If aid remains an independent part of government, the questions I was posing in answer to your previous question are relevant here. Always listen respectfully to progressive forces in the poorest countries who are willing and able to share their analyses and ideas. (But how do you find them?)
If I had a magic wand, the biggest ‘top-down’ question for reframing aid that I would wish for is to satisfy the urgent need for a low-carbon and employment-intensive transition.

A multimillionaire has left a substantial sum of money to Oxfam after dying alongside his family in a plane crash, just months after the scandal-hit charity said it would have to cut jobs and aid programmes because of reduced funding.
Catering boss Richard Cousins was killed on New Year’s Eve with his fiancee, her daughter, and his two sons while on holiday in Australia. According to the Sun, his will specified that £41m of his money should go to the charity in the unlikely event that he and his sons died together.

A U.S. drone base in a remote part of West Africa has garnered attention for its $100 million construction price tag. But according to new projections from the Air Force, its initial cost will soon be dwarfed by the price of operating the facility — about $30 million a year. By 2024, when the 10-year agreement for use of the base in Agadez, Niger, ends, its construction and operating costs will top a quarter-billion dollars — or around $280 million, to be more precise.

Mr. Duclos’s targets, although less lofty, are in a sense more powerful for being hard-nosed and tied to a measurable statistic. They are within reach, but still a stretch. Besides, he likely wants to curry international favour by lining them up with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
But a poverty reduction strategy cannot be just about whether Statistics Canada tells us that some figure took an uptick or a dip a year-and-a-half ago.
It’s about whether Canadians have the resources and capabilities to live life with dignity and to participate normally in society; about whether the young have a solid education that will open doors for them; about whether those doors are open free of discrimination so that everyone’s skills and talents are recognized; about whether families are confident in the future, knowing they can deal with the challenges that tomorrow will surely bring.

The plan has kicked off an impassioned conversation about the role of technology in governance, the legality of the ledger framework, and how it can ensure a fair vote. It comes at a time when Kenya is looking favorably at blockchain, with companies using it to disrupt key industries like agriculture. In February, the government set up a task force to study the benefits and challenges of blockchain in the hope of using it to create foolproof land registries and tackle corruption.
Still, skepticism remains about its potential use in politics. Elections in the East African nation are a heated affair that draw upon tense tribal divides.

Coherent management of the internship programmes for the entire system would have positive impacts, such as:
(a) reducing competition among organizations for talented candidates;
(b) reducing the burden for applicants, who currently submit several applications to each organization;
(c) reducing the burden on the administrations of the programmes, which would receive short-
listed candidates who have been pre-screened against the organization’s selection criteria;
and (d) avoiding “internship tourism”, which can occur when there are no records at the system level of the number of internships in which a candidate has enrolled.

In a document seen by NewsMavens on Tuesday, Unicef Ethiopia was asked by Ethiopian officials to explain themselves and pledge to review, from now on, the images that their partners from richer countries circulate in the media, as stereotypical narratives of poverty and helplessness flooded celebrity news sections in Lithuania.
Sob stories by the three Lithuanian celebrities made it look as if there was some secret 'white saviour's' textbook, which the participants dutifully copied to spread the message that 'saving' children is quite cheap -- a few euros donation is all it takes.

DV: If you look at the images that are rewarded and recognized, they still tend to be violent, sensationalistic, often showing people of color in distressing situations. This needs to change. Again, adding more layers to the story — because life is layered — will help that change. We have to stop focusing only on the negative and, again, value everyday moments. This will give us a clearer understanding of all the world’s horrors and beauties.
NS: Stories on conflict have predominantly been told through the lens of white men. I haven’t seen a whole lot of other perspectives. Unless we have diverse perspectives, the narrative on conflict photography will lack nuance.
I hope photo editors assign native and women photographers to document conflicts in their backyards. Right now the narrative on conflict photography is somewhat monochromatic.
SD: Conflict coverage has fundamentally changed in the U.S. The images that make it to the public are generally the most dramatic, but also the most expected: those that fit our idea of what a war is supposed to look like — bombs, smoke, rubble guns, sad faces, dead bodies (but only brown bodies), and places that look “over there.” The nuanced and more everyday images are often trapped on a hard drive, to be pulled out and shown to editors who fall in love with the work and recognize their importance but can’t get them published.

I would like to think it can be used as a ‘model’ because it reaches an audience through a medium that is easily accessible to them so that they can understand or know a little more than they usually would. I would love to see communities self documenting to better understand for themselves as well as others. I’ve actually written a guide and put it up on the website so that someone who wants to start off a project like this would know how to go about it.

In fact, in all areas of their work, it is clear that NGOs need to include language as a key consideration when designing development projects. They should use local interpreters wherever possible, who will have a deep understanding of the culture. They need to make more effort to translate development jargon, and better support multilingual staff who undertake the informal work of language mediation outside of their agreed job descriptions. NGOs should also conduct regular assessments to determine whether communities and fieldworkers understand one another well. It’s not just NGOs that are problematic. We found that DfID also has a blind spot about the importance of languages. For example, it only accepts funding proposals in English. This prevents thousands of excellent local organisations in developing countries that are unable to speak or write English, but are worthy of financial support, from applying for funding.

Amin, like others in his generation such as India’s Ashok Mitra and Brazil’s Celso Furtado, did not go immediately into the academy. He went home to Cairo, where he worked in Nasser’s Institute for Economic Management (1957-1960) and then to Bamako (Mali), where he worked as an adviser in the Ministry of Planning (1960-1963). Amin would talk fondly of these years, of the experience he had in trying to move an agenda for the development of his country and that of other African countries. The limitations set by the powerful countries of the world — the imperialist bloc led by the U.S. — and by the system of monopoly capitalism prevented any major breakthrough for states such as Egypt and Mali. Amin’s first book, published in the 1960s, was on the experience of development undertaken by Mali, Guinea and Ghana. It warned against any facile belief in progress. The unequal system in the world generated profits for the powerful and generated poverty for the weak.

Asking for and getting feedback on my book was a way of making connections with people and building a community around myself when I was feeling lonely and isolated. I’d moved to a new city, I was a new mommy, I was not working, and I missed “my people.” Connecting with like-minded artsy-fartsy folks kept me sane. So while feedback served an important role for my book, it also played a bigger role in my life. The feedback mechanisms I talk about here don’t have to be used for a project. They can just be used.

Dear White Consultant,
You are not of the Pacific islands.
You are entranced by our grace,
in awe of our strength
but
so quick to judge our mistakes,
so quick to share your thoughts
on how to fix us,
how to better us
as if your ancestors had not tried before.

You've all read and probably shared this NYT story on Facebook. Here's important context:

- @JonasKaiser: https://t.co/zEjUStzyXw
- @halhod: https://t.co/ItpqgSCt3F
- @ferrisjabr: https://t.co/vaw5KexSFU@CaseyNewton sums it up: https://t.co/xcpJmouRHFpic.twitter.com/xwTMzfXq69

— Simon Hurtz (@SimonHurtz) August 23, 2018

Jokes aside, fictional tropes can have real-world consequences. In her New York story, Cogan pointed out that the trend of portraying women reporters as poisonous and promiscuous was creating a toxic environment for real journalists, whose professional overtures to sources were frequently mistaken for personal ones. And even though shows such as Sharp Objects aren’t intended to offer a serious critique of journalists and their methods—in Camille’s case, it’s to show how thoroughly she sabotages herself at every turn—these portrayals matter, especially in an environment where Americans trust journalists and their methods less than ever.

Ultimately, the colonization of yoga by White women is a shining example of what Coates identifies as an abiding principle of U.S. forms of White supremacy. To a large extent, this dynamic remains shielded from otherwise obvious critiques by the specious logic that yoga is spiritual, private, and therefore, beyond reproach. To this defense, I would argue that privacy and the right to privacy are also racialized and White supremacist concepts in the United States. But more importantly, what emerges from this analysis is that White women often need yoga to cultivate what Womanists like Hazel Carby identified long ago as the racialized “cult of true womanhood”—a sense of self that is built in contrast to non-White women through the qualities of piety, purity, and spirituality. Carby describes a relationship between White women and non-White women that endures through and by yoga, observing that, “ideologies of White womanhood [were] are the sites of racial and class struggle which enable[d] white women to negotiate their subordinate role in relation to patriarchy.”

THREAD: ~50% of Tunisia's new municipal councilors are female—how are they different from male councilors? For answers, check out the 2nd @DemocracyIntl brief on our 2018 candidate survey (by @AlexDBlackman@aytugs and me) https://t.co/gQxJfLSA5A#TnMunicipales2018#tunisie

— Julia Clark (@juliamgclark) July 20, 2018

The report recommends that WFP pay more attention to humanitarian principles, including in situations where there are trade-offs between access and humanity on the one hand, and impartiality, neutrality, or operational independence on the other. It also recommends that WFP significantly increase its investment in the dissemination and implementation of the policies, including by strengthening staff competencies, designating responsibilities for humanitarian principles and access at the country level, prioritizing humanitarian principles when engaging with cooperating partners and commercial providers, investing in its use of needs assessment data and its security capacity, and strengthening dialogue and advocacy with donors.

This discussion paper summarises what is currently known about diversity and humanitarian leadership, and aims to identify how the two intersect in the international humanitarian system. It starts by unpacking what we mean by diversity – in gender, age, race, ethnicity and thinking. It explores the real and potential benefits of diversifying leadership identified across other sectors that could be applied to the humanitarian sector. It concludes with the proposition that humanitarian leadership does not currently draw on its diversity, to the detriment of humanitarian effectiveness, and suggests two hypotheses that could be tested in order to verify or refute this proposition.

What is development? What does it look like? Development means different things to different people and in an increasingly polarized world, voices from the Global South are urgently needed to provide a balance of perspectives, lest we hear mostly one side of a multifaceted story. The Aspen New Voices Fellows writing in this anthology all agree that fundamentally, development is about dignity. Dignity of people. Dignity of planet. Dignity of life.

It establishes a framework for analysing elite bargains and understanding how external diplomatic, security, economic and transitional justice interventions can affect them and pathways out of violent conflict. It describes the forms of violence that surround bargaining processes, and how resources and rents and degrees of inclusion and exclusion can affect the extent to which bargains ‘stick’. The paper concludes with a summary of the implications for policy and practice.

Thnx Robin for sharing some strategies on decolonizing the curriculum @STLHE_2018#STLHE2018pic.twitter.com/IUcFQooLX8

— Dr. Klodiana Kolomitro (@Klodiana23) June 21, 2018

Young African scientists face persistent barriers which cause them to leave their own countries, and even academia. This means the continent’s work force loses highly trained people who are crucial for scientific and technological advancement, and for economic development.
It’s estimated that 20,000 highly educated professionals leave the continent annually, with up to 30% of Africa’s scientists among them.
A number of factors contribute to this trend. The extreme factors include war and political instability. But the more common “pushes” are a desire for higher pay, better opportunities, and the search for a conducive research environment – one where infrastructure and management help drive careers and research potential.

The message we want to get across is precisely that it is important to go beyond conventional methods when evaluating the quality of development research. The research in Peru helped us gain a better understanding of climate change in the central region of the country and contributed to shaping policy and interventions in terms of adaptation in that area. It was rated highly by recourse to a more holistic evaluation process such as RQ+, particularly in terms of its integrity, legitimacy and positioning with a view to practical applications. It is valuable in spite of not being published in high-impact journals but rather disseminated in publications that use local languages, thus allowing its immediate use by local actors seeking to resolve urgent issues.

The basic question is whether it is worth exploring PhD options as a mid-career, midlife aid worker with an intention to transition from the development industry into academia. tl:dr: Don’t do it!

Ultimately, the more morally relevant metric is not proportions or absolute numbers, but rather the extent of poverty vis-a-vis our capacity to end it. By this metric, the world has much to do—perhaps more than ever before.

May is right that all African leaders want jobs for their young people, but Britain cannot support exploitative jobs which in fact keep people in poverty, or allow companies to give jobs on the one hand and demand tax holidays with the other.
Britain’s aid budget is precious, and in a world of increasing humanitarian emergencies, fragile states, and with hunger in Africa increasing, it is stretched. Aid should never be diverted from its legal and moral purpose of reducing poverty. Now is not the time to move the goalposts.

The U.S. and Russia are the world's largest weapons dealers. I mapped the flows of arms exports leaving the U.S. and USSR/Russia from 1950 to 2017. Full video (with audio) available here: https://t.co/1Yg1mTA8uVpic.twitter.com/OQM6Q9CGdL

— Will Geary (@wgeary) August 27, 2018

Though, talking about diversity, when you look at the complaints and where they came from, one couldn’t fail to notice that the majority – if not all – were men. This also exposes another issue of lack of diversity on the side of women in tech scene in Africa.
Perhaps, this is also an opportunity for the men who complained to place themselves in the shoes of the women.

Shofco is not the first organization to try and improve water access in Kibera. But many previous attempts to support traditional underground piping systems have left pipes vulnerable to leaks, breakage, and consequent contamination.Initial funding was provided by Pentair, the multinational industrial company. Shofco then worked with Safaricom and the US African Development Fund to build additional kiosks. So far, Shofco’s aerial piping system services reaches over 11,000 people. This is meant to be a pilot phase of the project, and the organization is currently working with the US Centers for Disease Control to study the system’s efficiency before scaling up.

So, here is the thing, though: Yes, a UNSC referral of #Burma to the #ICC is unlikely. Yes, if one somehow passed, it would almost certainly lack the teeth to materially raise the chances of prosecution of those most responsible for atrocities against the #Rohingya. But... (1/9) https://t.co/TRrNbJkxpO

— Kate Cronin-Furman (@kcroninfurman) August 27, 2018

The @rgurumurthy@grantmgordon IRC/Vox Displaced Podcast is rapidly becoming the best podcast on global development, and the @owenbarder episode is probably the best so far https://t.co/6WujUWv5x5

— Lee Crawfurd (@leecrawfurd) August 31, 2018

Nearly 80 percent of Uganda’s population of 41 million people is under the age of 30, according to Youth Policy Labs, a Berlin-based think-tank. Though new to politics, Kyagulanyi has succeeded in mobilizing youth discontent. The #FreeBobiWine hashtag has become a rallying point on Twitter.
This is something veteran opposition politicians such as Kizza Besigye, who at 62 years old is considered part of Museveni’s generation, have failed to do so. Besigye has lost three consecutive, disputed presidential elections.
The energy behind Kyagulanyi comes in contrast to signs of declining support for Museveni, a former guerrilla fighter and one of Africa’s longest-serving rulers.

