thoughtfully designed to reflect the type of transformation we seek for the world. Intentional design, planning, and strategy underpinned the structure and content of the agenda. Threads of love, humility, patience, curiosity, inquiry, and openness wove the community together. Among other factors, creating a convening where ancestral traditions find their rightful place in dialogue about the future; grassroots activists share their insights and solutions as experts; and pedagogical models rooted in global south traditions are centralized, the exchange decolonized the conference space.

We know — based on evidence from the Aid Attitudes Tracker study — that moral sentiments are a key factor that drives individuals’ engagement with global poverty. In a recent AAT survey, we took the opportunity to investigate this further, and looked at a more specific question: of the many moral arguments to fight poverty at home and abroad, which are the most and least convincing for the UK public?
(...)
Surprisingly (or, maybe, neatly) the three arguments that respondents said best apply to fighting poverty at home, also apply to fighting poverty abroad or to both. As show in the graph below, the three best arguments are:
“[fighting poverty] is the right thing to do”
“human beings have a right not to suffer”
“we should help if we can”.

Adopting Workplace in early 2016, while it was still in beta, was a leap of faith. Using enterprise social networking was also a departure from our traditional controlled communication at NRC, and we were concerned that Workplace would be filled with irrelevant noise or be a place for venting frustrations about everything and everybody. We were also concerned that users in some locations would not have sufficient bandwidth to engage in a media-rich exchange.
To prepare ourselves for these uncertainties, we adopted a lean start-up approach trying a range of new ideas while being ready to pivot if they didn’t work out. In the beginning, we had a “no social” policy, but we soon realized that being social is part of being colleagues and an asset, so we changed this and now 7% of the content is characterised as social. We also made it clear from the beginning that this was a work tool, and that NRC’s code of conduct still applied on Workplace.

Most development communications education in Nepal is viewed through a ‘journalistic’ lens. Most of the lecturers are media professionals. While they bring good experience and expertise, particularly in media and communications, the broader understanding of development discourses is limited compared to development practitioners. While media professionals do engage with development organisations more often these days, particularly through media fellowships and consulting jobs, the ‘out-sourced’ nature of this engagement doesn’t really match the experience that a research uptake or C4D professional would have, as he/she would have exposure to wide range of development-related discussions and resources.
It is high time that development communications as a field evolves further – both academically and professionally – in countries like Nepal. It needs to move beyond the journalism field, with greater emphasis on understanding and communicating development discourses in a better way.

You have a special interest in displaying the work for women photographers.
I'm promoting women artists because it's very difficult everywhere in the world for them, and it's even more difficult for women artists in Africa. Sarah Waiswa had a series, "Stranger in a familiar Land," a photographic essay on the theme [of albinism]. In Africa, those people are persecuted because they are supposed to have magical powers. She's changing the way we are seeing them — making beauty from their difference.

Sasha Ingber for NPR's Goats & Soda talks to Marie-Ann Yemsi, the curator of the African Biennale of Photography.

Nnedi Okorafor Is Dropping a 5-Issue Comic Inspired By Legendary Black Knight Antar

Honor through perseverance. Legacy through diversity. IDW is proud to present the epic story of one of history's greatest warriors and finest poets: Antar the Black Knight. A despised camel driver born of an African slave mother and an Arab Noble father, Antar proves that heroes are made by embracing who we are and dreaming about what we can become.

The annual SIMA Awards honor eye-opening documentary filmmaking and VR experiences that exemplify excellence in their potential to inspire social change. Each year, projects are selected from over 140 countries around the world, competing for awards, cash prizes, media features, distribution opportunities, and entry into SIMA’s signature film programs.

But practising mindfulness to deal with work-related stress is not turning us into rebels, it’s making all docile. Is it our equivalent of soma, the drug that kept everyone happy in Huxley’s Brave New World? We’re more likely to rebel if we don’t dull the pain, right?
Yes, mindfulness might encourage colleagues to be nice to each other, and help bosses make better decisions (in the interest of the bottom line, of course) and we might all work faster. But removing the negative thoughts from our minds also makes us more accepting of our lot. Even for people who are inclined to challenge the status quo, a course of mindfulness will make them less likely to question why they aren’t getting extra holiday, longer lunch breaks or reduced working hours to reward improved productivity. Mindfulness is the ultimate sticking plaster for when nothing materially improves.

“Open any American news outlet and it’s just Trump, Trump, Trump. When that’s the case, there’s very limited space for news that’s not about him. It’s just intuitive that foreign coverage would suffer.” As a result, she continues, “Everybody wants to write for these places, yet there’s a shrinking amount of space for [freelance] work, so we’re all just competing over scraps.”
According to Nathalie Applewhite, managing director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the lack of international coverage has become a real problem for Pulitzer grant recipients. Those grants, she says, were established to address the earlier crisis in which news organizations were closing foreign bureaus and could no longer fund big foreign reporting projects. “Now we’re seeing an even bigger challenge,” she says. “We’re providing the monetary support, but the problem is finding the space for it.”

The blog post displays a lack of awareness for less-privileged lives (even as it also discusses how an Uber-like app might help them). And if it’s any signal of the mindset in Silicon Valley, that is a huge problem. Because technology companies are not only making software anymore: They host the public discourse, have the power to influence elections and our emotions, and are spreading into industries with large low-wage workforces. If the people who are creating some of the most powerful infrastructure in the world believe that its biggest battle is over which startup will be the Uber of Southeast Asia, that does not bode well for the rest of us.

This report addresses the future of basic education, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) use in deprived locations, and the use of ICTs in primary school learning in 2020 and 2025, especially in deprived contexts.

Lichtenstein’s called his piece “Decolonizing the AHR,” because, in his words, making a commitment (even a well-intentioned one) to diversity alone means, primarily, “adding extra flavors to the stew.” By contrast, he said, decolonization “is about changing the recipe altogether.”

When a friend drew my attention to Conan O’Brien’s trip to Haiti following the infamous ‘sh&€hole’ debate which named the island among other countries, I did not see myself writing about the program as an excellent example of how a celebrity gets broadcasting from a distant, foreign place right.

“There were a few of the girls who I talked to who were very opinionated and one of them was saying, ‘Americans come here to take from us and they don’t give back,’ and I was assuring her … I am not here to do that,” O’Brien said.

His program is an important reminder that celebrities do not have to bring ‘stuff’ to impoverished people, adopt their children or set up an organization themselves because the aid industry is too slow and inefficient in their views.
Promoting tourism, cornflakes, art and culture are actually great ways of encouraging people to explore foreign places, meet different people and taste real hot sauce.

One of the men allowed to resign without disciplinary action was Oxfam’s country director there, Roland van Hauwermeiren. The report said that Mr Van Hauwermeiren, 68, admitted using prostitutes at the villa rented for him by Oxfam with charitable funds.
Despite the admission, the charity’s chief executive at the time, Dame Barbara Stocking, offered the Belgian “a phased and dignified exit” because sacking him would have “potentially serious implications” for the charity’s work and reputation. After the internal inquiry, two other men in management were able to resign while four were dismissed for gross misconduct, including over the use of prostitutes at the apartment block where Oxfam housed them.
A number of sources with knowledge of the case said they had concerns that some of the prostitutes were under age. One said that men had invited groups of young prostitutes to their guesthouse and held sex “parties”. The source claimed to have seen footage from a night there that was “like a full-on Caligula orgy”, with girls wearing Oxfam T-shirts. The charity is understood to have no record of the footage being given to the investigation.

Jan Beagle, under-secretary-general for management of the United Nations, says the UN “does not prevent staff from speaking to the media”. This is not true. I am a UN staff member who was explicitly gagged after making a complaint about the conduct of a senior manager, due to a provision of our code of conduct that staff must always present a positive view of the UN.
Beagle claims that the secretary-general has strengthened whistleblower protection for those who report harassment. My own case was the first to be transferred under this “strengthened” policy, which provides a 30-day deadline. I have yet to receive a final decision 18 months after seeking protection.
Similarly, the United Nations is supposed to take a prompt decision on whether to investigate complaints of harassment or abuse of authority. I am still waiting 10 months after filing a complaint under that policy.

Saudi Arabia has recruited an array of foreign consultants and public relations firms to draw up and promote its new multi-billion dollar aid plan for Yemen, one that could reduce imports of vital goods into a key rebel-held port, an IRIN investigation reveals.

The CSR debate in a nutshell. https://t.co/ndXjSOnwyh

— Dan Hirschman (@asociologist) February 5, 2018

More research is necessary to understand what the relative wage gap is for men and women in the international development sector, but it is likely to be quite substantial given the working hours, travel requirements, and stressful conditions that are generally present challenging and pressure mothers to spend time away from their families.

It's 2018, so nothing matters, but...

A for-profit multinational company seeking charitable "child sponsorship" donations -- complete with sad pic of African kid? https://t.co/Hvmh7KEV0y

— Justin Sandefur (@JustinSandefur) February 2, 2018

"And what we find is that it follows a curve of diminishing returns — as you use more resources you get less social bang for your buck," says O'Neill. "So there's a turning point after which additional resource use contributes very little to social performance." Wealthy industrialized nations such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada have reached that point, says O'Neill. "As we increase our resource use, we get almost no increase in human well-being from that."
And this means for these countries the strategy of growing the economy — basically trying to create new wealth — to boost the well-being of their underprivileged citizens is ineffective. A much better approach, argues O'Neill, would be to focus on redistributing their existing wealth more equitably.

Africa’s smash-and-grab ‘development policies’ aiming to attract Foreign Direct Investment have, even the Bank suggests, now become counter-productive: “Especially for resource-rich countries, the depletion of natural resources is often not compensated for by other investments. The warnings provided by negative ANS in many countries and in the region as a whole should not be ignored.”
(...)
South African activist Chris Rutledge opposed this neoliberal logic last year in an ActionAid report, The AMV: Are we repackaging a colonial paradigm?: “By ramping up models of maximum extraction, the AMV once again stands in direct opposition to our own priorities to ensure resilient livelihoods and securing climate justice. It is downright opposed to any type of Free Prior and Informed Consent. And it does not address the structural causes of structural violence experienced by women, girls and affected communities.”

Former volunteers and staff, in interviews with the Guardian, said up to five tour groups could be moved through the orphanage each day, bringing donations, potential sponsorships, food and gifts.
Only a handful of the children are orphans, despite the institution marketing itself as an orphanage for more than a decade.
Chester confirmed only six of the children were without both parents, 64 had a single parent living, 14 had both parents alive and 10 were described as “special cases”. She said she had never hidden the fact that some children had parents, and the centre’s website carried that information.
In recent months, as pressure mounted in the Australian parliament to stop orphanage tourism, the institution rebranded itself as Jodie O’Shea House. The word “orphanage” has been removed from parts of its website.

To me, “humanitarian journalism” is journalism in the public interest, particularly when it sheds light on marginalized communities. I’d say a large portion of our work does this.
Why do we focus on humanitarian journalism? It’s needed. Most existing journalism about social issues is (in my slightly irreverent opinion) jargon-laden, homogenous, and flat. And it turns people off from paying attention to them. I think it’s just as important that people understand advances in women’s health as the latest presidential scandal. Who decided that politics are a matter of national interest, but that social issues are fringe? We’re committed to presenting humanitarian topics in a manner that’s approachable and, well, bright.
There’s a lot of room to innovate in “humanitarian journalism,” which makes our work really fun. We constantly ask ourselves, “How can we present this topic so it emotionally resonates? How do we make this feel necessary? What about this is bold and fresh?”

The Howard G. Buffett Foundation has presented its work carefully. Articles from the region published in reputable media agencies, including the Guardian and Al Jazeera, have received support from the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF), which in turn received funding from Buffett. His foundation directly contributes to the organization’s Great Lakes Reporting Initiative, which supports female journalists who work in the DRC, South Sudan, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Central Africa Republic on issues related to “empowerment, democracy, food security, and conservation efforts.”
This seems like a much-needed project: at a time when media outlets face growing budget shortfalls, the IWMF provides cash-strapped journalists with generous grants. I myself was grateful for the support I received from the Great Lakes fellowship to report from eastern Congo, but I also felt uncomfortable with the knowledge of who finances the organization.
(...)
In Morvaridi’s words , organizations, including the media, promote the priorities of “elite capitalist philanthropists” and thereby “contribute to the building of the political agenda they support.” The IMWF has successfully reshaped mainstream media narratives in the Great Lakes region, diversifying the range of stories that emerge from that area and influencing international opinion. However, in partnering with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, it has legitimized Buffett’s activities in the region and his support for the Rwandan government.

The second moment came during the question and answer session, when someone sought Adichie's opinion on postcolonial theory. Her response was: "Postcolonial theory? I don't know what it means. I think it is something that professors made up because they needed to get jobs." This comment didn't provoke as much noise on as her clapback about bookstores in Nigeria.
As an academic, I am grateful for the interview, which eloquently demystifies postcolonial theory, despite her disavowal of it. Given students' intolerance for texts longer than a sizzling clapback tweet, the interview makes for an excellent introduction to this theory.

But overall, I still worry about how many northerners see development studies as the start of a career, when the whole North/South aid frame that underpinned the creation of ‘development studies’ is becoming increasingly redundant.

There’s a reason I love teaching. Designing a syllabus and curriculum challenges me to think strategically about what information and tools folks need, what insights I hope they uncover using them, and how we can collectively help each other in the learning process. Inevitably, along the way, I solidify my awareness of what I have been picking up in my own journey.
And then, then the students ask more questions. They challenge me beyond my own realm of knowledge and experience. They say something in a way I’ve never considered. Their turn a phrase makes my writer’s heart sing. They surprise me with their observations and questions. They inspire me with their passion and inquiry and resolve and love of their communities.
They remind me how important it is to continue to love the questions…

The crypto-disaster-capitalism going down in Puerto Rico is about as messed up as you might imagine. https://t.co/EHoiArC485pic.twitter.com/ArU89iVzIQ

— David Carroll 🦅 (@profcarroll) February 5, 2018

The conference is a “marketplace of ideas” only for those who already have plenty of power and influence in the traditional sense. Now, unfortunately, the market of ideas for security policy is hardly overflowing with good solutions. So, if the old, white men from the West are out of ideas, why not ask the young women from everywhere else? And, let us do so in ways that allow for more interaction, more debate and more innovation than the good old panel discussion.

But one of the pleasures of studying Nigerian media is that there is always much room for debate, and there is by no means a firm consensus on how to draw Nollywood’s cultural, geographical, and linguistic boundaries — nor, perhaps, will there ever be. My reservations about certain aspects of Witt’s book thus amount to little more than quibbles. This is an excellent, engaging introduction to an industry that deserves continued attention.

Roiphe writes that Twitter feminists project themselves as perfect individuals whose fear of their safety is “dramatized” and whose desire is to criminalize all male social activities. As she further expounds in this CBS News video, they are the thought police who seek to crush any divergent opinion that does not adhere to the agenda mentioned above. While I am against the ad-hominem attacks that Roiphe received in the weeks leading up to the publication of this essay, I understand why she's divisive. She’s in the midst of a new era of women who may not have gotten PhDs from Princeton or glowing reviews in The New York Times in their mid-twenties, and yet their words are having just as much influence as hers. The structure of recognition is changing. But rather than Roiphe jumping in and engaging with those younger than her on social media, she looks down on them with the term “Twitter feminist,” a subliminal shot to anyone whose politics have not been cultivated and uplifted through the academy or other traditional means of establishment.

