The former extremist fighter is accused of a long list of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including torture, extrajudicial punishments and participation in a policy of forced marriage, which the court argues “led to repeated rapes and sexual enslavement of women and girls”.

More than a hundred CEOs of NGOs from across the nation are promising to improve how they address and prevent sexual abuse and harassment by and among their staff. Their public pledge was signed last week by members of InterAction, an alliance of 185 American NGOs working to combat poverty across the globe.
At the time of publication, 118 signatories said they will commit to establishing “working environments free from sexual abuse, exploitation, and harassment by and of NGO staff within our organizations and the countries in which we operate.”

So peep how every woman’s “pants” (vagina) are different. And some of the women don’t have “pants” (vagina). pic.twitter.com/0YhAKkyJeZ

— Africana WomaNINJA (@ZalUIbaorimi) April 10, 2018

The elephant in the room is of course that the adults were almost entirely inactive during this pilot. It was so time consuming to manage the youth group that it was impractical to chase them up while the pilot was happening, but afterwards we found out that they hadn't been 100% clear on what they were supposed to do, and furthermore were much more taken up with the demands of day to day life than their younger counterparts to participate.
Despite this, we feel that this model would be a great way of distributing key information to local populations, through working with young-people-as-mediators (or 'techno-educators', as they liked to call themselves) in the knowledge that they don't only share with people their own age. Given that we were able to reach about 250 people from a group of five, with evidence of more reached, there is a strong chance we can reach thousands with a standard size WhatsApp group of 256.

China is often lambasted as a nefarious actor in its African dealings, but the evidence tells a more complicated story. Chinese loans are powering Africa, and Chinese firms are creating jobs. China’s agricultural investment is far more modest than reported and welcomed by some Africans. China may boost Africa’s economic transformation, or they may get it wrong — just as American development efforts often go awry.

Labour's new policy paper on #globaldev commits to 'reducing the use of so-called ‘poverty porn’ that erodes the possibility of solidarity'https://t.co/Jyn0XpFCRV@socialmedia4D

— Martin Scott (@martinscott2010) April 11, 2018

One of the world’s leading experts on humanitarian work with street children and children affected by war has been arrested on pedophilia charges.

In a new episode of the Humanitarian Assistance Podcast @meredithmblake and @Promundo_US's @bri_xy discuss five reflection questions for practitioners of gender equality https://t.co/vK2aes5juN

— ATHA (@athasweden) April 5, 2018

This all means it’s time to start having a serious, educational conversation about how today’s data fueled web really works — and whether our data should be protected by default.
Poor data practices are nothing new here in Africa. The Cambridge Analytica saga simply provided a spotlight. But perhaps there is a silver lining: With tens of millions of Africans using Facebook, this saga might spark better laws, and a better understanding of how the web really works. And in the meantime: Please read the terms and conditions, no matter how difficult that may be.

Although aid organisations are increasingly concerned about promoting gender equality, when faced with people’s immediate needs and the urgency to addressing them as fast as possible, social interventions can rely on, and reproduce, unequal gender roles and norms, rather than working to improve them. For instance, targeting mothers for information about children’s health or education is valuable, but may be limited given that some women do not have full mobility or financial means to follow up on the information and given that it leaves out the father’s role in parenting.

Laptops have introduced the children of Nosy Komba to previously inaccessible tools. But we found that original projects were limited. While applications used were designed to foster creativity, children need support to develop creativity skills.
Educators have a crucial role to play here. They can help to nurture children’s creativity: the can help them to connect their lived experience and to express their imagination to produce original content. This will unlock new forms of expression and different kinds of literacy, including visual.

My guess is that the transition from basic skills that may be taught through a laptop to secondary and tertiary education skills that will be needed to sustainable transformation are probably very difficult to learn.
But more importantly, OLPC should reach out to critical voices to discuss their engagement and communication strategy that could be misinterpreted as an emerging form of digital colonialism.

Though Bassam may not know it, his visit to the supermarket involves one of the first uses of blockchain for humanitarian aid. By letting a machine scan his iris, he confirmed his identity on a traditional United Nations database, queried a family account kept on a variant of the Ethereum blockchain by the World Food Programme (WFP), and settled his bill without opening his wallet.
(...)
The real promise of using blockchains may not be realized until organizations like the WFP and the UN have the courage to open at least parts of the system to other agencies, and then to take the bravest step of all and turn over ownership of the data to beneficiaries like Bassam, who currently has little say in the matter because he has to be in the system if he wants to eat.

While aid organizations are finally coming to terms with the lack of women in leadership positions and seeking to remedy the situation, this will not translate automatically into more black women in leadership. Black women generally have no internal champions to shepherd them through the politics of getting to the executive suite, nor are they groomed through the organizational pipeline for leadership roles. In a recently released impact study on gender and racial diversity in the aid sector, Quantum Impact reported that of the 162 organizations analyzed, four out of five organizations (80 percent) had leadership teams that did not have a representative number of people of color. Half of all organizations (51 percent) had no leaders of color.

Moreover, the report says the voices of those with lived experience are often inadequately represented in charity digital campaigns.
“Digital campaigners often work in silos, away from those with lived experience (and even organisational colleagues); those with lived experience are inadequately supported in participating in campaigning; and charities are often poor in identifying which of their campaigning supporters are able to offer lived experience.”
Those with lived experience of an issue are the very people that should benefit hugely from the rise of digital, says the report. Their voices can be amplified through the multitude of channels and can be effective agents of change instead of passive case studies.
But right now, these voices of lived experience are being overshadowed by the sheer volume of voices that digital campaigning permits, the report warns.

The old way of appealing for help during a human rights crisis, simply by telling people all that is wrong in the world, risks making the public fearful and hopeless, says Thomas Coombes, Amnesty International’s deputy director of communications. The solution, he says, is to offer hope, even in the darkest times imaginable. Asking people fleeing war and persecution to tell their own stories is the best way to forge a direct emotional connection and reach out to people watching an appeal

The possible reason for this is that short term contracts are considered the norm, and a peculiar aspect of the way humantiarian work is managed. However, if we consider failure to retain as the main problem, we can see how short/fixed contract are worth of investigation as a major driver – no matter the rationale behind their use. I will come back to this point in the next post, where I deal with possible solutions to the problem.

I guess that brings us back to the subject of final reports. I reluctantly conclude that bureaucracies will always require them, and that we should not be naive about abolishing them altogether. But they will likely never be efficient vessels for conveying information or learning. For those, I wish we could find a way to increase by half the amount of time that program officers and grantees spend together hashing out how things are going, what they are learning (together), and ideas for iterating. I think program officers would find this more rewarding than the constant staff retreats, strategy refreshes, and internal reporting they are caught up in. If we could find a way to do that with an attitude of genuine inquiry (as opposed to evaluation), that would go a long way toward accelerating learning and building the relationships and trust need to enhance the odds our programs will succeed in improving the world.

The Artificial Intelligence, which has been dubbed under the name Michihito Matsuda, seems to operate by a simple slogan; "Artificial Intelligence will change Tama City."
(...)
If you assumed that artificial intelligence itself couldn't run for mayor, you're absolutely not wrong; that just happens to be where things get truly interesting. The two-person team pushing Michihito Matsuda consists of both Tetsuzo Matsumoto, the vice president of mobile provider Softbank ($74 billion revenue), and former Google Japan representative Norio Murakami. Standing at the forefront of this all, however, is Michihito Matsuda.

The idea that working class fiction and/or fiction centered around the rural poor hasn’t been published is horseshit. You just haven’t been reading it. Name a year and I’ll tell you a book that should’ve been bigger than it was. https://t.co/gvWuHKyG5J

— David Joy (@DavidJoy_Author) April 8, 2018

Is there anything we can do, then, to help an echo-chamber member to reboot? We’ve already discovered that direct assault tactics – bombarding the echo-chamber member with ‘evidence’ – won’t work. Echo-chamber members are not only protected from such attacks, but their belief systems will judo such attacks into further reinforcement of the echo chamber’s worldview. Instead, we need to attack the root, the systems of discredit themselves, and restore trust in some outside voices.

The C4D Hub was developed through a three-year research collaboration with UNICEF C4D that aimed to bridge the divide between adaptive and participatory evaluation approaches, and the more dominant accountability-driven, results-based approaches. The principles underpinning C4D value participation, inclusion and local knowledge. C4D often encompasses intangible and interconnected social changes, that are difficult to predict and are ideally community driven. The C4D Hub is designed to encourage R,M&E that reinforces C4D principles and encompasses the complexities of social change.

Ezili’s Mirrors is important because through it Tinsley shows us ways that black femme life and black queer life exists and asserts itself as other than the abject, the undesirable, the inappropriate, and the excessive. The book illustrates how and why the figures of Ezili, only one goddess among a pantheon, serve as such an effective foundation on which alternate black narratives, representations, and ways of seeing have been built. Tinsley does not suggest that the task of decolonial epistemological critique is easy. The challenge of extracting the oppressor implied in Lorde’s quote is not dismissed. Instead, she proves that it is possible by illustrating how creating and embodying epistemological alternatives has already been and is currently being done across the black Atlantic.

"The Millennium Villages Project: a retrospective, observational, endline evaluation"

* The evaluation in @TheLancet: https://t.co/M1HkL8jR9s

* Reaction from @JeffDSachs: https://t.co/JWJBEAA8JV

* Andrew Gelman's (@StatModeling) summary post: https://t.co/zjTCd8Bw4mpic.twitter.com/X752Ffbgko

— David Evans (@tukopamoja) April 14, 2018

Not sure how I missed this, but the evaluation of the Millennium Villages Project is out. I didn’t see any surprises. Big and consistent effects on health, not much else is stable. No large effect on poverty. https://t.co/gjm8eTlYVo

— Ryan Briggs (@ryancbriggs) April 15, 2018

The achievements of the MVP in health suggest support for the project’s emphasis on strengthening the continuum of care from households, to primary care facilities, and to tertiary care facilities. In particular, we believe that the project’s cadres of paid, professionalized community health workers, empowered with smartphones to aid in service delivery and real-time disease monitoring, contributed to the positive results. The project was also an early adopter of interventions and technologies that have since been implemented by development organisations and governments, in part because of the MVP’s demonstration and advocacy.

For that reason, the analysis by Mitchell and colleagues represents the culmination of heroic efforts to identify the treatment effect of the MVP against stacked methodological odds

The authors deserve to be congratulated for squeezing as much juice as possible from this academic third rail, and for transparently and courageously telling the world: this was it, this is the best we can say about the MVP.

The lessons from the MVP are highly pertinent. Multisector planning, budgeting, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation are feasible and necessary. Information platforms can be created for multisector plans and programmes. Computer technologies, including artificial intelligence and big data (responsibly managed), offer new cutting-edge solutions.

There is no doubt that the MVP debate will find its way into textbooks, course syllabi and many more academic research and writing. I am also pretty sure there will be a celebratory conference in 2025 to mark the 20th anniversary of the project.
But 13 years after the project started we need to continue those debates, even if they will remain marginalized, on how to communicate development differently, with communities and real people, on smaller scales rather than simply relying on more technology, better tools and bigger RCTs.
The Lancet papers are a powerful reminder of how development knowledge is produced and legitimized and how the habitus of conducting research seems to have changed very little during the 13 years of one of global development’s most discussed projects in the 21st century.

Stanford PhD student asked #ICT4D group to submit "Do X with Y to achieve Z" solutions for "tech to improve quality of life"& to help government in #PuertoRico -group was not exactly thrilled about this #globaldev approach... pic.twitter.com/uwkUgYiZMX

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) April 14, 2018

You are only one inspirational quote from GH superstardom. Use words such as ‘vision’, ‘humbled’, ‘empower’ and ‘change’. They should just trip off your tongue. Practise, practise, practise until it feels natural. Make speeches at every opportunity.

Keep in mind that it will take a maximum of two weeks for your office or team or organization to move on after you leave. If you were to be fired or resign tomorrow, the most you can expect is that after two weeks, your colleagues will still tell stories about you at the local relief zone watering hole. This means you can relax, turn the self-importance dial back a few notches, and manifest some genuine humility. You’re not the only smart one on the team. Turn off your computer and leave the office. The world won’t end if you work sustainable hours.

Breaking: Alan Parker, chair of Save the Children who presided over the crisis of harassment, has finally resigned. @Je_ne_tweet_pas& @handtomouthb& women who fought back for their dignity in the face of huge resistance won this for Save the Children. Eglantyne Jebbs of today. pic.twitter.com/Q2GsIGgojo

— Ben Phillips (@benphillips76) April 19, 2018

What’s the point? To raise money? If so, the DEC appeals were a brilliant success. However, if we are also concerned about wider effects and longer-term engagement with global poverty and social change, the report card is definitely more mixed. There is tentative evidence that the harder-hitting appeals get more people to donate, but they also significantly reduce the number of people who say that they would donate. And, on top of this Marmite effect, there is also the negative spill over effects on people’s sense of being able to make a difference.
Is there a trade-off between fundraising and building engagement? Our results suggest that there is. But what can or should be done about this?

First, the illegal ivory trade isn’t organized by a transnational crime syndicate or international gang. Rather, local traders buy and sell from and to a variety of sources, depending on what opportunities arise.
(...)
Second, the transnational trade does not oversee and guide ivory poaching. Rather, international ivory traders largely depend on local black-market traders.
(...)
Chinese buyers and Facebook pages may be important for the illegal ivory trade; without a market, there would be no reason for the supply and trade. But transnational crime relies on local actors. Local actors are the ones who supply the illegal ivory, and are in turn dependent on international actors to sell it. For this, local traders have various degrees of power and autonomy. For those attempting to curb this crime, it’s essential to understand that local traders are not a unitary group.

Shame on @WorldBank: draft #WDR on The Changing Nature of Work "...almost completely ignores workers’ rights, asymmetric power in the labor market, and phenomena such as the declining labor share in national income"- takedown from @ITUCGlobalUnionhttps://t.co/LLw3IdEYm1pic.twitter.com/eZ0MrsSue6

— Jesse Griffiths (@JesseLGriffiths) April 12, 2018

Australia’s Minister for International Development declared in London overnight that further investment in overseas aid would be ‘politically difficult’. Yet Australia’s defence budget is 8 times larger than our aid program & has bi-partisan support! pic.twitter.com/9xVWV8vLPn

— Paul Ronalds (@PaulDRonalds) April 16, 2018

Vietnam has achieved its success the hard way. First, it has embraced trade liberalization with gusto. Second, it has complemented external liberalization with domestic reforms through deregulation and lowering the cost of doing business. Finally, Vietnam has invested heavily in human and physical capital, predominantly through public investments. These lessons—global integration, domestic liberalization, and investing in people and infrastructure—while not new, need reiteration in the wake of rising economic nationalism and anti-globalization sentiments.

There’s surprisingly little hard data about the long-term impact of OLPCs on childhood education, though. Zamora points to some case studies for individual countries, and says OLPC wants to commission more comprehensive research in the future. But the organization has mostly focused on anecdotes and distribution numbers as markers of success. “OLPC was always very averse to measuring how well they were doing versus the traditional school system,” says Gros. “There have only been a very limited number of attempts to actually measure how well students were doing with OLPC versus not, because it was very hard to do.”

Yet, if our objective is to ensure and promote equity, then we should consider the potentially regressive nature of the mobile phone platform. Savings generated by more efficient service delivery for a mobile-phone-using part of the population could for instance be used to expand service access to more marginalised groups, who are costlier to reach. However, if we continue to believe in mobile phone ubiquity, then the persistent reproduction of this myth in the global technology and development discourse will not only render it meaningless. It can also obscure potentially harmful development practices.

In essence, Code for America is playing the long game, in a way that most of their peers at Skoll might not be. In the social enterprise world, speed and scale are highly valued currencies. The government offers massive scale, but not the speed. “We don’t have one silver bullet that’s going to fix government,” says Pahlka. “I’m okay that it’s going to be a generational project, I’m okay developing capabilities and strengthening institutions over time.”
It may not be, to a traditional technology company, the most “efficient” way to spend one’s time, but in the end, perhaps it will offer the thing social entrepreneurs crave most: impact.

I fear that this confusion sadly does not reflect well either on the political establishment in Pakistan who approved this nomination, nor on the professionalism of those involved in the nomination itself. I would hope that the Pakistani press and those on social media will recognise this and respond accordingly. I am sure they will agree that this is not a matter of pride for Pakistan, but actually sadly reflects rather badly on them. I am somewhat saddened by this and only write to clarify the confusion that has already arisen and has been pointed out to me by colleagues. It will not make the slightest difference to the ongoing work that my colleagues continue to do in this field.

If you stand for gender equality and against abuse, do your practices reflect that? How are you inclusive of women’s leadership? The Haiti Community Foundation has a very participatory, bottom-up approach. In our pilot region, to ensure that women leaders’ voices are included, we ask that one of the two representatives sent by communities to our planning meetings be a woman leader.

By stacking the functions of disaster relief tents on top of each other, the architects estimate the structure would take up to 30 times less room than a traditional tents or containers used in disaster relief.
This would reduce the cleanup operation required to clear the ground in an area that has been hit by hurricanes, floods or earthquakes, allowing survivors to be temporarily housed near their existing communities.

So on point and backed by strong examples. If you’re measuring the impact of #civictech, check out @mstem‘s lessons learned #TICTecpic.twitter.com/n3GVnpdDUZ

— Nicole Anand (@nicole_anand) April 18, 2018

90% of what passes for “serious debate about the future of the Internet” in the US is just desperate liberal academics, fully aware that nothing can be done in their frames & terms of reference, generating futile ideas that, as they themselves know all too well, are bound to fail

— Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) April 19, 2018

He then added a list of productivity tips including advice to:
Cancel large meetings or if you have to have them keep them "very short"
Walk out of a meeting or end a phone call if it is failing to serve a useful purpose.
Avoid acronyms or nonsense words. "We don't want people to have to memorise a glossary just to function at Tesla"
Sidestep the "chain of command" to get the job done. Managers insisting on hierarchies will "soon find themselves working elsewhere"
Ignore the rules if following them is obviously ridiculous.