Deforestation and quarrying have made Adimali prone to this kind of disaster. Whenever there’s massive rainfall, a portion of the mountain just collapses, blocking all the roads and making the villages inaccessible, even by foot.
The villagers are afraid because their houses and land aren’t stable anymore. These problems are manmade — they are the result of human sprawl, our neglect of the environment, deforestation, and rampant and unplanned construction. So when it rains in excess, the land becomes unstable.

As development researchers we need to critically evaluate and reflect on our ways of doing research, question assumptions that may be inherent in our thinking and strive to de-link colonial biases of knowledge production and sharing from ways of researching, teaching and learning. As scholars we should revisit the basic paradigms of research, especially objectivity. If being value-free means being indifferent to the basic struggles of human and social rights it cannot be part of what it means to be an academic. Epistemic justice is at the very basis of sustainable transformations. We strive to give visibility and voice to attempts to build a just and sustainable future. We do this by serving as platform for critical discussions, contestation and debate that do not seek excuses for, but instead address historical injustices.

While #MeToo is unlikely to generate formal financial reparations as in settings of transitional justice, legislatures and private entities like Time’s Up are generating a variety of resources for victims ranging from counseling to money for litigation and some victims may receive money from civil litigation or settlements. Complex victims ought not be denied access to such resources simply because they are not ideal victims. Rather they may find themselves in the unusual position of being eligible both as a giver and receiver of recovery resources.

Police militarization is sometimes viewed as a necessary infringement of civil liberties for the sake of public safety.
But that position is a false choice based on this study, and a common outcome of aggressive police operations, Lemieux said.
“Research into aggressive, military-style tactics — stop-and-frisk, security checkpoints — may have some effect on targeted crimes like weapons possession. But it has very little impact in terms of crime overall,” Lemieux said. “However, “it does impact the feeling of safety and security in the community where those operations are conducted.“

What are your favorite international development jargons? I created a project title generator that randomly combines words to form a development aid project title. Operationalize and disseminate! https://t.co/cWkShpcDXG#MyDevAidProject#globaldev

— Andrew Zubiri (@jadz) August 20, 2018

To make a collective action with transformative reforms may require more fundamental social, economic, and political economy problems.

— Drunk World Bank (@DrunkWB) August 31, 2018

How is it that we live in this age in which Mark Zuckerberg and every other Silicon Valley person is claiming to change the world, and in which every finance person in New York is involved in giving back? Why do we live in such a generous age that has also been such a cruel age? The argument of the book is that these things are not a coincidence, that giving has become the wingman of taking, and generosity has become the wingman of injustice, and changing the world has become the wingman of keeping the world fundamentally the same and keeping the winners on top.

Is that the kind of future we want? As the latest round of critiques makes clear, we probably won’t have much of a say in the matter. The philanthropists will decide, and then it will be left to their foundations to fight it out.

Reading @WinnersTakeAll is answering key questions that have frustrated me while working on Humanitarian Technology over the past 10+ years. For example: I’ve collaborated with big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and just couldn’t understand why ... 1/ pic.twitter.com/5TwpJktGPp

— Patrick Meier (@PatrickMeier) August 31, 2018

So, MasterCard sells purchase data to Google and others. Both are not open about it at all.

My take: exploiting knowledge based on combining/matching *individual-level* data = systems of consumer mass surveillance, whether 'double-blind encryption' or not https://t.co/WmgRhlR3D1

— Wolfie Christl (@WolfieChristl) August 31, 2018

We were also struck to learn how disinformation workers create implicit rules for themselves and their colleagues to help them sleep at night­. These range from drawing moral boundaries (“In a flame war, I only poke fun at people’s bad grammar. I will never slut-shame.”) to affirming that they’re acting in accordance with their own beliefs (“If I don’t really support the politician who’s hiring me, I pass the account onto someone I know who’s a real fan.”). There are even those who acknowledge the inauthenticity of their avatars (one staff member of a politician reported being peer-pressured into creating a fake account in the name of “team spirit” during campaign season).
Through discussions of workers’ social and financial motivations and moral justifications, we ultimately aim to shed light on the vulnerabilities in the political and media ecosystems that make political trolling a side job that’s hard to refuse.

This handbook should be a resource for international work relating to gender equality and all women’s and girls’ full enjoyment of human rights. It contains a selection of methods and experiences that can provide examples and inspiration for further work of the Swedish Foreign Service, other parts of the civil service and society as a whole. The handbook also describes the first four years of working with a feminist foreign policy.

It explores some of what we do and do not know about the impacts of humanitarian situations on adolescents’ lives. Adolescents and their specific capacities and vulnerabilities have tended to be overlooked in the design and implementation of humanitarian responses, including in social protection and further components of such responses.

So what does a real immunization effort look like in the field?
Super casual.
We would have a really small tent, some benches and chairs for seating, and women coming in with their children. There would be a little table where vaccinators had their vaccination cards and sheets. The vaccinator would sit with his cold box of vaccines right next to him on another chair, and inoculations would happen right in the tent.

For now though, our analysis of the survey results from 51 aid workers working across the sector (8 UN agencies and 18 INGOS, 1 consultancy) finds without doubt, that aid agencies have focused on changing policies as a means to ‘prove’ that work on the issues of sexual harassment, exploitation and abuse has happened – either to donors or to the media. It is important to note here that there are some outliers, but the majority of agencies are simply not working to change their culture.

North Africa’s application of this simplistic model of Western border control risks a new crisis. The establishment of new forms of control, including restricted movement and the full taxation of previously smuggled goods, do not represent a re-establishment of state authority but rather the imposition of a completely new center-periphery relationship at the exclusive cost of the periphery. In the absence of alternative economic strategies, this risks the precise thing these controls were designed to prevent: the center’s loss of control over its borderlands.

We identified four universal actions. The first is establishing a system-wide focus on quality, because there's no accountability today. There's no system to sound an alarm, and there needs to be one.
Second, you've got to redesign health systems. A lot of health systems today are organized to maximize access — a lot of small clinics spread out over a large territory.
(...)
Third, the health workforce education in many low- and middle-income countries is just really outdated. Clinicians come out very good at identifying pathologies on slides but have a harder time doing problem-solving and connecting with patients.
And then the last area of improvement for us was public demand. In most service industries, it is the pressure of customers that often improves the product or service. Yet in health care, we ignore patients as consumers. Many people anticipate low quality and have low expectations. But people do want good care.

Maybe I was too harsh – the SDGs are showing signs of having a drip drip influence that is dispersed and hard to pin down. Lots of spin and lip service, but some impact, albeit softer, more pervasive and harder to measure than ‘have you halved X?’ The SDGs seem to fit a diverse, multipolar world where development priorities are quite rightly decided at a local level, not imposed from outside, and being being subsumed into national politics in different ways in different places.
But that still doesn’t answer the question of why we should devote so much time and attention to the SDGs, when other international instruments are more binding (ILO and UN Conventions). I have still have seen nothing that compares the SDGs against all these other agreements in terms of their impact on decision makers.

“We don’t know what to do with them. As of now we are holding the waste and trying to find a solution to manage it,” admits Pankaj Panjiyar of Doko Recyclers. “We have to find a sustainable solution to manage electronic waste before it becomes too big of a problem to handle.”

Wanna be a foreign correspondent? Sure, as long as you have no college loans and can freelance for $200/article for years. It’s not impossible to make it on your own but the secret is a lot of us come from at least an upper-middle class background and don’t like to talk about it.

— Melissa Chan (@melissakchan) August 30, 2018

Way back in 2001, the SATELLIFE PDA Project demonstrated the viability of cutting-edge handheld computers at the time – Personal Digital Assistants or PDAs – for addressing the digital divide among health professionals working in Africa.
Do you even remember PDAs? Well, if you read their case study, you’ll be sure to recognize the seven lessons they learned. Check how far we’ve come with technology, and yet how good implementation practices don’t change

While our discussion so far generally paints an optimistic picture, there exist issues and challenges that need particular attention especially from development workers, institutions and governments. It is often the ‘poor’ and ‘vulnerable’ populations that are affected most by gaps in public services. When the arms of the government and institutions are too short, communities – through volunteerism – organise themselves to respond to each other’s needs. Over-reliance on these helping behaviours – without considering the very real vulnerabilities that these groups face – may lead to exploitation of the energies of the poorest in a given society. In this way, volunteering may contribute to the process of increasing responsibilisation – where citizens are expected not only to be active (as in ‘active citizens’) but responsible for (as in ‘responsible citizens’) their own service provisions. As a Peruvian woman volunteer expressed, “we have a lot of goodwill, but we also need to eat…”

Little did I realize then that I had landed the opportunity of a lifetime and 18 years later, I have to say that it was the best career and life decision I ever made.

To me, working for a cause such as ours gives even mundane tasks importance. There are many aspects to the job that are difficult – the constant change of going from one duty station to the next, work-life balance when everyone around you is working around the clock, being away from home for extended periods of time and not seeing your family, lack of career opportunities for spouses etc.

She learns in college of the gulfs between being politically aware and active, between the African and African-American experience, between superficial activist wins — like a black professor being given tenure — and stubborn institutional racism. She becomes strident in her fight for racial justice, as well as for gender equity.
Later in life, she is initially reticent to pursue a relationship with a white Australian man because he doesn’t fit her anti-racism politics. “I want him to be black and he is not,” she bemoans. Her younger sister swoops in with some tough sibling love: “Maybe you need to rethink your politics so they fit you better…. I mean, if you took it all to its logical conclusion you’d be married to a black lesbian who is five foot nine with dreads because the only lover who can ever know what it’s like to be you is you.”

The underlying reasoning here is that poor mothers are reproductive subjects who, by dint of their failure to achieve economic success, are morally suspect, so much so that they are treated pre-emptively as though they constitute an immediate threat to their children. So as a perverse administrative outgrowth of this moral judgment, they are compelled to give up many of the normal rights attached to liberal individual subjects—effectively, to occupy a position in the postliberal social contract suggesting that they do not possess the fundamental rights thought to underwrite it.

A study by St Andrew’s University established that even when males demonstrate superior methods of obtaining food, females would rather mimic each other’s techniques because of an innate distrust of the opposite sex.

Having interviewed Nike workers, I would hope the company applies this beautiful slogan and Kaepernick’s example to its labor practices. https://t.co/xlSkCI4UiC

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) September 4, 2018

Some would argue Facebook isn’t to blame for this any more than the phone company is. But social networks have allowed this problem to metastasize, and they reach orders of magnitude more people than would ever have been possible before. At what point does that become a social issue worth regulating?

The story of Facebook’s rise in the Philippines is, in many ways, the story of Facebook’s original mission of “making the world more open and connected,” and its unexpected, calamitous consequences. It’s the story of Facebook working exactly as designed in a country that seemingly had so much to gain from embracing it. It’s the story of what happens in a society when truth no longer matters. And, if you’ve paid any attention at all to what’s happened in the United States this past year, what’s happened in France, in Mexico, and in Myanmar, it’s a familiar one.
“At some point they knew — we knew — that dissemination of fake news, propaganda and outright intentional manipulation and brainwashing was being committed through their platforms,” de Lima wrote from jail. “At that point, when they knew and did nothing to protect both their own platforms and the people who use them from these unethical, illegal or destructive practices, they played a part in everything that happened.”

Navigating the complexities of overseas student service and community engagement can be difficult for educators. ALTO, as part of the ReThink Orphanages Network (Australia), along with members Save the Children Australia and World Challenge have developed the following resources for schools and universities engaging in overseas student travel.
(...)
To support educators in teaching about the complex issue of institutionalisation, voluntourism and orphanage tourism, we have developed a set of curriculum modules aimed at Year 10 students.

Literature on how to deal with non-English studies when conducting reviews have focused on the importance of including such studies, while less attention has been paid to the practical challenges of locating and assessing relevant non-English studies. We investigated the factors which might predict the inclusion of non-English studies in systematic reviews in the social sciences, to better understand how, when and why these are included/excluded.

Still at #MERLTech ? Make sure you stick around for Fail Fest and the happy hour! I will be sharing tales of failure from the new book "Evaluation Failures" edited by @EvaluationMaven . pic.twitter.com/cX6V2iYKyO

— Isaac Castillo (@isaac_outcomes) September 6, 2018

Moreover, there is increasingly a need to critically interrogate what decolonization means in the context of the University of Cambridge – an institution founded on racist, sexist, classist and ableist oppression; to reflect on what it takes to pursue a truly decolonized education; and to prevent the neoliberal university from transforming “decolonization” itself into a box to be ticked off through the “inclusion” of “diverse” names, rather than the rectification of epistemic injustice.

However, one left the event with a strong feeling that one had born witness to a bit of preaching to the choir, and that it will take much more than this in the years to come to move from theory to practice. The reactions certainly indicate that institutional structures as well as hegemonic conceptions both right and left in Norway makes even the most modest part of this program, relating to an increased representation of scholars of minority and/or immigrant background in Norwegian academia, a fairer representation of past and present scholars from the Global South on university curricula in Norway, and a more equitable approach to co-operation and partnership with scholars and universities in the Global South a hard sell indeed. Critical whiteness studies will not be coming to Norway anytime soon either.

Private equity-owned colleges lead to more debt, worse learning outcomes, and but are “better able to capture government aid.” https://t.co/jLctISspLF

— Thomas Zeitzoff (@zeitzoff) September 3, 2018

Frustrated with the slow transition toward open access (OA) in scientific publishing, 11 national funding organizations in Europe turned up the pressure today. As of 2020, the group, which jointly spends about €7.6 billion on research annually, will require every paper it funds to be freely available from the moment of publication. In a statement, the group said it will no longer allow the 6- or 12-month delays that many subscription journals now require before a paper is made OA, and it won't allow publication in so-called hybrid journals, which charge subscriptions but also make individual papers OA for an extra fee.

The film ranges over issues such as journal price inflation, researcher evaluation and impact factors, and the disparity of access between the predominantly wealthy global north and the mostly lower-income global south.
(...)
As a piece of advocacy, Paywall is compelling enough to attract new converts. It will not, however, educate the public in the complexities of open access.