Finding diverse sources, and tracking them, takes time, but not that much time. I reckon it adds 15 minutes per piece, or an hour or so of effort over a week. That seems like a trifling amount, and the bare minimum that journalists should strive for. There are many ways for us to increase the diversity of our sources, and achieving gender parity is by far the simplest of them. After all, it is easy to guess someone’s gender based on their name, and when tracking progress, there is an obvious 50 percent threshold to aim for.
Since November 2015, I’ve also been tracking the number of people of color in my stories. That figure currently stands at 26 percent for the last year, ranging between 15 and 47 percent from month to month. I want to make it higher. I’m thinking about how to include more voices from LGBTQ, disabled, or immigrant communities. I’m thinking about the people who appear in the photos that accompany my pieces, rather than just those whose words appear within quote marks. Gender parity is a start, not an end point.

Covering the role played by the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), the organisation established in the 1960s to create a point of contact between broadcasters and international aid charities, and the transition from radio-only to TV appeals, the paper shows how the BBC had to adjust its process of negotiating with good causes and audiences as new fundraising techniques began to gain following.

The purpose of this article is to contribute a critical theoretical understanding of cross-professional relations on social media, focusing on politicians, journalists and PR practitioners. It is well known that these professional groups establish personal and close relations in offline contexts, but more attention needs to be paid to the role of social media. Here, it is argued that in the context of digital media use, semi-private chatting, humour, and mutual acknowledgment, including the use of likes, smileys, heart symbols, etc., are evidence of a 'neoliberalisation' of cross-professional relations. The underlying idea is that the common practice of self-branding undermines representations of professional belonging and exacerbates the blurring of professional boundaries. The critical conceptualisation of such 'transboundary' interaction between politicians, journalists and PR practitioners, which is guided by a cultural-materialist approach, includes the presentation of examples deriving from the Swedish Twittersphere, and suggestions for empirical research.

Decolonizing IR scholarship goes beyond simply including more people of color in our syllabi. In addition to questioning the dominance of western epistemology and methodology, previous intellectual anti-colonial movements have emphasized the need to fight the pervasive erasure of political actors of color and their contributions. It does not involve merely mentioning them in passing. In IR, it also demands that we re-examine their relationships with contemporary political and security architectures and the latter not be taken for granted. Critical security theory begins to question the production of conventional knowledge in the discipline by interrogating the social, historical and political roots of that knowledge. But this practice needs to permeate the entire field.
In the meantime, Afrofuturism and Black Panther offer us the opportunity to interrogate how we understand the historical events of the past in a dramatically emancipatory way. I for one have already purchased my tickets. Not because I need to imagine a world where a fictional country in Africa named Wakanda matters. I have done so because I know that Africa, its Black minds, its Black voices, and its Black bodies have always mattered.

The late Haitian anthropologist Michel Rolph Trouillot argued that the world-historical event of the Haitian Revolution was and remains unknown to many Westerners because it contradicted much of what the West told both itself and others about itself. “How many of us can think of any non-European population without the background of a global domination that now looks pre-ordained? And how can Haiti, or slavery, or racism be more than distracting footnotes within that narrative order?”
What is needed is a narrative in which the histories of Haiti and the US, and of racial subjugation and global domination, are seen as mutually constituted. As Haitian Ambassador to the US Paul Altidor recently pleaded, “Given our two countries’ long intertwined history, it is time we get to know each other on a level of mutual respect and understanding.”

The government has ordered Oxfam to hand over files on charity staff who paid for sex in earthquake-torn Haiti. The demand follows an investigation by The Times that revealed Oxfam covered up the use of prostitutes by senior aid workers.
Matt Hancock, the culture secretary who is responsible for charity regulation, said: “These allegations are deeply shocking and Oxfam must now provide the Charity Commission with all the evidence they hold of events that happened in Haiti as a matter of urgency.

“CVs that would raise questions elsewhere because of the frequency of moves are part of the culture,” said the UN official.
“The system is so big, and needful of staff, it’s quite easy for people to disappear and pop up elsewhere. It’s not considered weird if people move on. That’s what happens often with emergencies.” The yawning gap in wealth and access to resources between aid workers and those they are paid to help adds to the potential for exploitation.
“The [senior aid officials on the ground] don’t even lead the life of the locals, they are small gods. It’s about entitlement – they are entitled to do whatever they want,” said one former senior Oxfam employee.

Former staff who worked for the charity in Chad alleged that women believed to be prostitutes were repeatedly invited to the Oxfam team house there, with one adding that a senior member of staff had been fired for his behaviour in 2006.

But much else is at risk, too. In the era of Trump, Brexit and silken Rees-Moggery, the notion that prosperous nations have a moral and practical responsibility to the poorest is fading from fashion. The populist right is straining at the leash to take a wrecking ball to the Department for International Development; to caricature it as the paymaster of pimps and perverts. Those who believe in Britain’s enduring obligation to the desperate of the world face the fight of their lives.

The former international development secretary Priti Patel said: “People knew in DfID. I raised this directly with my department at the time. I have UN reports... there are 120 cases involving something like over 300 people. That was just the tip of the iceberg.”
After Mordaunt’s warning that public funding was at risk, Thomson said she shared the “anger and shame” widely expressed over events in Haiti. “It is clear that such behaviour is completely outside our values and should never be tolerated,” she said. “We apologise unreservedly. We have made big improvements since 2011 and today I commit that we will improve further.”

A culture of bullying, harassment and racism is rife among agencies around the world. This is an industry in need of reform
(...)
Thanks to brave whistleblowers and those who have confronted Oxfam, many of whom are women, the floodgates are now open. It will be impossible to hold back all the information emerging from other aid organisations on the opaque and damaging cultures that have allowed potential criminal activity, sexual exploitation, harassment and other abhorrent behaviour to thrive, and indeed be rewarded through the promotion of those accused of wrongdoing. We have seen at least one resignation – there may be more.

Senior figures in the humanitarian world have described the allegations of sexual exploitation that have embroiled Oxfam as the tip of the iceberg and the aid sector’s #MeToo moment.
In interviews with the Guardian, humanitarian officials with experience working across the globe have told largely similar stories of colleagues’ use of sex workers, suspicions of the exploitation of vulnerable women for sex – including minors – and a unwillingness of their organisations to properly tackle the issue.
Many said that despite repeated warnings – going back 15 years to a then controversial report by Save the Children on the prevalence of sexual abuse in west Africa that include aid worker abuse – the issue has long been ignored by managers.

This is not just about a handful of charity workers tarnishing the work of living saints. There are many good people in NGOs who understand the complexities of being “in the field”. The best of them work with smaller local organisations. This is not an excuse to cancel aid budgets – but can we please stop talking about sex work as a lifestyle choice. We are beginning to know what Oxfam did not want us to know, but we already knew that the “price” of certain women is considered so low as not to count at all.

A former senior official at the charity also said she had repeatedly warned senior management of a culture of sexual abuse in some offices around the world, and asked for more resources to tackle the issue. Helen Evans, the head of global safeguarding at Oxfam from 2012 to 2015, told Channel 4 News that in a single day she received allegations about a woman being coerced to have sex in a humanitarian response by an aid worker, a woman being coerced in exchange for aid and another case where a staff member had been struck off for sexual abuse and hadn’t disclosed that.
She also claimed that volunteers as young as 14 in Oxfam shops in the UK had alleged abuse. In at least one case an adult volunteer had allegedly assaulted a child volunteer. In 2012-14 there were 12 allegations, she said.
The European commission, which provided almost as much funding as the UK government last year, said: “We are ready to review and if needed cease funding any partner who is not living up to the required high ethical standards.”

The Oxfam scandal has become a fresh front in a culture war: any aid that isn’t a geopolitical or trading instrument is hypocritical do-gooding. All officials are contaminated. It’s the politics of annihilation, to which the only response is to go back to first principles: should we stop the “madness” of foreign aid? Only if we want to descend into the madness of solipsistic isolation.

An epidemic has affected institutions across our society, from political parties and the House of Commons, to broadcasters, football teams and private companies – and it is global in reach. This epidemic is rooted in the unequal power relationships that enable powerful and predatory men to exploit women and children through bullying, sexual harassment and outright violence. The only antidote is a culture of zero tolerance, backed by rules, recruitment practices, and leadership.
Development agencies cannot get this wrong. We are dealing with some of the world’s most vulnerable people. Across our programmes, we come into contact with women and children who have lost everything. Our staff in Bangladesh are working with Rohingya refugees who have been impoverished, displaced, and traumatised by horrific acts of violence. They have a right to expect and demand the highest standards of protection.

And of course, sex in war and disaster zones isn’t surprising. I’ve seen a lot of it in other disasters since; there have been books written about it. There’s a basic psychology to it, something about a primal need for comfort and trauma bonding. But what I found disturbing in Haiti was the profound disconnect between the overtly sexualised atmosphere in the aid and journalistic community and the visceral horror of the catastrophe surrounding us.
I saw the international aid community do a lot of good in Haiti. It also brought cholera to an already devastated country. Now it appears that aid workers also took the opportunity to buy underage sex cheaply. Trauma bonding I can understand – callous exploitation I cannot.

But the French charity told The Independent that they “conducted references checks as per French labour law regulations and internal procedures before employing”, him.
It said: “During this process Action Against Hunger received no information regarding the inappropriate and unethical behaviours of Roland van Hauwermeiren when he was with Oxfam in Haiti nor any warning on the risks of employing him.”

Oxfam is far from alone with sexual harassment, rape and child rape accusations. The problem is becoming more well known in the entire aid industry. The UK’s former National Criminal Intelligence Service, which registered and monitored the activities of paedophiles, warned as far back as 1999 that the scale of the problem of paedophiles in the aid world is on a level with sex tourism.

You can almost feel the warmth radiating from the middle-class, middle-aged snug bars of the Home Counties, where the thought of a rich country sending 0.7 per cent of its GDP to needy foreigners curdles the tonic in the G&Ts. What a relief to find their intuitive distrust of altruism confirmed.
They always knew these charities, like foreign aid itself, were gigantic rackets propagated by morally superior liberal prigs and operated by crooks. Now they’ve been proved right.
(...)
It would be a tragedy and a source of national shame if the Government let this scandal be fashioned into the battering ram that finally broke its resistance to cutting that budget.
It should increase it by whatever is required to ensure that Oxfam and others have the funds for adequate background checks and effective policing of staff. What it cannot do, however intense the pressure from the reactionary right wing, is throw out the malnourished baby with the scummy bathwater of a few rancid individuals.

The sex trade is built on colonialism and racism, as well as misogyny. Whether it is the overrepresentation of African American girls and women in prostitution in the US, or the targeting of indigenous and native women and girls in countries such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada, it is clear that rich, powerful, white men consider it their “right” to use such women and girls as commodities.

A global register of development workers may be established, as the UK, alongside the the United Nations, increases its efforts to combat sexual exploitation and prepares to host a summit on the issue later this month.

Winnie Byanyima, who became executive director of Oxfam International in 2013, said she was saddened by what took place in 2010 and that it could not happen under systems and rules put in place since.
“I feel deeply, deeply hurt. ... What happened in Haiti was a few privileged men abusing the very people they were supposed to protect - using the power they had from Oxfam to abuse powerless women. It breaks my heart,” Byanyima said in an interview with Reuters TV in New York.
“We want to restore trust. We want to build that trust. We are committing to be honest, to be transparent and to be accountable in addressing this issue of sexual misconduct. We are in a different place today,” she said.

Charities aren't the most deviant organisations on Earth. They're just the easiest ones to kick this week.
And in an increasingly tribal and divided world, it seems if you're Labour you kick the rich perverts of the President's Club and if you're Tory you say it was fine because they were making donations while groping young women.
And when the Tories kick Oxfam for groping young women while spending donations, the Reds say it's not so bad because charity. No-one, anywhere on the political spectrum, asks why sex abuse still happens in the 21st century, in so many walks of life, and what can be done to stop it.
None of us are any better for this. Haiti, meanwhile, has 40% unemployment, 58% poverty, and 2.5m people still in need of humanitarian aid.
Aid which, today, people are demanding they not be given because it suits a wider political ideology. The only thing more sickening than sex abuse are those people who use it to settle a score.

The Charity Commission, the independent regulator of charities in England and Wales, has today, 12 February, opened a statutory inquiry into the charity Oxfam (registered charity number 202918). It comes after the Commission examined documents sent today by Oxfam regarding allegations of misconduct by staff involved in its humanitarian response in Haiti. The Commission has concerns that Oxfam may not have fully and frankly disclosed material details about the allegations at the time in 2011, its handling of the incidents since, and the impact that these have both had on public trust and confidence.

Four years later, Malik Miller was at her desk in the Swedish government’s aid department. A file landed on her desk: an application for funding from Oxfam in Chad. She opened it and was appalled to find van Hauwermeiren’s name listed as the country director.
Per Byman, then humanitarian director of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), confirmed to IRIN that he had been alerted in 2008 by Malik Miller to van Hauwermeiren's previous record at Merlin.
He told IRIN he had taken advice from SIDA's legal department on what to do about it, but couldn’t recall the outcome. He said he was "disgusted" at reading the recent news of van Hauwermeiren's behaviour..

Nevertheless, in the #MeToo era, a new paradigm has just arrived for international co-operation agencies and humanitarian-aid organizations: We can no longer keep silent, we cannot hide, we can no longer hope that people forget. On the contrary, we must condemn this cover-up. We must blame those who hoped for silence. The aid industry must enter the #MeToo era and denounce every incident, use judicial tools to punish crimes and provide support and compensation to victims. This is an opportunity. All aid workers know it. There is a taboo that must be broken.
(...)
Are Canada and its international-aid agencies ready to do the same? One thing is certain: Aid agencies sorely need to get their houses in order. This is the only way to regain the public's trust.

From the archives: Sean Penn talking about the resignation of Oxfam's then-Haiti country director Roland Van Hauwermeiren in mid 2011 as a result of the scandal that is in the news today. Source: https://t.co/s86YE6nCDGpic.twitter.com/dBCUbjAreb

— Tom Murphy (@viewfromthecave) February 12, 2018

In thinking about the @oxfamgb scandal, I believe this is the kind of instance where large NGOs could benefit from a position akin to a public editor. I doubt it would ever happen and there may be good reasons to not do it, but I think public facing accountability is needed.

— Tom Murphy (@viewfromthecave) February 12, 2018

Hey twitter it IS possible to be horrified at what has happened at Haiti in Oxfam, passionate about value and purpose of international development and worried about the impact of the gagging laws on the vital capacity of charities to speak truth to power. All at the same time.

— stellacreasy (@stellacreasy) February 12, 2018

Oxfam is taking a beating! For bad behaviour? Yes. And for having the moral leadership to create policies that worked in identifying bad behavior, terminating it, and reporting it. Not completely transparent? True, let's debate it. But they are still way ahead of the curve.

— Marc DuBois (@Humanicontraria) February 12, 2018

I've worked for #Oxfam for 7 yrs. My Oxfam is full of the most dedicated people, fighting poverty & injustice. My Oxfam agonises endlessly to live up to the highest ideals. These disgusting individuals never belonged in Oxfam. https://t.co/0LbLlKb3zm

— Erinch Sahan (@ErinchSahan) February 11, 2018

1) The #Oxfam prostitution scandal does not surprise me. I was raised all over the world by frontline aid workers and am used to the humanitarian industry being staffed by bizarre, narcissistic people.

THREAD 👇👇👇

— Isabel Robeson (@robesonblogs) February 12, 2018

So senior men who failed to address sexual harassment and predatory behaviour in their charity are quietly moved on to other well-paid jobs in the sector; while the honourable @pennylawrence resigns. Ho hum: who says patriarchy is dead?