Blockchain systems do not magically make the data in them accurate or the people entering the data trustworthy, they merely enable you to audit whether it has been tampered with. A person who sprayed pesticides on a mango can still enter onto a blockchain system that the mangoes were organic. A corrupt government can create a blockchain system to count the votes and just allocate an extra million addresses to their cronies. An investment fund whose charter is written in software can still misallocate funds.

The idea that privacy is the core objective of data protection is quite individualistic. It assumes that harm can mainly be posed to the individual and its rights. While this can be true, my main concern is the harm that the data industry can potentially cause to societies. The algorithmic clustering of society into groups and profiles, and the discrimination that can result from that. The power that companies – who weren’t elected and who bear no social obligations other than to please their customers – are accumulating every day. The shifting power dynamics and their consequences on groups and societies at large.
With the narrative of “user choice”, internet companies are diverging our attention from the real problem: their power and influence on society. The Data Problem is not so much about your personal data, but about how all of our data in bulk feeds this new Infocratic System.

Our observations do not suggest a moratorium on research in fragile and violent contexts, but they do mean being attentive to—and working to combat—potentially exploitative dynamics. Becoming sufficiently acquainted with social and political norms to confidently navigate risk can take time that academics do not always have. However, there are measures that researchers can take to better prepare for the ethical challenges they may face in the field. Drawing on the observations of researchers working in violent and fragile contexts across multiple methodological traditions, table 1 delineates a set of concrete questions and recommendations to guide scholars embarking on this type of research. Yet, it is not only individual researchers who need to be more reflective about the ethical implications of work in fragile and violent contexts. As a research community, we also can do more to ensure that researchers who travel to work in these settings are appropriately trained and prepared, that ethically problematic research is not rewarded, and that the contributions of local partners are adequately credited.

The TL;DR for @MilliLake& my new @ps_polisci article, once provisionally titled "I Left My Ethics in My Other Pants and My Other Pants at Home in America": https://t.co/orWyRV8el9

— Kate Cronin-Furman (@kcroninfurman) April 18, 2018

"The Big Data Agenda: Data Ethics and Critical Data Studies": Great new open access book by @anniric in my book series "Critical Digital & Social Media Studies", published by @UniWestPress@uw_ias. Gratis pdf & affordable paperback https://t.co/1PYgWNPEPtpic.twitter.com/BVUOo9Ehfx

— Christian Fuchs (@fuchschristian) April 16, 2018

This GrantCraft Leadership Series paper by Jenny Hodgson and Anna Pond focuses on how funders around the globe are challenging this norm by sharing and shifting power into the hands of local leadership. It explores examples, advice, and the driving questions for donors interested in producing people-owned changes, without losing sight of their institutional interests.

Philanthropy too must acknowledge its place in the context of transformative demographic changes. Addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has been an ongoing challenge within philanthropy, and while there has been progress, it requires continual work.

Although Australians are generally supportive of aid, most backed major aid cuts in 2015. However, most Australians think the purpose of Australian aid should be helping people in poor countries, not bringing benefits to Australia. There is a clear left–right divide in responses to all questions; however, some variables correlated with support for aid fail to explain variation in views about aid's purpose.

As part of an ongoing movement to decenter White masculinity as the normative core of scholarly inquiry, this paper is meant as a preliminary intervention. By coding and analyzing the racial composition of primary authors of both articles and citations in journals between 1990–2016, we find that non-White scholars continue to be underrepresented in publication rates, citation rates, and editorial positions in communication studies.

If academics' focus on publishing in journals was not so driven by jobs/grants/tenure/promotion, what kinds of conversations could our discipline be having? What kind of difference could those conversations be having in the world?

— Janet D. Stemwedel (@docfreeride) April 15, 2018

I am a proponent of birthing practices that respect women’s choices and resist the unnecessary hyper-medicalization of women’s bodies. However, humanized birth in Mexico should not be available only to wealthy, light-skinned people. Poor Indigenous people cannot access birth facilities like the one Pilar chose, of course. But they have birthing traditions of their own that stretch back thousands of years. The government’s attempts to control Indigenous women’s bodies are based on economic, cultural, and racial discrimination.
When Pilar checked out from her stay at the lush humanized hospital in Mexico City, she was given a wooden keepsake plaque with her baby’s footprints handcarved by an Indigenous artisan. This should not be the closest that Indigenous people come to natural birth.

YES! NYC is ridiculously prohibitive for grad students, contingent faculty, & other scholars w/ limited institutional resources—a widely discussed point at this year’s MLA in NYC, too. Plus there’s the fact that interviews take place at MLA, giving candidates no option but to go. https://t.co/NdRVJUBGyE

— Rebecca Colesworthy (@RColesworthy) April 16, 2018

How do I fit my academic job into a 37 hour week? I don’t, I couldn’t possibly because this job is impossible to do/ complete/ control. But I am not willing to give my life to it or work longer hours unpaid, so here are 10 ways I survive: 1/11

— jenny pickerill (@JennyPickerill) April 16, 2018

“Some people complained that it would take women two months to build it, but we finished it on schedule in a month,” she says. “People acknowledge that we are capable now, even if they do not specifically praise us.”
Because of her building work, Ranjana is earning an income for the first time – about £6 a day. “I used to be totally dependent on my husband’s money, but now I can contribute to the children’s expenses. I can stand on my own feet.”
Sharmila Tamang has become a contractor, overseeing the building of 12 houses, with three more under way. “I do contracted work as if I was building my own house. People say I work hard. We women have become the first choice for building a house in the village,” she says.

A Canadian man who spent decades working with children’s organizations and received the Order of Canada for his global contributions is now locked in a crowded detention cell in Kathmandu accused of having sex with minors.

It's a problem that has come seemingly out of nowhere. Over the last five years a worrisome number of low-income countries have racked up so much debt they are now at high risk of being unable to pay it back — with potentially devastating consequences not just for their economies but for their citizens, many of whom are already living in extreme poverty.

"For the past 150 years, from Manchester to Myanmar, the garment industry has been shaped by a search for desperate young women, who would rather work 14hr days than be in poverty in the village" - Dr Frank Hoffer (ACT)

— Alice Evans (@_alice_evans) April 27, 2018

Almost 80% of senior leadership teams in the top 500 charities lack any ethnic minority professionals, while 62% of the charities have all-white boards, the research found. Gender diversity, compared with other sectors, was “better than most”. However the analysis shows imbalance at the top. In a sector whose workforce is 65% female, men are still taking up almost 60% of senior leadership roles.
Inclusive Boards published similar research two years ago, but found “insufficient improvement” – only a 0.3% increase in the levels of ethnic minority individuals on charity boards. It also found that the percentage of all-white boards had actually increased, by 5%.

The fractured U.N. system is not well positioned to make the process user-friendly, said one senior U.N. official with knowledge of sexual harassment procedures.
“If you have to report it through your immediate hierarchy, there is a conflict of interest there — possibly a conflict [of] interest and capacity issue going through HR. The ombudsman is somebody considered to be close to the management,” said the official, who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the topic.
“Basically, the system up until now has not been very friendly. It is not very user-friendly, especially for somebody who is possibly traumatized, possibly depressed, or having a difficult time.”

Former staff members say Loijens's fundraising prowess allowed her to get away with treating people badly. Her value to the organization, they say, includes the deep knowledge she has developed over the years about how to value complex assets such as artwork, real estate, and especially stock in privately held companies that can bring significant tax benefits to donors when they give it away. Donors who give appreciated assets to a nonprofit need not pay capital-gains taxes, and they can take the appreciated value of the asset as a tax deduction.
(...)
Several former staff members say Carson and Loijens were consumed by their desire to grow the foundation, recruiting donors from San Francisco, which has its own community foundation, and from the East Coast, where it opened a development office in 2017.
A former staff member says: "Emmett values asset growth at the foundation above all other measures, and she is the head of development. There has been a lot of growth in assets there — she gets credit."

Changing this culture requires self-reflection on the part of all aid workers, both managers and staff. It requires open and honest discussions about personal and institutional responsibilities in addressing inequality in the system. And leadership that is willing to create listening spaces for staff; where what happens in the office is not solely about maintaining the public image of do-gooders that get results, but about acknowledging the vulnerabilities and limitations of being human. We need to be talking to each other more, supporting each other and seeing the value in human relations as part of the humanitarian agenda; how we relate to each other as colleagues and how we relate to the people we are wishing to help. Inner reflection, plus honest discussions within and across organisations, are a starting point to transcending some of the power imbalances inherent in the aid system and encouraging a joint, inclusive, vision of what a ‘good’ working environment within the sector could be.

Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, you get hammered by the Daily Mail. pic.twitter.com/Mkd5vH6PeQ

— Owen Barder (@owenbarder) April 24, 2018

The center also employs a nurse who meets with mothers and offers contraceptives. As a result, about 8 in 10 of the mothers now take birth control measures, says Onesphore Biryabanzi, gender and family promotion officer for the district.
The vision is for the day care center to fight both child abuse and poverty, Biryabanzi says.
Mothers who leave their children at the center can now apply for small loans to start their own businesses in Rwanda thanks to a partnership between the district and a local partner Action pour le Developpment du Peuple.
“This will contribute to reducing the number of women crossing the border and that of children left behind in the day care, because their mothers will stay with them in the village, busy running their projects [that are] expected to improve their living conditions,” Biryabanzi says.

Sfeir said there’s a straightforward — but logistically challenging — way to fix that. “All the money used for creating the orphanages can be [redirected] to develop a school with local teachers,” she says. Tourists’ money could instead be used to help build schools or to support unseen costs like teachers’ pay and transportation — something Child Safe is working to create a system for.
What is clear is that Cambodian students want those with the power — be it the government or international investors and tourists — to create better options for them.
Kosal Visal, a 22-year-old who has lived in a Phnom Penh orphanage for a decade striving for an education that his two farmer parents never had says that, as things stand, orphanages are still the best option.
“Living with family, you feel warmth, of course,” he says with a sigh. “But coming here you have access to education. So you choose the orphanage.”

Local groups’ rootedness in the communities they serve results in a deep knowledge about these local relationships and coping mechanisms, which may never be fully understood even through the most comprehensive needs assessment or baseline study. Their day-to-day interaction and connection with their “constituency” allows for more access to those in need and more expertise about their social context than any other development actor.

A reconstruction of Sri Lanka’s descent into violence, based on interviews with officials, victims and ordinary users caught up in online anger, found that Facebook’s newsfeed played a central role in nearly every step from rumor to killing. Facebook officials, they say, ignored repeated warnings of the potential for violence, resisting pressure to hire moderators or establish emergency points of contact.
(...)
Despite criticism and concerns from civil society groups, the company has done little to change its strategy of pushing into developing societies with weak institutions and histories of social instability, opening up information spaces where anger and fear often can dominate.

Which brings me to the biggest blind spot of all – power. In the technocratic lala land of the WDR’s authors, the best results coming from the enlightened philosopher kings who are assumed to be in charge around the world stepping in to adroitly enable everyone to ride the technology tiger, as the market and its new gizmos rip through the status quo. What about imbalances in bargaining power, vested interests, political capture and their consequence, rising inequality? Not much on any of those, I’m afraid. All in all, a fascinating document (when was the last time a WDR quoted Marx, Nehru and Lenin?), and well worth close study (I’m sure I’ve missed lots of gems). My overall take? History may be on the side of the optimists, but boundary conditions on growth, and technological acceleration could mean that this time really is different.

Frustrated by badly designed showpiece meetings. On my hit list:
1) formal welcome remarks (by someone who knows nothing on topic), 2) overloaded panels, 3) moderators who don't moderate, 4) the mere pretense of audience interaction. We can do better.https://t.co/uaj98ZTrc8

— Michael (@michaeljarvisdc) April 24, 2018

My inbox:
"Nowadays younger researches keep the blogosphere alive with debates about chickens or cash transfers or CCTs or microcredit... topics the earlier generation (and this one too) knows are trivial in the grand scheme of national development and hence of human well being."https://t.co/zZcHSF9iYP

— Justin Sandefur (@JustinSandefur) April 21, 2018

6 years after I wrote about sending shoes to Africa, good intentions & the bumpy road of DIY #globaldev learning, it is still a bad idea... https://t.co/Kqpx6LjaSUhttps://t.co/MiMsaYqxlF

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) April 25, 2018

“This neighbourhood is depressing. It has a high level of violence and drug addiction and many social problems, so we want to bring a little more happiness to the community. The project could also mean that people in the neighbourhood have a bit more culture, because culture is power.”
The latest edition has a gossip section, a “Monica recommends” column and a budget recipe – how to make a meal for less than 10,000 Colombian pesos (around £2.50) – for the poorly paid workers.
But La Esquina also covers more hard-hitting subjects, including the horrifying reality of botched plastic surgeries that often afflict the country’s transgender women.

Despite heavy criticism, especially from local populations, white men from North America who "solve problems" on behalf of "African youth" still bring in millions of dollars in contributions and investments.

— Esra'a (@ealshafei) April 26, 2018

I guess we westerners cannot avoid being westerners and seeing the world as westerners all the time.
We keep seeing change as the result of the actions of individuals and leaders with specific traits and skills, instead of perceiving as key the relationships among them and the basic conditions that enable them to achieve things.
Therefore the superabundance and hypercentrality of “leaders” we see… even when we perform a literature review!!
Three out of the four “implications for staff” focus on leaders and key individuals. And the fourth, which is about teams, seems to treat them mostly as a collection of individuals, which “need space and time to develop trusting relationships”.
(...)
This is not to say that leaders and individuals do not play a role. They do. But they are trees which matter as part of the forest. And adaptive management cannot become a serious thing as long as we remain unable to see the forest for the trees. Obvious things like “for adaptation teams matter, more than individuals”, or “you cannot get meaningful adaptation if people do not stay enough” need to be recognised. What is the value of selecting and contracting any incredibly good leader or key individual, if he/she will leave in two years, just in time to destroy the “trust” that was starting to emerge around him/her?
If expecting that the core of a team stays together for 5 years to get an important job done is something unrealistic for the aid industry… well, then we are probably not trying hard enough when we talk about “adaptive management”, and we are just still “blah-blah-blah-ing”.

I would argue that a population with critical digital literacy skills would be the best defence against psychological profiling, microtargetting, and fake news. National digital literacy campaigns could increase citizens' critical understanding around privacy, data security, fake-news and understanding of how to combat gender-based and race-based online violence and hate speech. This is about more than technical skills. Such programs would need to raise citizens' critical consciousness about the political economy of data and how we can work together to tackle online abuse and technology injustice. In learning how to decolonise the digital world it will be instructive to draw upon the literature on colonisation and decolonisation including Albert Memmi, Audre Lorde, Paulo Freire, bell hooks and Ngugi wa Thiong'o

When it comes to conflict and post-conflict environments, passing on information to the population based on what is needed by those who experience the crisis is a vital and yet challenging task for aid organisations.

Um, sorry. Forget social enterprise. #socent

Run an honest business; pay your taxes; don't cut legal corners; pay your employees a fair working wage with good benefits. And don't carry on about it on Twitter.

— Evil Genius (@EvilGeniusPub) April 22, 2018

The reporting on the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal has danced around this issue by invoking the expert judgement of researchers whose careers are tethered to the success of psychometrics. Wylie himself is still in the psychometrics business. When he describes the overwhelming power of weaponized digital propaganda, he is not a dispassionate analyst; he’s also drumming up future business opportunities. Stanford University Professor Michal Kosinski is also constantly interviewed and profiled in articles about Cambridge Analytica’s psychometric breakthroughs. Kosinski has published several articles on the topic of psychometrics, and is indeed a leading expert on the topic. But his next grant, his next paper, and his tenure case all hinge on convincing peers, peer reviewers, and the public that psychometrics represents a significant breakthrough. One should expect him to offer an optimistic assessment of the current and future viability of psychometrics. Likewise, if you ask researchers at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Center whether psychometrics is valuable to political campaigns today, what answer do you think they’re going to give you?

Yet the meritocracy myth, which my research shows has a stronghold in the world of entrepreneurship, means that women are constantly told that all they have to do to get more of that $22 billion or so in venture capital funding is make better pitches or be more assertive.
The assumption is that women aren’t trying hard enough or doing the right things to get ahead, not that the way venture capitalists offer funding is itself unfair.
(...)
The next step is to move away from gender-neutral approaches and instead adopt “gender-aware,” proactive measures to change unfair practices. This includes setting concrete goals to achieve gender balance, examining the gender composition of boards, committees and other influential groups in the organization, and assessing the tools and channels used for outreach, recruitment and support of entrepreneurs.

Companies, asking for advice: "How can we tell if our diversity and inclusion programs are working?"

Me, an expert: "Find out how Black women are experiencing your company."

Company: "Oh so survey women of color?"
1/?

— Nicole Sanchez (@nmsanchez) April 22, 2018

GenderAvenger.com went live in February 2014, and it’s not hyperbole when I say “we’ve come a long way, baby.” Over the last four years, we’ve called out conferences and their organizers, called in those inspired to do the work, and raised the bar for including women on stages, in magazines and newspapers, and on television news shows. A large part of what has enabled this work is our GenderAvenger Toolkit. Our community has been the inspiration behind its growth, which is now made up of four robust tools: the GA Tally app, weekly Action Alerts, the GA Pledge, and the Stamp of Approval.