The documentary also looks at what Yanchyk calls "unconscious bias," where female scientists deal with inappropriate comments of a professional or personal nature.
In one example, Jackie Dawson, an Arctic scientist and Canada Research Chair at the University of Ottawa, describes speaking on identical topics as a colleague, who is "a male scientist who has a big white beard and is a tall guy."
Her male colleague is often asked to share his data, while she is often challenged on the accuracy of hers.
For Prado, insensitive comments directed her way have been personal in nature, relating to her looks or her Latino background, Yanchyk said.
"Honestly," said Yanchyk, "someone even … made jokes about her being a stripper, made jokes about her makeup. It's very upsetting to hear her situation.
"They told her, 'You don't look like a scientist. And you have to choose being a scientist or being pretty.' That was basically it."

Mostly this message is to say hi and that we’re available to have a meeting with you and your “marginalized” friends — preferably the ones who look good on camera. It would be an excellent photo op for the university’s Facebook page (caption: “Look at all this diversity!”). During the meeting we’ll talk circles around the topic, put the jumbled nonsense into an email, and if there’s any pushback against those notes (which will be forgotten by the end of the semester) we’ll plan another meeting about that email with the notes from the meeting before it, and keep having meeting after meeting after meeting until you give up.

Chairat, Patima and the TMFG team have developed a system whereby slave workers can make calls for help on their mobiles while at sea without being detected.
The details of this scheme, Chairat said, must be kept secret.
He now sees the release of slave fishermen as his central aim and is committed to freeing the workers and raising awareness of their plight.
A consumer war on the industry, he says, is not the answer.
"We don't want to pressure consumers to stop buying seafood," he says.
"A boycott affects the fishermen too. The solution is that the workers have to have power. There has to be collective action."

the leader of Greenpeace Norway, Truls Gulowsen, who commented on the UNEP-leader’s extensive travels and lack of routines for emission of greenhouse gases.
(...)
«Erik Solheim has made the UNEP much more visible, which is a good thing. Part of the reason of course being his travels and discussions with so many persons. But this report puts him as well as the organisation in an extremely bad light. It weakens the credibility of UN’s entire environmental organisation.»

Guterres is in the perhaps impossible position of leading something called the United Nations at a time when, in his own view, the world is fracturing. And as he tells it, it’s not just dysfunctional democracies and xenophobic nationalism that made it this way. The culprits also include shifting power dynamics and resurgent great-power conflict in a world organized neither by the bipolar competition of the Cold War nor by the singular leadership that the United States exercised after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “We live in a … chaotic world,” he said, in which “impunity and unpredictability” have become “the name of the game.”
In the case of the Syrian war, for instance, “you have the involvement of the superpowers. You have several regional actors, be it Turkey, be it Iran, be it Saudi Arabia, Qatar. You have terrorist groups. And then you have all kinds of Syrian movements,” observed Guterres, who days earlier had appealed to the Syrian government and its Russian patron to not perpetrate an expected bloodbath in the last rebel-held stronghold of Idlib. “It’s very difficult to put the puzzle together, and it makes peace much more difficult to achieve. First it makes prevention more complex, because we have more actors and the risks of conflict increase. And then it makes conflict resolution even more difficult, because of all the contradictory interests of these … actors.”

Now he and his co-authors have checked back in again nine years after the intervention, and the results are a great deal less promising than after four. While the people who got cash were earning 38 percent more money than the control group in year four, the control group caught up to the cash recipients by year nine. Overall income was no higher in the treatment group, and earnings were higher by a small (4.6 percent), statistically insignificant amount.
The recipients did have more assets on average than people not getting the money, which makes sense; they had a sudden influx of money, some of which was sure to go toward buying durable assets like metal roofs, fruit-bearing trees, or work tools.
“The right way to look at these results is that people were richer for a while and then they have nicer houses,” Blattman said. “Consuming that stuff makes you less poor. But I think what a lift out of poverty means is not just that you have some extra savings and a buffer, but actually that you have some real, sustained earnings potential, and that’s not what we’ve seen.”

This is a shocking lie. Let's be really clear what happened:

The immediate storm damage killed only a few people; the inept relief effort then left thousands more to die. [THREAD] https://t.co/42WDawS1yd

— Jeremy Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) September 13, 2018

We need a new narrative around international economic assistance fit for the 21st century. Current thinking is little changed since the 1940s – portraying aid as a short-term charitable act and dividing countries into ‘developed’ (aid providers) and ‘underdeveloped’ (recipients) – and is conceptually flawed in today’s world.

Yesterday, I co-facilitated this dialogue on #aidtoo and safeguarding in the #globaldev field.

This was an important conversation of learning with and from each other. Here’s a thread of collective insights for those who couldn’t join us x pic.twitter.com/wSQalbaQgb

— Marion A. Osieyo (@Marion_AO) September 11, 2018

The solution begins with an uncomfortable conversation within the development industry on the complicity of various actors in the pattern of de-politicizing marginalized women in the Global South; a dismantling of the guise of empowerment in order to reveal the funding, incentives, colonial legacies, and political agendas driving the design of programs. In Sri Lanka, Colombia, and elsewhere, female activists are wary of both the political elites in their own country and the ideological strings tied to Western NGOs. As these collectives eke out their own political spaces, they each offer distinctive ways forward to address the deep-seated causes of inequality.
If donors and practitioners are serious about greater access to power for marginalized women, the entire framework of contemporary empowerment programming needs to be examined and restructured to allow women to find the cultural, economic, and political space required to address inequality in all its forms.

Watch this Ugandan protestor storming an invite-only meeting in a hotel. Professionals sometimes say that such elite meetings are where progress happens & eschew protest like hers, but who is the brave one, & hasn't all big change need brave disruptors? pic.twitter.com/ICU8SXFM9m

— Ben Phillips (@benphillips76) September 8, 2018

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is launching a podcast series entitled ‘Awake at night’ focused on the incredible people who have dedicated their lives to helping people who have been forced to flee. Listeners will join UNHCR’s communications chief, Melissa Fleming, in personal conversations with an array of humanitarian workers, and learn what drives them to risk their their own lives protecting and assisting people displaced by war.

As international organisations prepare to hold meetings to figure out what to do, a refugee in Tripoli asks how children can continue to survive w no food in the middle of heavy fighting. pic.twitter.com/eFDXJBGPcW

— Sally Hayden (@sallyhayd) September 2, 2018

Organisations around the world have been working for years to end orphanage tourism. Their work is starting to bear fruit. Australia is now discouraging the practice, and the Australian parliament is considering a law to label orphanage tourism as child trafficking and ban it entirely. In July, the UK international development secretary, Penny Mordaunt, announced that the government’s foreign aid programme would now support family- and community-based care for all children. In May 2016, the London School of Economics set up a consortium of universities pledging not to advertise orphanage placements to their students.
Many major tourism companies – for example, Global Crossroad – still prominently feature orphanage work. Nancy McGehee, a professor of hospitality and tourism management at Virginia Tech University, says that companies send representatives to speak on campuses. But some companies are closing their voluntourism programmes. The International Volunteer HQ announced that it would stop sending volunteers to orphanages by March 2019. Projects Abroad stopped in January 2018. “I don’t think we’ve lost any business from it,” says Jessi Warner, chief operating officer of Projects Abroad. “Quite often someone will phone and say: ‘I want to work in orphanages.’ When our team explains why we don’t do that, everyone is open to it. They often join our community care programmes. It’s just about awareness.”

Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated after leading the most influential protest movement in American history. King revolutionized the use of nonviolent resistance to combat racial injustice in the United States, but the Alabama preacher did not always believe in nonviolence. In fact, early on, King relied on armed guards for his protection until an older Quaker activist named Bayard Rustin walked into King's home and changed the direction of the civil rights movement.

The plantations and factory alike are engulfed by tangled outrage and nostalgia, ubiquitous reminders of unfulfilled potential and the uneven dividends of economic growth. People in the vicinity of these relics of Nkrumah’s modernizing mission, however, have not given up all hope that they may “redeem” the fruits of his development visions. What efforts are people taking now to stake claims to rubber’s rewards? What does it mean to seize the future of a hurtful past? What would substantive decolonization of Ghana’s rubber industry look like?

Now that we understand these phenomena better, we need radical solutions to come into play in the political arena as well as the intellectual one. And they need to be animated by an egalitarian spirit, not a technocratic one that, in the current context, is doomed to fail. Boushey suggests going back to basics and figuring out what it is we’re referring to in the first place when we talk about economic growth. The gross domestic product “has been our measure,” she points out. “We think that if GDP went up, that’s good! But we need to show people what matters is not how much it grows [but] to whom the gains go.” “We need to make sure wealth is not self-perpetuating,” Boushey adds. “We got here by saying, ‘Rich people and Wall Street have our interest at heart, and they’ll regulate themselves and there will not be bad outcomes if we let them do what they want.’ We saw how that turned out.”

The billion dollar question that is all-but impossible to answer: are development finance institutions additional, or do they crowd out private investors? New @CGDev paper from me, @NicVdSijpe and Raphael Calelhttps://t.co/n0bhXXoJ21

— Paddy Carter (@CarterPaddy) September 12, 2018

In this short report, we describe the key features of the landscape of private foundation support for international non-profit journalism. Our findings are based on interviews with representatives of a range of relevant foundations, intermediaries and non-profit news outlets in 2017.

Drawing on these studies, as well as related bodies of evidence, we developed a program theory proposing three pathways through which CT could impact IPV: (a) economic security and emotional well-being, (b) intra-household conflict, and (c) women's empowerment.

#WomeninSTEM get a lot of “Reply Guys” who repeat the same unhelpful comments.@shrewshrew and I (a woman & a man in science) have attempted to catalog those replies, to save us all the trouble of writing new responses every time.

presenting THE NINE TYPES OF REPLY GUYS

(1/n) pic.twitter.com/0ewNRJloLu

— Scott Barolo (@sbarolo) September 3, 2018

Scientists in developed countries provide nearly three times as many peer reviews per paper submitted as researchers in emerging nations, according to the largest ever survey of the practice.
The report — which surveyed more than 11,000 researchers worldwide — also finds a growing “reviewer fatigue”, with editors having to invite more reviewers to get each review done. The number rose from 1.9 invitations in 2013 to 2.4 in 2017.

All this can be organized in relation to the purpose of academic publications, and what the PRS precludes: a constructive production of the tools, the basis for debates, made available for the workers in academic research.

Now libraries feel empowered to confront the big publishers. They can refuse to renew contracts with companiesas their users have another means of getting past the paywall. As the system has begun to creak, government funding agencies have at last summoned the courage to do what they should have done decades ago, and demand the democratisation of knowledge.

I think we should instead pay much more attention to the kinds of mobility that are important to people’s everyday lives, such as habitual cross-border movement and trade. We need to arrive at a much deeper understanding of the role of movement in people’s lives, including how dreams and desires for mobility interact with immobility of different kinds. In this way, we can turn the table on the official gaze and on public debates surrounding African migrants, who are often seen as “problems” in official European discourse and policy.
And finally, we must keep shifting our gaze, to not look simply at migrants themselves, but at the powerful sectors that work on migration and the actors who shape our understanding of migration. Researching these actors, which is a way of “studying up,” is also very important.

Publications: Investigative journalism in Africa; ending extreme poverty; medical brain drain? Not so fast!

Academia: Caribbean hurricane vulnerability & British colonial plantations.

Enjoy!

Development news
Commitment to Development Index 2018

The Commitment to Development Index ranks 27 of the world’s richest countries on policies that affect more than five billion people living in poorer nations. Because development is about more than foreign aid, the Index covers seven distinct policy areas: Aid, Finance, Technology, Environment, Trade, Security & Migration.

How can the U.S. be sure the money it spends on programs to help people in poor countries is *actually* making a difference? An economist pushed @USAID to try a novel test. The results are out … and they’re proving … awkward. https://t.co/FbNjg02JBopic.twitter.com/93cq78peNs

— NPR Goats & Soda (@NPRGoatsandSoda) September 18, 2018

On Thursday, USAID released the results of this innovative A/B test. As it turns out, neither the holistic intervention nor the smaller cash transfers moved the needle much on nutrition. The tailored program did increase savings, while the small cash transfer allowed individuals to repay debt and accumulate assets. Larger cash transfers (about $530 per household), however, had substantial effects. Households increased their productive assets by 76 percent, saved 60 percent more, and were able to consume 32 percent more than in the past. They were able to buy more varied food for their families. Children in these households were taller, weighed more, and were less likely to die early.

1/ I’m actually a big fan of #cash for some poverty reduction & #globaldev goals, but does anyone else also want more nuance and less blanket uses of “foreign aid” in the discussion of these (exciting, yes) results? There are things having $100 in your pocket cannot fix...like: https://t.co/Uv9DuIu4Zb

— Tricia Petruney (@TriciaPetruney) September 16, 2018

Positive review of the effects so far of the merger of aid, trade and foreign affairs into one government department, Global Affairs Canada, from the authoritative @oecd DAC peer review. (Working better than many expected, it seems.) https://t.co/ioFR46MYiEpic.twitter.com/X8PoeeLzU2

— Owen Barder (@owenbarder) September 16, 2018

The report raises concerns regarding Canada’s relationships with civil society, noting the government’s reliance on project-based funding, and refusal to provide program or core funding as was its practice in the past, preferring to use these organizations as service providers or contractors rather than treating them as development actors in their own right. Similarly, it recommended that Canada provide multilateral development organizations with more unearmarked, core funding. Also highlighted was the government’s continued lack of a clear strategy for engaging with the private sector, including measures to ensure that Canadian companies respect human rights abroad.

Kanikkannan said questions remained unanswered regarding the Karkara case, including the issue of why UN Women had declined to name him, why a copy of the report would not be shared with victims, and why the adviser had not been referred to police earlier in the process.
She said: “Firing a staff member is not a punishment proportionate to the severity of the crime. It remains to be seen if the UN follows through on its obligation to cooperate with the authorities. Its system-wide policy of jumping the line ahead of police action has undoubtedly already jeopardised the justice process.”
The investigation into Karkara was carried out by the UN Development Programme’s Office of Audit and Investigation, which delivered a report to UN Women at the end of August.

The Trump administration will open a week of high-level meetings at the United Nations General Assembly in New York with a drug policy event featuring President Donald Trump. Invites to the event are being doled out only to those countries that have signed on to a controversial, nonnegotiable action plan, according to documents obtained by The Intercept — among them the countries with the world’s most draconian drug laws.