— Owen Barder (@owenbarder) February 12, 2018

How long have the Times been working on the Oxfam story? What is the new information that made them look at it? Is it pure coincidence that Jacob Rees-Mogg delivered a petition against the aid budget to Downing St last Thursday?#r4today

— Ed Wilson (@eddwilson2) February 12, 2018

My statement following tonight's interview with @cathynewman@Channel4Newspic.twitter.com/uGJqpNfkFa

— Councillor Helen Evans (@helentevans) February 12, 2018

What’s fascinating about all the hot takes on sexual molestation, rape & harassment is that there are actual experts who have worked on these issues for decades. Why has the mainstream media given so little space to these *informed* voices?

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) February 10, 2018

Nothing can justify what the Oxfam staff in Haiti did. I make that clear. But I make it as clear that I believe that the attack on Oxfam is deeply cynical and entirely because it has upset those with wealth. On balance then Oxfam has faults, like everyone and every organisation. But what it does is overall immensely valuable. The balance is weighted heavily in Oxfam's favour. Unless of course you're very wealthy and deeply offended by those who suggest that may not be entirely due to your own efforts, as Oxfam do. And that is what this is all about. Oxfam's crime is to upset wealthy people. And on that issue, I agree, it is systemically responsible.

Oxfam advocates participatory approaches, and what better way to do that then to empower project beneficiaries to directly give feedback on your operations whenever they need to and in real time? This could be achieved through a tool like UNICEF's U-Report. This mobile reporting tool for communities was first deployed in Uganda in 2011, the same year that the alleged abuses occurred in Haiti. It has since expanded to a number of other countries, and is helping to give a voice to people who often are not often consulted directly, in their own words, about how an NGO's intervention has actually affected them. Instead of relying solely on reports from staff who wish to keep their jobs and may not want to rock the boat, going directly to communities might be a great way to learn of abuses - and sooner.

We don’t just get to sign up for an NGO Job and be a good person. We actually have to continually be addressing structural oppressions as they show up in us and that’s why the ‘thousands of passionate aid workers and a few bad eggs’ type of analysis warrants questioning.
Not from the destructive place of destroying any commitment to caring about making the world a better place, but out of a genuine commitment to showing up differently.
We are human and fallible. We make mistakes. We, as a sector, have done far too much trying to fix the problems ‘out there’ without addressing how social injustice shows up in us, in our own lives and the lives of our organisations.

In addition, on a more formal level, there needs to be better training, preparation and post-deployment debriefing that seeks to support aid workers throughout the course of their work. This is particularly important in field offices, and even more so for national aid workers; because we should not forget that they are the ones who are most likely to be the victims of violence in the course of their work, and at the same time have less capacity – due to their professional status and the limited bargaining power they hold – to respond to or prevent such incidents from occurring.

About 7,000-10,000 Comorians – more than one percent of the islands’ population – died on the crossing between 1995 and 2012, according to a report from the French Senate. Many local observers cite higher figures, and the Comorian authorities claim it is “the world’s largest marine cemetery”.
French border patrols catch several kwassa kwassa per night. In most cases, the people on board are deported the very next day. Mayotte has a population of just over 200,000, and yet manages to deport about 20,000 people each year.
Mayotte is exempt from certain French immigration laws, and the border police do not always respect those that do exist. In a report last year, France’s human rights commission condemned the quick deportations in Mayotte, where most migrants don’t even see a lawyer or a judge before expulsion.

When going to Wall Street, or Davos, or other centers of wealth, the World Bank should inspire the billionaires to put their surging wealth into personal philanthropy to support the SDGs. Bill Gates is doing this, with historic results, for public health. Which billionaires will champion the SDGs for education, renewable energy, fresh water and sanitation, and sustainable agriculture? With a clear SDG plan, the World Bank would find partners to help it fulfill its core, historic, and vital mission.

The World Bank’s Misleading Defense of the Doing Business Indexhttps://t.co/aANPkYyBWp

1/n

— Justin Sandefur (@JustinSandefur) February 14, 2018

Between 2013 and 2017 the country’s national and per capita GDPs contracted more severely than those of the US did during the Great Depression and more than those of Russia, Cuba, and Albania did after the fall of communism.
This is a humanitarian crisis of immense proportions. By May 2017, Venezuela’s minimum monthly wage wasn’t enough to meet even 12 percent of a single person’s basic food needs.2 A survey of 6,500 households by three prestigious universities showed that 74 percent of the population had lost on average nineteen pounds in 2016. Infant mortality in hospitals has risen by 100 percent. Diseases nearly eradicated in many countries, like malaria and diphtheria, have flourished; illnesses largely new to the area, like Chikungunya, Zika, and dengue, have spread. Caracas is now the most dangerous city on the planet. All this is happening in a country that has one of the largest oil reserves in the world.

The harsh reality of this bleak system has spurred a mass exodus, especially of the youth, out of Eritrea: with so many people falling victim to human trafficking and slavery in North Africa; organ harvesting in the Sinai; death in the Sahara Desert; or drowning in the Mediterranean and Red Seas. A decision to brave such risks becomes a viable option only when the alternative is far worse. The substantial reports and mounting evidence from the sheer number of people fleeing Eritrea for reasons, such as persecution, torture and detention, are met with the denial, dismissal or shifting of blame to “others” by the regime and its supporters. The regime’s ‘official’ narrative consistently assigns blame for the lack of progress or the reality of immense suffering affecting Eritrea and its people to hostile external entities, such as the US, the UN or Woyane, that threaten Eritrea’s security. In the incessant scheme of externalising the causes of Eritrea’s predicament, the net of blame has been cast even wider as of January 2018 to include mothers and immediate family members of recruits as encouraging them to flee.
As a people, Eritreans, especially in the Diaspora, need to find a way towards reconciliation and unity through open dialogue. The combination of persistent externalisation and extreme politicisation of Eritrea’s problems festered over decades, fed by the unrelenting narrative of the regime, has produced a divided, fragmented and polarised Diaspora, unable to coalesce and undertake concerted positive action, to the delight of the incumbent regime.

Secondly, researchers suggest that there’s not enough evidence to show that aid that targets the so-called root cause of migration is effective. This aid has failed to kick-start poor economies, meaningfully increase youth employment, or have a significant effect on violence prevention. “Though occasionally intensive job training has reduced youth unemployment, there is scant evidence that such programs can be scaled up to achieve national impacts,” researchers note in the report.
The study goes on to paint a far more complex relationship between migration and economic development. Families often pay significant amounts of money upfront in hopes that it would lead to income gains from overseas work. In short, sending young male relatives abroad is often seen as an investment for the future. Thus, aid that results in greater economic opportunity at home, may end up making “such an investment more feasible,” researchers note.

I’m optimistic it’s not a permanent state. We’ve never been particularly good at balancing domestic political news with important stories from the rest of the world, but I also don’t think we’re doomed to be glued to the White House indefinitely. The collective passion of those who care about people and places around the globe will eventually remind funders and consumers that we are capable of learning about more than one thing at a time. Let’s just hope this doesn’t in the meantime lead to more non-profits losing their international news funding.

But international journalism had a lot of problems to begin with, and maybe this destruction is also an opportunity to rebuild. I’d love to see bolder, more in-depth stories told by people who are from the places they’re reporting on — or at least have spent significant time in those regions. I want stories that don’t feel phoned in but finely crafted with the assistance of crack mentors. I want stories that don’t focus on the largesse of Western donors and other saviors and instead rethink the concept of a savior altogether.
I want stories that give me a new window into the world — which international journalism, as it exists now, has too often failed to do.

The controversy around the film started in November, after the international trailer was released. That's where the white horse made its appearance, which Linda rides while trying to halt a train loaded with the super-rice.
"It plays to stereotypes of an exotic but backward people just waiting for a white person to swoop in and save them," says Bengaluru-based cartoonist, Manoj Vijayan, in an interview with NPR.
(...)
The film's white savior message isn't the only issue that rankles. "The script seems to have gone overboard with its lazy cliches, the lame jokes and the stereotyping," says Vijayan. "It's a sadly missed opportunity to tell a story with some nuance and ends up pandering to tired old preconceptions."

It was on our second WE Villages trip to rural India, that I found myself saying yes to co-writing a book that sets out the premise that you can achieve equal (if not more) success, both personally and professionally, by embedding purpose at the heart of everything you do. Drawing on our individual sectors of business, social enterprise and charity, WEconomy really is a collection of all of our life experiences, business learnings and hunger for positive change.

HOW TO WRITE ABOUT THE RICH (see below for explanation
1: Do not broadly attribute a company’s work to their owner/CEO.
2: It is always relevant to note how people have accumulated wealth, and who they have harmed to do so. Never omit it.
3: Be skeptical and don’t just publish a wealthy person’s claims or without doing due diligence or offering a critical corollary.
4: Don’t trip over yourself to humanize a rich person and make them look good — you’re a journalist, not a PR person.
5: Don’t let it all be about them.
6: It’s not fucking news if a rich person likes Rick and Morty or whatever.
7: If you’re writing from a place of personal perspective, you should write about them with the same bilious contempt they have for human life.

Bloggers and digital influencers are regularly tapped by ad agencies and brands to promote campaigns and products.
The same tactics and skills employed by boutique agencies to push products and build reputation by tapping digital influencers are also used for political clients.
When the line between the organic and paid endorsements are blurred, it also has an impact on how the Comelec and candidates implement and comply with campaign finance regulation.

In the last decade the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) figures on the international radar as a place of horrific sexual violence and ‘vile barbarity’. Drawing on ethnographic research in eastern DRC, this paper argues that these framings have a contaminating effect on the researcher and the way that knowledge is produced and mediated. What does it mean to do research on violence in the ‘rape capital of the world’? It addresses three significant ‘fields of power’ that emerge when conducting research in a violent setting as a politically and geographically situated researcher. First, the paper argues that a colonial imaginary, which produces racial and sexual hierarchies, informs contemporary representations on sexual violence. Second, it critically examines current knowledge on sexual violence in eastern DRC that, primarily drawing on victims’ testimonies, may reinforce harmful framings. Third, the paper shows how I shaped my research in relation to ‘toxic’ discourses on sexual violence. In doing so, this article reflects on what it means to ‘undo’ research from a ‘violent’ space by disrupting received knowledge on sexual violence and critically exploring the researcher’s responsibility in representing violence as experienced by others and his/her complicity in perpetuating harmful framings.

The report presents the benefits of big data (for example, real time data), risks (for example, elite capture and privacy), and policy implications (for example, how it can be incorporated in project cycles from planning to evaluation). It ends with a compendium of gender-related big data projects and their relevance to the SDGs.

The editors have identified five principal ‘pathways’ by which the scholarship opportunity may catalyse change beyond individual achievement. These are:
The ‘change agent’ pathway where individual recipients generate positive social change through personal action with multiplier effects;
The ‘social network’ pathway where networks of scholars and alumni promote change through collective action;
The ‘widening access’ pathway that fosters social mobility through the explicit selection of scholars from underrepresented communities;
The ‘academic diversity’ pathway where scholarship programmes influence universities to be more inclusive of non-traditional students; and
The ‘international understanding’ pathway that creates conditions for enhanced inter-cultural and international communication, tolerance and cooperation.

If as many as 80 percent of doctoral students in cultural anthropology are not getting tenure-track jobs, then why are PhD programs in the United States almost exclusively training them for a professional life that few will realize? A new essay from David Platzer and Anne Allison tackles this question head-on, drawing on their own experiences in elite departments and on interviews with tenure-stream faculty, recent PhDs, current graduate students, and staff members of the AAA. Recognizing the critical importance of this issue to our discipline, the Cultural Anthropology editorial team has convened a forum around Platzer and Allison’s essay, inviting responses from both senior scholars and recent PhDs who are contending with precarity firsthand.

No there is nothing technically incorrect about the observations or suggestions that follow–but the fact that the authors present them as new, and that they talk right over the space already vibrantly occupied by the actual academic precariat, which has been publishing on this for decades now, is in and of itself the manifestation of the privileged insularity of the tenured and their sanctioned ignorance of these decades of actual human suffering wrought by the depredations of the academic job market.
This job market is not “daunting” or “uncertain” or “volatile” or other pretentious evasions scattered throughout the essay. It is in a state of catastrophic 40-year-long collapse that has destroyed countless lives. And elite faculty, who by their own admission ( as in this piece) “don’t know what the fuck we are doing,” have failed utterly to train their students to cope with this catastrophe…. while at the same time (as in this piece) sniffily dismissing their students’ efforts to find advising elsewhere.
This sanctioned ignorance, friends, is why nothing changes.

These reflections foreground a discussion on possible ways forward for researchers and their attempts to engage with NGOs and IOs. The most straightforward suggestion would be to acknowledge the reasons for misunderstandings and to try to approach employees of NGO/IOs by offering a clearly outlined collaboration which would be valuable for both sides, and, if it is of interest, a long-term cooperation. It is necessary to understand the actual value of such cooperation. Most of the time it is likely to be the mere exchange of views and an opportunity for self-reflection for both NGO/IO worker and a researcher, not the transfer of knowledge and critical thinking often implied by researchers and NGOs/IO staff alike. Another possibility could be engaging in collaborative projects between NGOs/IOs and researchers, if organisations require additional external feedback and evaluation of their work. Such collaboration could also be facilitated with scholarships (as opposed to offering unpaid internships) that enable young researchers to spend time in an NGO/IO and to design and conduct research – which they can use in their Master’s thesis or PhD research, for example.

But the aid industry is operating in the same mediatized and socio-political environment where other #MeToo moments and movements have been happening. This environment demands quick, visible and clear-cut changes-and anything that has to do with development usually works at a different speed. For substantial and longer-term changes building up structures will require generous and patient donors, a nuanced media coverage and a general public willing to engage with complicated processes of social change. That’s a lot to ask for. Paying for experts, paying for capacity development, paying for time to get things right and paying for scaling up organizational structures is not what donors are keen to fund and Silicone Valley-type disruptors keep promising.
The risk is that for large organizations (e.g. UN organizations and large INGOs) it may become part of ‘bureaucratic capture’, of box-ticking and dodging hard decisions. For small organizations it could be expensive and time-consuming, possibly paralyzing their work.
But for each and every organization is will require more communication with the outside world and finding that perfect balance of ‘doing good’ with good people and empowering structural frameworks.

In a statement, Forsyth said his decision to step down from UNICEF was not because of “the mistakes I made at Save the Children”.
“They were dealt with through a proper process many years ago,” his statement said.
“I apologised unreservedly at the time and face to face. I apologise again. There is no doubt in my mind that some of the coverage around me is not just to - rightly - hold me to account, but also to attempt to do serious damage to our cause and the case for aid.”
His decision to step down comes as charities in the aid sector pledge to overhaul their approach to dealing with allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment.

Speaking on Wednesday from northern Canada, O’Keefe, who no longer works in the international development sector, said her time at Save the Children was a “formative career experience,” which contributed to driving her out of the international sector. She and other women in her department were “groomed” by their manager to accept inappropriate workplace liaisons as normal she said.
Inappropriate but consensual relations between Cox and female staff in the department he headed were an “open secret,” O’Keefe said. Although behaviour at the office was generally professional, O’Keefe said she had witnessed “inappropriate behaviour” by Cox at after-hours gatherings, office parties and events.
Junior staff risked being sidelined and excluded from the more prestigious and important projects if they questioned Cox’s behavior, O’Keefe said. “I myself feel complicit,” she said, adding that she now regrets not speaking up. “We were afraid to speak to Justin… I was often afraid.”

“We pay for the home, we pay for the school for the children, so it kind of guarantees that there is more stability and you don’t have a bunch of guys with a lot of testerone living together in a compound,” the spokesperson said.