Standards in general are not a barrier to new or small NGOs and newcomers to the sector, Knudsen insisted. In fact, she added, they provide a framework for good practice and comparability.
Knudsen pointed out that standards and certifications only demonstrate whether an organisation has the structure to do quality work. They are “an enabler, rather than a predictor” of quality, she said.
Hauselmann of HQAI said that previous attempts at third-party audits and independent assessments had suffered because of a perception that they are “a tool to sanction”. Instead, he stressed, they should be seen as one of the “most important drivers for improvement”.
However, Nicholas Stockton, former head of the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership and a veteran of earlier initiatives to improve standards, doesn’t believe NGOs can achieve effective collective self-regulation.
After revelations of sex-for-aid abuses in West Africa in 2002, there was a “moral panic”, and new initiatives were established, he wrote in an online comment on IRIN. Gradually, however, “business as usual resumed and a growing sense of impunity and hubris grew, and with it the ever-increasing danger of unmanaged moral hazard that has now been blown open.”

Dozens of women reported sexual harassment, exploitation, and even rape by their employers on tomato and strawberry farms in Spain, Morocco, and Italy that sell their produce across Europe.
Speaking to BuzzFeed News, union officials in Spain likened the women’s working conditions to “slavery.” The tomatoes and strawberries these women harvest are sold across Europe, including the UK, Germany, and France, as “safe and sustainable.”
(...)
But Lidl did not comment on possible corporate responsibility for the incidents in southern Spain or the possibility of taking action to actively prevent further sexual abuse of workers.

The allegations had been made by up to three female staff members at the WFP in Suva.
Morale had taken a hit in UN circles in the Pacific in subsequent days, with staff frustrated and disappointed, the staffer added.
"I would hope they employ an independent panel to undertake this inquiry."
The UN spokeswoman would not confirm whether the staff members had been suspended pending the outcome of the investigation.
She also would not give any details about the allegations.

Save the Children UK is to withdraw from bidding on United Kingdom government contracts as it falls deeper into a sexual misconduct scandal.

“The way that international relations is conducted is very different from the way it was conducted before, Jacobs said. “And I’m not sure whether this has something to do with the UN being or not being ready for or not made for it.”
The UN can provide straight news on its Twitter accounts, which run from official pages of agency heads to development experts, but how does it create a personality that draws people back, eager for useful, reliable information?
(...)
The UN is also hampered in contradicting fake news coverage by how communications are still handled within Turtle Bay, the nickname of the UN compound in New York. Much of the work of the UN, including by the top brass, is done behind the scenes, creating a veil of silence that harks back to the Cold War and one that no one is eager to lift, despite calls for “transparency.”
The secretive nature of some Security Council meetings — euphemistically, “consultations” — hinder the flow of good news stemming from the Council, which does exist; such as, most recently, the peacekeeping mission in Liberia closing on good terms with its “host” country.

We cannot go on with this system of tacitly accepting that particular countries will nominate people to top international jobs (e.g. US nominates head of UNICEF, UK nominates head of UNOCHA, Europeans nominate MD of IMF). I see no reason to accept Ken Isaacs in this job. https://t.co/HRCTin6DGd

— Owen Barder (@owenbarder) April 28, 2018

Ultimately, according to women like Asif, the gig economy’s flexible, part-time work model — long derided as precarious and exploitative in West — may prove beneficial, accommodating dual mother/worker roles and allowing women to join the labor force at times when they would usually drop out to concentrate on their families.
“After getting married, I wasn’t working at all because I had a child,” says Asif. Today, she typically sees two to three clients a day and juggles parenting and work. “I don’t need to ask anyone for money because I earn my own money.”
“The entire purpose was to give economic independence,” Shameelah Ismail says. “If we want the economy to boom, we need to tap the women. When they see their mothers are the ones earning and the main breadwinners, their mindsets change. They are more open to women working, and the entire society changes.”

Eye-opening work on Amazon Mechanical Turk workers making a median of $2/h because 31% time spent on unpaid work (searching for tasks, etc) and majority of requests <$5/h. Many papers at #chi2018 use Mechanical Turk, what are our responsibilities as researchers knowing this?

— Lis Sulmont (@lis__sul) April 26, 2018

I was told, in categorical terms, that this wasn’t legally possible. These territories were independent entities, and would have to make the decision themselves. I shared legal analysis I had commissioned to no avail.
(...)
We should not confuse our job with that of politicians or bureaucrats who think in terms of what is possible. We should deal in terms of the world we want to see, then create the conditions that make it so.

The news media is not a simple mirror to the world. News content is a crafted, cultural product. It reflects the priorities and news values of the organisations and journalists that make it. And – crucially – it reflects the economics of the news industry and who is willing to pay for information.
(...)
Indeed, business reporting is a welcome change to centuries of “Afro-pessimism” in news content, and reports that focus on crises, darkness, poverty and white saviours.
There is a problem, however, when business journalism (made with a financial clients in mind) becomes a central source of information for general news audiences. The content of this news tends to sustain what the linguist Norman Fairclough calls a “neoliberal globalization discourse” in which important dimensions of globalization – ecological, cultural, political and societal – are often absent, or presented as subordinate to the global market system.

There is widespread dissatisfaction within the aid industry with the quantity and quality of mainstream news coverage of humanitarian issues and crises.
73% of respondents agreed that mainstream news media does not produce enough coverage of humanitarian issues.
Mainstream news coverage was also regularly criticised for being selective, sporadic, simplistic and partial.

Quick thread on this:

"Why Dictators Love Development Statistics" by @gladsteinhttps://t.co/OHZDdeI1nA

— Justin Sandefur (@JustinSandefur) April 27, 2018

Supporting national staff to cross the management threshold is a lot of work. We have to actively look for talent, which means time spent with people, knowing their capability and performance, and genuinely helping them develop in areas where they’re weak. Which, in turn, requires planning and methodology. “Local staff capacity building” cannot be just a random sequence of one-off training workshops and promotions. It is not creating unique positions in a structure just for them. Rather, it means looking carefully at resources available and making tough choices about how to deploy those, and then being able to explain rationally why you chose what you chose (because in my experience, investment in local staff mobility is almost always questioned by someone, at some point).

The long shadow of Germany's colonialism: my delaration in the case of the Ovaherero and Nama peoples v. Germany https://t.co/HCN4TFmA5E#Namibia#Herero#Nama#reparations

— Matthias Goldmann (@MattHGoldmann) April 27, 2018

Promotional goodies are an inevitable part of any conference. I don’t want that to change (I don’t think anyone does) but it can absolutely be done in a way that’s more environmentally friendly, while offering more value to attendees. From better gifts, to food and experiences, there are a lot of ways forward.

“We found that op-ed pieces have a lasting effect on people’s views regardless of their political affiliation or their initial stance on an issue. People read an argument and were persuaded by it. It’s that simple.”
(...)
In both experiments, people exposed to op-eds shifted their views to support the argument presented in the piece, with the general public being marginally more persuaded than the elites.

The resume of the near future will be a document with far more information—and information that is far more useful—than the ones we use now. Farther out, it may not be a resume at all, but rather a digital dossier, perhaps secured on the blockchain (paywall), and uploaded to a global job-pairing engine that is sorting you, and billions of other job seekers, against millions of openings to find the perfect match.
(...)
LinkedIn could build pattern-recognition software that combines such data with insights from companies into what combinations of employees are effective, he said.
“You can imagine scenarios where we ask recruiters, who have visibility into their organization or are trying to find someone new, about what types of people are working well together inside the company, where are there pockets where they’re seeing success,” Roslansky said.

Henry Schleiff, a Travel Channel exec said “when it comes to debunking the myths around some of our greatest historical mysteries, Megan Fox’s passion for discovering the truth is just visceral.”

44 other administrative and academic buildings were severely damaged, while 99 other campus buildings suffered minor damage.
Some 54 community colleges mainly affiliated with TU also collapsed in the disaster and 171 suffered damage.
However, three years down the line, only two administrative buildings of TU have been constructed, while just 10 damaged properties have been repaired.
“The government hasn’t prioritised our reconstruction. We will have to wait for years if the process is not expedited,” said TU Rector Sudha Tripathi.

Even so, modeling values of fairness, empathy, acceptance, kindness, respect, and responsibility to and for other people in an online setting can remain elusive. The same thing can be said for capturing students’ excitement for discovery, satisfaction and pride in their accomplishments. Rather than an inherent characteristic, inclusivity in an online classroom should be pursued in an intentional and ongoing way.

I am doing my PhD research with unemployed youth in Freetown, studying violence in the aftermath of war. I hang out in “ghettos”, I sit endlessly as young men drink, smoke, listen to music, and we talk about “the system”. It’s intense, but rewarding work, I’m learning every day, I think it’s what I have been trained to do, the full immersion experience. Then, one day the violence I am researching comes very close, too close, it rips my world apart.These two short snapshots seem unrelated, but as I lay in my hospital bed in Freetown after Kadiatu’s death in the district hospital, I kept finding myself thinking about what had happened five years before. They were isolated instances in an otherwise happy and rewarding near-decade of engagement in Sierra Leone. However, in both situations I felt utterly powerless and fragile, and in both cases I experienced on my skin the kind of fear and violence that I have explored in my research, whilst becoming profoundly conscious of the ways in which my experience remains nonetheless fundamentally different.

So in the name of viewpoint diversity, Dear Colonialism, let me suggest a radical notion. It is time for anti-colonial and decolonial viewpoints to be heard and to be taken seriously. It is time to stop pushing these views to the side claiming that they are a new orthodoxy when your orthodoxy still clings tightly to each wall of our homes.

You have never left.

Dear Colonialism, the world will never be rid of your effects, whatever your assessment of them may be. The reality of the world you created cannot be escaped. If you are so brazen, so strong, so able, so capable as to right the wrongs you see in our lands presently, then own the wrongs that are yours.

Another memo, dated February  14 and addressed to Faki, among others, elaborates further on issues within the peace and security department. It is signed by five senior officials from the department’s administration and human resources wing. It describes a “poisonous” situation in the department, which is “too male-heavy in the upper layers”.
This memo accuses Chergui of abusing the powers of his office to secure his preferred candidates for positions, and interfering in the interview and recruitment process. Specifically, it refers to irregularities in the process to appoint an acting head of the crisis management division; and in the process to appoint a permanent head of conflict prevention and warning.

Plans for the U.N. screening tool to register workers found guilty of sexual misconduct were announced at the gathering of its agency heads in London this week.
"(It) is a screening tool so that when we have confirmed perpetrators of sexual harassment in the system, we can ensure that they are not able to move around," Beagle told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on the sidelines of the meeting.
Beagle said groundwork for the system, which will be managed by the secretariat, is complete and it was expected to be fully operational by the summer.

Findings from new research: #women in #Lebanon are being detained for up to 2 years without a hearing - most for minor offences & without knowing their right to legal aid - Yara Issa, Connecting Research to Development #Justice4womenpic.twitter.com/ITt0YpgL3U

— Oxfam Middle East (@OxfamMiddleEast) May 11, 2018

Staff harassment, a “culture of irresponsibility” and the use of “psychological violence” as a management tool are all prevalent at the EU’s lead agency for managing migration, according to allegations in internal documents seen by POLITICO.
The letters and emails paint a picture of an institution in deep crisis with experienced staff leaving because of alleged coercion and an absence of “rule of law” at the Malta-based European Asylum Support Office.
POLITICO reported in January that the agency’s Portuguese executive director, José Carreira, is already under investigation by the bloc’s anti-fraud office, OLAF, for alleged misconduct in procurement and human resources and possible breaches of data protection rules. He contests those charges and the allegations made in the new documents.

They call it a "dirty war" - a silent conflict in Cameroon's anglophone region marked by near-daily attacks by separatists and a brutal army backlash that shows no sign of abating.
Over the past eight months, scores of police, soldiers and civilians have died in the heartland of francophone Cameroon's English-speaking minority.
Homes have been torched, shops looted, complaints of summary arrest and detention are common and, according to UN estimates, tens of thousands have fled their homes.

💯💯💯
I challenged #globaldev Twitter to join me in making a crowdsourced online zine about gender & humanitarian aid. & u delivered! Thx to everyone who got crafty & made a page.

Here's the zine:

⚡️ “#AidGoesPunk: 24-Hour Zine Challenge” https://t.co/3qba21exGt

— Malaka Gharib ملكة غريب (@MalakaGharib) May 10, 2018

The course is exclusively aimed at females, aged 15-25, who are unable to pursue a four-year degree due to lack of funds or hail from families where they are prevented from enrolling in co-education schools.
“In Afghanistan the ability to work remotely is a key tool in the push for equality,” said Rasa.

What frustrates me is the lack of investment in M&E – yes, we need to explore new and innovative schemes, take a punt on promising ideas, but this must come with solid learning, evidence building and robust M&E. And up to now, this has been notably lacking. While it is perhaps not surprising that insurance companies have neither the skills nor interest in considering the impacts on gender, equity, social cohesion, female-headed households, the landless, or whether there are negative unintended consequences – the donors funding these schemes really should.

This film project seeks to visualise one of Africa’s divided cities, and is part of the research project “The Ethnography of a Divided City. Socio-Politics, Poverty and Gender in Maputo, Mozambique” headed by the Chr. Michelsen Institute and funded by the Norwegian Research Council. While the film relates actively to the research project, it approaches the themes of that project from new and original angles and ANIMA has had full artistic freedom in its filmic approach. A focus on the people inhabiting the city’s so-called bairros (districts/areas) provide a privileged view of the way in which symbolic and material boundaries of various urban spaces are contested, negotiated and, ultimately, inscribed onto mental maps of the city.

When collected and analyzed, this data can help identify the problems that matter to a community. It can shape the best ways to address those problems, and it can help us assess the actual impact of a particular solution. Small data can also give us the information to persuade governments and private funders to invest in the provision of community-based justice systems by demonstrating how a low-cost solution can save money—and, sometimes, prevent a costly crisis.
While it does not replace large-scale legal needs studies, collecting this data is less expensive because it is generated through the day-to-day provision of legal services. It also adds an important complementary picture; it reflects experiences navigating real-time legal processes, whereas surveys often rely on people’s recall or perceptions.

We are thinking about special development zones or about changing certain cities by setting a framework of rules and regulations. These regions would then no longer be governed by the normal Libyan law but would have their own rules. This is something that is familiar from special economic zones. But special economic zones are usually places where factories are built and workers go for work. We are taking this a step further, arguing that we also need to move towards governance, and that there need to be special forms of governance, too, since it is not just about business or the economy.

When we wanted to diversify our development news diet, we ran into a major problem: international development journalism is really, really white.

Of the 39 side events with announced speakers at talks in Bonn, which started on Monday, just one third have an equal gender balance or majority of women on their panel. 65% of all listed speakers are male.*
A spokesperson for Climate Focus, who helped organise an all-male panel on Tuesday, recognised the need to be more thoughtful about representation in the future.
“Gender balance obviously wasn’t considered when putting together the panel but was noticed by ourselves during the event and also brought up during the event by the panellists,” he said.

Since 1993, UNDAC (United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination) has been the first international emergency response team to arrive at the scene of over 281 disasters.

Some interesting points, but even in 2018 #globaldev gravitates around the typical Northern/Western middle-class university student who wants to/can afford to work abroad. What about alternative paths & options (other than career change after you did something else)?!? https://t.co/qtbJ8pxc6H

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) May 5, 2018

Fascinatingly, the study did not start out as an examination of gender specifically–it was meant as an examination of how workplace culture shifts when office design changes radically. It was only when Hirst, who conducted interviews on-site and spent a lot of time observing the workplace, began to feel pressure to dress in a more feminine way herself that she began to wonder about it. “She was surprised by the unusual amount of care she took over her own appearance, a degree of self-consciousness that she found burdensome as time progressed,” the researchers write. “To ‘fit in’ with the modern, clean aesthetic of the building itself and a dress code that was widely adopted, she departed from her usual preference for wearing jeans and no makeup; adopting a smart trouser suit and putting on makeup.”

I found the secret eligibility criteria form circulating around most foundations and donors: pic.twitter.com/p60bpaftW4

— Esra'a (@ealshafei) May 3, 2018

But on its current path, crypto is replaying the same inequities that came before. Men still overwhelmingly dominate the technology’s development and the accumulation of resulting wealth—though the gender of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym for bitcoin’s inventor, remains unknown. Without a concentrated effort to change the industry’s course, it will further entrench the existing gender gap in finance and tech, this time in an unregulated and anonymous environment.
“What you’re observing is really a reflection of the much larger complications of gender and work and power in American society,” says Joy Rankin, a historian of gender and technology and an assistant professor at Michigan State University. “This is a microcosm of all of the challenges of a developing, burgeoning sector of the economy that has a lot of promise but is therefore also fraught with high stakes.” The lack of diversity in crypto has implications beyond a basic sense of fairness. If blockchain really does redefine the global financial system, the uniformity among its creators will result in biased products.

It remains a fascinating and important movement that shows the value of fusing the pragmatic need for housing with anarchist approaches to life and politics. I got to know this movement in the 1980s before Kadir’s direct involvement.
(...)
Although the book’s sociological lens is useful as an analytical tool its emphasis in the inconsistencies and flaws sometimes miss the true achievements of this movement. This is particularly important at a time when the nature and importance of transgressive sub-cultural movements are again in the spotlight. Indeed the difficulties of the movement insisting on its own normative structures around the acquisition of specialist squatting skills from DIY to legal expertise to which members were expected to conform, far from being a weakness might hold important lessons for future movements.