Guterres is fully aware of the UN’s political flaws as well as structural and staffing shortcomings. We must hope that he finds the fortitude not to shy away from the Sisyphean task of transforming — and that is the word — how the UN does business. Could he use the Trump administration’s tightening of financial screws — including its nearsighted, heartless halt of funding to the UN’s Population Fund (Unfpa) and the Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (Unrwa) and the Green Climate Fund, which supports the Paris Agreement — to do what long has needed doing?

And this brings us to United Against Inhumanity (UAI), an emerging global movement of citizens and civil society who are outraged by the inability and unwillingness of the formal international system to address the causes and consequences of armed conflict. One of the goals of UAI is to work with citizen and civil society organisations and to put the citizen at the centre of efforts to combat the inhumanity of warfare and the abomination of measures that deny those in need of refuge the right to seek asylum. It aims to increase the political and reputational damage to perpetrators and to support civil society mobilisation actions on the inhumanity of war and the erosion of asylum.

“A limited international attention span and a never-ending supply of atrocities means that systematic repression unaccompanied by a high death toll simply incurs fewer reputational costs than a bloodbath.” Read @kcroninfurman on China’s Uighur repression: https://t.co/SZ5WUy8rH0

— Anjali Dayal (@akd2003) September 19, 2018

Ophelia told me that pessimism is the worst possible expression of privilege. Because then you're basically writing off millions of people who simply can't afford to think that way: they can't look at the statistics and conclude, "You know, it doesn't look so good for my family. I think we'll just give up." I try to hang on to that idea when I feel hopeless, that optimism is a moral choice. That the alternative is a failure of not just empathy, but imagination.

As a consequence, this approach individualises the ‘problem’ of poverty whilst failing to acknowledge, contextualize, highlight or analyse the structures, institutions and actors that actually make and keep some people poor. For example, the idea that role models can be effective in changing people’s behaviour, emotions and self-concepts isn’t new; what’s new is the belief that these aspirations can lift people out of poverty without broader changes in politics, social structures and institutions. Returning to the brothels of Kolkata, advocating for the removal of psychological barriers may not be effective if the working conditions of sex workers and the structures on which their material deprivation stands continue to go unchallenged.

Behavioral scientists can keep demonstrating value to edutainment and social and behavioral change communication, in part through future deployments of this method and increasing the base of evidence. They can do so through much more research about the psychological mechanisms of edutainment, which we have little understanding of yet. In everything from peace building to fertilizer use, edutainment has been used, and behavioral science should be used too.
What is certain is that we must keep working together. Edutainment is the best-funded, best-evidenced approach to behavior change communication at scale. It is vital, and it is not as good as it could be. Behavioral science has much to offer in maximizing its impact.

The analysis of CARE International’s visual communication on Twitter demonstrates that CARE’s imagery has shifted to portray a greater representation of empowered women. Yet, images of women vastly outnumber those of men, and women are portrayed as victims more often than men. As such, CARE’s communication can be characterized by a lack of gender as well as contextual variability. Thus, CARE’s communication reflects a greater entrenchment in, and perpetuation of, a victim paradigm that inadequately represents the needs and capabilities of both genders.
In moral and ethical terms, the emotions of compassion and empathy should be unconstrained by gender. Though women do suffer disproportionately as a result of humanitarian crises, their over-utilization as a means of eliciting compassion and empathy points to an unequal sublimation of who may be deserving of an assistive response. This delineates who can and cannot be a victim, elevating gender roles and dichotomies and marginalizing the agency of both.

It’s too easy for even people who know better to describe Africa in relation to its position in Western and now Eastern commodity chains, to accept that the challenge is in finding a suitor rather than emphasising the agency of African people. We pick up the discourse uncritically and in so doing reinforce it. Africa represents “a new economic frontier” and not, for example, a home. “What’s Trump’s position on Africa?” we scramble to answer as if Africa cannot exist without Trump expressing an opinion on it. Yes, it’s in the nature of international economic and political discourse to unsee people, but shouldn’t we resist this dehumanising language?
There’s certainly truth in that African political leaders are so eager to drop everything and traipse around the world, begging bowls in hand, at the beck and call of leaders from other parts of the world. In 2014, rather than visit various African countries, for example, Obama simply summoned them all for a meeting in Washington DC. And they came. Tony Blair did the same thing in 2004. Our presidents scurry off to Brussels and Paris, and China every three years.

“Because people want every hour and dollar they give to be stretched thin.” Hutchings told me that his biggest problem was the volunteers, donors, and their lofty expectations. Many donors want to assign criteria to how their food is given out. They want their money feeding as many as possible, to make sure you spend it only on eggs and bread. They want to police. They don’t care about the “how”. Even the most good-hearted volunteers want to feel thanked. Refugee Support began its work in April 2016 at Alexandreia camp near Thessaloniki, Greece. They set out to open a food store, then a clothing store, a well-designed, peaceful marketplace stocked with donations, where a person of note wouldn’t be ashamed to shop. When Hutchings showed me photographs, I thought: my mother, an Iranian doctor, would shop there. My grandfather, a landowner, would be proud to run into a neighbour there. It was a far cry from the item-specific trucks.
At first, residents made appointments and collected prepared baskets of food, thoughtfully arranged with necessities for each family. Everyone received the same thing, regardless of allergies, habits or taste. But people didn’t have the same needs, and soon there were grumblings, barter, waste.
Hutchings and Sloan decided to display the goods and give people the respect of choosing for themselves. The store’s currency would be points distributed weekly like income – 100 points per adult, 50 per child, 150 for pregnant women. Store prices would be pegged to market prices (20 points per euro). Sanitary items would be free. If residents wanted to spend all their points on chocolate spread, they had that right.

The Guyana case offers clues to help the move towards structural change, as it highlights issues UNICEF Innovation ignores: the relevance of attitudes and values that frame projects/programs, the need to collaborate with people as equals and the role hardware plays in this, the need to identify and tackle power imbalances in every intervention, the need for knowledge equity, capabilities, and autonomy for adequate impact and sustainability, the need to understand change is a long term thing, not the result of a technology transfer scheme (the tribes and Digital Democracy have been partnering for more than 10 years).

Dessalines’ vision of an autonomous black state – a nation founded by enslaved people who killed their colonial masters – alarmed the patrician Virginia plantation owner, Jefferson’s letters show. The U.S. was also being pressured by southern slave states and French and British diplomats to shun Haiti.
Rather than reckoning with the ills of racial oppression and colonialism, most prominent thinkers across the Americas and Europe interpreted Dessalines’ war as an example of African barbarity.

I Don’t Have Experience Here, But My Take Is

I Realize We’re Out of Time, But If I Could Just

As I Wrote In My Free Ebook

I’m Sorry I Missed The First Part of This, But I Think

Let’s Hear More From The Same Voices

A Few Problematic Generalizations to Illustrate My Point

Binance, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency exchange, has moved from China, where it was founded in 2017, to Malta, where it is creating a blockchain-based bank called the Founders Bank. Yanislav Malahov, one of the creators of Ethereum — the second-most popular cryptocurrency after bitcoin — has chosen Liechtenstein as his base to build a new blockchain called Aeternity. And companies like remittance firm eXlama decided to set up shop in Gibraltar, because it was “one of the first” territories to “answer to the demand” for a legal framework for blockchain, cryptocurrencies

'Investigative Journalism in Africa: An Exploratory Study of Non-Profit Investigative Journalism Organisations in Africa'. Really interesting report by @AlvinNtibinyane on this important topic https://t.co/XW9oMf8rEX

— Martin Scott (@martinscott2010) September 19, 2018

400 mil. people in Sub-Saharan Africa still live in extreme #poverty. This book combines careful research, hard-won experience & ethical advocacy advice on how to bring about change for the most vulnerable. Free download:https://t.co/fSJI7imNT4#ASAUK18@devcomms@OfficialUoMpic.twitter.com/Su6cM5O3qm

— Practical Action Publishing (@PractActPubs) September 12, 2018

Brain drain? Not so much. "For each new nurse that moved abroad, approximately two more individuals with nursing degrees graduated... Nurse migration had no impact on either infant or maternal mortality."https://t.co/ln7UWEWumK

— David Evans (@DaveEvansPhD) September 20, 2018

Despite all of its attendant vulnerabilities, the plantation remained the centre of British Caribbean society into the late nineteenth century. The fact that the British vision for the region developed so little meant that the plantation continually exposed the region’s inhabitants to increased risk. A hurricane in 1898 that hit Barbados and St. Vincent caused landslips that rendered many homeless and necessitated the rapid importation of provisions and timber. This system, as unsustainable and ill-suited to the region’s environment as it was, remained because it primarily benefitted a select group of people who were far removed from its consequences. Such a conclusion should cause us to reflect on present day developments in the Caribbean.

I was his interpreter, both linguistically and for an understanding of the society that harbored him. I gave him news of the outside world. When he had a vocabulary loss, he turned to me for the word and meaning. I was less given to compliments than his fans, although I sensed he wanted my approval, especially when we came out of meetings with functionaries, foreign militants, or diplomats (p.195).

The Algerians (…) had never known any Americans, let alone Black Panther Americans. (…) They were suspicious of them and in awe of their lifestyle, their prowess and efficiency. (…) When the Panthers arrived, Algeria was a leading light in the Third World, active in international politics and the non-aligned group of nations. They were hosting and training liberation movements from Latin America, Africa and Asia (p.167).

While Algeria was avowedly Third World and an outspoken critic of the colonialist and imperialist West, it was in no way a “rogue” state. The authorities wanted it to be known that anyone entertaining thoughts of skyjack aimed at their country should understand that the Algerian government was not their accomplice, even if it judged the hijackers to be victims of an unjust society and was willing to guarantee their personal safety by granting asylum (p.164).

Algiers, Third World Capital, brings out the best in what I appreciate so much about alternative writings about the history of development: Through the eyes of a fascinating personality the reader is immersed in a historical puzzle that vividly and also entertainingly, outlines the complexities of transformation, of alternatives ideas, different ideals and insights into societies, countries and larger parts of the world in limbo. When it comes to popular forms of writing on global developments and using autobiographies as resources for teaching, research and communicating #globaldev, make sure you pick up your copy of Elaine Mokhtefi’s book!

THREAD

In July 2018, a horrifying video began to circulate on social media.

2 women & 2 young children are led away by a group of soldiers. They are blindfolded, forced to the ground, and shot 22 times. #BBCAfricaEye investigated this atrocity. This is what we found... pic.twitter.com/oFEYnTLT6z

— BBC News Africa (@BBCAfrica) September 24, 2018

Denmark’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) said it was withholding its 2018 contribution of about $1.6m to Unep. “The ministry is familiar with the criticism of Solheim’s travel activities,” an MFA spokeswoman told the Guardian. “We take this seriously. We are now awaiting the final audit report and its possible recommendations before we pay additional funds.”
Sweden’s International Development Agency (Sida) said they would not approve any new funding until all the issues raised had been resolved. “Sida takes all signals of misuse of funds very seriously,” a spokeswoman said.

But after a campaign led by a former intern, the UN agency has agreed to provide full financial support for its young workers by no later than 2020.
It told the BBC that targets are also in place to ensure that 50% of interns come from developing countries by 2022."It's unacceptable that 80% of WHO's work goes into supporting people in developing countries, yet only 20% of their interns come from them," says Ashton Barnett-Vanes, 29, a British doctor of English and Jamaican heritage from Wolverhampton, who started the campaign after his internship in 2012.

Critics of the “localisation” agenda question whether local aid organisations can always adhere to the humanitarian principles of independence and neutrality, particularly in conflict zones. Many donors have also been reluctant to directly fund local NGOs, instead opting to work through intermediaries like the major international aid groups. When funding does reach the ground, it is often earmarked for short-term projects.
Local aid organisations say they’re in a constant struggle to survive. They’re asking for stable, longer-term funding that will allow them to grow and sustain local expertise.
Money is important, but it’s not the only factor. Local leaders say they want a greater role in making decisions. They’re also asking for help to build skills and expertise on the ground, so that grassroots groups will be better equipped to lead in future emergencies.

Simple strategies for opening up procurement to firms in the global south have been well documented for many years. Yet evidence from 18 donor agencies who responded to our survey shows that such strategies are often ignored. Donors do not consistently advertise contracts in the local media, they still set very large contract sizes, and the procurement processes are often only conducted in the languages of donor countries, but not the local languages of countries in the global south.
Meeks said: “If donors are really committed to maximising the catalytic impact of aid for development in the global south – not just for their own companies – they should urgently take action to untie their aid and improve their procurement processes.”

The message from these speakers was very pure and clear: we must bring more joy and love into the aid and development sector if we are to challenge and transform it. There were some wonderful grounding techniques led by Agnes Otzelberger and Mary Ann Clements among others (sorry I couldn’t get to them all!) that helped put this principle into practice, and which we can use in our day-to-day lives to help us connect with ourselves and others. All in all, there was so much to take away from this conference; to work with in ourselves, and in our communities and organisations. As Mary Ann Clements pointed out in her closing remarks at the end of the conference, space has opened up for us to challenge situations of patriarchy and racism in our sector. In this regard, I believe healing solidarity means three things: recognising our own positioning within these situations, recognising where other people are at with regard to understanding the problems, and being willing to meet them and ourselves on this trajectory with compassion and the belief that we all have a role to play in creating more positive models of development and power.

The SDGs prompted hope that their ambition and collective vision would mobilize business to a new degree and provide further momentum to efforts to more fundamentally align business models and strategies with sustainable development. The evidence to date doesn’t seem to validate this hope. Instead, our findings appear to confirm a broader trajectory of the corporate sustainability agenda, which over the years has become increasingly company-driven (vs. stakeholder-driven) and focused on a narrow ‘business case’ as primary motivator for companies to engage in sustainability issues. This approach is likely to disappoint our collective expectations of business’ contribution to achieving the SDGs.

Damning new research claims to have uncovered serious employment violations and ‘poverty wages’ at H&M gold suppliers. Researchers interviewed garment factory workers from Bulgaria, India, Cambodia and Turkey. Interviewed workers in India and Turkey earn about a third and in Cambodia less than one-half of the estimated living wage, claim the researchers, while Bulgaria interviewed workers’ salary at H&M’s gold supplier is claimed to be “not even 10 per cent of what would be required for workers and their families to have decent lives.”
The findings, published by Clean Clothes Campaign, arrive at a time when H&M has just published a press note suggesting it has reached almost one million workers with its ‘fair living wage’ strategy.