These victims are not typical Mail and Telegraph readers and they understood that a story about a lack of accountability in an aid organization will likely be followed in those newspapers by calls for less foreign aid. None of the victims support that goal. What they want is aid plus accountability.
Almost all of the complainants went to the Guardian first. Different Guardian journalists were contacted, but all went quiet. One told me: “I just wanted to say I haven't forgotten about this. Unfortunately the decision to work on the story or not is above my station, so I'm just waiting for a decision either way…” Later, when I asked if they had heard back the same journalist said: “I haven’t unfortunately. It was passed onto powers that be. At the moment it’s looking like it’s not going to run... I presume after some weighing of pros and cons.”
Not only did the Guardian not run a piece about Cox and Forsyth, they actually ran a piece by Cox. This was three months ago. Still I and others kept pressing them. To those affected it looks like some senior media people protect those who are also their personal friends—both the BBC’s Andrew Marr and Sky’s Adam Boulton have publically spoken up for the two men. Perhaps they also think that they are protecting Save the Children, but you don’t protect charities by covering up the behavior of predatory men, only by helping them free themselves from them, and if you leave it to outlets like the Daily Mail then the story gets turned into another reason to cut support for charities.

This paper uses the real stories of 29 aid workers from around the world to piece together the scale of the abuse within the sector. It also uses the authors own stories from her 10+ years in the sector.
This research finds that gender-based violence, perpetrated by humanitarian actors, is condoned, covered-up, and replicated throughout the entire aid sector. Abuse of power and privilege has become a daily reality for women working in the sector, and for the women and girls it serves.

So proud that @UNAIDS launched #Confidential#Integrity#Hotline
..The Integrity Hotline is a confidential service, accessible 24/7 from any location to raise a concern or report #misconduct by a #UNAIDS staff member #UNAIDS strongly believes on transparency & #accountabilitypic.twitter.com/MLjLgXBIG1

— Fahmida Iqbal Khan (@FahmidaIqbal) February 20, 2018

A warehouse in Vanuatu’s capital, Port Vila, holds 10 huge shipping containers filled to the brim with discarded goods and rotting food. This is what’s left of the massive piles of donations sent to the South Pacific nation in the aftermath of the most powerful storm to strike the remote island group, nearly three years ago.

"And even if you have resources, sometimes you aren't empowered enough to use them," she says. For instance, she says, a mother may know that she needs to vaccinate her child, but as a daily wage earner, she may not have the opportunity to take off work to do so.
"While it might ease our conscience to think that poor people can and do smile and are content with their lot, the truth is that when you're poor, whether you smile or not, other people are always in control," says Rathnam. "It makes me wonder, just how many poor people did Mr. Trump Jr. actually see?"

"For all the hype around disruption and automation, the current evidence is equally consistent with the idea that investing significantly more money to train, recruit, and retain the highest quality #teachers in public education systems is even better value for money."https://t.co/kdnYPb8s6L

— David Evans (@tukopamoja) February 21, 2018

The gala, televised by China’s state broadcaster, featured a well-known Chinese actress as an African woman with exaggerated buttocks, a large chest and a face painted black. Carrying a platter of fruit on her head, she was accompanied by an African man dressed as a monkey.
Many found the portrayals offensive.

Following this principle, we developed the first series of the Reframed Stories project in close collaboration with the indigenous community of Sarayaku and the Shuar nationality, both situated in the Ecuadorian Amazon region. These groups have been standing up to extraction projects in their territories for years and have taken their fight to the national and international level. As such, they have important insights to share about the media coverage of community resistance strategies.

In addition to highlighting cutting-edge pilot initiatives, the Summit confirmed the importance of proceeding with caution while introducing an unregulated and emerging technology in humanitarian environments. In such contexts, when information is highly sensitive and populations are vulnerable to grave rights abuses, innovative projects must imperatively fall in line with humanitarian principles above all other motives.

Listen to Diana Mitlin interview Pablo Yanguas about his new book Why We Lie About Aid which is out now on Zed books. They discuss the aid sector, accountability and the Department for International Development.

How will you evaluate this program? Because we have little funding for a formal process with an external evaluator, we will have Edward, our social work practicum student, design a self-report survey. At the beginning and end of the program, we’ll administer the survey. We’ll put in lots of numbers and percentages to make it look impressive. This is not very rigorous or valid, due to selection bias, self-report bias, confounding variables, and a host of other issues, but it should be enough to convince you that we have good evaluation data. Please send money so we can buy Edward a cake.
How will the community be transformed as a result of this grant? Hahahaha, that’s a good one! This grant is for $5,000! And people say funders don’t have a sense of humor! 5K will allow us to pay for six weeks of rent, which means we can stay open, and who knows what awesome stuff we’ll accomplish during those six weeks, am I right? Please add three zeroes if you really want to see transformation.

In the introduction to the book, Wakhungu-Githuku writes that she sees the pieces as “voiceless conversations that hopefully will demand countless encores.” Art in Kenya, she argues “is currently galloping and that despite strong influences here and there, in the absence of a truly dominant aesthetic, artists are exercising latitude, freely mixing genres, debunking traditional templates, eschewing predictable cages and experimenting with abandon.”

She had her first harrowing brush with notoriety for a memoir she published about her time in Zambia (titled In Congo’s Shadow: One Girl’s Perilous Journey to the Heart of Africa), in which she painted herself as a Mother Teresa figure bravely navigating the all-encompassing threats of Mother Africa. She wrote of being frightened of rebels targeting her, the “skinny white muzungu with long angel hair,” and of her “special comfort in my bond” with an orphan, a “smiling gap-toothed child with HIV whose greatest joy was to sit on my lap and drink from a bottle of Coca-Cola.” The book—the type of thing that would have gone wholly unnoticed if it weren’t such a stark example of white upper-class privilege—was received so poorly that Linton took it out of print and issued a public apology. It also sparked a Twitter hashtag, #LintonLies, detailing its myriad inaccuracies (the Daily Telegraph, which had run an excerpt, eventually withdrew the article from its site and issued an apology). “My greatest sorrow is that the effect of my book was the exact opposite of what my intention was,” Linton says now.
Hampel kindly explains away the book’s tone-deafness by saying: “Louise was blessed and fortunate enough to be raised in a Scottish castle, and to not understand the reality of some human beings with a different background.”

That is the challenge of the narcissism of today’s digital nomad: it’s about freedom of movement, but not responsibility to engage. The loyalty of patriotism is replaced by a kind of brand loyalty, and there are dozens of other brands on the government shelf. There is a supposed mutualism between the digital nomad and the local population: the former brings prosperity and an innovative outlook, the latter provides for the quality amenities that attract the nomads. But ultimately, only one of these groups has the ability to leave.
Governments are competing better to get talent into their countries, but now they need to work with nomads and global talent, and vice versa. We need to move toward a more expansive view that people can have multiple nations, and nations can share a single person. We all need to engage deeper with the places we live globally, and realize that it is not someone else’s job to make our neighborhood right.

The purpose of Pinker’s laborious graphs and figures is to reassure his audience that they are on “the right side of history”. For many, no doubt, the exercise will be successful. But nagging questions will surely return. If an Enlightenment project survives, what reason is there for thinking it will be embodied in liberal democracy? What if the Enlightenment’s future is not in the liberal West, now almost ungovernable as a result of the culture wars in which it is mired, but Xi Jinping’s China, where an altogether tougher breed of rationalist is in charge? It is a prospect that Voltaire, Jeremy Bentham and other exponents of enlightened despotism would have heartily welcomed.
Judged as a contribution to thought, Enlightenment Now is embarrassingly feeble. With its primitive scientism and manga-style history of ideas, the book is a parody of Enlightenment thinking at its crudest.

Partly for this reason, the book will no doubt attract a large audience. It is not just Steven Pinker and a goodly proportion of beauty pageant contestants who want world peace, progress and material prosperity. At some level, and with variations, this is what we all want. To be told that these are permanently underwritten by a historical trajectory that springs from the Enlightenment will no doubt be reassuring to some, particularly if the cost of maintaining the trend is a relatively painless subscription to the ideals of reason, science, humanism and progress.
For those sceptical of Pinker's imagined history and unconvinced by his sanguine assessment of human nature, the future is somewhat less certain. Achieving his desiderata, if possible at all, is likely to be hard work. And if history is to serve as any kind of guide in our efforts, we need to try to get it right and resist the temptation to reconstruct it in our own image.

Avoid – or at least mitigate – the structural socioeconomic inequalities and unequal government spending that characterised urban housing policies before 2011, since these were major sources of poverty and conflict. This brief suggests that regime-led urban reconstruction may well replicate the
political-economic patterns that were at the heart of the mass mobilisations in 2011. By implication, mitigating this risk by focusing on marginalised groups or areas – from an urban housing perspective – may help reduce the longer-term risk of increasing urban poverty and renewed violence.

For those who remain in the system and look to pursue postgraduate degrees, the lack of mentorship and role models is another issue. When you don’t identify with people who are lecturing in terms of image, culture and background, it’s easy not to relate to the field or subject. Diversity in the lecture hall is a way to show black women students that they can also take ownership in a particular field.
It’s important for these young women to look beyond the academy for mentors, too. One of the women I admire is Getty Choenyana, who trained as a mechanical engineer, then founded Oamobu Naturals and uses her scientific skills and knowledge to successfully produce marketable products.
Family, marriage and culture also influence black women’s experiences as scientists. A number of African communities and cultures do not have a tradition of professional women. There is a strong expectation that women must conform to the traditional roles of wife and mother.

In my experience reviewing IS Journal and conference (locally and internationally), and examining thesis, it has been quite down heartening to have to see yet another Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) interpretation, or heavy reliance on Sen’s Capability approach. Don’t get me wrong – these theories have been quite powerful and insightful, however, at times they are insufficient to drive the interpretations of our contexts. To get a paper published in a mainstream IS journal, one is required to build their argument from popular theory – however, what does one do, if the theory does not explain the context. Are we forced to reverse engineer, and squeeze our empirical experiences into a particular theory just to get published? Or should we rather explore theory from a vast variety of disciplines (transdisciplinarity) to introduce new understanding of IS in developing countries. I choose the latter. Theory is important, because it shapes our understanding of phenomena from different angles. However, publishers, editors, academics should begin to recognise the emerging change in methodology and approach, when working in our unique contexts – this calls for the development and recognition of sensitised approaches to research in African and developing countries.

While I enjoy the flattering attributions of expertise over my research topic that these fabrications occasionally grant me, I often feel troubled by the way they blur my authorial role into the figure of the social media savvy or the computer geek, hiding how most of my ethnographic knowledge is actually grounded on a patchy process of discovery, a messy interaction between my puzzled inquiries and the kind help of patient friends who bear with my often clueless questions about the latest Internet meme or slang term.
Digital ethnographers are often closer to practical brokers, curious newcomers relying on the knowledgeability and interpretive guidance of what Holmes & Marcus call “paraethnographers” (2008). It is important to remember how the figure of the expert fabricator can become an enticing professional illusion that easily overrides the messy, processual and thickly social construction of local expertise.

Ms. Martin, who has advised the United Nations and other international aid organizations on gender-based violence, said she and her colleagues feared that Mr. MacLeod’s figures would provide exactly that kind of excuse, distracting from the less splashy but more reliable information that is already available.
“I have heard so many horrific stories from women that I don’t need false statistics waved around,” Ms. Martin said. “It discredits the very brave women and children who struggle to come forward and then do — usually to disbelief and disinterest.”

Harper said the departure of high-profile officials did not exonerate the UN of responsibility, and that it had allowed a culture of sexual harassment to fester for years. She says she was repeatedly invited to drinks by Loures, who once told her she was “a very naughty girl” because she had declined an offer in South Africa to meet him one night in his hotel room. In addition, following a work conference, Loures assaulted her in a lift, she said. “We left the conference and shared a lift together and he attempted to kiss me. In the process of me moving away, he bruised my lip. On exiting the lift he tried to get me into his hotel room and ripped a button off my shirt.”

In an open letter published today, 88 civil society organisations have urged investors to cease their support for the multi-national for-profit chain of private schools Bridge International Academies (BIA), which runs over 500 schools in Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Uganda, and India.
These organisations are calling investors’ attention to a series of concerning practices by BIA and the associated legal and reputational risks they incur. These practices include lack of transparency, poor labour conditions, and non-respect of the rule of law in host countries. Investors in BIA range from well-known private investors such as the Omidyar Network, the Zuckerberg Education Ventures, and Bill Gates to public State agencies from the USA, the United Kingdom, France, Norway, the Netherlands, and the European Union.
According to the letter, BIA has been acting in defiance of the law and has a negative impact on the right to education of thousands of children in countries of Africa and other regions.

If Apple is to go directly to the supplier, it will likely benefit the likes of Glencore, while cobalt profits do little to improve the country’s economy. Congolese policymakers are already considering increasing the royalties mining companies must pay to export cobalt. If that law takes effect, companies with a longstanding presence in the DRC will probably find a way to work around it. Thanks to a deal like the 2012 joint agreement with the DRC’s national electricity supplier, Société Nationale d’Électricité, Glencore “contributed” $389 million as a loan to improve the electricity grid, according to the results report. The state repays the loan through granting electricity discounts.

Catanzano said: “The Saudi-led coalition is offering to fund a response to address the impact of a crisis it helped to create. The acute crisis in Yemen needs more than what appears to be a logistical operations plan, with token gestures of humanitarian aid.
“A meaningful response to the world’s largest humanitarian crisis requires more access – not less. At best, this plan would shrink access and introduce new inefficiencies that would slow the response and keep aid from the neediest Yemenis, including the over 8 million on the brink of starvation.
“At worst, it would dangerously politicise humanitarian aid by placing far too much control over the response in the hands of an active party to the conflict.”

The widespread unpopularity of targeting in Mongolia will be a threat to the stability of the Government. As has happened in other countries, as a result of being forced to target the poor, the Government’s popularity will be hit. Indeed, it may lose the next election since any sensible opposition will campaign on the basis of reintroducing universality. It is also highly likely that, as with other poverty-targeted benefits, due to the unpopularity of the schemes, over time the budgets and value of the transfers will fall, thereby further harming those living in poverty.
(...)
It seems clear that the IMF and its partners are interfering in national policy discussions and using their power to influence decisions and subvert democracy. It is also worrying that the rest of the international community – including key UN agencies which purport to support inclusive social protection – appear to have remained silent despite the IMF’s actions clearly harming children and families in both countries. We should expect more from them, as should Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia, both of which should be able to look to the UN to protect them from outside threats.

This suggests that China needs to have a conversation about racial insensitivity, which is too common and too often dismissed as cultural specificity. The cultural specificity argument goes like this: while something might be considered offensive in the “West” (for example, blackface), it is not in China, and, therefore, there is no need to feel offended by it.
(...)
If China wants to be viewed as a responsible global actor, it needs to find appropriate ways to prevent controversies such as the one created by the offensive CCTV skit. It could, for example, seek out African specialists at Chinese universities to offer expert advise.
More importantly, when errors are made – and Chinese leaders need to accept that nobody is infallible – Beijing needs to be ready to acknowledge them.

I just came back from Ethiopia where I had no phone connection. It was wonderful being away from social media, living in the real world. With real people. pic.twitter.com/GW6eekpSsb

— Asia Argento (@AsiaArgento) February 16, 2018

From the latest Oxfam sex abuse scandal, to the rise of private contractors, to the decision of the U.K. to leave the European Union, to the decision to spend more aid through other government departments, how is aid changing under the influence of the media? Is conservative media destroying public trust in aid? Are antiaid campaigns working, and how are nonprofit and for-profit communications strategies evolving as a result? What recourse do aid organizations have when negative press coverage turns political? Who speaks for aid?