Researchers and policymakers need to become better aware of the broader set of assumptions, biases and limitations in trials. Journals need to also begin requiring researchers to outline them in their studies. We need to furthermore better use RCTs together with other research methods.
(...)
Trials involve complex processes – from randomising, blinding and controlling, to implementing treatments, monitoring participants etc. – that require many decisions and steps at different levels that bring their own assumptions and degree of bias to results.

An overview report from the workshop provides more detail about emerging research themes, digital policy issues, and summarises the workshop structure and content.

The moral economy of mobile phones implies a field of shifting relations among consumers, companies and state actors, all of whom have their own ideas about what is good, fair and just. These ideas inform the ways in which, for example, consumers acquire and use mobile phones; companies promote and sell voice, SMS and data subscriptions; and state actors regulate both everyday use of mobile phones and market activity around mobile phones. Ambivalence and disagreement about who owes what to whom is thus an integral feature of the moral economy of mobile phones. This volume identifies and evaluates the stakes at play in the moral economy of mobile phones. The six main chapters consider ethnographic cases from Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Vanuatu. The volume also includes a brief introduction with background information on the recent ‘digital revolution’ in these countries and two closing commentaries that reflect on the significance of the chapters for our understanding of global capitalism and the contemporary Pacific.

It’s now been about a year and a half since I began opening up about my experience of depression. There have been many points when I felt that I was just complaining without feeling better, or when I did start to feel better, only to get totally knocked out when some new source of stress came up. But the average trend of my feelings has been decidedly upwards, towards a place of much greater self-understanding and much less fear and shame. Talking about my emotions has deepened many of my friendships, as I found that people tended to respond to my admissions about mental health not with derision, but by sharing stories about their own challenges. It’s helped me to have a calmer, happier, and more trusting relationship with my current partner, knowing that I can now communicate openly about any problems that might arise. It’s improved my performance at work, as it let me address some productivity issues which I hadn’t even realized were related to depression, like what used to be a horrible habit of procrastinating on email. And it’s allowed me to feel curious about the world again, which, as someone who still hopes to finish her PhD research some day, is very reassuring!

What does this mean for Indigenization or Decolonization of Canadian academe? It means that the majority of the people making decisions are white. It means that arguments for changes to institutions have to be filtered through whiteness, through white bodies (both human and institutional), and that white people still, largely, operate to own, control, and command what any changes to a campus looks like. (This is what Dr. Sara Ahmed articulates when she discusses the notion of ‘white men as buildings’ in British academe (Ahmed 2014)). It means that racialized students, staff, and faculty are at an extreme disadvantage (and even at risk of serious sanction, expulsion, or firing) when they raise questions of racism and ethical violations in Canadian universities. It means that Indigenous faculty have to be the ‘good’ kind of Indigenous (inoffensive, mystical, peace-full) or else be labelled as trouble-makers or, for Indigenous women, risk being seen as the ‘angry Indigenous woman’ stereotype. It means that Indigenization is not Decolonization (Giroux 2017).

Amongst my own cohort of anthropologists, I detect rather a deep-set sense of anxiety that our own research, much of which is posited in communities and topics outside the parameters of what once would have been considered legitimate ethnographic research, will pass muster. Ethnographic ‘depth’ can be easily confused with an exoticised search for authenticity, which in turn can frequently become synonymous with emotional or physical hardship. This is further exacerbated by a wall of silence surrounding the ethnographer’s own personhood and situation in the field, and the complex realities of living and working in fieldsites where total immersion and isolation, if desirable, is practicably impossible due to digital connectivity. Anthropological lines of enquiry have diversified enormously in the past decade, and notions of how to construct a fieldsite are also in flux. Hegemonic structures within the academy, including teaching curricula, funding requirements and job application processes still disproportionately represent the old school however, and until these catch up with the present diversity of research, early-career ethnographers will continue to feel insecure, anxious, and pressurised in this key rite of passage.

But have you ever met anyone who genuinely feels that most of these meetings are useful, productive, efficient or enjoyable? Me neither.
I can only speculate that we continue having so many meetings because of a few good ones we had in the past -- we’re hoping to recapture the magic. Perhaps that’s why meetings are standard practice and a significant demand on everyone’s time, especially for those in administrative roles. And certainly, collaborative, innovative, thoughtful and productive meetings are worthwhile.

YES @viet_t_nguyen!!! "Most of the world is neither white nor European... literature, like the economy, withers when it closes itself off from the world. The world is coming anyway. It demands that we know ourselves and the Other."#AAPI#AAPIHeritageMonthhttps://t.co/wQo70QyD10

— Jennifer Lee (@JLeeSoc) May 3, 2018

I am very excited to host another great guest post!
Milasoa Chérel-Robson works for UNCTAD and her reflections on the challenges and trade-offs of combining her international career with family duties highlight many personal insights into bigger debates in gender and development.
This is a perfect long-read for the weekend after Mother's Day that spans a historical trajectory from Madagascar and the socialist aspirations of the 1970s to the limits of “leaning in” in Geneva and contemporary Rwanda where Africa is celebrating a bright economic future.

Sex offenders and paedophiles are travelling to the world’s conflict zones to prey on vulnerable children, the National Crime Agency has warned.
Robert Jones, deputy director of the NCA’s child exploitation and online protection command, said offenders were exploiting the chaos of war and areas hit by natural disaster. He urged the aid sector to help make it as difficult as possible for individuals to commit crimes abroad.

All this led me to believe that I understood sexism and indifference, intimidation and abuse. And I thought that MSF with its storied Nobel Prize winning history of temoignage and speaking out on behalf of the least powerful in the world was the obvious choice for me to move forward in my fight to support vulnerable women and girls around the world.
I thought I knew about toxic cultures, but I did not.

One contributing factor might be the fear that acknowledging our ethical problems might put off potential supporters.
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But it’s time to change that. In my experience ethical guidance is most useful when it is explicit about the ethical risks, and when it recognises uncertainty and grey areas as well as red lines; when it encourages debate. After all, medical students don’t simply learn the Hippocratic Oath, they are taught why it matters in situations of unequal information and power, and how it has been applied. International aid organisations – from donors through to international NGOs and the consulting firms who deliver donors’ projects – all need make sure that every staff member carries out her work reflectively, with an appreciation of its ethical dimensions, and in the knowledge that she is expected to put any project on hold until any ethical question has been answered satisfactorily, even if this goes against the perceived short term interests of her employer. That seems at least as important as making sure she understands the procurement and whistleblowing policies, or knows which particular list of abstract nouns her organisation has decided to put on its website.

Four broad arguments can motivate scholars to engage in the humanitarianism-conflict debate. First, as independent researchers in the field, scholars have more freedom to speak up. Second, many will argue that ‘speaking the truth’ is a scholarly duty. Third, scholars’ voice might carry differently than that of human rights organisations or journalists, as scholars are supposed to adhere to rigorous scientific and ethical standards that grant their research some credibility. Last, academics increasingly vary their channels to seek ‘societal impact’. Newspaper articles, debate evenings, social media and blogs such as this one can help convey to a wider audience what would otherwise remain obscured.

The imprisonment and control of Palestine is a profitable enterprise. For years Israeli weapons companies have boasted of “live-testing” on Palestinians. The Israeli Army and its officers are a global brand in both hardware and security consultancy. Some examples:

— Omar Robert Hamilton (@ORHamilton) May 14, 2018

IRIN rolled up its data science sleeves and deployed a bot on an important new challenge: making up names of aid agencies and aid job titles.
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Humanitarian job titles invented by AI

Senior!

Chief of Party (Sex)

Sneak Specialist

South Changes Manager

Chef of Finances and Grant & Manager

Regional Leader (Interant) Livelihood and Consultant

Multiple International Director

Nation demonic Manager

In our classrooms, we must mimic the settings I encountered in my time at USAID: Opportunities to experience and negotiate the tensions — and confusion — that arise when people from different professional and intellectual backgrounds first work together toward a shared goal. We need more curricula that put environmental scientists, economists, anthropologists, and engineers in the same classroom, wrestling together with the same challenges.
There will be barriers to designing and executing such curricula, not least, the inherent difficulty of teaching transdisciplinary material to students with diverse intellectual backgrounds. It is not easy to walk a social scientist through ecological theories of resilience, or an environmental scientist through post-structural critiques of development.

Within programmes, the value for money focus tends to be on economy and efficiency in delivery, with effectiveness analysis proving highly erratic. The only convincing story of a value for money argument increasing cost effectiveness cited by ICAI relates to a programme in Uganda, where DFID staff drew on global evidence and encouraged implementing partners to use cash transfers rather than food aid. Failing to focus on effectiveness across the board undercuts the promise of value for money: what’s the point of doing things cheaply and quickly without demonstrable evidence that they are having sustainable impacts?
What’s more, the value for money approach of DFID is a bit too Mystic Meg: that is, it assumes DFID can make financial and social predictions when it can’t; DFID often works in complicated contexts, on complex problems. But ICAI found few cases of programme managers or participants monitoring the costs and outcomes of ‘small bets’ with a view to evaluating and learning what worked best and then adapting their approach. Instead they found that what might best be described as DFID’s blueprint planning approach is in tension with its commitment to learning and adaptation, emphasised in the Smart Rules.

The Herero want preferential access to the land that was taken from them. But their numbers — less than 10 percent of the population — are too low to give them sway in the Namibian government, Veii said.
The second is reparations. In recent years, Germany has started to take responsibility for colonial genocide and has offered development aid to Namibia. But many Herero and Nama have called for direct reparations, of the sort paid to Holocaust survivors after World War II. They say the descendants of victims, not the nation of Namibia, should lead negotiations with Germany.
"Development in the regions we live in is slow and almost nonexistent," Veii said. "This poverty is generational, and unless we break the chain through reparations from the German government, the status quo will remain."
That battle has moved to the U.S. thanks to a 2017 lawsuit. Under the Alien Tort Statute, an unusual law that has allowed foreigners to sue perpetrators of human rights violations, the Herero are challenging Germany in U.S. federal court.
The third issue might be described as truth and reconciliation. When apartheid ended in the early 1990s, South Africa empowered victims to publicly challenge their perpetrators. But Namibia did not.

The militarization of policing and counterterrorism operations in East and West Africa has chiefly multiplied the numbers of people seeking vengeance against the state, contend regional experts Nanjala Nyabola and Obi Anyadike in the third episode of Peacebuilders, a Carnegie Corporation podcast series. Hosts Aaron Stanley and Scott Malcomson speak with experts from the region in this second episode of the Peacebuilders series.
(...)
I think part of the issue is that African security forces need to do their job. I'm not a complete pacifist. You need to have security forces that are professional and able to fulfill their functions. More importantly, you need to have a police service that is able to perform its basic functions. Which we don't have. Our police forces are underfunded, undermanned, understaffed. They don't have even the most basic of forensic skills. This is a policing issue before it's a military issue. It's a policing issue. You should be able to identify people early and not take them to a police station and torture them. Because as we've seen time and time again, that's just creating yet more radicalism. What we're seeing in Northeast Nigeria is a military that blunders around, burns down villages, rounds up young men and brutalizes them there and then or throws them into detention where they're kept for God knows how long. And there is no intelligence value whatsoever, but you are creating the conditions. Vengeance is a very powerful motivating force among young radical men and women.

Listening to Quake, a pretty cool BBC audio drama series on the role of technology in disaster response. The first episode is about a video game guild who volunteer with crowdmapping after an earthquake. cc @mstem@willowbl00@dangerbuihttps://t.co/7sI1bTx36H

— J. Nathan Matias (@natematias) May 13, 2018

“They may not have the academic skills to plan their neighborhood, but the Haitian people have a vision,” says Clement Belizaire, who heads Haiti’s government agency that’s theoretically responsible for overseeing the planning and development of Canaan but that hasn’t been allocated the funds to do so. “They want to have public spaces, they want to have the life of a normal family. So they try to plan on a very micro level.”
But if neither the central nor local governments invest in developing Canaan and it remains informal for too long, it may become impossible to turn this rapidly expanding city into a legal and fully functioning municipality, suggests Belizaire. “If you let the informal invade the area, you won’t have room for the formal. And it will be a very long process to rehabilitate and have a great Canaan,” he says.
There’s more at stake than just Canaan’s own future. If the city does become viable, it may offer lessons for other poorly governed cities beyond Haiti’s borders. After all, Canaan may be the world’s newest ungoverned city, but it isn’t the first.

The global development sector’s current policies, procedures, and day-to-day practices are actually in conflict with movements’ life cycles. Supporting movements means not determining goals or timetables, recognizing that these are ever-shifting within movements to meet the challenges and opportunities of the day.
If activists are already marginalized, extracted from, and demotivated by the aid sector’s paper pushing and internal navel gazing, how can we possibly presume to support entire movements?
Perhaps supporting movements is a sectoral trend that will fade away as many do. Or, we are approaching a dangerous precipice that could further damage people’s efforts to determine their futures.

In the aftermath of atrocities, the refusal to provide justice motivates the suppression of memory. Over time, the enforced forgetting becomes synonymous with injustice, until eventually, remembrance itself passes for justice.
And sometimes, justice passes for memory. In transitional contexts, trials and truth commissions are frequently seen as a means of forging collective memory, a shared narrative of the past on which to base a new political order. But as Rieff argues, an exhaustive reckoning with the past is beyond the scope of justice mechanisms. And rather than building consensus, the assignment of blame can sow the seeds for further discord. The vexed relationship between memory and justice is never clearer than in the presence of the disinterred victims of violence.

The job that I held in Vietnam at that point was one that had been designated (in a different directive by a different ministry) as foreigner-only – so I knew I was not taking a Vietnamese person’s job. I paid my taxes (which were higher than for most Vietnamese nationals actually), took Vietnamese language and culture classes, participated in community events, and tried to be a good citizen, even though formal citizenship was something that was unavailable to me in Vietnam. But true assimilation, or even integration, was elusive. Most of my non-Vietnamese colleagues and I lived in a state of liminality; not unfamiliar in the country, but eternally “foreign” nonetheless. And I hadn’t really minded this, until the connotation of “foreign” changed, from being just “different” to being “unwelcome”. Tourists, on the other hand, seemed to be almost universally adored by the Vietnamese, even though they barely scratched the surface of Vietnamese culture.

In the April/May issues:@TheAtlantic - 6 of 18 authors are women (0 of 8 reader responses by women). @ForeignAffairs - 3 of 29 authors are women (0 of 10 book reviews by women).@ForeignPolicy - 6 of 18 authors are women.@NewYorker - 4 of 21 authors are women.

Cool. pic.twitter.com/OhOIIdYRUP

— Anne Connell (@AnneMartinConn) May 11, 2018

The UK has more investments in compassionate technology companies than the rest of Europe put together, data from Public - which supports industry start-ups - suggests.
These companies are part of a sector estimated to be worth about £7bn, more than the financial tech sector - the new services such as current account apps disrupting traditional banking.
And the UK technology industry as a whole grew by 4.5% between 2016 and 2017, according to a Tech Nation report released today.

More than his pots or body, his lifestyle is what attracts. Eric travels to nice places, takes surfboard selfies and the type of pleasing, generic photos of landscapes found in tourism brochures. He appears to live a version of the four-hour workweek. Tortus implies that, with a bit of skill, practice, and an active Instagram account, we too could live a globe-trotting life of leisure. Like any number of TV shows such as Chef’s Table that emphasize the craftsman ideal, Tortus presents a highly exceptional case as an image of what we can aspire to in a world that does not support it. Instead of the daily resignation and despair felt by most people at their jobs, the brand presents a world in which you can “Do what you love, and never work a day in your life.”

I was diagnosed with PTSD two days after I got back from Virginia. In the weeks and months that followed, I experienced flashbacks, nightmares, insomnia, dissociation, chronic body pain, and severe depression and anxiety — symptoms that interfered with my work reporting on fascists, but that were triggered by it, too. Every time I looked up photos of protesters clashing with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, or videos of the car attack, it was like I was back on that street corner.
(...)
Speaking with The Outline, he recalled that going through the violent logs was stressful — even though, as a white man, he knew he wasn’t a target of these groups. “I think my ability to be cool and keep doing it is a level of privilege,” Schiano said. Still, he said that he avoided violent content of the night of the torch march, where he was concerned for his safety. “I’ve had to re-watch it at other points in my own work,” he said.

Our findings indicate that in most PEM projects published in scientific journals, participation is mostly functional in the sense that local peoples’ involvement is framed so that they contribute to the gathering of information in a cost-effective way, while their potential interests in shaping the purpose and format of the project and use of the data appear overlooked. Overall, the actual practice of most PEM projects analyzed appears to foster participation in a very limited sense of the word.

In sum, while the engagement with the private sector might offer a certain number of advantages, the mindset in which it occurs, however, is cause for concern. On one hand, it seems that humanitarian organisations, while recognising the need for
better capacity and diversified skills in the sector, tend to over-rely on the private sector as a solution. On the other hand, donors’ subcontracting and transfer of risk of humanitarian responses to the private sector play into the underlying dynamics that drive the gap in the emergency response by humanitarian organisations.
All of this feeds into an ever-growing vicious circle at the expense of increased capability and skills of the humanitarian sector for the emergency response, where the immediate needs of the most vulnerable populations are not being met: humanitarian organisations shy away from timely and effective responses and do
not invest sufficiently in technical capacities (thus giving way for the private sector to intervene). In addition, while the private sector gains legitimacy in a new field, this might carry the risk for humanitarian principles to be easily dismissed and considered dated and simplistic.

We find suggestive evidence of a short-term
improvement in some education services, but these effects deteriorate by year two of the program, and we find little or no evidence of an effect on health and water services at any period. Despite relatively high levels of system uptake, enthusiasm of district officials, and anecdotal success stories, we find that relatively few messages from citizens provided specific, actionable information about service provision within the purview
and resource constraints of district officials, and users were often discouraged by officials’ responses. Our findings suggest that for crowd-sourced ICT programs to move from isolated success stories to long-term accountability enhancement, the quality and specific content of reports and responses provided by users and officials is centrally important.