Erwiah is trying to balance scale with better wages (although she would not give further details) and working conditions. With a factory in Accra, Studio 189 is already different from many other manufacturers. For starters, the label came out of Fashion Rising, a project on the back of the One Billion Rising global campaign against gender-based violence.
The factory was partly funded through a partnership from the International Trade Center, the Swiss and Ghanaian governments, which sponsor a program to grow the local fashion industry. Its focus on sustainability earned the firm this year’s Council of Fashion Designers of America and Lexus Fashion Initiative award.

In a study conducted by Nirantar as part of the sexuality workshop, adolescent girls shared a colourful range of fantasies. One said she wanted to wear only her underclothes and fire bullets from a gun. Some girls simply wanted to cut their hair and walk around holding hands with male friends.
Then there is S. Her arms hurt from milking the cows everyday. Sometimes even the walk from the field to her home seems too long and lonely. Her clan doesn’t allow widows to remarry. But for her, to desire and to be desired are things she doesn’t need societal approval for. She says if she keeps worrying ki log kya kahenge (what will people say), who will worry about her? Two decades after the first time she had sex, it’s not the man alone who calls the shots in the bedroom. Sex is never over till S too has had an orgasm.

The root of my discontent is that while everyone continuously debated “development” and attempted to “rethink” it, not once it was clarified what the (minimum) common denominator of the “development” to be rethought would be. Were we talking about intervention, projects, stakeholders, cooperation? Were we rethinking technical modes of intervention? Ways of studying or researching? Or were we questioning the roots of persistent inequalities, the sources of poverty and the causes of injustices (e.g. the legacy of colonialism, global capitalism and our imperial mode of living)?

Now 29 and a fully fledged MP, Ngwenya is charged with putting together an irresistible proposition for voters ahead of the 2019 presidential elections as the DA’s first head of policy. Quite a responsibility, considering 2019 represents the first time in democratic South Africa that any party besides the African National Congress (ANC) has even an outside chance of winning.
As early as her teenage years, Ngwenya “just knew” she was a liberal who believed in the importance of individual rights. The best groups, she says, are ones where members are free to join, free to leave and free to decide what the group stands for. Some groups — those demarcated along racial or gender lines, for example — are “the exact opposite” as they are generally “ruled by a hegemonic elite.” It’s always riled her when “someone stands up and says, ‘Black people feel this …’ or ‘Women want that …’ ”

The discrimination Gautam faced as a young man only made him fight harder. The second time he applied for a passport, a mid-level government official who had also risen from a rural village sympathized with his plight and approved his application.
Gautam was going to America.
"From that point on, I felt — ah! I have managed to do something impossible," he says early in the interview. His cup of tea, forgotten, cools before him as he recalls the pain and then joy of his challenges. "Even when the king rejects you, that's not the end of the road."
For Gautam, the road would extend all the way to a top leadership position with the United Nations.
In 1971, he graduated from Dartmouth, where he studied international relations, after just three years. Next, he received his master's degree in economic development and modernization from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School in 1973.
After that, he ascended the ranks of the United Nations, beginning as a program officer for UNICEF and climbing to the position of assistant secretary general of the U.N. from 2000 to 2008.

Certainly many of the current theatrical productions are heavily based on real life experience, if fictionalised in part. Part of The Jungle’s power is the fact that you know this comes from Murphy and Robertson’s own experience running the Good Chance theatre dome in the camp itself. My own play Aid Memoir which opens at the Pleasance Theatre, Islington in October, and is performed at City University in November before going on tour, uses my own experience as a journalist and working for a major aid agency.
While The Jungle sites itself in the specific months leading up to the demolition of the camp and uses film of Alan Kurdi to locate it in real life, I chose to create a fictional refugee camp – set in England, run by African aid workers who allow the winner of Kenya’s Got Talent to run a celebrity appeal to save the UK refugees. By switching round the sufferers and the saviours, Aid Memoir directly tries to challenge the audience’s preconceptions around aid.
The challenge for any writer is to engage audiences with these issues, which let’s face it do not make for a relaxing evening. Part of this is telling engaging human stories – showing refugees and aid workers as real people – not just saints or archetypes.

The “Mandela and Me” exhibition at the British Council in London marks the centenary of Nelson Mandela’s birth in 1918. The exhibition is sponsored by Anglo American, the mining giant that was the biggest corporation in South Africa during apartheid and has, since 1999, been headquartered in London.
This corporate connection influences the narrative that is spun at the exhibition. For example, it completely ignores Anglo’s own role as a founder and principal beneficiary of both British colonial rule and later the apartheid regime.
A film shown as part of the exhibition features young South Africans relaying what Mandela means for them. They appear inspired. Yet, I couldn’t help feeling that this was an exercise in the construction of public memory that has connotations of manipulation.

This research suggests the need to consider the future of work not only from an economic or employment law perspective but from a mental health one too. What are the psychological implications of precarious work and how are factors such as financial instability, the feedback economy and personal relationships reflected in mental health outcomes or connected to the business relationships most musicians and other gig economy participants work under?

Over the past six months, the IRC has been gathering the testimony of clients who attend our mental health centre in Mytilene, the capital of Lesvos. This brief outlines our findings and puts forward recommendations for the Greek local and central government, EU leaders and donors, to ensure that all asylum seekers at Moria in need of mental health services are able to access it and that living conditions do not trigger or exacerbate existing trauma.

a series of independent data-driven organisations are emerging to fact-check legacy news media as well as other news sources. This study examines how these actors advocate and adopt journalistic practice and the perceived impact they have on news journalism. We draw our data from in-depth interviews with 14 practitioners working in three organisations—Code for Africa, Open Up and Africa Check—that are currently leading major data and fact-checking operations in sub-Saharan Africa. Our findings show that while these non-journalistic actors are at the periphery of news media as institutions, their operations, activities and goals are at the heart of journalistic discourse.

Finally, they learned that there was nothing particularly sacred about tradition in the Ivy League -- especially the traditions surrounding exclusive whiteness. By decolonizing the curricula to include black studies units, and in creating their own affinity groups and spaces, they learned how blackness could enhance even the most elite white institutions. Laudably, most of the people featured in the book continued to think about themselves as part of a larger movement for black freedom and used their Ivy influence (through black alumni networks or their careers) to engineer opportunities for others.

Your project is at the intersection of anthropology and ethnic studies, and draws on history, critical race theory, and literature. I love that! This is going to pose major problems for you. Anthropological empiricism can render critical race theory and literary studies fundamentally suspect. Furthermore, anthropology still hasn’t figured out what to make of ethnic studies. Studying Asia or Latin America is highly prestigious. Studying immigrants? Not so much. This is the work of sociologists, or of people overly invested in identity politics. If you’re a person of color studying a minority group in the United States, a good number of anthropologists will write you off as “studying yourself.” (Feeling incredulous yet? You’re in good company.) Anthropology has, for centuries, freely studied the world’s nonwhite populations, but “home” is more complicated. To clarify, anthropology does acknowledge our settler-colonial history, but Native Americans don’t figure into this definition of home. I’m talking about white middle-class academics, who comprise the mainstay of anthropology.

Developing a learning mindset is the first and most important step towards being an effective international volunteer (p.28).

If your motivations are to give to the world in a way that makes you feel proud, valued, or that you have contributed, then your first step is to make sure you invest time in researching and identifying a project that is really worth being proud of (p.43).

Although I am still involved in development work, the way I strive to beat the internal debate is to devote most of my time to global education (p.62).

It’s important to take the time to learn about the unique situation and challenges in the place where you are working, to take the lead from local people in what is wanted and needed, and to learn how you can be a long-term ally in challenging the structural causes of underdevelopment (p.73).

Everything from your future career path to interacting with others on a daily basis can be part of the continued impact you have on the world, and your actions are part of a large ecosystem of inspiring people working towards – and achieving – positive change (p.343).

Learning Service is an important, positive, constructive and encouraging collection of volunteering best practices and food for thorough reflection as well as an excellent introduction for all those who may be approached by young people or co-workers who are excited about saving the world and want to do it as ethically as this imperfect offering allows.

The best Nobel Prize in a long time. Finally focus on horrific & widespread sexual violence in war. Must lead to action against impunity for perpetrators & preventive action within armies & militias. It is ten years since I fist proposed heroic Mukwege for Nobel Prize. https://t.co/fOpphHFdYs

— Jan Egeland (@NRC_Egeland) October 5, 2018

Eighteen charities have been expelled from the country, ActionAid told the BBC.
The move comes amidst increasing concerns by human rights activists and press freedom campaigners about freedom of expression in the country.

While exhausted by the attention, Strick said it was welcome. After all, it took three months to finish the in-depth, open-source investigation that he helped produce for the BBC.
The media requests (including this one) came after the news organization’s new investigative unit, Africa Eye, published the project in a Twitter thread Monday morning, racking up nearly 70,000 likes and more than 50,000 retweets as of this posting. The thread, which summarized a video report, outlined how a team of open-source investigators verified a video from sub-Saharan Africa that had gone viral on social media.

They might want to discuss the implications of the difference between being an immigrant and an expatriate. Or maybe Melania might have some words of inspiration for them, being an immigrant (not an expatriate) herself into the United States.
But none of this will happen.
And so, her extended photo-op tour will be largely pointless, particularly given that she doesn't really dictate US policy. And even the thought that merely her raising awareness over an issue facing Africans will bring substantive change is insulting on two fronts. It assumes that Africa is a blank slate mired in problems waiting for a savior to project her good intentions on. It also assumes that those problems are so basic and ultimately so ethereal that the mere presence of an American first lady would make a difference.
To be sure, sometimes a first lady does bring that charisma, star power, and je ne sais quoi to have a symbolic, yet tangible sway in government policy (I'm looking at you, Michelle Obama). But what use is symbolism in an administration where norms have been shaken from their foundations, where political mores have been trashed and where seemingly naked power rules the day?

This is appalling! I demand an African sunset, boabab tree, huts & an elephant in the background! Maybe children playing football as well! A pith helmet & plantation boots are not sufficient to frame 'Africa'!! https://t.co/zt7ngaytuD

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) October 5, 2018

Baroness Stowell will say that charities are expected to display high standards of conduct.
She will say: “It [a charity] must behave like a charity, not just call itself a charity because of the aims it has and the work it does.
“Charitable aims cannot justify uncharitable means. Our evidence shows that many people from all walks of life, across all backgrounds, ages and inclinations, feel this way.
"They may arrive at this point for different reasons […] but they all end up at the same place. Our evidence shows that people want to see charities being held, and holding themselves, to the highest standard of charitable behaviour.”
The Charity Commission itself, which has been criticised in the past for taking too much to carry out investigations, “must become a more effective, robust and proactive regulator”.

At the heart of the story is patriarchy, power, privilege, race, toxic masculinity, women, men, girls and boys, harmed and damaged by systems and structures and power that is overwhelmingly white, western, male and has its roots in the legacy of colonialism and neo colonialism.
Also at the heart of the story are the women whistleblowers, many of whom have paid a heavy price with their careers put on hold, or destroyed; some who have been painted as villains in the story for bravely speaking out to protect vulnerable people and to instigate change.
The way the story was framed, however, by many seeking to only look inward during this “scandal” was that the reporting was a right wing and orchestrated attack on the aid sector, that the UK government, hostile in its attitude towards international development and the previously ringfenced international budget was using the Oxfam “scandal” as an excuse to cut funding for the development and aid sector.

Faced with uncomfortable realities, Magufuli is now seeking to outlaw facts—and in particular fact-checking. Earlier this month Tanzania's parliament passed an amendment to the statistics act, giving the government broad authority to set standards for independent data collection, and making it a criminal offence to publicly question official government statistics. One amendment states: “A person shall not disseminate or otherwise communicate to the public any statistical information which is intended to invalidate, distort, or discredit official statistics.”

Our vision was an open data standard, easy to access, free to use, that would underpin any conversation about aid. There would be a single version of the truth, shared between governments, civil society and citizens. A bit like accounting standards, the aid information standard would vastly reduce the costs of collecting, publishing and using information about aid. The information costs that made it hard for aid to be accountable, coordinated, complementary, and efficient would be swept away as more and more of the international development community adopted IATI. Or so we hoped.
A huge amount of progress has indeed been made over the last ten years. The establishment of the original, agreed IATI Standard provided a foundation on which organisations could publish a range of aid and development data. Publication rates have increased with more than 800 organisations publishing data on IATI by July 2018, encompassing more than one million activities.

Last year, DFID gave £2.6 BILLION pounds to countries in Africa. That's so much money! How are they still so poor when we give them BILLIONS of pounds every year? Well, hold on, there are 1.2 billion PEOPLE in Africa. So that works out at just over £2 each for the whole YEAR. Of course it doesn't go to everyone, let's say the money is perfectly targeted on the poorest 10% of people. So they get £20 each.
Somehow there is a lot of magical thinking that by pooling money together it somehow automatically has totally outsized impacts. Of course its possible that smart investment in research or better governance can have truly outsized impact if it can nudge a country toward a slightly higher growth rate, but that isn't what most aid is even trying to do, and even when it is they stuff is wicked hard and we can expect most attempts to fail.

Announcing the 2018 awards, the MacArthur organization wrote: “Barber approaches social justice through the lens of the ethical and moral treatment of people as laid out in the Christian Bible, the Reconstruction and civil rights movements of the South, and the US Constitution.” The program added: “He is effective at building unusually inclusive fusion coalitions that are multiracial and interfaith, reach across gender, age and class lines, and are dedicated to addressing poverty, inequality, and systemic racism.”

Isn’t it hypocritical that we treat Ma Durga as our daughter, but we can’t accept a natural process that all daughters go through? Who are we really shielding when we become so angry about talking about gods and menstruation. Celebrating the menstrual cycle of a goddess at the Kamakhya Temple every year is convenient, but this is not?