Things aid critics say
-charities should not be political
-charities should challenge corrupt kleptocrats
- only give humanitarian aid
- only create jobs, fight corruption
-money should go to front line not overheads.
-where are the safeguarding, evaluation, results, tracking..?

— Owen Barder (@owenbarder) March 1, 2018

A feat of elegant design wowed elite architects and promised to bring education to poor children in Nigeria. Then it collapsed.
(...)
This ending is unsatisfying, poetic, and true. Change is never linear, humans are ever contradictory, and answers are rarely easy. “The money is literally just sitting there,” Etomi told me. Meanwhile, in Makoko, school years pass; children grow.

Despite the importance of photojournalism, it is unclear what the future of the industry will be, and what role photojournalism can play in addressing some of today’s greatest challenges – environmental degradation, climate change, ecosystem collapse and their impact on humankind.
Today, more than half the world’s population has access to the Internet and billions of photos – real and fake – are shared online everyday. Audiences are more immune to the power of images, and less likely to trust images they know might have been manipulated.
The great photographs of the past were made in a time when newspapers provided the world’s news feed, when readers waited with bated breath for the morning and afternoon editions to hit the stands. They were made when crises were relatively contained in time and space, and when newspaper budgets were bursting. Today’s global challenges are increasingly complex, intertwined and multilayered; capturing those intricacies, providing actions to address them and maintaining the world’s attention at the same time is an increasingly difficult task.

About a year ago, I attended a meeting in Bogotá with the Minister of the Environment about the Pacific Coast, a rainforest region rich in biodiversity and populated largely by black and indigenous peoples. For thirty years, research and strategies to “develop” the area have centered on large-scale development interventions, such as the expansion of oil palm plantations, mining, and large port development. Against this backdrop, poverty, inequality, and violence have deepened. To say the problem facing the region—and other parts of Latin America—is lack of development is fundamentally flawed. At that meeting, I argued that we should dare to reverse the picture: to entertain the idea that the problem of this region, is not underdevelopment but, in fact, excessive development. Recognizing this opens possibilities for new thinking based on alternative notions of human and ecological well-being.

Eric Schmidt asked at MIT about regulating AI: "Instead of spending all day worrying, why don’t you wait until there’s a near miss?” + "Let's not translate that worry into premature constraints on the innovators here in the room."

— Jack Clark (@jackclarkSF) March 1, 2018

The only gaming here appears to be using tragic events for automated content monetization. The mass shootings in particular are especially troubling: the experiences of the least fortunate among us — including tragedy survivors, children, and their families— are being used to algorithmically profit from the most impressionable.

There’s a noble kernel to Pinker’s project. He wants to discourage the kind of fatalism that leads people to think the only way forward is to tear everything down. But he seems surprisingly blind to how he fuels such fatalism by playing to the worst stereotype of the enlightened cosmopolitan: disdainful and condescending — sympathetic to humanity in the abstract but impervious to the suffering of actual human beings.

Steven Pinker's new book is American mansplaining at its finest. Are you suffering from global warming? Ecological collapse? Dispossession? Drones? Stop complaining... you're earning $1.25 per day! Everything is awesome!

— Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel) February 27, 2018

And as philanthropies and their fund managers question whether their investment translates to capital additionality or displacement, innovators such as Tomás Durán, Aaron Tanaka, and Jessica Norwood — who drive innovations like worker ownership to preserve quality jobs in low-wealth communities, community-controlled capital, and investment vehicles that directly address the racial wealth gap — receive little to no investment at all: traditional, impact, or philanthropic. A significant delta exists between what mainstream impact investors deem as investable and the cash-strapped innovations coming from communities throughout the country.
The questions we ask today are too narrowly focused on technocratic concerns like “How do we get more deals done?” instead of “How do we foster equality, transfer power, and enable community wealth through our capital?”

Most women in the study reported physically punishing working days that involved travelling significant distances between home and work, often carrying heavy loads, and incurring injuries. With no time to rest between work and caring for children and other family members their own health and wellbeing often comes last. However, women dig deep into personal and social reserves and carry on, because of the economic necessities they and their families face.

The more philosophical question for me is whether #globaldev& capitalism will ever be able to 'empower' women in the global South (and ROW) or simply create new, subtle ways of manufacturing consumers, needs, demands & exhaustion rather than discontent & opposition https://t.co/8clvoZ5DJy

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) March 1, 2018

The study finds that the policies hinge on two seemingly commensurate objectives, varying between conflict-free sourcing and promoting peace. We find that, in reality, these objectives may not align. We also find that much reform practice is geared towards conflict-free sourcing, and is far less appropriate for promoting peace. This includes the tendency to implement the policies in conflict-free zones, their narrow scope, the reliance on the government and their indifference to the impact of the reforms for poor miners. The findings suggest that exercising due diligence has become a goal in itself. This raises the question of whether giving buyers a clear conscience and developing a traceable and conflict-free product has received more prominence than has contributing to improving the situation of the Congolese population.

This chapter provides an overview of the specific legal, ethical, and privacy issues that can arise when conducting research using Twitter data. Existing literature is reviewed to inform those who may be undertaking social media research. We also present a number of industry and academic case studies in order to highlight the challenges that may arise in research projects using social media data. Finally, the chapter provides an overview of the process that was followed to gain ethics approval for a Ph.D. project using Twitter as a primary source of data. By outlining a number of Twitter-specific research case studies, the chapter will be a valuable resource to those considering the ethical implications of their own research projects utilizing social media data. Moreover, the chapter outlines existing work looking at the ethical practicalities of social media data and relates their applicability to researching Twitter.

1. CBC called me yesterday at 710 AM (I'd just woken up) & asked me to comment on Cormier verdict. I agreed, tho kind of off-put by the time. We spoke for 14 mins. I was then asked if I'd be available to speak to host of morning show. I said yes,but again, off-put by the approach

— Dr Fish Philosopher🐟 (@ZoeSTodd) February 24, 2018

Water scarcity and inequality are on the rise globally. By putting these three vignettes into alignment, I wish to suggest that racial and economic inequality is not erased in the face of disaster, but potentially exacerbated, and that conservation and crisis planning must center marginalized voices in order to be effective. Any attempts to compel collective action in the face of water crisis will ring hollow without acknowledgement of, and accounting for, the differential impact of global climate change on the poor. While wealthier, whiter residents of Cape Town frantically adjust to tracking their water use, desperately hoping to avoid day zero, for many day zero arrived a long time ago. One suspects much of this urgency is motivated by a fear, rather than a belief, that we are really “all in this together”.

Last update: 5 March 07:15 EST; there are now more than 110 resources!
For the time being, this bibliography will not be updated anymore.
The debate has branched out in so many different directions since the original scandal broke that I want to keep this thread more narrowly about the Oxfam scandal and how media the aid industry responded to it.

Oxford security makes a woman cleaner scrub out “Happy International Women’s Day” on the Clarendon steps. What an image for #IWD, @UniofOxford. #strikeforUSS#UCUstrikepic.twitter.com/E9u5S37hWW

— Sophie Smith (@DrSophieSmith) March 8, 2018

A story about digital journalism in 2018 in three parts. pic.twitter.com/uJch1P49fm

— Alan White (@aljwhite) March 8, 2018

Read women.
Cite women.
Credit women.

Teach women.
Publish women.
Present women.

Acknowledge women.
Award women.
Amplify women.

Hire women.
Support women.
Promote women.

Hear women.
Believe women.
Follow women.

Pay women.
Pay women.
Pay women. #IWD2018

— Shailja Patel (@shailjapatel) March 8, 2018

We ask for three fundamental reforms to shift the patriarchal bias in aid:
Trust women: organisations need to take action as soon as women report sexual harassment, exploitation and abuse; allegations must be treated with priority and urgency in their investigation; the subject of a complaint of this nature must be immediately suspended or removed from their position of power and reach of vulnerable women and girls.
Listen: foster a culture where whistleblowing is welcome and safe - the way to win back trust of donors, the public and the communities we work with is to be honest about abuses of power and learn from disclosures. Sexual harassment, exploitation and abuse should no longer have to be discussed in hushed tones in our offices.
Deeds not words: We need effective leadership, commitment to action and access to resources. It is not enough to develop new policies which are never implemented or funded – with the right tools we can end impunity at all levels in the sector.

Brie adds: ‘We were so grateful when our former senior colleague Faiza Shaheen also spoke out’ – she is so far the only other former staff member to talk openly on television about mistreatment – ‘but we also deeply understand why some of our colleagues feel unable to say anything.’
Finding the courage to go public did not result straight away in the media covering their story. Some were too close to some of the men involved: ‘I wrote to a powerful female editor whose recent positioning I truly admired. She never replied,’ explains Alexia. Others, Alexia and Brie say, were too frightened of being taken to court by some of those they were challenging.
‘But #MeToo has changed everything,’ notes Brie. ‘And we just refused to stop trying.’
(...)
Pepper de Caires and O’Keefe emphasize that they are not the only or even the worst affected. They are clear that they are only two people, who happen to be more visible than others, within a much larger group, forming bonds of solidarity and alliance with women across the world. ‘The outpouring of support we’ve had from colleagues still too afraid to come forward has been overwhelming. It’s what keeps us going,’ says O’Keefe.

Sir Alan is described as saying, "the best way to protect the organisation from reputational risk is not to let the organisational response become disproportionate".

For one brief second, I asked myself questions about whether I was over-thinking, over-analyzing, and generalizing? Or missing the point entirely? Or all of the aforementioned? For one minute, I wanted to return to my silence on this matter. Maybe I was just plain wrong and my lens was clouded by my acute sense developed from being the only black expatriate representing Oxfam in the room.
I often wondered about the presumptuousness of aid organizations proclaiming that somehow they could “build back better” in Haiti? What did that mean? How do you fix history when there was almost no understanding of the cultural and social constructs that gave birth to this island nation and its place in Caribbean history? Haiti is important to the psyche of the Caribbean despite all the problems, because the Haitian war of liberation stands as a defining moment in Caribbean history. Haitians represent that all of our enslaved ancestors chose and fought for liberation over bondage.

But if these numbers broadly hold up, they suggest US institutions involved in international development aren’t sufficiently practicing what they preach when it comes to the importance of diversity and equality to outcomes—and they are less effective as a result. More (and more fairly remunerated) women in nonprofit leadership will change what the sector does for the better.

So the ‘sacrifice’ of our aid work and the power we wield and the powerful self-belief in our goodness produce people who are inclined to believe that it is OK to engage in what we know is wrong for others. This is the notion of privilege, a word which, as the Economist points out, defines a ‘private law’.
I pray for the pendulum, that these and other reflections on the grey do not dampen the black and white fervor aiming to exorcise the bad apples (sexual cowboys and others) and the culture of acceptance that has empowered them for so long. I also pray we are not one major earthquake away from the status quo snapping back.

These women were not only handpicked for their utter excellence; we gauged their impact and influence, and this year, we hone in on the component of community building. It is one form of admirable triumph to pull oneself from the rubble, out of unfavorable circumstance, away from persecution, abuse, war... It is something else and altogether superhuman to run back into the settling dust to save others, in their communities, their countries, their continent and the world.
In short, they are superheroes. No, not from Wakanda. But from Lagos, Somalia and Sierra Leone, Botswana, Dakar and Nairobi to name a few. We at OkayAfrica are honored to uplift them and add to the growing number of collective 100 Women honorees for a campaign that last year successfully reached 72 million people. 72 MILLION. And each of those people received the same message:
African women are no longer requesting seats at the table. You might want to see about getting a seat at ours.

Here's an oped idea for anyone who wants to write it: "Rethinking the idea of International Women's Day breakfasts: how expensive events at 7am in the middle of the city are about the most exclusionary event you could design full stop, let alone in the name of feminism".

— Lisa Pryor (@pryorlisa) March 5, 2018

So what happened?
There are many competing explanations for why São Paulo registered such monumental improvements in safety. For example, some social scientists believe that the murder drop coincides with a decline in the number of young men and falling unemployment. Others say it has more to do with tighter controls on access to alcohol and firearms. A few researchers believe the drop is due to the dominance of a single gang – the PCC – that imposed its own brand of criminal order, a kind of Pax Mafiosa.
Whatever the explanation, the city’s great crime drop does not receive much international attention.

When someone in the aid world is all "I don't have time for bureaucracy and process; I just wanna get sh!t done", my eye starts to twitch. It means we'll have audit issues and clean up later.

"Disruption" in the aid world is tricky to pull off. Here are my rules to live by:

— Evil Genius (@EvilGeniusPub) March 4, 2018

Between the convoluted ownership structures and dead-ends created by corporate confidentiality, following the chain of responsibility from the project to the supposed ultimate beneficiaries – citizens – is rarely straightforward. But Dutch non-profit Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) set out to follow the trail down the rabbit hole anyway. They allege in a recent report that the Canadian company behind Mongolia’s Oyu Tolgoi copper mine may have taken advantage of preferential trade agreements to minimize its tax payments to Mongolia and Canada by as much as $700 million.

More than a year later, as a new wave of violence has sent hundreds of thousands of Rohingya pouring into Bangladesh, former Obama administration officials have been emailing one another and agonizing over what more—if anything—they could have done to prevent the current crisis. Did they pay enough attention to this one group? Were they blinded by the positive changes in Myanmar and naive about the impact on the Rohingya? Was it a mistake to lift the sanctions?
Critics of U.S. policy, many of them human rights activists and some former administration officials, blamed Rhodes, and by extension Obama, for not pushing hard enough to protect the Rohingya. Rhodes was so invested in his narrative about engaging adversaries, these critics charged, that he failed to fully appreciate the Rohingya’s plight. Some former and current U.S. officials I spoke to said they found it difficult to point out problems with the “Oburma” legacy, especially in Obama’s second term. “It was really hard to issue statements that suggested not all was well with the U.S. relationship with Myanmar, even when it came to the Rohingya,” one U.S. official involved in the process said. “Everything had to sound positive.”

These and similar stories demonstrate the veracity and significance of one of CPAID’s guiding principles: that public authority in fragile contexts does not always function solely via official or normative means, but rather involves multiple actors and institutions – both formal and informal – operating under their own logics and mechanisms concurrently with or alternate to more official channels. In the case of the current Ugandan refugee scandal, the same public authority institutions formally employed to promote human rights, good governance, and social justice are also those engaged in opportunistic social and economic exploitation, no matter how unofficially. Thus, in public authority situations such as this, we not only see how formal and informal mechanisms of governance can both play out through multiple alternate channels at the same time, but also how these varying governance forms can involve the same actors engaging in competing strategies simultaneously.

Among other troubling details laid out in the report, journalists relied on quid-pro-quo promises of money or aid, which led to a feeling of betrayal by the women, who expected help in return. (A journalist should never offer money to a source; the journalist wouldn’t know whether the source is being truthful, or whether the source is just saying what he or she wants to hear. At the same time, in such situations, WMC Women Under Siege has witnessed and experienced misunderstandings between journalist and source: Sources often assume money or some kind of aid is part of the deal when speaking to the media, when no such thing has been offered or promised.)
According to the report, 80 percent of women expressed fear that if journalists disclosed details of their identity—including names, eyes, and markings like tattoos—it could lead to retaliatory violence and even death of family members in captivity. Some survivors told the authors that they’d witnessed, heard, or experienced ISIS identifying them through media reports and then retaliating against relatives or other community members.