Folks often mistake my small-steps approach to big problems as naiveté or misplaced optimism. Do I for even a second think that doing these things alone will change the systemic barriers and obstacles that women in the academy face? No, I do not. But do I think that the accumulation of such things might improve the experience of women in the academy and be part of the leverage for systemic change? I absolutely do.

Our thinking in compiling this list is what underpins everything we do at Apolitical: that public servants deserve recognition, and that celebrating the best encourages the spread of good ideas. And that if you give public servants authoritative information and access to their colleagues’ help, you can change the world.

Less than a decade ago, beds at NDLEA facilities were filled almost exclusively with working-class people struggling to wean themselves off locally brewed alcohol, heroin, and cannabis. Those using tramadol — a synthetic opioid and cousin of powerful prescription painkillers like morphine, oxycodone, and fentanyl — were rare cases, almost entirely confined to young men doing hard labor or people who’d become addicted through medical prescriptions. “Eight years ago, I’d be surprised to see a few tramadol cases [a year],” said Audu Moses, a psychiatrist whose work with the NDLEA and a UN-sponsored clinic makes him one of a handful of addiction specialists in Nigeria. “Now, I’ll see around 10 patients in a month, and every year it’s going up.”
Today, Nigeria stands on the brink of a catastrophic epidemic. BuzzFeed News has found Nigerians of all ages are popping millions of pills daily, washing them down with codeine, another drug based on opium poppies, or as part of a cocktail that includes “purple lean” and Rohypnol, the date-rape drug. Senior military officials told BuzzFeed News that stashes of tramadol recovered from Islamist militants like Boko Haram often outnumber bullets found in their hideouts. Aid workers say it is circulating in refugee camps. College students use it as an aphrodisiac. In the rural north of the country, subsistence farmers say it keeps them going for hours on end, a phrase echoed by sex workers in southern urban centers.

But the ruthlessness with which the government is removing obstacles to progress is alarming. Tens of thousands of people have already been moved from the center to the city's periphery, where they have largely been left to their own devices.
And soon, many others will no longer be able to afford to live in the affected areas. Rents for apartment buildings rose by an average of 61 percent between 2012 and 2016 and as high as 100 percent in some neighborhoods along the tram lines.
It's urgent that more be done to help the people who have been left behind by these changes.
Overall, mobility can clearly hold the key to greater prosperity - also in other sub-Saharan countries. But the cities affected by these changes need more international money and know-how.

The politics and the basic logistics of getting goods into these two ports offers key insights into the dynamics of the conflict in Yemen and can explain why Yemen is experiencing such a profound humanitarian crisis.

I’ve spoken to male refugees who say that the widespread perception that only disabled female refugees are vulnerable left them invisible to aid agencies – abandoned by the humanitarian system. It’s important to emphasise that the intersection of gender, disability and displacement can have a marginalising impact on both men and women.
Ultimately, all this suggests that if we are sincerely committed to ‘Leaving No One Behind’, it is imperative that we understand the diversity of experiences of the most vulnerable groups in society. We must also appreciate that when applying an intersectionality lens to our work on a practical level, we must recognise that the relationship between disability, gender and displacement is complex, multifaceted and the ways in which power is distributed can change across contexts and situations. Humanitarian actors must, therefore, step away from narrow definitions of gender, disability and displacement and work towards more rigorously planned humanitarian responses that appreciate each aspect of human difference.

Red Nose Day is typical of “brand aid” initiatives that engage consumers in low-cost heroism as a way to channel good intentions into politically unquestioning and commercially lucrative options. Red Nose Day’s branding is about making companies look good while also encouraging consumers to spend. Only 50¢ of that $1 Red Nose purchase goes toward the Red Nose Day Fund. The remainder goes to the manufacturer.
Several studies show this kind of charity branding works, for companies. Consumers prefer companies that support charitable causes, so corporations get involved to improve brand awareness and sales. One study demonstrated that tying branding to a cause increased profits and “increased sales for the entire line of products connected to the brand.”

But these are flattened out by this choice to photograph women with such complex lives through the medium of a single portrait and possibly because photographing 83 portraits in a single day perforce flattens out personality, movement, life, history. The photographs freeze these women in positions of suffering and victimhood more than any repetition of their story might have done. It is, though, astonishing that the New York Times would juxtapose such a collection of images with the story of a journalist’s tough road to capture them. It is quite literally a ludicrous juxtaposition between the extreme trauma and violence all of the photographs’ subjects have experienced and the pathetic struggles of an American writer in search of a particular image. It is, too, this image that beggars belief. The reams of film, paper and audio out there on the problems of the single story, especially about Africa, especially about African women, should have surely given Searcey and Ferguson pause.

I will remember also what the environmental rights defender on the panel reminded our audience — including Steve and myself — that day. He, who has escaped many attempts on his life for his convictions in Nigeria, reminded us: once you are hooked to the struggle for justice, there’s no going back!
I am hooked, I admit. I am hooked to not being another brown woman who internalizes her own oppression, who exercises complicity through collegiality, who vents to her own community but remains compartmentalized at work. I refuse to be fragmented as a human and as a woman.

“If you don’t do it authentically,” says González, “just don’t do it.”
Inauthentic gestures — for example, promoting diverse faces on an organization’s website without concomitant shifts in outreach or recruitment — are a common misstep. Another is focusing too much on increasing the number of people of color hired, instead of investigating why the numbers are so low and addressing the root causes, says Charles “Chas” Lopez, vice president for diversity and inclusion at Earthjustice, a San Francisco–based environmental law nonprofit.
Mary Scoonover, executive vice president of the California-based conservation non-profit Resources Legacy Fund, says her organization has, since inception, focused on broadening, ethnically and economically, the groups and leaders who advocate for conservation. But they decided 10 years ago they needed to do more to diversify their board and staff.

First and foremost, Northern internationalization must address local human rights priorities, not Northern priorities for the South. All human rights are equal, but they are not equally resonant or strategic in every context. Thus, when selecting issues to tackle, Northern groups must take the lead from the South. The costs of getting it wrong are greatest there and Southern advocates are more likely to look well beyond narrow, issue-specific and short-term successes to the larger and longer-term political, economic and social transformations. Southern rights advocates’ earlier attention to economic and social rights and strategic alliances with domestic social change movements—of the poor, landless, indigenous peoples, labor, environmental activists, to name a few—are evidence of this.

The Signal Code: Ethical Obligations for Humanitarian Information Activities translates and applies the foundational sources of ethical humanitarian practice to humanitarian information activities, such as mobile devices, WiFi provision, data collection, storage and analysis, and biometric registration tools. This document represents the first effort to provide humanitarian practitioners and researchers with comprehensive ethical guidance for this increasingly commonplace and critical area of humanitarian practice.

The problems are worsened by the unequal power dynamics in the offices of multinational media that employ “local staff” to provide translation, conduct research, and navigate complex bureaucracies, but pay them a fraction of what their foreign colleagues earn. In China, these “news assistants” are mostly young women. This pattern is mirrored in other countries, where the pool of those with the English-language skills needed for the job often skew female. “Many people, especially those with real regional and local knowledge, are not hired on proper terms and have little or no recourse to the law or to union support, or even just commonsense support and mentoring,” says Didi Kirsten Tatlow, a Hong Kong-born journalist.

Maciej Ceglowski, who runs a grassroots group called Tech Solidarity that has organized events with tech workers around the country, doubts the possibility of a worker-driven uprising. “Getting from griping to organizing seems to be an insurmountable step,” he says. “I feel like the closest we came was around the travel ban, when people were really agitated and it was their coworkers and families on the line.”
Without a realistic chance to effect change, “It's superhuman to ask people to organize around high ethical principles at the risk of their livelihood,” Ceglowski says. Big tech poses other roadblocks. “These organizations are big enough that people can rationalize they are working for a good subgroup of it,” Ceglowski says.

We also provide data as workers, and this data has value. Our CVs, biometric data such as fingerprints or iris scans, geographical locations, interpersonal networks – as well as the abundant data mined from us as employers monitor our workflows and even our keystrokes – can be sold and analysed for use in marketing, advertising and HR. For example, U.S. call centre employees at an international banking giant have reported that analytics software monitored their every word and scored them on the friendliness of their tone. The bank used this information to judge workers' performance, and a bad score could cause financial harm, discipline or even termination. Workers said there was little to no recourse to correct mis-scorings, even though it was the software that had failed to recognise certain speech patterns

Offering extremely candid comments from mainstream journalists, the report provides a snapshot of an industry caught between the pressure to deliver page views, the impulse to cover manipulators and “trolls,” and the disgust (expressed in interviewees’ own words) of accidentally propagating extremist ideology.
(...)
As social and digital media are leveraged to reconfigure the information landscape, Phillips argues that this new domain requires journalists to take what they know about abuses of power and media manipulation in traditional information ecosystems; and apply and adapt that knowledge to networked actors, such as white nationalist networks online.

Ehrenreich contemplates with some satisfaction not just the approach of her own death but also the passing of her generation. As the boomers have aged, denial of death, she argues, has moved to the center of American culture, and a vast industrial ecosystem has bloomed to capitalize on it. Across twelve chapters, Ehrenreich surveys the health care system, the culture of old age, the world of “mindfulness,” and the interior workings of the body itself, and finds a fixation on controlling the body, encouraged by cynical and self-interested professionals in the name of “wellness.” Without opposing reasonable, routine maintenance, Ehrenreich observes that the care of the self has become a coercive and exploitative obligation: a string of endless medical tests, drugs, wellness practices, and exercise fads that threaten to become the point of life rather than its sustenance. Someone, obviously, is profiting from all this.

These new threats have arisen because there are increasing attempts to provide a ‘scholarly’ veneer to what are otherwise hateful ideologies. At a time when there are concerted efforts to decolonize academia, there is concurrent rise of colonial nostalgia and white supremacy among some academics, who are supported by and end up lending support to the escalating far-right movements globally who misuse notions of free speech and academic freedom to further their agendas and attack higher education. Critical scholars thus need to hold accountable fellow academics, academic publishers, and universities in order to protect academic integrity and scholarship in an era when free speech is misused to silence the pursuit of scholarly rigor and ethical engagement.

Replicating interaction effects from 22 papers in top political science journals, a study finds that core assumptions often fail in practice, and many papers based on interaction models are modeling artifacts or are at best highly model dependent https://t.co/uqsRib2WZgpic.twitter.com/Rucs8SodJ7

— Nicole Janz (@PolSciReplicate) May 19, 2018

10 facts about digital interventions and behaviour change-new @girleffect& @NewKnowOrg research featured at @devex webinar https://t.co/fL2xwd1Q3q#devexlive 1/2 pic.twitter.com/iIvtfOMiW1

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) May 23, 2018

Girl Effect unearthed numerous insights into how digital interventions work and what works best, along with more surprising findings such as the impact on silent users or ‘lurkers’, and how avatars and profile photos can prompt change.

Here are 30+ studies on the economics of education and health that I've encountered and found interesting recently.

Several male scientists have asked recently what they can do to be better allies for women in science. I’m making this thread to collect possible answers & examples. If you have tips, advice, requests, examples etc. please feel free to add to this thread (or @ me & I’ll add it).

— Iris van Rooij (@IrisVanRooij) May 16, 2018

“Moocs are a failed product, at least for the goals we had set for ourselves,” said Shen, who was in India earlier this month. “Our mission is to bring relevant education which advances people in careers and socio-economic activities, and MOOCs aren't the way."

As anthropological research suggests the unintended afterlives of their projects, too, are related to broader issues in international development. In my view, this is less about these organizations’ alternative ethical foundations – the genealogies of their visions for development – but about systemic inequality in the development sector, the rise of development bureaucracy and the continuous expansion of neoliberal managerial practices.

Since the publication of my investigation into corruption in UNHCR Sudan on May 15, I've been contacted by numerous other refugees, as well as current & former UN staff, all backing it up. Really hoping things get better for the refugees on the ground. https://t.co/InAdunmxyP

— Sally Hayden (@sallyhayd) May 27, 2018

The donkeys, bought in neighbouring Tanzania, were given to residents of a village in Gitega province as part of a project by a local NGO to help women and children transport agricultural products, water or wood.
However, a presidential adviser described the project as "an insult to the nation".
Gabby Bugaga, spokesman for the Senate president, also wrote on Twitter the French were "taking us for donkeys".
"Be honest, is the donkey a symbol of a quality or a flaw," he wrote.
Donkeys are not indigenous to Burundi.
On Sunday, Agriculture Minister Deo Guide Rurema asked a local administrator to "facilitate the immediate withdrawal of all donkeys that have been distributed ... without respecting the technical procedure of the distribution of exotic animals".

Philip Kleinfeld spent five weeks reporting from inside the peacekeeping mission in CAR. His three-part series looks at UN operations in one of the world’s most neglected and least understood conflicts, the violence that hobbles humanitarian efforts, and rape victims left to fend for themselves long after initial revelations of their abuse by peacekeepers faded.

this project explores three alternative visions for humanitarian action:
The new humanitarian basics calls for a rescoping of the concept of humanitarian crisis and the humanitarian sector’s role in it.
Network humanitarianism challenges the notion of a humanitarian ‘system’ as a structured architecture led by the UN, and instead envisions it as a system of distributed governance.
The 'humanitarian anchor' outlines a social economy approach to humanitarian action that addresses the urgent and growing need for meaningful solutions in protracted crises and caters to the aspirations of affected people.

Humanitarian reform efforts in recent decades have underperformed because they have focused on enhancing coordination without realigning funding incentives. The predominant business model in the humanitarian sector encourages UN agencies to conflate their designated normative and technical leadership functions with their own programmatic fundraising in ways that directly impede cohesive, end-user-centered humanitarian response.

#Innovation gets tossed around a lot in aid - but what does it really mean to incorporate innovation in humanitarian work? @nattyray11 + a team of experts answer just that question in 'Managing Humanitarian Innovation' --> https://t.co/n0Ft2HvjSJpic.twitter.com/EiTfeqX9Wo

— HHI Signal Program (@HHI_Signal) May 31, 2018

Growth and influence are not goals in themselves, certainly not in charities. If you have lost your moral compass, your growth and influence are built on very shaky foundations. Dominic Nutt, a former head of media, reports the bizarre objective among senior SCF-UK executives to “take down Oxfam.” What kind of human rights organisation wants to “take down” another important charity? The same one in which a senior executive asked me at a meeting with other NGOs, “It there anyone here we should poach?”
Effective international cooperation is about putting the least powerful first—about transferring power. But at SCF-UK I heard NGO partners from the Global South referred to by leaders as “crazies,” and other charities badmouthed openly as the collegial practices of the charity sector were arrogantly ignored. It is not always easy to work in coalition with people from your own country, let alone from other cultures, but respect is a sine qua non of this type of work.

Safeguarding cannot exist without a concerted commitment to diversity and the systematic inclusion of local and national staff in leadership and decision-making positions.
Safeguarding cannot exist without coming to terms with how gender and race intersect in the humanitarian space.
Safeguarding cannot exist without trust and a belief that the system will provide adequate protection. Safeguarding must be independent of human resources functions.
Safeguarding requires an embedded policy of care that originates in local and national offices, supported by headquarters. Trainings and policies that are developed must come from the people most affected, with the participation of every staff member, from the country director to the chauffeurs, and every person in the organizational chain.
The aid sector must shift its thinking away from the tired and over-utilized paradigm that has always gone in one direction — from developed nations to developing nations of the global South.

For anyone who doesn't want their old shirts, pants or dresses to end up in a landfill, clothing donation bins sound like a win-win-win solution: the donor gets to declutter, the charity operating the bin gets to resell the clothing to fund good deeds, and a shopper on a budget gets to buy affordable clothes.
But in reality, the path your worn-out jeans take isn't so straight, and doesn't always benefit the people you may think.

Yikes, World Bank research literally funded by Uber about Uber. https://t.co/pYoqUj4vcR

— Justin Sandefur (@JustinSandefur) May 31, 2018

The 2018 Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals: an all-new visual guide to data and development

Extraordinary. Homicides in Karachi have dropped from 2,507 murders in 2013 to 365 in 2017. That's an 85 percent drop in a city that once had the highest homicide rate among the world's megacities (10+ million ppl). [Source: CPLC, h/t @norbalm] pic.twitter.com/sgEba5nSDX

— Asad Hashim (@AsadHashim) May 26, 2018

Cloudwalk, a company based in South China's Guangdong Province, has signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement with the Zimbabwean government for a mass facial recognition project, according to a statement sent to the Global Times by Cloudwalk on Thursday.
The project will help the government build a smart financial service network as well as introduce intelligent security applications at airports, railway stations and bus stations, said the Science and Technology Daily.
The company will also help build a national facial database in Zimbabwe, the newspaper reported Thursday.
"Zimbabwe has been suffering social security issues, including robberies and shootings, so the system could help in this area," said Shen Xiaolei, an associate research fellow at the Institute of West Asian and African Studies in Beijing.

In the future ppls will be targeted and selected using facial recognition from a live feed in a disaster zone. Cash will be directly transferred to their accounts. We’ll use other forms of AI to track their expenditure and include it in their ‘file’ for future disasters. Discuss https://t.co/q9vW2jM0I9

— Paula Gil (@chicledeuva) May 28, 2018

“What anthropologists do that bugs the heck out of me is critique. Be constructive for a change. … Why can’t an anthropologist learn how to contribute towards design? Learn how to contribute towards processes of co-production? Learn how to make human beings actually matter in the process by which decisions are made?”