The renaming of streets is an important urban decolonial practice. Names and naming, one of the panelists at the August 2018 street renaming festival pointed out, is fundamental to human communication. To name is to render or revoke dignity. But if South Africa is used as a barometer of the work street renaming is meant to do, then it is not at all a straightforward process, and one that can surface all kinds of tensions in black communities.
In Berlin, however, where colonial histories are often silently accepted, the inscription of new names is surely a good thing

So I made the only string of decisions that felt rational at the time. I quit my job in Atlanta, Georgia as a National Football League (NFL) reporter, turned in my car, informed my apartment complex I would not renew my lease, filled a couple of suitcases, and soon stepped foot on the sand in Huanchaco, Peru: a small, arid beach town known for its surf, seafood, and laid-back lifestyle.
On May 11, 2017, as I sat along the shore and watched the sun set below the Pacific for the first time, the gravity of my choices became clear. I took an enormous risk — one that, for better or worse, would drastically alter my future.When I decided to teach abroad, I had no particular destination in mind.

Build your muscle to work against implicit bias and structural racism and misogyny on a daily basis. Beverly Tatum describes structural racism as a moving airport walkway. Virulent racists are running on the walkway. Some people who disagree with racism think they are disengaging from it by standing still, but the walkway still moves them toward the same destination of racial disparities and discriminatory outcomes. In order to take an active role in dismantling white supremacy and any system of oppression for that matter, one must turn around on the walkway and walk faster in the opposite direction. This takes strength, backbone, endurance and tenacity. For many white people, it takes building muscle groups that they have never had to use.

Priceless podcast from @IDS_UK - a lovely chance to hear Robert Chambers on error and myth, and the importance of definitions and timeliness #IDSbetweenthelineshttps://t.co/I0OWiQLxLB

— Karen Brock (@karen_v_brock) October 3, 2018

This work-in-progress artefact provides a useful and nuanced starting point for development NGOs to explore their organisational use of social media and align these to the NGO activities as mentioned in the columns of the table. Based on the NGO’s activities one or more columns are relevant for assessing the use of social media. The cells in the table that are found when intersecting the column with the rows provide information on how social media acts for that specific development purpose and social media activity in the context of development in mind.

The data imaginary that I discovered seemed particularly powerful. The data analytics industry present a series of problems and inadequacies to which data analytics are offered as the solution. This builds up a kind of allure of data analytics that speaks to a sense of limitation, lack or deficiency. Notably, the data imaginary is geared toward the idea that we can always be better, quicker, more efficient, more productive, more intelligent, more strategic and more competitive. The data imaginary plays to our fears of being left behind in a speedy world, of lacking a competitive edge, of being out of touch, of not matching up. The data imaginary blends together promises with fears of what we might become. A life without data is left unimaginable, and a life with data is glossy, shiny, and full of hope. That is the image that is conjured. The result is that data analytics become much harder to turn away from.

A Social Media Star Is Shot Dead in Baghdad. Iraqis Fear a Trend. The killing of Tara Fares has raised fears of a coordinated campaign to silence outspoken women in Iraq, via @NYTimeshttps://t.co/tO8ZTt8hk4

— Jacobo Quintanilla (@jqg) September 29, 2018

In this guide, we explore how funders can engage in participatory grantmaking and cede decision-making power about funding decisions to the very communities they aim to serve. Deciding Together: Shifting Power and Resources Through Participatory Grantmaking illustrates why and how funders around the world are engaging in this practice that is shifting traditional power dynamics in philanthropy. Created with input from a number of participatory grantmakers, the guide shares challenges, lessons learned, and best practices for engaging in inclusive grantmaking.

This report is guided by two central truths. One: digital technologies are rapidly revolutionising many aspects of life as we know it. Two: not everyone benefits from access and effective usage of these technologies. Women, people with low levels of education, people living in poverty, and rural communities often benefit less from the great opportunities of digital technology. Unless we are deliberate about empowering these already marginalised groups to participate in our increasingly digital economies, societies and political systems, new digital opportunities may only magnify inequality and exclusion.

This paper discusses the two paradigms and the incongruent images they evoke about crises, local institutions and the recipients of aid. The article puts forward the case for studying the ways in which these contrasting aid paradigms shape practices, dealing with the importance of discourse, the social life of policy, the multiplicity of interests, the power relations and the crucial importance of understanding the lifeworld and agency of aid workers and crisis-affected communities. The article demonstrates how the stories that humanitarians tell about themselves are based on highly selective views of reality and do not include the role they themselves play in the reordering and representation of realities in humanitarian crises.

Nevertheless there has been very slow progress in poverty reduction, and there has been catastrophic destruction of environment and increase of inequality. An attempt has been made to explore the role of NGOs, their emergence with the rise of the neo-liberal world view and new economic order, as also their retreat, polarisation, integration and subsequent corporatisation.

While resource wealth can yield prosperity it can also, when mismanaged, cause acute social inequality, deep poverty, environmental damage, and political instability. There is a new determination to improve the benefits of extractive industries to their host countries, and to strengthen the sector's governance. Extractive Industries provides a comprehensive contribution to what must be done in this sector to deliver development, protect often fragile environments from damage, enhance the rights of affected communities, and support climate change action.

How to make academic seminars more inclusive? Some tips for organisers, moderators, and audience members to support #diversityinacademia during Q&As informed by our study https://t.co/7fRGHULU0I. For more info, see our website https://t.co/0OwneiC10cpic.twitter.com/bVCUoc1Ulu

— Alecia Carter (@alecia_carter) September 27, 2018

Alongside a broader shift to neoliberal and financialized economies, storytelling is being reconfigured on the model of the market to produce entrepreneurial, upwardly mobile subjects and is leveraged toward strategic and measurable goals driven by philanthropic foundations. Curated personal stories shift the focus away from structurally defined axes of oppression and help to defuse the confrontational politics of social movements (pp.2-3).

Stories valorized experience above structure, falling prey to a relativist dogma that each person’s truth is as valid as another. The promoted emotional response and feeling over thinking creating a binary that was never present in earlier situations. And storytelling encouraged the idea that individual redress or compensation, such as court judgements in favour of battered women, would provide the solution to deeply entrenched systems of poverty and patriarchy. (…) Talk shows emphasized “real people telling real stories”, and truth commission officials insisted on the mythic origins of storytelling practices in traditional cultures. The spectacle of stories as cathartic for individuals and for divided nations has been crucial in giving legitimacy to orders ranging from postapartheid South Africa to post-Bush America (pp.36-37).

The writing workshops are part of a broader network of State Department-funded exchange programs, leadership schools, Fulbright scholarships, and development agencies that aim to cultivate the subjectivity of a layer of leaders from the upwardly mobile urban elite who will help to lay the groundwork for a neoliberal market democracy. Those Afghan women who oppose US intervention, campaign against US-supported warlords and seek to promote self-determination and economic independence for Afghanistan are further marginalized politically (p.67).

By tying stories to electoral and legislative campaigns and by representing them through the lens of nationalist mythologies, a range of groups participated in a process of transformismo that absorbed and defused the discontent being expressed globally and domestically toward American-supported neoliberal and imperialist policies (p.165).

Collective, grassroots, and global social movement organizing is the key for shifting from the terrain of the probable in which much non-profit and development work takes place to the terrain of the utopian, where we can start imagining a fundamental restructuring of work, reproduction, and the global economy (p.170-171).

Curated Stories is a remarkable entry point for critical discussions that probably all of us should have who ‘do’ communication and/for development. Critical engagement with the storytelling discourse goes far beyond an authentic organizational blog or the limitations of hashtag activism. Fernandes provokes us to think beyond the instrumental, often time-consuming, practices of ‘innovative’ approaches to development and communication that easily get ‘stuck’ once they reach formal social, political or economic spaces. The book also asks challenging questions about ‘our’ work from and in the global North and how storytelling can move beyond the comfort zone of mediatized development work.
This is a concise and accessible academic book that should be on your reading list, discussed in the office and shared with students and partners around the globe!

"The cold war was more damaging to Africa than colonialism"-ladies & gentlemen, the Personal Representative of the German Chancellor for Africa, Guenter Nooke (original interview in German) 1/nhttps://t.co/owz0yLPIlX

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) October 8, 2018

The pith helmet was part of a pseudoscientific discourse that enforced class, as well as racial domination, since only the rich could follow such medical advice.
The pith helmet is sometimes used to denote a "frontier" spirit of adventure and intrepid exploration. This is wrong. In fact, their historical social role was to emblematise white fragility and anxieties, as well as blurring the distinction between white civilians and the colonial police and military, who also wore pith helmets.
Colonialism extracted labour and resources from "natives" by ordering colonial societies through extreme and everyday forms of violence. But it was always necessary to insist that despite enjoying the protection of colonial states armed to the teeth in order to immiserate and exploit subject peoples, it was whites - and white women, in particular - who were the most vulnerable group in the colony.
In this sense, the pith helmet represents not only colonialism, but whiteness, too. We might think of whiteness as an identity that always noisily insists on its own vulnerability (despite social and economic realities to the contrary) as the principal justification for the oppression of racialised others.

It’s not that people aren’t working—it’s that too many of them are working in the wrong fields. Or, more to the point, it’s that too many people are working in fields and not in factories or tech startups or wherever else people are supposed to work in a “diversified, modern economy.” Such a transition is necessary, purveyors of the African green revolution say, not only because work in factories and offices are better, but because agriculture is so inherently backwards. The kind of farming that the majority of Africa’s rural people still practice, growing food for a small group of people to be processed by hand, is what people do when they’re not sufficiently integrated with the global economy. If people must farm, they could at least grow raw materials for local industries, or exports for hard currency, with a minimal use of labor and a maximal use of technology. Alas, even that is a job for a mere sliver of the population, preferably something below ten percent of everyone in a given country.

All of these totems of western pop culture—Banana Republic’s “safari craze,” Ralph Lauren’s well-appointed tents, Peter Beard’s fashion shoots, Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa—are problematic because they exoticize and generalize the people and places surrounding their white subjects.
Melania’s pith helmet and its accompanying clothing seem to celebrate this legacy, whether knowingly or not. They fit perfectly with the first lady’s tradition of dressing for her role, as the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino once put it, “as if she were a paper doll, every outfit a costume.”
Costumes are frequently offensive, and this one of a white westerner in Africa is no exception. But is it surprising? Not even a little bit.

Clancy said international NGOs had to walk a careful line of not acting paternalistically and taking over aid operations. “There’s pushback against the international community who come flooding in days or weeks later, taking over the response. It’s about taking back that power and saying local organisations have significant capacity.”
The Indonesian government, the Indonesian Red Cross and other Indonesian NGOs all have “significant capacity” for providing humanitarian assistance, said Clancy. “Natural disasters aren’t a new phenomenon for Indonesia, unfortunately … They are well experienced in responding to natural disasters.”

(THREAD)
Narratives on #localization, pitting INGOs vs NNGOs, continues to be discouraging. This point is relevant, but simplification obscures the real issues and potential solutions. https://t.co/wTzbfbAw4D

— Lindsay Hamsik (@lindsayhamsik) October 4, 2018

If people could empathize with mass suffering, philanthropy could become broader and more effective. But by no means would it fix all problems. The most generous charity after a disaster like Indonesia’s still must be delivered in order to help and, as in Palu, lack of good infrastructure can prevent that. Empathy generated by mass death can’t lower the toll. Charitable donations tend to be reactive, not proactive—it’s easier to care about the ongoing suffering of many than the potential suffering of future people that could still be prevented. In cases like these, aid and philanthropy should be driven by something else—for instance, objectively reasoned principles about which policies can make the biggest difference. But the fact remains that many of us will give only and most often to the causes that move us.

The charity would raise over $8 million, including almost $600,000 from the U.S. government. Meyler would enter a rarefied world of globe-trotting problem-solvers. She would rub shoulders with Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey, and even get invited to the Obama White House. MTM’s footprint in Liberia would multiply to 19 schools teaching 4,000 students.
Yet some of the girls present that September day had a secret. Far from being saved from sexual exploitation, they were being raped by the man standing beside Meyler on the stage.
His assaults went on for years and continued in the new school. He was protected by his position — he was presented as “co-founder” of MTM; he and Meyler had had an intimate relationship, and she kept him in place even after having reason to suspect his predilections. But he was also shielded from exposure in the community by everything that she had brought: a school, scholarships and, above all, hope.
After his crimes became known, filling hundreds of pages of police and legal records, the charity worked to obscure the details and to place responsibility almost anywhere but with Meyler or MTM: Liberia’s culture was blamed. As a growing number of former staff, victims and their families told us their stories, More Than Me fought to contain the damage. Senior charity officials, with Liberian government support, cross-examined key witnesses, asking if they wanted to take back what they had said. Many of those they reached still rely on the charity for support. They told the charity they no longer wanted their stories published.

But his recent proposals to amend UN staff rules and regulations to further advance gender parity at the United Nations, have triggered a strong protest from the Geneva-based federation of UN staffers worldwide.
Ian Richards, President, Coordinating Committee of International Staff Unions and Associations (CCISUA), representing over 60,000 staffers in the UN system worldwide, told IPS that staff unions disagree with the proposal to change the downsizing rules to make achievement of gender parity at the UN a factor in determining who is fired when posts are cut.
“The current rules state an order of retention based on contract type with due consideration for length of service, performance and integrity — standard practice for most organisations elsewhere as well”.
This is implemented, he pointed out, through a points system that has been signed off by the secretary-general and unions, and is relatively well accepted by staff.
But “management is now proposing to sweep this aside so that gender becomes the determining factor regardless of performance, competence, integrity, length of service and so forth,” Richards added.

The BBOG operates a surprising funding policy: they have so far refused funding support from both foreign and local donors. The leadership argued that once there was money, there would be a struggle for it among them, and their focus would be shifted from pressurising government to sharing money. They also feared that once people (especially politicians) gave them money, they could be seen as being partisan. (There were allegations at the start that they were being used by the opposition to harass the government.)
Relying heavily on donations from members and in-kind support, the Movement does not even have a bank account. They do, however, solicit international news makers (such as Ms Michelle Obama) to openly identify with their cause.
A lot is being said about the shrinking civic space in conflict-affected and authoritarian settings. However, a closer attention to the strategies of civic actors may reveal two things: one, that the civic space is not really shrinking but changing, and two, the creative ways in which civic actors are responding to these changes – the creativity that explains their resilience.