"Refugees are fleeing our services & camps en masse. The industry calls them 'urban' refugees. I prefer 'people-who-don’t-want-to-live-in-a-camp-with-no-real-livelihood-and-no-proper-education-eating-the-same-food-everyday-and-no-where-to-go” refugees.https://t.co/NmEw6zo6L9

— Jeff Crisp (@JFCrisp) March 2, 2018

Worked on two grants today and realized how much organization leaders in seek of funding are forced to weaponize language against the very people we're working to help. Getting access to philanthropic capital means calling our own people "low income""disadvantaged""underserved"

— Sherrell Dorsey (@Sherrell_Dorsey) March 4, 2018

A new generation of riders though look nothing like the colonial-era equestrian enthusiasts who may have ridden here before. Most of them are giggling Congolese adolescents who take the sport very seriously. Their parents are entrepreneurs who want to prepare them for life beyond Congo, so many of them attend international schools and slip easily between French and English. In Lubumbashi, there isn’t much to do beyond WhatsApp groups and playing with Snapchat filters for the girls ages between eight and 13 so these events are as much a social gathering for them, as it is an aspiration for their parents.

Back in Bahir Dar, the children, polite and restrained during the performance, cheer and clap wildly as the concert draws to a close. At the end of the gig, there’s a stage invasion. Unfazed, the band simply carry on singing with the children.
Habtamu, 19, is full of praise for the project. “It helps girls be confident,” he says. “Teaching a young girl is changing a whole community.”
A decade from now, Yemesgen’s ideal vision is a “euphoric state” where Girl Effect does not exist, because the project has succeeded and given all girls in Ethiopia a voice and agency. But he is realistic. “We know there is a lot of work to be done to get to that stage. In 10 years, I want to look back and see there has been a change.”

Academics can't stop talking about Black Panther.
Sure, it's just a movie. A superhero action movie.
But it's also a movie about an (admittedly fictional) African nation that, in the absence of colonialists, shaped itself through careful governance into a thriving society. And so on Twitter, in newspapers and just about anywhere you look, researchers, professors and African leading lights are talking about Wakanda.

If the role of intermediaries for international news is being re-thought, it is important to first clarify precisely who these organisations are, what they are trying to do and how they differ. To this end, the following explainer seeks to answer five key questions about the role of intermediaries for international news.

The leadership of the 100 largest international media corporations is dominated by men. Thirty corporations have no women whatsoever in their top management, according to new statistics compiled by Nordicom.
Nordicom has mapped men and women in CEO positions, positions in top management generally and seats on boards of directors, based on the list of the top 100 international media corporations published by the Institute of Media and Communications Policy in Germany. The result shows a significant lack of women among the leadership of these corporations.

Games I'm uninterested in playing:
1. Give Me One Example. Not That One. Or That One. Or
2. You Can't Prove It Was Us
3. Let's Rationally Debate Your Humanity
4. I'm the Victim Now That People Are Mad
5. Watch These 40-Minute Videos Where a Beard Mumbles Into a Webcam
6. Actually

— Shaenon K. Garrity (@shaenongarrity) March 1, 2018

Enlightenment Now has few of these qualities. It is a dogmatic book that offers an oversimplified, excessively optimistic vision of human history and a starkly technocratic prescription for the human future. It also gives readers the spectacle of a professor at one of the world’s great universities treating serious thinkers with populist contempt. The genre it most closely resembles, with its breezy style, bite-size chapters, and impressive visuals, is not 18th-century philosophie so much as a genre in which Pinker has had copious experience: the TED Talk (although in this case, judging by the book’s audio version, a TED Talk that lasts 20 hours).

Some thoughts as a white person who has attended decades of conferences and enduring hundreds of Q&A sessions...

— Lisa Mecham 💙 (@lmecham) March 8, 2018

Really? The biggest obstacles to kids achieving at school are the drill-and-skill curriculum, overstretched teachers, underresourced schools, an education system obsessed with rankings and targets, parents facing economic insecurity and politicians who prioritise short term gain https://t.co/8enwfoKlUU

— Sonia Livingstone (@Livingstone_S) March 4, 2018

“Only strong communication strategies, built around clear core values, will ensure that NGOs are heard above the increasing stridency of competing voices on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. […]
Openness, accountability and inclusivity are key. Regulation of social media platforms is very much on the political agenda, but so far they have avoided the type of regulation that controls the mainstream media by insisting on their role as intermediaries rather than publishers or news organisations.”

This article shows the impact of “maintenance affordances” on women’s capabilities to use mobile phones to lead lives they value. Analysis of data from a qualitative study of mobile phone use by 30 young low-income women—including 15 who had no access to the Internet other than through their mobile phones—shows how maintaining mobile phones through charge, credit, and repair is a significant burden. These challenges were inextricably bound up with structural inequality experienced by respondents such as poor employment conditions and unaffordable housing. This study therefore proposes a new theoretical framework combining affordances and the capability approach, in which the maintenance affordances of a technology are seen to impact directly on individuals’ capability to use this resource to lead lives they value.

“In my second sub-study, entitled In Search of The Pitiful Victim, the purpose was to examine with what frequency emerging countries are portrayed as powerless and pitiful. In this respect, I did indeed carry out an expended framing analysis with regard to 876 news reports and 284 development aid ads released in the Netherlands, Flanders and England over the last years”. The notable results showed that particularly NGOs based in England build on the depiction of the powerless and pitiful. While in the Netherlands and Flanders the latter occurs to a lesser extent, the study does acknowledge that Dutch and Flemish NGOs and newspapers nourish the dependency relationship between emerging nations and development aid: “I can’t establish a causal link, but it’s plausible that this is the reason why only a small percentage of the Dutch and English population is aware that global poverty is on the decline – when it comes to Flanders, I don’t have access to related figures”.

Announcing the formation of the African Center for the Study of the United States at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (HT Achille Mbembe on Facebook) pic.twitter.com/X2TRREaiSE

— Grieve Chelwa (@gchelwa) March 8, 2018

Results showed no agreement among reviewers regarding the quality of the applications in either their qualitative or quantitative evaluations. Although all reviewers received the same instructions on how to rate applications and format their written critiques, we also found no agreement in how reviewers “translated” a given number of strengths and weaknesses into a numeric rating. It appeared that the outcome of the grant review depended more on the reviewer to whom the grant was assigned than the research proposed in the grant. This research replicates the NIH peer-review process to examine in detail the qualitative and quantitative judgments of different reviewers examining the same application, and our results have broad relevance for scientific grant peer review.

"It's kind of like a sensor that's embedded in them, which can be used for tracking them," Ram said of the card. "It's really not designed to track their social interactions, but you can, because you have a timestamp and location information."

What happened when we randomly assigned online students a white male name?

The probability the instructor responded to their comments doubled (i.e., 6% to 12%)

New @StanfordCEPA study with R. Baker, B. Evans, & J. John: https://t.co/On0uXxPOPBpic.twitter.com/UPblPJ8X97

— Tom Dee (@Thomas_S_Dee) March 8, 2018

I caught up with the creators of The Mission Marie-Marguerite Sabongui and Benedict Moran to learn more about their UN sitcom project.
We discussed how to communicate development and international politics issues differently in an age of new TV platforms, satirical commentary as edutainment and what could be the beginning of a global movement of creative talent taking on the absurdities of the aid industry.

In the all-staff meeting, Sidibé said he had the full backing of António Guterres, the UN secretary general. Sidibé claimed Guterres had called him to say, “Let us continue, let us do what is right for people, let us not be held back.”.
Sidibé told staff they must not be divided, adding: “If we are not going united out of this room, believe me a lot of people will be losing their job, and families will be suffering – and that is not the people who should be suffering.”
Sidibé also appeared to criticise staff who have spoken to the media about concerns relating to the handling of the Loures investigation. “Some people don’t have ethics, and they don’t have [a] moral approach to respect this confidentiality,” he said, adding that he would not speculate on the case involving Loures.
Last month, several UN staff members told the Guardian they had been approached at their desks and asked to sign a letter in support of the deputy director.

"Oxfam has been able to show that they have strong rules and routines that work in practice,” Eldhagen said. She added that the decision to resume funding is important for hundreds of thousands of people helped by the charity. “Fundamentally Oxfam is a good organization that does an impressive job. We know that they take these issues seriously."

She said the investigation showed "institutional failure" and that she had apologised to the former employees who agreed to speak to her.
Bono, meanwhile, spoke with the Mail on Sunday about its investigation, saying he was left "reeling and furious" when he learned of the allegations in November.
"My team and I heard concerns about low morale and poor management in this office but nothing along the lines of what emerged recently," he said.
"The head office failed to protect those employees and I need to take some responsibility for that," he told the Mail - adding that he would like to meet the victims to apologise in person.
Other prominent members of the charity's board include former UK Prime Minister David Cameron and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer.

Both Dobson-Hughes and Wibben ask whether the use of the term “feminist” instead of “women’s empowerment” or “women’s equality” could be a hindrance to long-term policy changes. “Finland has done many of the same things that Sweden has done but hasn’t called it ‘feminist foreign policy,’” Wibben says. “I’m wondering if it’s a branding effort more than it is a policy.”
Overall, Dobson-Hughes believes Canada has an uphill struggle this year, despite its heart being in the right place.
“Every single country in the world does badly at gender equality and women’s rights. There is no equal country that gets to sit on a moral high horse and lecture others. None of the G7 countries are where they would want to be and where they have all committed to be under the [UN] Sustainable Development Goals,” she says.
“Part of Canada’s big task ahead is [looking at] where are those places where it thinks it can make progress.”

But the divergent national rankings in the WPS Index and the Global Peace Index do not necessarily tell us something new about security by adding women’s experiences of conflict. What they tell us is that different things are being measured, and specifically that the WPS Index is not taking adequate account of how some countries foster warfare, particularly abroad. The Global Peace Index, like all measures of fragility, instability, and conflict propensity, urgently needs a gender perspective. And the WPS Index would benefit from additional measures of conflict (for instance, measures of militarism) so that its understanding of organized violence captures more than in-country armed conflict.
Without indicators for organized violence beyond battle deaths, the WPS Index is less a way of calibrating how states score in terms of women peace and security, than a way of measuring women’s economic, political, and social security. In that sense, it is a great improvement on existing indices of gender equality or of women’s empowerment, but does not yet tell us which countries are able to engage women in making and keeping peace at home and abroad.

Aid convoys, airdrops, and access: How we've covered 7 years of war in Syria https://t.co/jcox1Aq3gIpic.twitter.com/yj0dUElNIz

— IRIN News (@irinnews) March 15, 2018

For our 280 rescued people on board the #Aquarius it has been a long and often dangerous journey through #Libya& onto flimsy boats on the Mediterranean Sea. Those that travel alone are particularly vulnerable, with 25 unaccompanied minors & 38 solo women currently on board. pic.twitter.com/icejNNlq9W

— MSF Sea (@MSF_Sea) March 11, 2018

BuzzFeed News analysis, using the social media monitoring tool BuzzSumo, found that the number of shares on the most-read stories about Syria — across all publishers — has fallen dramatically in little over a year.
Comparisons are difficult, partly due to fluctuations in the intensity of the conflict, and also owing to Facebook’s recent algorithm change at the end of 2017. Nevertheless, the figures are stark.
(...)
“Watching it every day it just never stops, it never changes,” El-Katatney said. “It is just saturation. It’s desensitization, it’s numbness, it’s paralysis.
“I feel like if I have been doing this for years and years, and I have had millions watch and witness, but everything still remains the same.
She is left asking: “What kind of ways can we cover Syria that we haven’t done a thousand times before, whether it is with footage or with the scripting? And sometimes we fail. Sometimes there just really is nothing.”

Second, we’re creating a new Internet of Things Big Data Initiative with operators, convened by GSMA. Just as the smartphone brought an unprecedented level of new opportunities for the poor to access markets and finance, we believe IoT can bring us closer to our goal of ending extreme poverty.

They also believe that the partnership creates a conflict of interest. One part of the beer company could be working with local health ministries to improve their pharmaceutical distribution networks while another part of the company could be working against those same ministries to potentially block new alcohol control measures.
(...)
The criticism of the Global Fund/Heineken partnership, however, continues. The influential medical journal The Lancet just came out with an editorial saying Sands should scrap the Heineken alliance. The editorial says the new head of the Global Fund with this partnership is "alienating large parts of the global health community."

“National Geographic’s story barely mentions any problems,” Mason said. “There are no voices of black South Africans. That absence is as important as what is in there. The only black people are doing exotic dances … servants or workers. It’s bizarre, actually, to consider what the editors, writers, and photographers had to consciously not see.”
Contrast that with the piece in 1977, in the wake of the U.S. civil rights era: “It’s not a perfect article, but it acknowledges the oppression,” Mason said. “Black people are pictured. Opposition leaders are pictured. It’s a very different article.”
Fast-forward to a 2015 story about Haiti, when we gave cameras to young Haitians and asked them to document the reality of their world. “The images by Haitians are really, really important,” Mason said, and would have been “unthinkable” in our past. So would our coverage now of ethnic and religious conflicts, evolving gender norms, the realities of today’s Africa, and much more.

This, perhaps is the central implicit message of the 2018 WDR – that going forward, the crucial transformative idea is no longer the ‘education for all’ vision of the MDGs, but a vision of pro-active engagement by all stakeholders; a vision, one might say, of ‘ALL FOR EDUCATION!

This group of women live in incredibly difficult circumstances. They have travelled miles to bring their children to this clinic and have to make daily choices that most of us can’t begin to understand. They are passionate, kind, resilient, tough, funny. They have hopes and dreams just like anyone else. But in development jargon they are usually referred to as ‘beneficiaries’.

Any words or phrases like “empower” or “capacity building” that can contain, assume, uphold, or cover up a giver/receiver dynamic and what have been severe and damaging power differentials in the international aid and philanthropy sector, are problematic for me as a Director of Communications.

And we only have 8 decades of social science #globaldev insights from sociology to anthropology & more to reach this conclusion! https://t.co/YYBXjjAbfx

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) March 14, 2018

So, here’s what Macy is trying to say to us: If you’re trying to do good and it feels messed up, listen to your feelings. Trust your intelligence. And speak up.
In response, many people will urge you to numb, rationalise, and ultimately deny your experience. Often this is because deep down they are scared of having their world blown apart. They’re imploring you not to rock the boat, because they don’t know if they can handle it.
But many others who share your experience will open up to you, and some will give you courage and inspiration to find your own path trough this and your own answers that live up to your values.

I discovered my own personal power in moments of real struggle and vulnerability. No matter what your situation, you ALWAYS have some power and privilege that you can tap into. You can be a person of colour who has just come into this country, you’re struggling and trying to make a life for yourself, and, if you look closely, you’ll see you that you have some form of power and privilege that you can tap into. It all depends on the conversation you’re having with and about yourself. So, get clear on the power that you do have and how you can use that power to lift yourself and other people up.

But is it a good way to distribute charity? And is Drake the best person to decide how money should be given away?
Probably not. People tend to give money to causes that mean something to them, not necessarily which charity is meeting the most urgent needs.
That doesn’t mean an ultimately self-centered music video hasn’t done some good, though. Seeing someone help a stranger makes us more likely to help others. So the thousands of tweets praising Drake’s generosity might not be as empty as we thought — each one of them is now more likely to help someone in need. And now that Drake has got the taste for giving, this likely won’t be his last generous gesture. This time it was his studio’s money. Next time it might be his own.

Tariq has worked in humanitarian response for pretty much every major crisis of the last ten years. He reflects on how he got started, what keeps him going, and how to stay oriented in extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
(...)
100 Voices is a podcast series with people doing impactful work for places blighted by serious violence.