By our agreement, [TOMS] could have chosen to remain anonymous on the study; they didn’t…For every TOMS, there are many more, both secular and faith-based, who are reticent to have the impacts of the program scrutinized carefully by outside researchers…many organizations today continue to avoid rigorous evaluation, relying on marketing cliches and feel-good giving to bring in donor cash. TOMS is different…
Will TOMS’ new methods work better? Only randomization will tell. Fortunately, TOMS is committed to doing just that.

Not everyone shares the concern with salvation at the heart of Catholic social teaching, but it does offer a rich vision of human freedom, one that contains both the material and the ethical. By foregrounding the ethical, it recasts development as a moral project, requiring policymakers, institutions and everyone concerned with the enterprise of human fulfilment to reflect critically on their aims. It raises questions about the extent to which a programme or policy furthers ‘the good’. The process of reflection and critical deliberation is also key for Sen’s vision of development and human freedom.
Development must be fundamentally based on a ground-up conversation between people, wrestling about what matters: what non-material things matter, and in what balance with the material. The questions of ‘what is a good life’ and ‘how ought one to live’ must be perennial concerns of any endeavour aimed at human fulfilment, and must be central to both theory and policy of development. While the answers to these questions might stymie an unequivocal response, they are always worth asking if development is to enable human flourishing.

Sad & symbolic of our times: 10 person panel, 9 persons visible in the room (in this pic); the inflation of panels has become one of the key aspects of preventing meaningful communication & discussions in many sectors, including #globaldev& #higheredpic.twitter.com/Ud5hNXVSbd

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) May 28, 2018

This only shows about half of the room-mind boggling to image how many people hours of #globaldev time are spent on meetings like this... https://t.co/UeFEsU8Iv8

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) May 31, 2018

The long conversation is essentially a relay of timed two-person dialogues around a central theme.
The first person interviews the second, asking a series of questions (some predetermined, some spontaneous), then the first person exits, the second person becomes the interviewer, and a third person takes the stage.

What it does suggest, however, is that when it comes to giving, the CEO approach is one in which there is no apparent incompatibility between being generous, seeking to retain control over what is given, and the expectation of reaping benefits in return. This reformulation of generosity – in which it is no longer considered incompatible with control and self-interest – is a hallmark of the “CEO society”: a society where the values associated with corporate leadership are applied to all dimensions of human endeavour.

The pressing question now is how can we sustain and broaden the mass feminist renaissance as resistance, while rejecting the logic of neoliberal feminism. How can we maintain feminism as a threat to the many forces that continue to oppress, exclude and disenfranchise whole segments of society?
#MeToo has carried out important cultural work. At its best, it has exposed how male entitlement saturates our culture. Ultimately, though, this will not suffice. Exposure is not enough for ensuring systemic change.

She is O.K. in principle with not being liked: she thinks that the desire to be liked is something that women need to get over. A male friend of hers told her that Ifemelu, the main character of “Americanah,” was Chimamanda without her warmth, and she bristled at this, even though she thought it might be true. Why the hell are you judging her like that? she thought. If Ifemelu were a male, would you expect and want warmth? All the same, it is painful to be attacked. “Ta-Nehisi Coates said to me once that what hurt him the most, becoming successful, was how much it was black intellectuals who seemed to be out for him, and I know what that’s like. I told him that there’s a circle of Nigerians who are resentful of my international success, and it’s very hurtful, because I want my people to wish me well.”

As a result of armed and violent civil conflicts, direct and indirect incidents have targeted medical education's components including medical schools and faculties, teaching hospitals, libraries, professors and medical students across several countries located in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America.
These attacks were outlined in a pilot report of the International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations (IFMSA) entitled Attacks on Medical Education, published last month.

As online spaces are increasingly used for public scholarship, and as many aspects of work in higher education rely on an individual's distinct skills and reputation, women in higher education cannot avoid using technology or social media, nor can they abandon their identity online. Keeping silent or avoiding online spaces is therefore not an option for most academics. And as public and networked scholarship stands to make positive and sizable contributions to our societies, we must recognize that encountering unsavory audiences online is a fact of life and must be dealt with.

Prof. Frances Negron-Muntaner, among many other collaborators, introduces to Caribbean Syllabus: Life and Debt in the Caribbean https://t.co/2xk5g5t7Mt

— ILAS-Columbia (@ILASColumbia) May 22, 2018

My last imagine of Hanoi was this tint wrinkled old woman in a log peasant skirt speeding off on her bicycle, holding a small tree full of oranges with one hand steadily steering with the other. Such are the images of travel that stay with you forever (p.84).

Looking back on six years in UNICEF, I feel to be in the right place. I made many friends; my work pleases me, although Saturdays and Sundays have lost their traditional meaning. These are often travel days or there is stuff to do in the office. (p.160)

In Nairobi, I spoke with very poor children in a community school who might otherwise have been in the street. My diary explains, “I spoke with them and enjoyed it”. That, I am afraid, sounds very much like development tourism indeed. But my diary called me to order a few days later, and this is the gist of it: that I should teach and motivate – and give something back for what I have learned from them. Even this sounds hollow. (p.189).

I really enjoyed reading Mohr’s memoir precisely because of his insights into regular UNICEF work that keeps the organization going. Partly because of his extensive diary keeping he manages to go back to small details and daily routines within the bigger picture of UNICEF under Jim Grant’s leadership and the monumental global changes that happened at the turn of the new millennium.
A Destiny in the Making also confirms the importance of memoirs and storytelling as important avenues in writing about international development differently, personally and historically.
Mohr’s memoir is another reminder of what a powerful and lasting impression UNICEF work has made on many people-inside the organization and its impact on children around the globe.

“I think if you went to the Times newspaper there would be people who misused their power. Certainly in my time in DfID there was an ambassador who was having affairs with lots of different people,” said Short, adding that the whole of government needed to have better codes of conduct.
Pressed by Pauline Latham MP, who said that exploitation by charity workers often involved the most vulnerable people in the world, Short added she was not suggesting such cases should not be taken seriously.
“I think probably people quite rightly expect more of people working in development than they do of people working in other fields. I’m not in any way trying too belittle taking it seriously, but I did think the hysterical response to the Times reporting – as though everyone working in development was morally disgusting and everyone was sexually abusing everyone – was way exaggerated and disproportionate,” she said.
Short, who was secretary of international development for six years, said she had not considered herself responsible for the management of NGOs, which received less funding from the UK government at that time. “I always had a sense of responsibility for funding and management of the money but I didn’t know much about the internal management of those organisations, which I think is normal,” she said.

At least nine humanitarian compounds have been looted in recent weeks amid a new wave of violence in the Central African Republic's second-largest city of Bambari – prompting many NGOs to temporarily suspend or curtail assistance to an already-struggling civilian population.
"We reduced hugely the operations," said Baptiste Hanquart, spokesman for a coalition of international NGOs in CAR. "The situation is really bad."
The retreat of humanitarian aid risks creating further deprivation and hardship for one of the world's poorest countries.

The funding context is complex and difficult, as increasingly charities are encouraged to bid against each other for limited funds, and to compete on the doorstep. The struggle to survive and demonstrate impact tends to harm rather than help attempts to act in the interests of staff and beneficiaries. The temptation to focus on superficial gloss rather than profound challenges is one to which no charity is immune, and most have, on occasion, fallen.

Why is the aid industry so dysfunctional? @PabloYanguas argues it's because of the lies we tell ourselves about aid. Including the lies that the industry tells to itself. https://t.co/LT6BySQBEUpic.twitter.com/mO7uY1ctd5

— NPR Goats & Soda (@NPRGoatsandSoda) June 4, 2018

There is one glaring problem: the SDGs are pushing an agenda carefully calibrated to avoid upsetting the world’s dictators, kleptocrats, and this century’s worst human rights offenders.
(...)
Today, dictatorships like Algeria, Belarus, China, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe are part of the Open Working Group tasked with implementing and monitoring SDG progress. Make no mistake: the future that these regimes and their backers want is one where repression and blatant looting is permitted so long as superficial “development” gains are made and quantified, and so long as pesky issues like respect for democratic rights and the holding of free and fair elections are sidestepped entirely.

The photo in question shows DeGeneres posing with 14 African children, and was tweeted by the talk show host with the caption, "Thank you to all of the amazing people I met on my trip, who helped make it so special."

So, when is it appropriate for donors to brand their aid? In response to large-scale humanitarian crises it makes sense for donors to brand aid to improve their reputations and increase domestic support. In these situations, it matters more that donor countries feel confident that they have the support of their people to provide substantial aid and that they need not worry about political blowback.
Surveys and reports measuring local governance, like Demographic and Health Surveys, also benefit from outside branding because such branding lends credibility that the outcomes of these surveys and reports are not controlled by the government.
Outside of these two narrow circumstances, and others determined exclusively by context, development aid should be deployed for systemic impact—to provide the tangible benefits to the local people and the intangible benefit of strengthening the social compact between the state and its people.

Informed consent by research participants requires a complex negotiation under any circumstances, but the history of experimentation Pailey and others describe too often intensify community concerns and negative responses to certain medical interventions.
How will the questions about its efficacy be properly explained? Under what conditions can an "Ebola contact" refuse the vaccine? Under what conditions will the vaccine be contraindicated for people who have been close contacts with Ebola sufferers, and how will this be explained?
(...)
They starkly contrast with the messages that need to be communicated to the communities facing an imminent threat from Ebola. That is: this vaccine is likely highly effective in the current formulation, but this element is still under investigation; only close contacts will receive the vaccination; and it is possible that some people will fall ill after they have been vaccinated.
But these do not make for catchy, succinct press releases. They do not fit neatly into an outbreak narrative of heroic rescue and scientific progress.

Market-expanding digital ecosystems are the“anti-silos.” By integrating efforts, all partners share in and derive value. They enjoy wide access to resources, talent and innovation, which lowers individual investments. And connecting more people means creating more ways to scale single solutions.

So I agree 100% of cash transfers; but I also feel like the sector is overlooking the way in which cash modalities potentially feed into the war on cash, surveillance capitalism, and neoliberal approaches to public service removal. Or maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places? https://t.co/c1o4b1t5Vy

— Paul Currion (@paulcurrion) June 4, 2018

Many authorities are realising that initiatives like this are producing positive outcomes. But they need to translate this into practical local support.
The first step is for authorities to recognise the value of what slum residents are doing in their neighbourhoods. The next step would be to build on these collective activities rather than supplanting them.

The romance between the ultra-rich and the domain of popular culture is hardly new. But the recent dance of ultra-rich kids in this domain gives pause. It provides a rare glimpse into the ways that a new generation of ultra-rich kids might increasingly marshal popular forms to advance subtle but dangerous conceptions of power and privilege. These “babies of neoliberalism” give gloss, poetry and cuteness to a deadly ideology. This cuteness is especially pernicious when one takes into account the fact that one of their parents became associated with the mysterious “cabal,” a niche group of oil importers who wield enormous political power because they determine the price of fuel.

For Ms. Mbabazi, the teenage years are a time for people to “live their lives and do whatever they wish.” But young people face great difficulty finding work in Uganda.
“The country is in trouble because you have all of these young people looking for work with too few jobs,” she said. “It’s going to be hard for the young people to actually be young in Uganda.”
But young people do not have to be a “burden” to the country, she said: Their energy can help solve problems. For her part, Ms. Mbabazi is not waiting for opportunities to come to her.
“I will start something for myself,” she said. “I will use my brain. I will use my talent. I will use my hands. I will go out and do something for myself. I will not wait for some company to create a job that will receive 700 applicants for that one job.”

But whereas mercenary campaigns in Rhodesia and Angola had been haphazard affairs, managed by a loose network of like-minded individuals and undertaken without clear profit motives, PMFs grew into sizable corporations with hundreds of employees serving lucrative contracts in several countries at the same time. They raked in billions of dollars, often with little oversight or accountability. Once mercenaries had decamped to fulfill quixotic dreams. Now they fueled a hyper-efficient, privatized war machine.

I have lots of issues with short-term missions, but one of the biggest is the damage it causes. You have people come in and they’re intoxicated with this new environment and there’s so much poverty around them that they’ve never seen before because they’ve never left their own backyards. They feel like they can help and they make all these empty promises and then they leave and forget. They put their pictures on the wall and pat themselves on the back, and it creates a real systemic issue. Especially where I live, which is in East Africa, where it’s now normal for Christians to come over for a few weeks and just give out candy and money and whatever and then peace out. It’s not helping anyone except themselves.

As you will see, deciding to publish the book, to distribute it, to make it a completed story for other people to read made content choices very difficult for me. Writing for ourselves can be powerful and healing, but it’s private, it stays inside. Publishing and inviting an audience can tear us down with self-doubt, wondering what “they” will think of our lives put on a page. Will they judge me? Will they understand my actions? My inactions?

My last side project before quitting https://t.co/1ihnIEPFmt was to convert my blog compilation ebook into a paperback. And it finally came out today. Available globally on Amazon or as a free PDF on the kiwanja website. https://t.co/ZtIJRMv9H9#globaldev#innovationpic.twitter.com/FWJIBg9P5Y

— Ken Banks (@kiwanja) June 6, 2018

Soon after, Mills announced on Twitter that she was taking a break from YouTube and social media. She couldn’t keep up with the pressure, and told her fans that while she was safe, and in good hands, she needed time to recuperate and remember why she loved making videos in the first place.
(...)
Not knowing how YouTube’s monetization system works, while also battling fears of videos being suppressed and less frequent uploads hindering their careers, are major anxieties. And like most anxieties that go untreated, they build up to a breaking point.

The new study’s lead researcher, Andrew Rundle, said that responsibility for staying healthy can’t just fall to the employee. He argues that employers have a responsibility to both inform their employees that frequent business travel could lead to poorer health, and offer reasonable policies to mitigate this. These include stress-management programs, cognitive behavioral therapy, and ensuring accommodations come with well-equipped fitness facilities and healthy food options.

I was truly saddened to hear about Kate Spade's suicide. It hit me hard, again, to see the human suffering. So the following critique is not about her. It's about the @nytimes coverage.

— Farai Chideya (@farai) June 6, 2018

One of my informal department tasks is helping our students transition to work. I don't know how it became my task but that is neither here nor there. I do it most often for sociology masters students but also some undergrads. A few things:

— Tressie Mc (@tressiemcphd) June 1, 2018

“What if we think about the mother in a village in rural India with the same kind of sophistication as we think about the upper-middle class Chevy buyer in the suburbs of New York?” The organizations and companies that are applying this consumer-based approach to development have the potential to transform the choices available to people living in some of the most impoverished parts of the world.

At a time when technology grants individuals the power to broadcast their aspirations, and organizations the power to learn more than ever about the communities they strive to serve, the development industry’s power and accountability structures can still constrict organizations’ ability to act on that information. Donor-driven health and development programs still tend to privilege risk-avoidance and control over responsiveness to a broad and diverse base of development “consumers,” said Karl Hoffman, president and CEO of PSI.

In Afghanistan for example, international organizations too often approach their work as though it’s being done in the absence of a state, said Rula Ghani, the country’s first lady.

#GlobalDev becoming more "market-driven" is not an inevitability I'm willing to accept. I wish more people in #aid would question this trend especially those that serve and/or are part of #civilsociety. The extracting, exploiting, polluting private sector does not hold "the key."

— Jennifer Lentfer (@intldogooder) June 13, 2018

As much as moving away from the ‘beneficiary’ logic is a timely debate, relying uncritically on data-driven public private partnerships to fix deep-rooted inequalities, political decisions to ignore evidence and to create a new class of empowered consumers will more likely create the next facebook-like scandal with sensitive health data rather than a transformation into a participatory, fair and sustainable future.

But what makes the aid sector unique are the opportunities it presents for people who have had their agency removed – vulnerable women, refugees, displaced people and others – to be exploited and abused. These women are overwhelmingly women of colour.

Once you have your wake up call and get over you guilt, you will start to see the world without the rose coloured glasses. Your position and the position of everyone around you in this world becomes apparent and you can begin to use your privilege to advance what is right in everything you do. When you begin to do this, the racial illiteracy, cultural incompetence and inequity becomes clear.
I have met too many women of colour who have left their jobs and are fed up of the development sector, because they are tired of working in a system that refuses to confront its own identity and practices while it preaches to others – and I don’t necessarily want to be one of them.

For as long as these inequalities persist, I will always want to do development work. I just don’t necessarily want to do it with the people who bring it here, until they muster some difficult introspection on how the industry treats workers who look like me.

With these hindrances and limitations to how far I could hold him accountable, I decided after one year to leave IOM. I took advice to leave well rather than try flogging a dead horse called ‘due diligence and justice’ but I was damn depressed. Speaking with other colleagues I was aware that the organization with less than 30 percent (I am putting it on the high) women working in an industry where women are the majority affected, could not afford a female minority justice worker. So with #AidToo I hope that this conversation brings forth the truth about racism and abuse in the development sector. Those in charge need to work towards solutions and inclusion- not just about numbers and getting minorities and women in positions of leadership, but ensuring that there’s genuine policy, practices and avenues to prevent such abuse of power.

Despite the austerity measures in place in some areas of Europe, the increase in funding for militarizing border security seems to be limitless. Frontex, which now has new powers to buy its own equipment, could see its current annual budget of 320 million euros ($375 million) increase almost sixfold to 1.87 billion euros ($2.19 billion) by 2027.
(...)
While the proposed increases of the E.U. border security and control budget clearly respond to a number of factors, the increasing role, funding and support for industry will ensure that they become one of the few beneficiaries from the refugee “crisis.” Ultimately this is not just a concern about corporate influence but also about entrenching a militarized response to a complex crisis. This will do little to tackle the root causes of the refugee crisis but rather provides another arena for profiteering from human suffering.