By examining the complex contemporary issues of colonialism and authoritarianism, a scrutiny of the public space littered by aid billboards and regime symbols illustrate that these two dimensions are not exclusive. Western aid has indeed conquered the streets with paternalistic billboards without tackling efficiently structural inequalities and political oppression that is also maintained and perpetuated by the current regime.

Reflecting on the coloniality of power and knowledge allows for a critical questioning of existing structures in global health.
Importantly, the next step should not be a fundamentalist rejection of all things modern or European or Western. Equally, we must be wary of false binaries (between the global north and global south) that are reductionist or over-simplifications of the very complex ways in which power affects these relationships. Rather, a more nuanced approach is needed, one that recognises that these inequalities are bad for all of us, and cannot be separated from the broader political economy of global health systems. Importantly, there is a role for actors from both the global south and the global north to actively participate in the decolonial project to disrupt power and knowledge asymmetries.
Some may say these asymmetrical patterns of power are inevitable while the majority of the funding still comes from the global north. Could power relationships in research partnerships between the global south and north be more equal? Could research consortia be structured differently? Are more horizontal, equal partnerships with true co-production of research possible irrespective of where the research funding comes from? We would argue that the answer is yes.

This. So many practitioners dislike RCTs because they imply “withholding treatment” from part of the sample. If we knew the treatment would work, we wouldn’t need an evaluation! https://t.co/aXWCgLs7QZ

— Jennifer Doleac (@jenniferdoleac) October 11, 2018

We asked Keren why it is that Israel’s technology industry performs at an astonishing level of productivity, especially in the military sector.
“Because we are checking our systems live,” he said. “We are in a war situation all the time. If it’s not happening right now, it will happen in a month.”
“It’s not [just] about building the technology” and having to wait years to try out the systems, Keren told us. The secret of the Israeli tech sector’s success, he explained, lay in “operating the technology faster than any other country in live situations.”
Keren isn’t the first to make this connection. Gaza is widely perceived as a human Petri dish – to improve killing capacity and cultivate pacification methods – among the movers and shakers in the Israeli high-tech and military sectors.

Now, my pet peeves with this AfDB data and analysis in these reports - make work, as you can see, for entire departments of people. From the 2018 Economic outlook for West Africa we have this helpful information from pre-mobile phone era informing us of history. pic.twitter.com/lflbi6KRq5

— The Prepaid Economy: African Edition (@prepaid_africa) October 6, 2018

All these strategies can and do work. But their success often hinges on larger factors. For example, the Ford Foundation’s asset-building efforts—the centerpiece of its economic equity funding under Susan Berresford’s leadership and beyond—achieved some real results. But the financial crisis of 2008 wiped out nearly all the wealth gains made by communities of color over preceding years. One of the reasons that crisis occurred is because there was barely any opposition to efforts to deregulate the financial sector during the 1990s. Even now, amid a growing push to undo the Dodd-Frank law and rising warnings about future financial crises, few foundations focus on policing Wall Street—an obvious high ground of political economy.
Many foundations seemed trapped in a dated mindset about how change happens and how to have impact. They haven’t wrapped their heads around key realities of our age, like the fall of public trust in institutions and elites, and rising polarization and populism. In this environment, expertise just doesn’t seem to matter all that much.
What’s moving change right now are social movements, ideology and tribal loyalties. Old-fashioned oligarchical power and raw political muscle matters, too—perhaps more than at any time since the Gilded Age.

Assuming that I am not the only one who experiences conferences as an ordeal, what would be some useful advice for how to attend and get the most out of them? Here are some questions I need answered

I hosted this week's episode of Quartz News about how Afrobeats—Nigeria's new-school pop music—is going global.
Watch here: https://t.co/wpPE8TvGxDpic.twitter.com/5jzM6XSyEX

— Yomi Kazeem (@TheYomiKazeem) October 4, 2018

Our approach is to first consider how ‘community’ has become popular in research and with humanitarian agencies and other organisations based on what can be considered a ‘moral licence’ that supposedly guarantees that the actions being taken are genuinely people-centred and ethically justified. We then explore several theoretical approaches to ‘community’, highlight the vast scope of different (and contested) views on what ‘community’ entails, and explain how ‘community’ is framing practical attempts to mitigate vulnerability and inequity. We demonstrate how these attempts are usually futile, and sometimes harmful, due to the blurriness of ‘community’ concepts and their inherent failure to address the root causes of vulnerability. From two antagonistic positions, we finally advocate more meaningful ways to acknowledge vulnerable people’s views and needs appropriately.

In this article, we combine insights from policy studies with specific case studies of Oxfam campaigns to describe four ways to promote the uptake of research evidence in policy: (1) learn how policymaking works, (2) design evidence to maximise its influence on specific audiences, (3) design and use additional influencing strategies such as insider persuasion or outsider pressure, and adapt the presentation of evidence and influencing strategies to the changing context, and (4) embrace trial and error.

Why do some nonviolent revolutions lead to successful democratization while others fail to consolidate democratic change? And what can activists do to push toward a victory over dictatorship that results in long-term political freedom?
Several studies show that nonviolent revolutions are generally a more positive force for democratization than violent revolutions and top-down political transitions. However, many nonviolent revolutions, such as the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt, do not seem to fi t this pattern. This study takes on this puzzle and reveals that the answer lies in large part in the actions of civil society prior to and during transition. Democracy is most likely when activists can keep their social bases mobilized for positive political change while directing that mobilization toward building new political institutions.

A key finding is that the narrative of ‘success’ often focuses on the ‘successful Mzungu founder’3, who receives more investment, has better networks and resources and can afford to take greater risks. This ignores the many local Kenya successes, and the fact that many perceived ‘failures’ contain valuable lessons, data and signals about market demands and customer needs.
Similarly, the funding landscape, dominated by overseas funders, donors and private investors, skews how aid implementers and entrepreneurs frame their projects, and distorts their incentives. Too much emphasis on numbers-based reporting to donors, and high-risk, easily scalable products for investment creates a gap in funding for local entrepreneurs, experimentation, building local capacity and exploring local markets and needs — i.e. finding out ‘what really works’. It also reduces the potential for creative and equal collaborations between NGOs and local entrepreneurs, a relationship that is more commonly that of client and supplier.
There is a clear opening in this landscape for local investors and intermediaries such as tech hubs, who understand the local context. While change is slowly taking place and social-tech projects with alternative models are evolving around the country, the ecosystem requires new forms of leadership and collaboration between different groups.
The report also reflects on major cross-cutting themes emerging from the interviews that resonated with my own and others’ research, such as the skills gap spanning the social tech ecosystem — including modern project management techniques, iterative product development and engagement with end users.

Humanitarian expertise can therefore be conceived as a sort of performance. It is less something a professional has acquired through experience (even though this is undeniably the case too) than something (s)he has come to excel at through repetitive performances. In other words, it is through the mastery of conscientiously choreographed practices of document production and bureaucratic rituals of authorization (embodied in meetings, conferences and workshops) that one qualifies as an ‘expert’.
This emphasis on ‘processes’ and ‘forms’ as effective carriers of ‘evidence’ denotes a commitment for action for lack of a concrete vision of the future. The tasks forces, working groups and conferences that humanitarian expertise relies on to achieve legitimacy tend to maintain ‘the reality on the ground’ that is supposed to inform policy ‘within the brackets’, to use the title of Riles’ 1998 American Anthropologist article (Riles 1998). Indeed, the ‘humanity’ embodied by the ‘people’ that such activities are ultimately meant to serve remains hidden from view, behind the documents and the processes that lead to their collective production. Expert knowledge, as a fragile product of negotiations, implicitly requires “the co-production of ignorance” (Mathews 2008).

Critical pedagogy asks that educators help students develop not only an epistemological relationship to reality, but also an awareness of their agency upon that landscape: the agency to change or be changed, to name or to be named, to claim power or surrender it. The learning management system doesn’t easily open itself to these concerns, but more importantly, the LMS makes no space for LGBTQ -- and specifically trans and queer -- identity formation. There need to be new practices developed for communication and support of trans and queer students across distance.

Technology is changing the skills that employers seek. Workers need to be better at complex problem-solving, teamwork and adaptability. Digital technology is also changing how people work and the terms on which they work. Even in advanced economies, short-term work, often found through online platforms, is posing similar challenges to those faced by the world’s informal workers. The Report analyzes these changes and considers how governments can best respond. Investing in human capital must be a priority for governments in order for workers to build the skills in demand in the labor market. In addition, governments need to enhance social protection and extend it to all people in society, irrespective of the terms on which they work.

It's that day of the year again!

The @worldbank World Development Report is out!
"The Changing Nature of Work"

And as some of you know, I always read it on the day of publication and live tweet my review

Background: here's my review of the last 5 WDRs https://t.co/TUnYGZbnEqpic.twitter.com/TUUj1phinz

— Alice Evans (@_alice_evans) October 12, 2018

Oxfam said the report’s main message was that governments should abandon labour market regulation and rely instead on low levels of welfare to prevent workers falling into extreme poverty.
With poor countries facing the twin threats from large corporates unwilling to negotiate with trade unions and young start-ups insisting on casual labour arrangements, Oxfam said the World Bank appeared to offer labour market deregulation as the only way to prepare countries for the changing nature of work.

The statistical acrobatics on inequality are aimed at bolstering the report team’s pro-deregulation ideology. The report repeatedly asserts that business deregulation will lead to decreased informality, even when data presented in the report contradict this claim. Figure 0.5, for example, shows a sharp fall in business startup costs since 2005, and the accompanying text acknowledges that “despite improvements in the business regulatory environment” over the past two decades, the size of the untaxed, unregulated “informal” economy has not declined. Yet the report, proving that ideology trumps factual evidence, repeatedly puts forward the need to reduce regulations in order to cure informality and several other economic ills.

The decent work agenda, which advances the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, presents a more coherent, balanced and equitable path to achieving inclusive growth and sustainable development.

The World Bank has launched a competition for university and college students to submit examples of governments, cities, firms, individuals, or any other actor taking advantage of opportunities created by technology and “the future of work”.

The 2019 World Development Report is unique in its transparency. For the first time since the World Bank began publishing the WDR in 1978, we made an updated draft publicly available, online each week, throughout the writing process. For over seven months, it has benefited from thousands of comments and ideas from development practitioners, government officials, scholars, and readers from all over the world.

All extremely uplifting—and just as unfocused: because the function of gerunds consists in leaving an action’s completion undefined, thus depriving it of any definite contour. An infinitely expanding present emerges, where policies are always in progress, but also only in progress. Many promises, and very few facts. ‘Everything has to change, in order for everything to remain the same’, wrote Lampedusa in The Leopard; and the same happens here. All change, and no achievement. All change, and no future.

If nothing else, Changing Nature of Work is an interesting case study on the communicative and discursive environment around so-called ‘flagship reports’. Their framing, but also the framing of the critique, have become performative non-places based on traditional assumptions what development organizations are, what they do and who they can influence with their knowledge.
In the case of the future of work an accelerated, overheated and unequal world will surely be less impressed with a World Development report than it was with some of the true ‘flagship reports’ of the past.

Who really needs a World Development Report? A few reflections on #WDR2019, the policy rituals of framing #globaldev policy + its critique & why an essay competition won't save flagship reports https://t.co/oqVmOhMOb0pic.twitter.com/4Kv3p7ANNX

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) October 16, 2018

Should aid workers fly less? Yes, but it’s a bit more complicated
Over at From Poverty to Power my dear colleague Thea Hilhorst shared some reflections on why aid workers should fly less and how the industry needs to address air travel in its efforts to lead climate and social change work by example.

I generally agree with her sentiment to fly less, have tougher discussions within aid organizations about (air) travel and be the change they want to see from other actors. But as basically everything else in #globaldev, things are a bit more complicated...

Should aid workers fly less? I'm responding to @hilhorst_thea's post at @fp2p on why #globaldev requires (air) travel, UN summits have a point & Skype meetings are not enough https://t.co/GjF6QLQDHl

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) October 17, 2018

UK Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt has probably had better days. As the host of the 18 October London conference on steps to address sexual abuse in the aid sector, she went for a bumpy ride: a prominent activist conspicuously boycotted the event; a whistleblower interrupted Mordaunt’s keynote address, walking on stage and charging that victims were not being heard; and the agenda, speaker list, and planning process all came under heavy fire in private and across social media. On top of all that, critics charged that the event was elitist and white-dominated.

In an interview with the Guardian on Wednesday, Donovan said the conference amounted to an “abuse of power”, complaining that its agenda left no room for critics or analysis from civic society.
“You cannot have a dog and pony show with people in high level positions from institutions that are at the core of this problem standing up and declaring their shame and despair and their commitments and then that’s the end of the summit,” said Donovan.
“The UK government has been touting its leadership on tackling sexual exploitation in the aid sector for months, advertising an international summit with the objective of ‘Putting people first’. But then we were met with radio silence and with no information on the chosen experts or what kind of forum there would be.”
Mordaunt admitted to the conference “that we haven’t done all we should have done”, but added: “From my perspective, I think we have made good progress in the last few months.”

Yet no amount of snazzy IT systems will stop sexual abuse. It is only through an independent mechanism holding power (currently overwhelmingly white, male and privileged) to account in this sector that victims and survivors will be protected. Until those accused of abuse are referred to the authorities rather than to opaque internal HR systems designed to protect organisations, there will be no change.

Here is audio of the protest speech by @je_ne_tweet_pas at the Safeguarding Summit #safeguarding2018pic.twitter.com/axNyCxdPy8

— Ben Parker (@BenParker140) October 18, 2018

Traditionally safeguarding is a word synonymous with bureaucracy. It’s an essential branch of humanitarian action that has got caught up in policy and fell down in practice. Historically, it’s been addressed top-down and from an organisation first perspective. Complaints and whistleblowing systems are in-house, often out of reach and inappropriate for staff and the people receiving aid.
Aid providers have made concerted efforts to create awareness among people accessing their services about their rights and what recourse they have to make complaints about sexual exploitation and abuse. Yet, safeguarding remains one of the most under-resourced and under-explored areas.

An important message from @alina_potts at the #safeguarding2018 conference: must always ask ourselves whether the people with the least power feel safe in a room, those with relative power should be dealing with this issue from a position of constant discomfort.