As one Blackwater mercenary told Scahill, “This is a trend. You’re going to see a lot more guys like us in these situations.”
Pamela Spees, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights who represents anti-pipeline groups in Louisiana seeking to keep TigerSwan from operating in the state, said that large-scale natural disasters tend to create a vacuum of accountability as private security, military, and police forces descend on ravaged communities. “It raises a lot of concerns when you have this growing patchwork of private and state interests that are basically executing law enforcement and security functions in these settings,” said Spees.
(...)
Indeed, at the same time that TigerSwan was promoting its hurricane response work, personnel were jetting off to the Kuwait International Conference for Reconstruction of Iraq, where TigerSwan sought some of the $30 billion put up for post-ISIS recovery, yet another conflict wrought by fossil fuel politics.

War is back in cities and civilians are in the middle of it all.
In 2017, ICRC released I saw my city die, a in-depth report looking at the devastating impacts of today's urbanizing battlefield. With 'Enter the room' we are using the latest in augmented reality tech to provide an even more intimate sense of what it actually feels like when war comes to your doorstep.

Waitresses on the brutal logic of putting up with harassment by customers:

"I needed the $20 tip."

“A significant portion of my income is how men feel about me that day."

“If you want to make the money, you’ll learn to laugh.” https://t.co/TnO1iLutAU

— jodikantor (@jodikantor) March 12, 2018

Instead, Indian media today report recklessly on ephemera that have no impact on public welfare, and focus constantly on the superficial and the sensational. In doing so, they trivialize public discourse and abdicate their responsibilities as facilitators and protectors of democracy. Far from a call for controls on the free press – no Indian democrat would issue such a call – this is a demand for better journalism. Government needs a free and professional media to keep it honest and efficient, to serve as both mirror and scalpel. A blunt axe serves no society well. If India wishes to be taken seriously as a responsible global player and a model twenty-first-century democracy, we must take ourselves seriously and behave responsibly. Our journalism, a face of India that others see and by which – fairly or not – we are judged, would be a good place to start.

Another big barrier to women’s involvement in OSM, besides the already vast disparities in the tech sphere, Levine said, is time. All OSM work is volunteer-based. “Women have less free time because the work we’re doing in our free time is not considered work,” said Levine. “Cleaning duties, childcare, are often not considered shared behaviors. When the women are putting the baby asleep, the man is mapping.”
As a designer with DevelopmentSeed, a data technology group that is partnering with OSM to improve its maps, Ali Felski has been interviewing dozens of OSM users across the country about how they interact with the site. Most of them, she said, are older, retired men with time on their hands. “Mapping is less community-based. It’s technically detailed, and there aren’t a lot of nice instructions,” she said, factors that she thinks might be correlated with women’s hesitance to join the field. “I think it’s just a communication problem.”

YouTube may well be operating as a giant radicalizing engine through its recommendation algorithm—leading people down a rabbit hole of misinformation, hoaxes and incendiary content. My latest for the New York Times on one of the most overlooked issues. https://t.co/nWIBXEr71Ppic.twitter.com/IslV5jshcL

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) March 10, 2018

Funding is a mess for the technical side of a social startup. Traditional investment doesn't work, because there's no value in the shares. Government funding expects functional work, in the form of projects. The logic doesn't allow for investing in infrastructure or technology for scale. It instead expects an organization - think Amnesty International or Doctors Without Borders - to have an existing IT department in a supporting role in the organizing. The structure does not give room for technology to be a leading force in innovation. Foundations - many of which are closely associated with silicon valley - are another path to go down, but it tends to require visible initial success or a super strong personal network, just like business itself. We need money to get things rolling, but we can’t expect the money up front.

Then he explains how he always sits in the front seat of Uber taxis, talking to dozens of drivers a week, hearing “the most remarkable stories”. He ends up hanging out “with a significant number” of his drivers. I ask how many Uber drivers he’s invited to Summit. He doesn’t say, but instead tells me an anecdote about a chef he invited to Summit after meeting him “at this dilapidated castle in England”.
The conversation reminds me of so many I have had in and around San Francisco, in which millennials made rich through technology relay snippets of revelatory conversations they’ve had with Uber drivers, some of whom live and sleep in their cars. It is as though the taxi-sharing app is one of the last remaining cords keeping the new elites connected to everyone else’s world. When Uber rolls out its self-driving cars, even that fragile connection will be broken.
There is shocking stratification in places such as San Francisco, I say; cities that seem increasingly detached from the real world.
“It is a big problem,” he agrees. “That’s why a lot of successful people like living in New York, because in New York you’re just always in it. You just go down to Manhattan and you’re right there, back in society.”

The study—titled An End to Manels: Closing the Gender Gap at Europe’s Top Policy Events (pdf)—looked at "high-level" conferences that took place across the European Union over five years and conducted a statistical analysis of over 12,600 conference speakers. What it found was that these events averaged three male speakers to every woman, a ratio that Heather Grabbe, director of the Open Society European Policy Institute, argues undermines not only women but all of society.
"Diverse views and experiences bring greater wisdom and a better connection with the needs and aspirations of citizens," Grabbe said. "If women are stuck on the margins, policy misses out on many great ideas and insights."

Algorithms and data-driven technologies are increasingly being embraced by a variety of different sectors and institutions. This paper examines how algorithms and data-driven technologies, enacted by an organization like Facebook, can induce similarity across an industry. Using theories from organizational sociology and neoinstitutionalism, this paper traces the bureaucratic roots of Big Data and algorithms to examine the institutional dependencies that emerge and are mediated through data-driven and algorithmic logics. This type of analysis sheds light on how organizational contexts are embedded into algorithms, which can then become embedded within other organizational and individual practices. By investigating technical practices as organizational and bureaucratic, discussions about accountability and decision-making can be reframed.

The usual excuses when #allmalepanel are called out. 41 of 42 speakers were men-so don't get distracted by the 24% number! https://t.co/MuV9shd308

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) March 16, 2018

The message from all this is clear: education is not enough. To truly separate yourself from the masses and to snag the elusive full-time job, you must build your experience profile. Your peers are doing it, they are doing more of it, and they are doing it better. You must do more. And if you find this stressful, avail yourself of the numerous resources on campus designed to ensure your positive experience. It’s an experience feedback loop.
This is the paradox: we know that contemporary students are reporting record-high rates of anxiety and depression, yet we continue to push and incentivize them to do more and more. This not only exacerbates stress and anxiety but deprives students of the thing that is essential for their education, maturation and growth, and which is uniquely available in university: time.

The idea of "keeping your twitter account academic" came up at today's social media session at #ORS2018. I'd like to push back against that a little. (a thread)

— Grace Mosley (@runDRG) March 11, 2018

Gabby works three or four nights a week and can make up to $200 a night from one international aid worker or U.N. staff client, she said — an evening that often includes dinner, drinks, and a fully paid hotel room.
This is in stark contrast to her South Sudanese clients, many of whom don’t pay at all and sometimes turn violent. Gabby says her life has been threatened several times when local men have pulled out guns and kicked her out of their cars in the middle of the night, forcing her to walk home in the dark, often miles away from town.
As a result, Gabby rarely works with locals anymore, she said, instead targeting “international guys” who treat her kindly and pay well.
Together with three or four colleagues, she frequents places she knows they’ll find clients, such as a few small bars just several hundred meters away from the U.N. base, where she says she can exchange contact information with men.
Gabby’s international regulars include U.N. staff and NGO workers who are generally “whites from all over,” she said, including Russians, Ukrainians, Britons, and Americans as well as men from other African countries, she said.

The memo, titled “America First Foreign Assistance Policy” and marked sensitive, echoes Trump’s oft-repeated claim that the world takes advantage of U.S. largess while opposing American goals. @columlynchhttps://t.co/gGdc0UcSON

— rickgladstone (@rickgladstone) March 16, 2018

Nothing will bring back those who were killed that fateful afternoon, and while we hope for the rapid recovery of the injured, one expects the airport authorities and government going right up to the Prime Minister’s Office will regard this tragedy as a wakeup call to make improvements so that the sole international airport is no longer an object of national shame.
It shows how badly the airport is managed that we rejoice when we find that the toilets actually have water or do not smell. Yet, lackadaisical attitude of staff in all categories, the chaos at the luggage carousels, the long lines snaking down from the arrivals escalators to get through a single body scanner – all of this add up to give the worst possible first and last impression of the country as a whole.
Incongruously, TIA’s ground handling and landing fees are among the highest in the world, and these charges are obviously passed on to hapless passengers. The stacking of aircraft above Bara and Parsa waiting to land is now legendary, and the lack of bays for those airliners when they finally touch down is scandalous.
TIA has over the past decade not been able to carry out the simple task of extending the taxiways to the end of the runaway on each side – to expedite takeoffs and landings. There is deep concern among those in the know that the runway tarmac surface is in dire need of repair.

Collaborating with the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR), Danwatch have collected water samples near the brewery, which indicates that a massive pollution into one of the biggest rivers in the country is caused by the Carlsberg brewery. The river is also home to numerous species threatened by extinction.

“With biometric alignment, we can reduce duplication between 5 and 25-30 percent … it pays for itself to be digitally and technologically sound in every location,” he said, adding, “the WFP should own that sphere because we are the biggest in terms of ‘out there’ in the world, impacting people. That platform needs to be designed in such a way that it can be shared.”
(...)
The WFP chief takes an executive’s approach to change, with targets, benchmarks, and management plans. He balks at those who say they are serious about achieving the lofty Sustainable Development Goals, and yet offer little in the way of a roadmap to getting there.
“If the Sustainable Development Goals are real and you believe in them, then show me your plan to get there. Show me your management plan to get there. I hear some of these countries talking about zero hunger by 2030. It’s the biggest bunch of BS I’ve ever seen,” Beasley said.

What happens to those cities over the next 30 years will determine the global environment and the quality of life of the world’s projected 11 billion people. It’s impossible to know how exactly how cities will grow, of course. But the stark fact, according to the United Nations, is that much of humanity is young, fertile and increasingly urban. The median age of Nigeria is just 18, and under 20 across all Africa’s 54 countries; the fertility rate of the continent’s 500 million women is 4.4 births. Elsewhere, half of India’s population is under age 25, and Latin America’s average age is as high as 29.

Morlu was recruited and his office supported by the European Union, granting him financial autonomy and a modicum of political cover that were rare in a politicized public sector, but essential for the job of Auditor General. Collier was supported by a British deputy, and his Anti-Corruption Commission supported financially by the United Kingdom. It was the UK, in fact, that mediated between Collier and the Sierra Leonean president when their confrontation escalated, keeping him active until the political pressure became unbearable.
Taxpayers in donor countries are unlikely to read such stories in the media, or even in reports produced by NGOs and other donor agencies themselves. Instead, they are treated to simplistic stories of how their Pounds and Dollars are saving children, or shallow polemics supporting one end of the political spectrum or the other, though they are particularly common in certain corners of the conservative movement.

“You’ve got to be bold and brave going forward. We can’t be irresponsible in not raising money for the work we do but we have to be about total impact rather than always chasing totals. It ought to be about the total impact. Raising money and raising awareness is the perfect storm.”
She also plans to recruit ambassadors and to ensure “behind the scenes” they are well-informed about the issues they are dealing with. Critics have hit out at celebrities fronting development issues they are ill-informed about.
(...)
“The portrayal of Africa is not solely in the hands of Comic Relief. We are here to tell the story of poverty wherever it lies.
“There’s been incredible progression in places like Niger and Kenya. Just like we don’t go and film Canary Wharf to show images of poverty in the UK or the stucco houses of Notting Hill to show what happened at Grenfell, likewise we don’t film the rising hotel blocks of Kampala.
“It’s very difficult to tackle it in a three-minute film without being too simplistic.

So #GeorgeClooney and #Prendergast are writing about #corruption and #conflict in #Africa and I need more caffeine to get started on this........

— Ami V. Shah (@seenfromafar) March 17, 2018

Situating it within dominant streams of thought in Africa, apart from the liberal tradition that would see the DDD agenda as a nuanced advancement of its long-standing modernisation paradigm, it would most certainly face hostility from the other intellectual traditions – the essentialist, Afro-Marxist and postcolonial traditions.
(...)
There is little explicit hint in the DDD agenda that these questions are receiving encouraging attention. Instead, one fears that there may emerge a bias towards state capability as the focus of DDD, rather than the capability of society to shape the state towards progressive behaviour. A focus on state capability is likely to lead to more problematic relations of power from which the state’s (often) negative domination of society will be perpetuated rather than reduced.

This week, an Instagram user who goes by the name of Jossa Johansson has come under fire for the caption of a post with a photo of herself embracing a little girl from Kibera, Kenya.
"One of the happiest moment in your life was probably when you met me and my friends," wrote Johansson. "I am sorry to tell you that there is a very slim chance we will ever meet again."

Why ask me questions anyway, when that article you read on the plane already told you everything you need to know about my community? You know what our houses look like, what our primitive diets consist of, our literacy rates, our recent troubles, our surprising resilience. I could see in your eyes that you didn’t know what to do with your immense guilt upon meeting me. You’re dreaming about “becoming successful, having a big family in a big house in a beautiful country,” while I’m rotting away “alone with my child in my small house made of mud and trees.” I re-lived the guilt you felt (we Africans are deeply compassionate) when I read your Instagram post. You’re right, we are poor but happy.

Housing / shelter issues in the developing world are almost *never* about actual houses, and almost *always* about land tenure and inheritance laws, zoning laws, illegal seizure of land by government, etc. Curious: Is there a 3-D printer for that? #aid#hum#shelter#innovatehttps://t.co/OoX1DHNd2i

— Evil Genius (@EvilGeniusPub) March 18, 2018

My team provides information to a variety of audiences with different needs. Sector specialists—for example water and sanitation or shelter leads—benefit from knowing what data is available, what data their teams should collect, and information products that help them assess a situation and analyze response options at a granular level. People leading the entire disaster response need insight into the plans and progress of all the different sector components, as well as awareness of how the pieces relate to the larger disaster situation.
Headquarters staff require a big-picture overview to place individual disasters in a global context. Good information management requires linking those needs, streamlining data collection and analysis, and effectively transforming and disseminating results. It helps to be creative in the use of secondary data sources, primary data collection, and analysis tools.

Now, months later — as her former employer Oxfam and other organizations confront sector-wide problems with sexual abuse — Janssen said she worries about groups becoming trapped by previous mistakes; that reputational damage, regardless of veracity, is doomed to repeat itself in a churning media cycle, where even legitimate failings in the aid sector uncovered by the media may come to be used as political weapons.

For the range of projects I’ve reported on over the years in person, and the ones we’re already receiving in our system, they often need to be judged on a case-by-case basis. Ascribing specific criteria becomes difficult — for example, if a project is ongoing, but is taking longer than it should, do we call that a failure? What’s the length of time before we can name it as such? Some delays are understandable, of course, but is it three months or six months or a year before you start to assign blame? (The answer, of course, varies by project — but in all cases, transparency and public accountability are useful tools.) On the opposite end of the spectrum, how long does a project have to last in order to be a success? I photographed an abandoned nutrition center in Ghana, a big, nice building that was unused. But, it had been used for several years. Is that enough?