We conclude that sub-Saharan Africa has three critical deficits: low levels and poor quality of education, low levels of electrification, and low levels of domestic revenue mobilization. These deficits are at the core of all other problems on the continent and—if left unaddressed—will make sustained development in sub-Saharan Africa nothing more than wishful thinking

It isn’t opportunism that’s driving the “brain drain,” doctors insist. In fact, many of them who settle abroad return frequently to offer medical expertise, training and help in the land of their birth. Several others study abroad and return to Nigeria to practice medicine, only to face frustration.
(...)
Along with family physician Dr. Okechukwu Ekemezie, Elenwoke helped launch Docotal Health two years ago. A global network of Nigerian doctors who perform online medical consultations free of charge, Docotal Health is a way for Nigerian doctors to help at home from afar. Elenwoke stresses that while donating money and resources toward Nigeria’s health care system is helpful, the country’s medical problems will be settled only by long-term planning.

What drives @PKleinfeld to seek out conflicts overlooked by many media organisations and to report stories few others bother to cover? Hear from him directly on our first Reporter’s View: https://t.co/ab5JEK4bVGpic.twitter.com/QAnGrsUp6Y

— IRIN News (@irinnews) June 11, 2018

And in my experience I do think women in particular are often more collaborative, as a strength: a lot of amazing women I meet are often not as comfortable about talking about themselves and about their achievements as their male colleagues; it’s about gender norms, and cultural norms. In my experience, women are not often not culturally encouraged to stand out, to stake a claim and say ‘this is the piece of work that I did’, or ‘this is my achievement’; my female colleagues and peers have spoken about not wanting to grab attention for themselves or be seen to be ‘bragging’ or making themselves stand out, often preferring to see it as a collaborative effort rather than an individual achievement.
And that often means that the faces of humanitarian innovations are not women, especially women of colour.

Kakuma camp is a vibrant place, full of life, love, business, solidarity and creativity. On the surface, the TEDx event may therefore seem commendable. People who live in permanent situations of displacement should not be relegated to the status of “refugee victims”, but have their voices heard. However, doing this through TEDx as a media brand, which transports the values of neoliberal globalisation to the site of the refugee camp, is both cynical and harmful. The fact of the UNHCR organising this event shows the extent to which humanitarian agencies are abrogating the political responsibilities of states and instead using their influence, standing and resources to offer dubious entrepreneurial fixes.

But political satire on the African continent now is moving to the canvas, television and computer screens, counting on the much harder-to-control social media share button that didn’t exist before. In Accra, Ghana, 28-year-old satirist Bright Ackwerh uses caricatures to highlight aspects of Ghanaian life often missed in the simplistic global narrative of the country as a stable, fast-growing economy. Nigeria’s biggest television station, Channels TV, airs a satirical show called The Other News that mocks the corruption and poor governance that hobbles the country. And Soi, observers say, is helping show Kenyan society a mirror.

Robert Lough told the HPR that it is valuable to understand the perspectives of people who accept these volunteers. “Across the board if you ask [members of communities being visited by voluntourists], ‘Would you like these [unskilled] volunteers in the community or would you rather they didn’t come?’ The answer is always ‘Yes, we want them.’” The voluntourism industry, if relatively futile in it’s main initiatives, is not usually some evil scheme in disguise.
When voluntourists come in as a group of outsiders and fail to pay attention to the community’s needs and reactions it can have devastating effects; however, the idea of a group of people caring enough to travel around the world has positive impacts. Lough says members of these communities “often talk about feeling validated and feeling like someone cares, which has tangible value.” These positive experiences can also get voluntourists on a road to making real, meaningful change through long-term, skilled volunteering later in life.

“Do we want more tourists? Maybe no,” said Balinese community activist Viebeke Lengkong last year. “It is a question of what kind of services we can actually provide for millions of tourists. Bali is in the middle of a water crisis. Bali is drying up.”
It’s reaching a breaking point. “The last time I went, I swore never again,” a friend recently told me, horrified by the number of people and amount of trash he saw. On his next vacation, he visited a small, relatively unknown island off Bali’s coast, thinking it would be quieter. It wasn’t. Tourists arrived by the boatload on the small island’s shores.
Bali is one among many places to feel the ill effects of mass tourism.
(...)
As Fodor’s suggests, don’t go to places that explicitly don’t want tourists, such as Venice and the Galapagos. Don’t go to places with economies that are overly dependent on tourism, such as Bali and Aruba. Don’t go to places unless you have a connection to a community there, suggests travel writer Bani Amor. And don’t go to volunteer or seek life-changing experiences abroad at the expense of the exotic “other”; such opportunities exist closer to home.

The piece in question, Demoncrazy, shows topless women challenging “the besuited, middle-aged, male image of power with which they grew up”, as the artist’s text explains. Which makes the complaints of Centre Party MP Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson all the more ironic.

The tools for making meetings work well are incredibly simple, well known and rarely applied; for one reason: respect.
If we respected our colleagues time (and the people paying for it) we wouldn’t schedule meetings without a purpose or turn up late. If we respected the views of everyone present, we would ensure they all had a chance to contribute. If we respected those tasked with writing up summaries, we would make sure our comments were short and clear.
Most people would be horrified to think they routinely show a lack of respect for their colleagues. But wasting their most precious resource — time- is the definition of disrespect.

According to a new paper published to be published tomorrow in Science (link is external), there is a quantifiable answer: roughly 25% of people need to take a stand before large-scale social change occurs. This idea of a social tipping point applies to standards in the workplace, and any type of movement or initiative.
(...)
While shifting people’s underlying beliefs can be challenging, Centola’s results offer new evidence that a committed minority can change what behaviors are seen as socially acceptable, potentially leading to pro-social outcomes like reduced energy consumption, less sexual harassment in the workplace, and improved exercise habits. Conversely, it can also prompt large-scale anti-social behaviors such as internet trolling, internet bullying, and public outbursts of racism.

extremely unpopular opinion:

a lot of what gets called “self-care” these days is just bourgeois luxury-fetishism that keeps us participating heartily in capitalism in order to make us feel better about having to participate in capitalism to survive

— a confused fish (@deetskies) June 5, 2018

Résumés that list proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite, excellent organizational skills, and core competencies acquired during volunteer service in a gap year disintegrate into infinitesimally small pieces until they vanish completely and become one with the colorless mist you see floating above your heads.

Sexual harassment is pervasive throughout academic science in the United States, driving talented researchers out of the field and harming others’ careers, finds a report from the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington DC. The analysis concludes that policies to fight the problem are ineffective because they are set up to protect institutions, not victims — and that universities, funding agencies, scientific societies and other organizations must take stronger action.

There are plenty of other professions where we see conditions much worse than in academia, observes @filvos. Critiques of higher education tend to frame academics as victims without agency #acceleratedacademy

— Mark Carrigan (@mark_carrigan) June 8, 2018

I would also hope that along the way you might consider the marginalized and obfuscated sources of moral philosophy, theology, political economy, historical sociology, political sociology, foreign policy analysis, hermeneutics, literature and anthropology. I would hope that you would realize that the sources most valorized by the academy tend to be racialized, gendered, classed, nationalized and (western) Christianized. I would further hope that you might at some point consider that living knowledge traditions are as theoretical as well-worn books. And it would be fantastic if you could gather all your thoughts and arguments in the various fora of IR, as well as in other places.
I am suggesting all this because to canonize IR theory is to obfuscate the field’s roots in imperial administration and to reproduce a set of concepts and narratives that are all predicated upon race, but unspeakably so. Such a canonization is therefore intellectually myopic, intellectually inadequate, and ultimately super-boring. I don’t really stress about the question as to whether IR is worth saving etc. because I know a lot of excellent early career and senior scholars who frequent its fora regularly. I guess I am suggesting that our field is at its best when approached as an applied studies rather than as a pretentious discipline.

While HAU’s Board of Trustees says the move is due to the publication’s growth, current and former journal staffers are blaming the broken free-access promise on what they describe as failed and even abusive leadership.

Priceless! A predatory journal says it likes my article on predatory publishers and wants me to "contribute other precious papers"pic.twitter.com/2FkOlfeuvv

— Liz Wager (@SideviewLiz) June 13, 2018

Generally speaking, I don’t like the word ‘trend’ and I genuinely believe that over the next 2-5 years many parameters will pretty much stay the same. I don’t really like talk about ‘revolutions’, ‘disruptions’ or claims about ‘innovations that will change X, Y or Z’. I also believe that many trends are actually macro trends about how life/work/the world are changing rather than changes that are unique to the aid industry. So when it comes to the organizational architecture of how development ‘works’, a lot of things will remain the same...BUT

I found it quite fascinating that of all automotive metaphors Malcolm Gladwell could have chosen (Tesla, Uber,…) he opts for upper-middle class Chevrolet consumers: “What if we think about the mother in a village in rural India with the same kind of sophistication as we think about the upper-middle class Chevy buyer in the suburbs of New York?” The organizations and companies that are applying this consumer-based approach to development have the potential to transform the choices available to people living in some of the most impoverished parts of the world.

The whistleblower claimed they felt unable to challenge the man "because he was quite senior".
"I felt that, with some of the older guys, there was definitely an abuse of power. They'd been there for a long time and took advantage of their exalted status as a Western aid worker," she said.
"There's definitely a feeling that certain predatory men were seen as too big to fail.
"You would often see men who were older, middle-aged, partying with much younger local girls. It was sexualised."

But with less money coming in, and with programmes greatly reduced, it says, “we need to be running a smaller infrastructure ... sadly the loss of some roles is inevitable as we cannot otherwise make savings of this scale”.
It adds: “We will seek to maintain our overall level of support for country programmes but narrow the range of support we offer within our themes of water, women, work and equality. In addition, from 2019 we will begin to reduce the number of countries in which we invest as a partner affiliate.”

So yes, abuse by an aid worker is different from abuse by someone, for instance, from the corporate sector. Whilst both must be held to account, the bar is set higher with aid workers because of the nature of what they do. So outrage is likely to be more vocal in these instances, as are calls for the sector to reform. And yet….is this assumed moral authority actually realistic in practice? The problem with arguing that all aid workers must act morally, all the time, is that it forgets that not every decision made or action taken by people in the sector is guided by purely moral, altruistic intentions. The image of the selfless, heroic aid worker unfortunately continues to dominate in the minds of the general public – at least in the western, aid giving world – even if it is regularly debunked by aid workers themselves.

We cannot spend more on our military than the next 10 nations combined while millions of Americans do not have food and housing and health care. It’s about time we got our national priorities right. That is why I voted against spending $716 billion on the military today.

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) June 18, 2018

“There’s certainly a pattern of saying one thing and having it be a pretext for something else in this administration,” said Sarah Dougherty, a senior fellow at Physicians for Human Rights. Dougherty explained that the withdrawal is disturbing because it dismantles certain humanitarian precepts the United States has been known to uphold for more than 70 years—precepts that the current administration can’t credibly maintain.

The Human Rights Council has undoubtedly failed to live up to its founding principles. But a US working from within would do better to push for positive change and prevent further backsliding on human rights than sitting on the side-lines. The remaining UNHRC members must now work harder than ever to prevent China and other authoritarian regimes from undermining human rights standards and push for the desperately needed reform of the council.

There are some key things that humanitarian and development agencies must avoid if they are to navigate this highly political area without compromising on their principles and harming the very people they exist to help. They must not:
(...)
Engage in refoulement (the forcible return of refugees), or involuntary returns of migrants in any situation. (...)
Engage in projects (or activities within wider projects) which offer humanitarian assistance or other aid to people which is contingent on them surrendering or limiting their rights, or making agreements which limit their future choices and may not be in their own best interests. (...)
Engage in projects where participants or beneficiaries are selected based on whether they are ‘potential migrants’, or report on indicators related to the number of migrants stopped due to programming (...)
Engage in projects with implicit or explicit migration-related objectives unless it’s clear that the activities are in their own right beneficial to the people they seek to help. Projects which aim to make migration safer, or offer sustainable and beneficial alternatives to migration without discouraging or preventing migration, may be justifiable. Nonetheless, great care should be taken to analyse and understand the potential consequences of involvement in such projects.
Engage in projects which support reintegration of returnees in their countries or locations of origin unless that return is voluntary and safe, and returnees have adequate protection (including from sufficient access by NGOs). (...)

We’re honoured to have won a #CannesLions for this video on the protection of health care.

Every day in war zones, hospitals provide life-saving care for anyone who needs it. They are #NotATarget. pic.twitter.com/YniPaidd9Y

— ICRC (@ICRC) June 20, 2018

NPR and the PBS series Frontline examined hundreds of pages of internal documents and emails. Rather than a well-orchestrated effort, they paint a picture of a relief agency in chaos, struggling with key contracts, basic supplies and even its own workforce.
(...)
When it came to getting the lights on, federal officials chose a contractor named Fluor — a company with global experience building power generation plants but little experience rebuilding the grids that distribute power to communities. Government sources said they went with Fluor because it was a company they trusted, but they also described weeks of bureaucratic delays as the company got up to speed.
But that wasn't all that was causing FEMA headaches. FEMA was struggling with its own staff. One internal staffing document reveals that more than a quarter of the staff FEMA hired to provide people assistance on the island was "untrained" and another quarter was "unqualified."

1. "Charities must engage with blockchain"https://t.co/VCq7Hzy6i0
2. but companies "may not have the charity sector’s best interests at heart"https://t.co/ZAiO4aXjUO
3. and "regulatory concerns and lack of confidence in the market" started to bite https://t.co/x9c2qsHJiA

— Paul Currion (@paulcurrion) June 20, 2018

Textbooks narrate history, science, technology, knowledge, homeland, citizenship and democracy from a male perspective. The scholarly pen, the scales of justice and the ploughs of industry are placed in the hands of men. Meanwhile, the stories of women and girls are told in their absence, represented through sub-texts, stereotypes and in passive contexts. A generation that is torn between slogans of equality on the one hand and the practices and performances that are rooted in gendered inequalities on the other might lead to revolt when its own belief systems are threatened by the contradictory realities of women’s and girls’ engagement and inclusion.

we changed our modus operandi and dropped the speed of delivery as an indicator of the innovation fund. We also pivoted from a focus on individual innovators and her ideas to investing in venture teams that bring diverse capabilities to the table including the abilities to: navigate power and politics, market the concept and raise follow-on resources, and operational dexterity to articulate a business model to deliver the solution at scale. From the get-go we agreed not to report vanity indicators. This includes the number of proposals received or ideas proposed at a given co-design event; the number of staff members and partners participating in innovation activities including trainings; the number of toolkits developed or the number of innovation blog posts published

Listening to @Prof_Karthik_M talk about a programme I’ve worked on for 6 years (which he evaluated with @singhabhi) that had no effect whatsoever. To rub things in a little further, he just said he couldn’t think of a title bleak enough to describe it

Fun times at #RISEConf2018pic.twitter.com/hFH2X6gbBd

— Susannah Hares (@Fihi_maFihi) June 21, 2018

Don’t just think about the qualities that you want in individual panelists or moderators; invite people who actually know each other. They’re used to having conversations together, they’re familiar with each other’s views, and they’re more likely to be comfortable debating and disagreeing respectfully.
If they haven’t connected before, have them spend some time getting to know each other. Even a quick email exchange followed by five minutes face-to-face backstage can help build rapport and give time to compare notes on what to cover (and avoid).

But we also see the need to diversify our event formats and challenge ourselves (and our peers) to reach a higher standard with these activities, which is why, with the help of our network of 40+ organizations and 200+ people, we produced this Crowdsourced Guide to Great Events.
After all, we all expend so much time and energy organizing and attending events, so why not think critically about how - through higher-quality events - we can have more impact?

This policy is a “living” document, and subject to refinement and expansion in the future. Last updated June 19, 2018.
We want XOXO to reflect the creative communities it showcases and celebrates. This policy serves as a list of our current inclusive production practices.

.@VIDA_lit ANNOUNCES the 2017 VIDA COUNT!@GrantaMag , @poetrymagazine, and @Tin_House continue to publish a range of voices@nybooks published a shockingly low 23.3% women

See all the #VIDACount numbers at: https://t.co/XfEj278QVm

— VIDA (@VIDA_lit) June 18, 2018

Organization after Social Media explores a range of social settings from arts and design, cultural politics, visual culture and creative industries, disorientated education and the crisis of pedagogy to media theory and activism. Lovink and Rossiter devise strategies of commitment to help claw ourselves out of the toxic morass of platform suffocation.

By using systematic search and screening techniques to populate the repository, which contains 4,205 development impact evaluations published between 1981 and September 2015, we can use the data to analyse the trends in impact evaluation research. Though we find early evidence of a plateau in the growth rate of development impact evaluations, the number of studies published between January 2010 and September 2015 account for almost two thirds of the total evidence base. Over half of all studies fall under health and education sectors, though we see in the current decade an emergence of studies in formerly unrepresented sectors. While development impact evaluations are concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America (60%), studies are increasingly conducted in underrepresented regions such as the Middle East and North Africa.

Results consistently indicate that there is no clear association between the political orientation of governments and the restrictiveness of migration policies. Instead, we find that the restrictiveness of migration policies is mainly driven by factors such as economic growth and unemployment, recent immigration levels and political system factors such as electoral systems or the level of federalism.

As I watched events unfold online this week, I was buoyed by how people were speaking UP. After years of witnessing and experiencing grievously unprofessional and racist/sexist/elitist behaviour from so-called ‘leading’ anthropologists, my little heart soared. People are ANGRY! People are demanding CHANGE! This makes me imagine what our own version of Ragnarök might look like — the death of epistemic jealousy, the reckoning of racism, misogyny, classism, exploitation in our departments, classrooms, conference halls, and yes, journals. And the refounding of a configuration of thinking and engagement that centres reciprocity, generosity, fair compensation, and accountability at its core.
This Decolonial Turn 2.0 or the Decolonial (re)turn (to nod to Dr. Rinaldo Walcott’s work) is forcing anthropology, writ large, to engage with some of the underlying structural injustices that keep it from truly decolonizing. To return to the issues we thought had been addressed, to make an honest assessment of what behaviours, logics, and ethics currently drive the discipline. I am buoyed by the proposition Walcott (2016: 1) makes of returning to engage things we have previously explored with an ethos of “growth, change, and doubt”. Decolonization of anthropology is not a done deal, not a fact, nor a data point. It is a process, one that must be engaged and re-engaged for as long as it takes to build something that reflects the ethics of the worlds we want to build, tend to, breathe life into.

Fixed-term, 50% employment - a good way to start teaching #globaldev about the pedagogies of the oppressed I guess... https://t.co/jMA6BCrpRf

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) June 18, 2018

This book has taken you on a journey of understanding trauma, highlighting the psychological risk to aid workers, explaining the physiology of trauma, sharing in-depth case studies to explore therapeutic trauma models, exploring coping strategies, managing critical incidents, highlighting pathways to care throughout deployments, and discussing the cultural relevance of trauma psychosocial services (p.115).

Years of traveling, often at short notice, to dangerous places: the unforgettable smell of a mass grave in a Lebanese summer; constantly juggling social and work life; hearing the crack of a bullet overhead in Yemen; talking about risk across grand tables in HQ, or plastic tables in the field; a close call in Syria, and guilt-inducing missed calls on my ever-present work phone had all taken its toll (p.3).

Journalists, therapists, aid workers, medical staff, social workers and care workers can all be exposed to vicarious trauma. Likewise, office staff can be exposed vicariously to trauma. This was highlighted in the Ebola response. Aid workers that were exposed to stories remotely started to experience trauma symptoms and requested psychological support (p.14).

I find working with trauma inspiring, not only because of witnessing the human spirit to survive, but also because of the privilege to travel such difficult terrain with an individual who is suffering to a path of greater resilience, self-compassion and traumatic growth (p.23).

By not checking with those with whom we are working, we risk causing harm through our assumptions, by being misguided or blinkered, such as offering individual therapy rather than engaging a family, community or organisation; or by offering assistance through an inappropriate channel, such as a mixed-gender group (pp.99-100).

The core principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence are more necessary than ever. (…) I strongly believe healing communities and countries suffering from trauma will lead to a more cohesive, inclusive and peaceful world (p.111).

As a researcher and teacher I am always a bit skeptical when authors or endorsements promise a book with relevance ‘for everybody in the industry’, but Psychological Support delivers on that front: There are parts written with a self-help framework in mind, but most importantly, as the subtitle suggest, it is a self-mapping book. It provides a roadmap for individuals about how to prevent trauma or get help and at the same time provides a professional framework for those who provide or manage care, have humanitarian aid worker family and friends or have a research or pedagogical interest in models around such support.
Dunkley’s vignettes, based on extensive work in- and outside the humanitarian industry, are powerful, tough stories and the theoretical framework around psychology and cognitive science helps the reader not to feel overwhelmed while at the same time being reminded compassionately that psychosocial support is not a simple ‘toolbox’ or ‘guideline’ that should be buried inside your computer.

In Nigeria, sexual exploitation, when perpetrated by military personnel, is not considered SEA, but regarded as “regular” gender-based violence. There’s a system in place to refer, investigate, report, and act on SEA cases involving humanitarians. Cases with non-humanitarian (i.e. military) perpetrators do not fall under that system. Instead, they are to be dealt with by organisations and bodies engaging in “regular” gender-violence work – who, amongst other things, should report soldiers’ abuse to the military, for it to address internally.
In practice, however, exploitation cases by soldiers are seldom dealt with by the humanitarian sector, as there are far too many cases and (while serious cases of rape might be reported) the military is too complex an institution to even know where to begin reporting a case of a soldier with a camp “girlfriend”. Some work is being done with the military, advocating for improved response, reporting and investigating on abuse by soldiers, yet this remains at an early stage.

Habiyaremye says he used to peel the WFP labels off bottles of cooking oil to decorate his toys. "No one complained that the logos were demeaning or humiliating," he says. "I feel that I am glad I got to know who served me at the refugee camp."
And that kind of connection is what aid groups want — on a global scale. Research has shown that there's a relationship between a brand's visibility — its public recognition — and donations, says Dmitry Chernobrov, a lecturer in journalism and politics at the University of Sheffield.
"When agencies post these logos on toilets, schools, objects, it's very much about gaining visibility to donor audiences through the international media," he says.

“Heavy winter clothing arrived. We don’t have winter here! These things just aren’t needed.”
The issue is a longstanding phenomenon in the humanitarian world: after a disaster containers of unsolicited bilateral donations (UBDs) arrive spontaneously, well-meaning but not well-planned, and often filled with unneeded or non-priority items. These containers place pressure on an already stretched humanitarian supply chain, congesting vital ports and entry points, competing for limited transport and warehousing space, and diverting relief workers attention. While UBDs are goods sent with the greatest intentions to help; the problem is they can often do more harm than good.

On average, Australians think we invest 17.5 times more than we actually do, and would like us to be 12.5 times more generous than we are. Only 6% of respondents guessed anywhere close to the actual number. If that’s how much they think we invest, it’s no wonder there is little support to increase it.
(...)
What’s surprising about foreign aid is the public scrutiny it receives from our political class over other investments in Australia’s national interest. Our diplomatic, defence and intelligence expenditure receive less public scrutiny despite far larger (and growing) sums.

The Gurkha family household is part of a well-established community and all participants appear to know and value each other’s roles. This is no surprise since these families have been set up for foreign military work for over two centuries. Consequently, the private security industry does not need to ‘sell’ security work to these communities the way it might do to other communities across Asia. These men and their families are already intellectually, emotionally, socially and physically set up for foreign security work.
(...)
It also shows us the profound ways in which family is shaping, but also shaped by broader foreign security migration patterns. To understand why Gurkhas continue to be an ‘easy sell’ and desirable in global security we need to look beyond the martial myth of these men. We need to also zoom in on the Gurkha household back in Nepal that enables this pattern of security migration.

This week on Change Making Women we talk to Ruby, who is originally from Nepal about how she developed the idea for Wuka Wear Period Pants and went about testing, developing and launching the product.
Listen to the show to hear more about the process of envisioning an innovative product, the environmental imperative for us to get into the habit of using reusable menstrual products, breaking down the stigma and taboos about our bleeding and the importance of addressing period poverty worldwide.

Most people in poverty can’t blag a dozen free Krispy Kreme doughnuts for having a famous face, and neither can they just pause the challenge in the middle of the day to buy some beard oil and hit the gym. Slipping into our scarred and malnourished skins for a day, knowing full well you are heading back to your mansion at the end of it, stuffed to the gills with all the freebies and luxury that most people can only dream of, is insulting and cruel. It is nothing more than “poorface” – performance poverty – to entertain yourself and others, with no value but your own entertainment and barely hidden disdain.
Poorface is a term that I coined a while back, used to denote the mockery and minstrel performance whereby someone in a position of privilege pretends to be poor for a day, in order to “experience poverty for themselves”. You won’t. Poverty is not a 24-hour challenge. It is a world of endless nothing. It is depression, despair, darkness. It is having no light at the end of the tunnel, like being stuck down a well, waiting to die.

Rand has released its evaluation of the Gates Foundation’s Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative and the results are disappointing. As the report summary describes it, “Overall, however, the initiative did not achieve its goals for student achievement or graduation, particularly for LIM [low income minority] students.” But in traditional contract-research-speak this summary really under-states what they found. You have to slog through the 587 pages of the report and 196 pages of the appendices to find that the results didn’t just fail to achieve goals, but generally were null to negative across a variety of outcomes.
(...)
The key is learning from failure so that we avoid repeating the same mistakes. It is pretty clear that the Gates effective teaching reform effort failed pretty badly. It cost a fortune. It produced significant political turmoil and distracted from other, more promising efforts. And it appears to have generally done more harm than good with respect to student achievement and attainment outcomes.

A ‘nexus that works’ is also a scenario where humanitarian aid is not only delivered, but where the benefits it brings to people are also protected and safeguarded. Decisions in relation to the conduct of hostilities and the respect for IHL are an essential (and so far missing) piece of the humanitarian-development ‘nexus’. These decisions can create or minimize humanitarian needs, and enable or hamper the continuity and integrity of essential public services and systems, including those being supported through humanitarian action. This comes with immediate and long term consequences for both people and country. States (and donors) must, in the first place, use their influence already during conflict—not just afterwards—to avoid causing humanitarian emergencies and to limit development setbacks.

The mutual complicity of the foreign backers of the warring parties must be seen for what it is: the most powerful have an interest in preserving the space to battle whomever they consider terrorists. From Eastern Aleppo to Mosul, Raqqa and now Eastern Ghouta, the various armies and their backers want to keep the trump card of fighting terrorism as the ultimate justification for any atrocities committed against trapped populations. The question for health care providers is whether the notion of an impartial hospital can fit within an environment where the “conventional ties between war and geography have come undone.” Instead of conflicts being delineated by territorial control, there is now a grey zone within which hospitals can come under attack for treating patients from a designated enemy that can incorporate entire communities. The “war on terror” narrative is used to justify the elimination of a population’s means of survival, with the ultimate goal of reasserting the monopoly of the state over the provision of social services as a source of legitimacy. The role of NGOs is entrenched in the state building logic. Therefore, when they operate impartially, they are considered a hostile part of the battlespace.

Ongoing research I’m carrying out as Visiting Scholar of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU) on the (political) use and the introduction of data-collection technology in Afghanistan seeks to map this technology, also reflecting on who uses it, who can get access to the collected information, and how and for which purposes it is used. The research importantly also asks: does technology really fulfil the promises it carries?

I’ve [EXPLETIVE DELETED] had it with, [EXPLETIVE DELETED] “pray for peace.”
But those thoughts quickly give way to extreme jadedness with the aid system. (Not cynicism, jadedness. The difference is important.) I’m jaded because I already know how this is going to go. Over the next couple of years, the aid system is going to pour untold resources—cash, human hours, travel, workshops…—into “innovative peace-building solutions,” or variations on that theme. Books will be written. Experts will sit on panels. Working groups will be formed. Jargon will be created. Niche/boutique NGOs and INGOs will come into existence. None of which/whom will do much more than add complexity and perhaps some more specialized jargon around a central basic question:
How do we persuade people to not hack their neighbors to death with garden tools?

I covered international development at The Guardian, and there was first a question around access. So the people who were presenting themselves as experts in the part of the world where I grew up – I was born in Cameroon and have lived and traveled around a lot of sub-Saharan Africa – had probably either been on a short fellowship, or had written a thesis, were academics who care deeply about it, or were NGOs and policymakers who were based outside [Africa]. Press officers were getting in touch with me and saying, “Our head of so-and-so in London, in Oxford, in Berlin can speak to these issues.” They never thought to say, “We have someone on the ground who can speak to these issues.”

Films like Black Panther and Moonlight aren’t the only drivers of that shift. The rise of Nollywood — Nigeria’s film industry that produces the most movies in the world — has also helped African narratives seep into Western entertainment, Igbokwe says. She’s spotting more Nollywood movies on Netflix now than previously.
The work done behind the scenes is just as critical for creating opportunity. “The writing rooms have to be increasingly diverse,” says Adegoke, who’s starting to write some of his own scripts.
This meticulous planning and work for the future isn’t surprising for the Nigerian diaspora, including in America. “There’s a great amount of preparation and training we put in whatever profession we’re trying to get into,” says Igbokwe. That strategy has taken Nigerian-Americans to rare success in fields ranging from medicine to entrepreneurship. It could be Hollywood’s turn next.

When it comes to social justice, "friendly debate" usually means "unpaid emotional labor in which you are pressured to be super patient and kind to me while I invalidate your humanity and the humanity of people you love." People's lives are not a thought experiment.

— Annalee (@leeflower) June 23, 2018

Pretty much every elite school I encounter is low-tech or no-tech (especially no edutainment) except limited, very high-end stuff. Instead they’re low staff-pupil ratio and pay teachers well, which public schools don’t—especially with such low rates of taxes paid by corporations. https://t.co/PoyXX2rBUn

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) June 22, 2018

This is amazing. One of the best contemporary scholars of African politics made his books available for download #openaccess#openscience cc @texasinafricahttps://t.co/zek33roFcd

— F. Bethke (@F_Bethke) June 27, 2018

We showed up. We engaged. We explained. We were met with hostility by some panelists. We clarified. We walked out. And we reflected. This is about more than the optics of a white, male panel, it is about the politics of it. It is actually about more than all-male panels. It is part of a broader conversation on decolonizing the curriculum. It is about addressing the hostile environment academia represents for many of us, highlighted in the stories told at the inaugural ISA pressing politics panel on #metoo. It is about reclaiming our discipline. When will ISA catch-up?

Happy to be part of @TAInitiative team taking the @OpenGovHub pledge to great events. Hope our members follow suit @megancolnar@laurambacon@joeasunka@VeraMshanapic.twitter.com/mtCFAZJ5Xo

— Michael (@michaeljarvisdc) June 26, 2018

1) Researcher at respected institution does a randomized experiment manipulating Wikipedia content: https://t.co/vtTg4Hyrje

2) Wikipedians unearth it, upset: https://t.co/0xoc5AH1fi

3) New policy — "Wikipedia is not a laboratory": https://t.co/RcaLMwUCM5@Haiyi_Zhu#hcic2018

— Michael Bernstein (@msbernst) June 25, 2018

Business schools don’t teach about co-operatives, mutuals, local money, community shares or social enterprise. They don’t mention transition towns, intentional communities, recuperated factories, works councils or the social economy. Ideas about degrowth, the beauty of small, worker decision making and the circular economy are absent. It’s as if there is no alternative. And because of all this, we should recognise that their time has come.
(...)
While I agree with some of Martin’s criticisms, the answer is not to close business schools but for business school deans and university management to engage in a real dialogue about the kind of business schools the world needs. This requires an overhaul of both business school curricula and university recruitment policies.

Unlike previous years I will have a proper break until the second half of August to focus on other (academic) writing projects, catching up on my reading list - and simply take a break from the #globaldev news cycle. There will be an official vacation post at the end of next week with reading suggestions from the archive-and perhaps even the odd book review or commentary depending on what will happen over the summer.

Here are my 9 trends and their implications for how to enter the sector and find meaningful engagement and employment.

I will arrange my reflections around two key points: First, the paradox that rightly demands better educated aid professionals, but not necessarily links them to equally professional work and salaries.
And second, a growing ‘volunteering industry’ that usually brings together state, civil society and academia, but that is more likely to contribute to a depoliticized ‘employability’ discourse than meaningful political engagement over development policy and practice.

The focus on the rural field also has the danger that it fits all too well with our social enterprise, public-private, win-win mindset where everybody can be on the winning team and can actually turn out to be more colonial than we enlightened cosmopolitan citizens of Aidland would ever think it is. Successfully returning from a ‘field visit’ comes with a lot of entitlements from a ‘proper’ shower to Skype dinners with ‘home’ and the guilty pleasures of Nutella, cornflakes or a few days off. It can also take the pressure off to not see the expat club, expensive trip to headquarters or a conference or injustice in the office through the ‘field lens’ that requires critical reflection, speaking up or even planning an ‘intervention’ of sorts.

There are now more than 120 resources featured in this bibliography!
For the time being, my bibliography will not be updated regularly anymore, but the July update includes new sources that are diretly linked to the financial fall-out from the original scandal.
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.

Milasoa Chérel-Robson works for UNCTAD and her reflections on the challenges and trade-offs of combining her international career with family duties highlight many personal insights into bigger debates in gender and development.
This is a perfect long-read for the weekend after Mother's Day that spans a historical trajectory from Madagascar and the socialist aspirations of the 1970s to the limits of “leaning in” in Geneva and contemporary Rwanda where Africa is celebrating a bright economic future.

I am honored to kick off the week with a powerful guest post by my colleague Ami V. Shah, Assistant Professor of Global Studies & Anthropology at Pacific Lutheran University.
We have been discussing many issues around decolonization for a while and I am thrilled that she shares her reflections here on Aidnography!

Maybe people only share panels with a particularly large number of men, but in general I have a gut feeling that panels seem to grow in different surroundings such as academia, policy and other public events. So even if we assume that these panels could be more diverse, that does not answer the more strategic question: What do you expect from a 6, 7 or 8 people panel?

And yet, I still really enjoy the freedom of running my own small public writing project.
My blog is everything academic publishing is not, from rigid formatting requirements to waiting for peer reviews and that feeling that you are writing for someone else who may in the end own your product anyway (I use Google’s Blogger so I am much more embedded in those dynamics than I should/want to be).
My blog is also a very small form of resistance within my framework of full-time academic employment: I can afford blogging and engaging with the public that way. Blogging remains a great way of staying tuned in debates and actively engaging in communicating development which is more than a job I am passionate about. Blogging informs my teaching, supports my research and may ultimately just be some kind of online diary-something that may never go out of style even if formats and platform shift!

At the end of the day, as with almost all the writing on Aidnography, my reviews are driven by curiosity and actual interest in the content. I do not review and promote books for the sake of the author and/or publisher, but I will also not author a set of reviewing guidelines and reserve the right to a certain amount of randomness what gets reviewed when and how.
Appreciating the hard work that colleagues have put into their books always benefits the wider academic community, reminding us of the importance of critical writing, independent publishers and communicating the importance and power of books to a wider audience.