There may have also been an element of competition that drove him forward. After all, reporting is often about who gets the story first, and who gets it best. When the Reuters journalists unexpectedly showed up, rebels say Allen first reacted with disappointment. A freelance journalist who had yet to place his stories, he knew he’d struggle to compete against the wires. “Allen, he didn’t want rivals around, so he was not very happy when he saw [them],” said Gabriel. “Their presence gave him that pressure, that he wanted to cover something more.”
Such sentiments, if true, wouldn’t be uncommon in a cutthroat industry in which journalists compete for an ever-declining pool of finances. I felt the same desire to protect my turf when Allen first reached out, asking for rebel contacts three months before his trip. I provided the contacts, but I didn’t volunteer any other information on how to navigate rebel-held South Sudan, a mistake that has been a great source of guilt. The same desire for exclusive coverage may have also stopped him from divulging details of his plans when he wrote again at the end of June to let me know he’d be traveling to South Sudan soon. In the end, we were both freelancers pitching stories to the same few outlets that still cover international conflict, and a war that commanded little attention amid reports on Iraq, Syria, and the Trump administration. At the same time, the bar for what the industry considers noteworthy coverage of conflict continues to rise, pushing young freelance journalists looking for a break beyond what many experienced media professionals deem safe.

Revisited tells a series of stories of children, young people and their families, and the trajectory of development in their countries over a decade.
At the pre-opening, Danziger shared the backgrounds to gathering some of these stories, bringing us a step closer into the lives of those he met. Happy endings were few and far between, but they were there among the people he met in India and Bolivia, for example. It is in these countries where evolving or new laws had combined with the determination of individuals and communities to bring about positive change, including improved rights and protection for transgender people in Tamil Nadu in India, and higher levels of primary education and prenatal and postnatal care in Bolivia. Sadly, the situation had drastically worsened in some of the places Danziger visited. In Honduras, the studious young boy who had loved school in 2005 and gave his grandmother hope for the future in 2010 had, by 2015, started selling drugs for a local gang to earn a living.

It’s in this heated climate that we’ve decided to take a closer look at the diversity surveys we asked candidates and recruiters to complete in 2017. To take a cool-headed review of gender diversity in the charity sector as it’s experienced by people looking to move into the sector, or move within it. And to get a steer from our recruiters on how seriously they consider it as part of the recruitment process.

First they said they needed data
about the children
to find out what they’re learning.
Then they said they needed data
about the children
to make sure they are learning.
Then the children only learnt
what could be turned into data.
Then the children became data.

— Michael Rosen (@MichaelRosenYes) March 18, 2018

Hi, it's not the job of funders to prop up legacy media newsrooms, especially if the journalism is not meaningfully improving people's lives. Funders should be investing in radically diverse ownership of the media.

— Molly de Aguiar (@MollydeAguiar) March 16, 2018

• obtained a PhD in in a subject relevant to Communication for Development, for example Development Studies, Media and Communication Studies, Cultural Studies, Social Anthropology or Political Science
• demonstrated teaching expertise through their ability to develop, conduct and manage education
• demonstrated an ability to engage with wider society and communicate their activities within their area of responsibilityIn order to qualify for this specific position, the applicant must have:
• documented competence in research-based teaching
• a high level of proficiency to teach, research and communicate in English
• documented experience of interdisciplinary research and teaching
• documented experience of supervision and examination of degree projects in the interdisciplinary field of Communication for Development

• experience in teaching and research on developing countries and the global South
• experience of teaching in an online, blended teaching environment and virtual teamwork
• knowledge of new media and/or visual communication theories and practices in the context of humanitarian or development communication in a historical as well as contemporary perspective
• additional language proficiency, including Nordic languages

1. A complete résumé.
2. Copies of relevant certificates.
3. A statement on pedagogical philosophy and intent.
4. A statement highlighting scientific, pedagogical and other activities of particular significance for the position.
5. Copies of selected scientific and pedagogical works (up to five in each category).
6. References

They call them “developing countries” because “countries struggling to recover from being ruthlessly pillaged and systematically destabilized” doesn’t have the same ring.

— neffí (@nefertizzy) March 25, 2018

Invest whatever writing and design energy you have in a website and social media that carry a distinctive brand, voice, and up-to-date content, and don’t forget about making it all show up in search results. It’s 2018. People do not form their views about an organization based on self-generated pamphlets delivered by the U.S. Postal Service.

She looks back on her first decade or so with kids as her “Wonder Woman” years, juggling her priorities as a foreign service officer, wife and mother. She made it a point to always have breakfast during the week with her sons, never accepting early-morning meetings unless she was travelling. On the flip side, weekday evenings were fair game for representing Canada at receptions and work functions. “There were two worlds, and I was running in between them, and I was working very, very hard,” Blais recalls.
As her kids grew into teenagers, and the “adrenaline stopped pumping,” Blais did go through a period of intense burnout and soul-searching. “I was petering on the edge for a while there, and finally it went off balance altogether.” Looking back, she thinks maybe she could have “dialled down the intensity a little bit” and still have made her way. “But I am pretty convinced that I am where I am today because I was very dedicated to my work,” she said.
Now, with her team at the UN, she is careful to apply what she knows about the importance of mental health and maintaining a “very fragile equilibrium.”
“What I try to do now as a manager is to let my staff know that perhaps you don’t need to be here until eight or nine o’clock. Do you really need that, or are you doing it because that’s what you feel you must do to do a good job? Sometimes those are two different things.”
This is something Blais wishes someone had done for her. “I think women tend to be very intense. We care so much about the work, and not to say that men don’t, but there’s a real, almost emotional attachment to the quality of our work that can be dangerous if we don’t manage it better.”

Yet the film finishes in Manhattan, where the documentary recorded the last six months of Clark’s campaign within a less accommodating environment. “I think that what does come out is the unreality of that bubble of life in New York,” Clark says of the process the film depicts, “which is governed by those who got their seats on the security council in 1945 before you and I were born.”
(...)
Despite inevitable leaks to journalists, there is, she says of the election, “Nothing transparent about it. Compare that to real life out there, real people, and the need they have of the UN for peace, security and development. And that’s quite a disconnect.”
Clark made it to fifth place in the sixth ballot before her own candidature was killed off. Watching the film, she suggests, one can make “an informed guess” as to who was responsible for that.

This isn’t the first time Kristof has come under fire for centering white characters and ignoring local efforts. Kristof is frank about his decision to use “bridge characters” (such as American volunteers in the country he’s reporting on) as a strategy for getting American readers to pay attention to remote conflicts in countries they may never have heard of.

"Kristof represented CAR as if it were miserable across the board, and that the people who live there are victims," Knuckey told NPR. "It represents a brand of journalism that has been heavily criticized for decades, and that is harmful."
Kristof himself says he was a "little bit" surprised by the reaction on social media but "understands the frustration that people have with the lack of coverage about things they care deeply about," referring to researchers, academics and aid workers who work to improve conditions in the CAR.
For Moussa Abdoulaye, a Central African activist, founder of a community school and consultant for media companies like Al Jazeera, VICE and HBO, perhaps the worst offense was Kristof's depiction of his country as a hopeless place.

We must resist the well-meaning impulse to improve the lives of menstruating girls through consumption. The greater need is for people to understand that periods aren’t something shameful and best kept hidden. When menstruation is treated as normal, it becomes more than a nuisance, a punch line or a weapon wielded to keep women in their place.
Our aim must be to transform the revulsion into respect, to shift from “eww” to “oh.” We need to redirect resources toward promoting innovative, inclusive and culturally sensitive community-based education about the menstrual cycle. And the audience must be not only girls, but also everyone surrounding them — boys, parents, teachers, religious leaders and health professionals.
(...)
But menstrual activism won’t be meaningful if it is reduced to Western-style “better living through more consumption.”

Yet these supposedly ‘safe’ programs do involve risks – just ones that are less obvious. Institutionally-focused programs typically offer individuals fewer incentives to buy into reforms, increasing the risk that there’ll be no political will to make reforms ‘stick.’ Since institutional change is slow, these programs also tend to have longer time horizons, increasing the likelihood they will struggle to demonstrate impact in the short-term, something that can leave aid providers exposed to criticism back home.
Accepting that even familiar, ‘safe’ programs come with risks will make it easier to move away from a mind-set of avoiding risk, because it forces us to confront the fact that avoiding all risk is impossible.

This is the sort of prompt that sends aid experts into ecstasy. It means policy reviews, evaluations, panel discussions and quite possibly policy retreats. Good times! https://t.co/muvIkhOnLH

— Richard Gowan (@RichardGowan1) April 4, 2018

IDS and partners took the twin opportunities of International Women’s Day and the 62nd Commission on the Status of Women to share research highlighting key barriers to women and girls being empowered, particularly around unpaid care, decent work and life choices.

In the years since that story, FGC has been a constant fixture in newspapers, on radio talk shows, and in Liberia’s politics. Once taboo, it is now on everyone’s lips, including, to our great joy, the girls themselves. In tribal areas, news of what happens in initiation ceremonies is reaching the girls, and they’re pushing back.
At this year’s International Women’s Day celebration, Nobel laureate Leymah Gbowee applauded Mae for advancing the cause of Liberia’s women. “When I started as an activist, you could not say the word ‘FGM’ in Liberia in a negative sense,” Gbowee told a crowded stadium in Monrovia. “Today, you can talk about it. For me, as a feminist and as a fighter, I have to remain optimistic that change is definitely going to happen.”

However, I’ve noticed recently a new and rather troubling use of social media as a de facto emergency call network when government systems are overwhelmed during a natural disaster. Quite desperate people are publicly posting private information online to pass along to official search and rescue teams and ad hoc volunteer groups that form to help evacuate trapped residents. The information lingers on search engines and insecure websites created by the grassroots rescue groups with little to no privacy protections against identity theft. I’m very concerned that folks who are trying to piece their lives back together are now at risk of data exploitation, too.
It is incumbent on digital humanitarians and our institutional partners to revise their organisational data policies to secure and/or mask personally identifiable information in light of this emerging trend. Crisis informatics researchers also have an enormous responsibility to ensure that we work closely with our institutional review boards to implement security protocols for storing and hashing social media data that may contain personally-identifiable information from crisis-affected people.

The concepts of ascriptive and expressive identity are useful because they show how the interactions with institutions and individual expression involve vital questions of power. Ahmed’s ascribed identity as a refugee is both enabling and constraining, particularly around movement and social life. Access to a means of expression such as Facebook gives Ahmed momentary freedom to express himself and be whoever he decides to be. This in turn has implications for two concepts which initially appear quite abstract — but which have concrete impact on the well being and personal dignity of refugees.

While the problems of humanitarian access and aid cannot and should not be boiled down to a single issue, the daily drumbeat of news on how social media is shaping our societies and politics should not be ignored by the humanitarian community. After all, humanitarianism exists in a political world. If these platforms have these platforms have the potential to undermine the very norms which construct our existence as a sector, the norms that protect both aid workers and civilians, and effect the decisions of policy makers towards aid, then the humanitarian community desperately needs a strategy address the new media world we live in today.

The authors of the position paper seemed a bit oblivious in one way, as well. As the Annals of Internal Medicine notes in an editorial in the issue that published the paper: "We were perplexed and disappointed that no authors from low- and middle-income countries were included and no input from in-country collaborators was acknowledged."
"I think they are comprehensive and well-written and I do not hesitate to congratulate the team that has come up with it," says Dr. Bernard Olayo, a public health specialist who practices internal medicine in Nairobi, Kenya. "But they could have done a much better job if they had received input from physicians and institutions that receive such kinds of doctors."
(...)
The doctor should be "a humble visitor," the paper states.
(...)
"I think the era of the physicians as master and commander is over, and that's very good thing," says Dr. Khan. A physician in any setting is part of a team, he believes, and that team includes the patient.

Everyone always wants to know how to get into the aid sector. It's competitive, but not particularly complicated. Here's what makes your CV stand out for me:

— Evil Genius (@EvilGeniusPub) March 23, 2018

Then we read out the blog from the laptop; Tommy was translating line by line. In terms of their suggested changes to our draft, there were few. Some wanted to discuss the theft of a blackboard from the school. Overall, they were hugely enthusiastic, and some wanted their names and photos included. We were reluctant to do that in case there were repercussions for them, and explained that to them. When I read out ‘Everybody made promises and didn’t come back. We care for each other and now we are being punished; where are the NGOs now?’’ – everyone stood up and clapped and cheered!
Then we had a really nice event – I did some magic tricks and we had running races for the children, then hopping, then the whole village joined in. All sorts of competitions. It ended up with me having a race with the primary school teacher. It was a dead heat. We were all mobbed by the kids at the end!’

I do think our training as anthropologists aims our attention to the social life of communities, with all its messiness and conflict and fissure. Do these insights also enable us to find solutions to the problems of development in small-scale contexts like this? In principle, yes.
To stay with the example of the cyber café we’ve installed: despite the frustrating loss of time – eight months of inactivity – my students and I have familiarity with the lines of authority at the cyber café and in the larger community, and we know what jealousies might be in play—so we are able to brainstorm solutions with local allies.
In this case, a promising outcome is in progress – and one that may vault the cyber-café into a whole new orbit of activity, with a private entrepreneur from a different ethnic group managing it, while adding a photo-copier and printer, and installing a money transfer kiosk. (Local wisdom is to go outside the community to look for a manager, as locals might attempt to poach on the goodwill of a family member or close acquaintance, quickly bankrupting the enterprise.) So – perhaps! Only time will tell if this will be a failure-into-success story. If it does, even a success will surely generate its own new round of challenges and setbacks. But, development in such a context is always like this.

I see some of what is happening, in particular online, around ‘self-care’ as a commodification and the development of a kind of ‘self-care’ industry that sells us stuff so that we can meet a need that the ‘do-it-all’ culture around us is creating.
(...)
In other words I see blogs and books full of all the things we should do for ourselves. But often they ignore the fact that the reasons we are so bereft of care are structural.

We identified four key ways in which biometric data is different from other pieces of personal data.
Uniqueness and immutability: Unlike names, appearances or home addresses, most forms of biometric data are singularly unique to the individual involved and cannot be changed. As people like Shoshana Amielle Magnet have written, the act of distilling an individual’s identity into a unique number or code may be viewed as dehumanising, and may embed discrimination along the lines of gender, race, or socio-economic status.
Richness of information: Some biometric data contains a richness of information that exacerbates the risks created through its collection, storage and use. Depending on the type of biometric data, a lot of personal information can be gleaned, from health conditions, to family members.
Mode of acquisition: The act of acquiring biometric data is often far more intrusive than the collection and provision of other types of personal data. In some cultures, an iris scan could be considered invasive, for example, as Privacy International notes in its 2013 report, Biometrics: Friend or Foe of Privacy?.
Flexibility of use: As technology advances, biometrics are increasingly used for surveillance and monitoring. Advancements are also permitting passive identification. For example, the use of facial or iris recognition at a distance, without the knowledge or involvement of the individual concerned.

Aimed at an audience of resilience and development practitioners, the Storybook offers diverse experiences and practice-based recommendations to leverage Big Data’s potential and address its risks as part of efforts to build resilience.

At a workshop in Canberra in December 2015 (where I was present) held to discuss the draft chapters for this volume, it became clear how widely entangled the dynamics of hybridity are, across so many issues from rights, identity, indigeneity, materiality, local governance, justice, reconciliation, sustainability, the nature of the state and international system, globalisation and the commons, to name but a few. It begins to bring a far more complex view of peace and order, one that accentuates
the open and hidden violence of more parsimonious approaches. Indeed, as an epistemological framework, with methodological–ethical sets of tools, it offers a completely new ontology of relationality across at least four dimensions as opposed to the black-and-white world of rational
self-interest. Due to the work of the scholars included in this study, it is gradually becoming clear that another world is not just ‘possible’ but is already in existence and that concepts and thinking about peace and peacebuilding need to respond.

I've realised that if I'm going to (continue to) be a productive and creative intellectual that makes some kind of valuable contribution, I need to do everything I can to ignore and protect myself from the bureaucratic and intellectually impoverishing madness that is the REF

— Julie Cupples (@juliecupples79) March 30, 2018