— NRC (@NRC_Norway) October 18, 2018

Our feminist collective 'NGO Safe Space' calls for action in 6 key areas ahead of tomorrow's Safeguarding Summit. We push to transform sexist, racist power structures at play with support & justice for those who experience abuses #aidtoo#metoopic.twitter.com/tBMIixU1lI

— Alexia Pepper de Caires (@je_ne_tweet_pas) October 17, 2018

A review of existing mechanisms yielded a list of key characteristics, including that these mechanisms usually function as a last resort, serve to make recommendations instead of as a direct enforcement authority, publish their findings, actively reach out
to make themselves known and proactively instigate enquiries. Key lessons identified from existing initiatives are the need to have a variety of methods available (face to face, phone, complaint boxes, help desks, etc.) and the need to be open to all complaints to be responsive to the true concerns of aid recipients. A typical challenge of existing complaint and reporting mechanisms is low usage unless efforts are made to publicise the methods, to reach out to target groups and to embed such mechanisms in a wider portfolio of accountability measures.

Such forensic reports are all too rare in a political system that clams up against aid critics, a civil service that stifles dissent and an industry that talks of transparency yet silences whistleblowers. They shatter the conspiracy of incompetence in a sector that swelled to obscene proportions despite persistent failure, shocking waste and evidence that aid thwarts democracy by inflaming corruption, fuelling conflict and fostering a culture of dependency.

A much more widespread problem is that children in foster care don’t get the services they need, and many wind up dropping out of school, pregnant, or incarcerated. (The outcomes would be far worse and tragedy more common if those children came from orphanages.) Foster care is neglected and underfunded. It needs more services and better monitoring. Despite foster care’s troubles, however, no one in America is clamoring to bring back orphanages. In poor countries, however, the picture is the opposite.

“Gone are the days when you're going to have a humanitarian sector that comes into a disaster situation with a very heavy footprint and sets up as almost an auxiliary, or a replacement of government services.”

Ciccolini: “We deal with people that sometimes have a very low level of education or data literacy. How can we pass all these messages about new technology or even more basic messages? And from a data protection point of view, it is, how can we say that consent is informed and valid?”

The other 13 recommendations address ways the Canadian government could improve the quality of its development assistance. Among them are: strengthening its engagement with Canadian, international and local civil society organizations; developing a strategy for working with private sector partners; providing more guidance and tools on how to implement the new feminist aid policy; and reducing the earmarking of its contributions to multilateral organizations, which prevents them from spending funds where they are most needed.
Several recommendations pertain to how Global Affairs Canada is organized internally and implements its aid programs, including: streamlining and harmonizing procedures within the department, which has still not adjusted to its absorption of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) five years ago; cutting the red tape, notably by giving officials in the field greater power to approve programs without undergoing burdensome approval processes in Ottawa; better supporting its staff; and being less Canada-centric by aligning more with recipient countries’ own data and results.

As an initial step, it’s time to stop seeing devolution as an end in itself – it is a process that can lead in a number of different directions, and perhaps even increase the short-term risk of conflict. It merits more critical engagement – instead of supporting county institutions as a de facto good, focus should be on how they function in ways that contribute to peace and stability. This requires two things: firstly, proper oversight and accountability mechanisms, both in terms of an impartial media, and more formal structures within the county government; and secondly, and above all, full political inclusion must be the central aim of those supporting devolution and the over-riding measure of its success. To do otherwise would be to fall back on blindly supporting formal institutions and procedures even as those in power continue to ignore the needs of many of their citizens.

The Rockefeller Foundation is supporting Vox.com with a $380,000 grant over 14 months to launch Future Perfect, Rockefeller spokesperson Matt Herrick told me. Think of it as market research.
“From our perspective, to make a big impact in the world and to lift as many people out of poverty as possible in a responsible way, it’s going to take big, bold ideas, and new people and organizations with wealth and means are stepping forward to make those big bets,” Herrick said. “This project by Vox explores the social impact of those efforts, and we feel that’s an important, worthy endeavor and in the public’s interest.”

A CANADALAND investigation reveals that WE is connected to no fewer than three companies known to use child and slave labour in their supply chain. In fact, WE logos can be found promoting products made in part by children, including Hershey’s products that contain cocoa farmed by child labourers in West African countries, and Kellogg’s products that contain palm oil farmed by child labourers in Indonesia. WE also has a large partnership with Unilever, which has been a major purchaser of palm oil produced with child labour.
WE’s partnerships with these brands involve promoting the message that by purchasing their products, children in impoverished countries will benefit. For example, child-labour-sourced chocolate is presented in stores with the face of a smiling African child, the logo of ME to WE (a WE organization), and a promise that the companies involved “help children here and everywhere.”

He sums up this government-market synergy, daftly, as “Optimism.” After all, the neoliberal elite has found a remedy for the savage inequalities of the market—a suite of cosmetic social fixes that abide by market logic, such as micro-loans and school vouchers.

Collaborating to organise public events to mark Sankara’s life is an activity that remains fraught with logistical difficulties of travel and visas for activists and scholars whose work and lives remain threatened. The silhouette of danger emerges in those moments when excessive documents are demanded before the issuance of visas, when letters of support are invalidated or when friends and colleagues kindly but prudently decline to disclose their accommodation locations and hotel venues in electronic correspondence.
Patricia Daley writes that, ‘In the era of neo-liberal individualism and the free market, it is often seen as outmoded to think in revolutionary ways’—indeed, it is often seen as naïve or cruelly optimistic. Yet, people around the world continue to be motivated by the story of Sankara and the Burkina Faso August Revolution. Events honouring Sankara are being held in Washington D.C., Toronto, Paris, Ouagadougou and elsewhere today to remember and to reflect on the life and legacies of Thomas Sankara.

Bref, Urgence Niveau 3 est une lecture complexe, aussi délicate que difficile à chroniquer pour la simple raison que si des défauts sont présents, ils ne doivent pas occulter l’importance du comics. C’est un coup éditorial réussi, une lecture qui veut faire prendre conscience d’une réalité que l’on passe trop facilement sous silence et le réussit très bien.

Here's a translation from the German of what Merkel's envoy Günter Nooke said in that interview about migration, Africa-Europe, Africa(ns) as a special case, the climate, and Paul Romer's charter cities. pic.twitter.com/T93j4UA0EC

— free together (@damned_crowd) October 12, 2018

We Got Love 🇺🇬 pic.twitter.com/WbTt7S3wMn

— Julz (@YesJulz) October 16, 2018

Visit @CadburyWorld to see the psychosis of Whiteness; the limits of social democracy and; a lesson in neo-colonialism: Journey starts with the (highly sanitised) conquest of the Aztec's by the Spanish. Skips over the slave trade (odd given how important sugar is to chocolate)/1 pic.twitter.com/HSxEv0lp1U

— Kehinde Andrews (@kehinde_andrews) October 16, 2018

Prior to online communication, some tour operators e.g. specialized on hiking in Rwanda or community-based tourism initiatives in Kenya had very little visibility. ICTs have helped to put them on tourists’ maps and reach customers, that are not the main stream platforms’ target group in the first place. Focussing on unique products and nurturing business and customer relations through direct online communication can be a potential viable strategy.
Last but not least, I see a lot of potential in the new and emerging tourism markets from Africa and Asia. The number of tech-savvy tourists from these markets could be an interesting group that SMEs can reach through ICTs.

No matter how busy your textbook venture capital Silicon Valley day is, there's always time for a litlle #globaldev in the evening! #NotTheOnionhttps://t.co/6PnPdUPChtpic.twitter.com/1RISPme2eB

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) October 19, 2018

Make sure you can sustain the campaign over the planned period
Running an ongoing campaign through a loose coalition or group of volunteers is difficult to sustain.
Even if your campaign is planned so that different partners or chapters work autonomously, organizing and coordinating this centrally can ease communication and workflows.
Be aware that you often need a range of skills in a campaign, from web design to fundraising.

We found that:
1  Very few international news organisations routinely cover
humanitarian affairs. Only 12 news outlets reported on all four of the humanitarian events we analysed in 2016. Because of the high costs of producing regular, original journalism on humanitarian issues, commercial news organisations do not usually cover humanitarian issues, with the exception of major ‘emergencies’.
2 Most humanitarian journalism is now funded by states or private foundations. This is worrying because claiming that particular actors or activities are ‘humanitarian’ is a powerful form of legitimacy. It is important that media about the suffering does not
become a vehicle for commercial or political interests.
3 A major challenge of foundation funding is its unsustainable nature, as most foundations want to provide start-up money, rather than giving ongoing support. Meanwhile government funding can constrain where and how humanitarian reporting takes place because of foreign policy objectives and diplomatic tensions

The objective of the mother- and baby-friendly workplace initiatives is to increase working mothers’ demand for and access to
facilities and services that support appropriate breastfeeding practices and care in the workplace.” In doing so, the initiatives aim
to generate evidence on the operational feasibility, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of supporting breastfeeding in the workplace, and to showcase its benefits for children, families, communities and businesses. UNICEF applied the Communication
for Development (C4D) process to design social and behavioural change communication strategies to increase acceptance of, and demand for, workplace breastfeeding programmes in each context

In response to Jessica’s request, I have extracted readings by African Feminist scholars that I include in the syllabi of the three courses I convene. These are postgraduate courses and they are not Africa specific. They focus on Gender Theory, Research Methods and Queer Politics. My syllabi cover Africa, Asia and the Middle East, which are SOAS areas of “specialisation”.
In crafting this list for a general audience, I have not highlighted specific articles from Feminist Africa and Agenda. Instead, I have noted the two journals as important sites for African and diasporan feminist scholarship and intellectual contributions. This also applies to Readers which include different contributions. These readings are not only assigned for classes that are focussed on Africa but are also part of other thematic issues covered in gender theory, queer theory and research methods.

By the time the social media discussing these kinds of arguments had had their say on the HAU project, it became hard to understand why so many people felt so passionately about it when it had begun. The project had focused squarely on open access and the idea that anthropology needed to get back to taking ethnography seriously in developing its concepts, rather than borrowing from western philosophers (which could also be seen as a neo-colonial, masculinist practice). Yet at the time at HAU, everyone was so busy trying to meet the next impossible deadline that these additional political issues circulating in anthropology more widely, and brought up in the subsequent social media storm, were not a strong focus. Moreover, there was nothing in the structure of the project that would ensure that such issues would be critically examined on a regular basis.

"I decided to share these pictures in order to foster discussion within my friends and following, specifically about the accessorization [sic] of black bodies for this couple's photo shoot," Christin said. She said took issue with how the couple uses "black and brown people and their experiences as props to gain a following" on Instagram.

"Just cruisin' through the ghetto in Congo in a wedding dress"-a terrible example of what the quest for a little Insta fame does to (white) people visiting "Africa" :( https://t.co/7O8yxjdLaP

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) October 23, 2018

the White Savior Industrial Complex is constantly churning out new avatars. There’s a slew of awards, fellowships, TED Talks, and funds directed at people like Meyler.
(...)
There’s a lot of anger directed at Katie Meyler right now, and rightfully so. But we’d do well to zoom out a bit. Katie Meyler created More Than Me, but the white savior industrial complex created her — and there’s a lot more of us complicit in that than we’d like to admit.

Why did Meyler choose West Point? And why her? What made her qualified to open a chain of schools in my country? Unlike many Liberian women working to help young girls, Meyler has benefited directly from a “white savior” complex, a belief that not only allowed her to think she was saving the girls of Liberia but that also led many residents of West Point to believe that Meyler was their savior. This is a long-existing mentality that we, as Liberians and Africans, need to guard against.
(...)
Rightly, the outrage is currently focused on the crimes that were committed. But we must not forget to do all we can to support the girls who will continue to suffer from the trauma of abuse for many years to come. The people of West Point need to come together and stand up for their own community — because Katie Meyler didn’t.

So if you are a privileged white person reading this: please think twice before starting a new international development organization. The very fact that you have such faith in your idea may be a manifestation of your white privilege. Cultures which give preference to whiteness have bred you to think you know best, to assume your idea matters, and that poor people should be grateful for your benevolence.

My take on adaptive management and localization complements PDIA by going a step further to underscore the organizational reforms that incentivize and empower practitioners to really go local and do development differently. This is the meta-challenge of adaptive development—designing institutions to alter the process of problem-solving itself, which will in turn affect every aspect of development assistance. The application of these reforms must vary across organizations. Some may be able to hit every mark of changing measurement standards, creating new depositories of knowledge, diversifying expertise, matching different competences to different problem-solving tasks, forming experimental teams, changing evaluation criteria, permitting failures, and more.

But now I realize this type of guidance is only useful insofar as it is grounded in a broader programming approach that embeds PEA (Political Economy Analysis) into strategy, planning, implementation, monitoring, and learning. And I have not encountered clear tools or frameworks for how to do that. Instead we are just making it up as we go – which is fine! But that leaves me profoundly dissatisfied, because the chasm between PEA theoretical guidance and PEA practical impact will continue to undermine the purported value of the TWP agenda, and the persistent invisibility of reports and recommendations will continue to hamper the systematic compilation of evidence in favour of more politically-informed aid.

After getting approval from the Swedish government last week, a prosecutor is now putting the last touches on a decade-long investigation into war crimes in Sudan that could end in charges against Lundin’s chief executive and chairman.
“We’re in the final phase,” Henrik Attorps, a prosecutor at the International Public Prosecution Office, said in a phone interview. “I wouldn’t have asked the government for permission to file charges unless there was reason to do that.”

The IDPC report was produced ahead of a high-level UN meeting in March next year, where ministers from around the world will make their own assessment of progress over the last decade. From this they will shape global policy over the next one. But it’s unlikely there will be much consensus. Paralysed by deeply divided approaches, the UN will likely usher through the same damaging, losing strategy of the last ten years to be repeated for the next ten.
After writing about drugs for the last 20 years, my conclusion is that the only way worldwide drug use will be eliminated is if Earth gets whacked by a colossal meteor. In the meantime, it’s time to do away with the myths and hyperbole so often used when talking about drugs. Drugs can be fun. They can also be dangerous. What is for sure is that they are not going away.

Much of a migrant’s journey on the way to the fabled promise of a better life in Europe is spent simply waiting. For the next pick-up vehicle, for the next meal, for hope, and sometimes, for death. Much of the waiting happens in ghettos where starving migrants while away time discussing conditions back home and dreams of a future they were trying to reach with new friends. For these migrants, making new friends to forestall boredom is a near necessity as they travel with strangers. Andrew was separated from most of the 21 other people he left Nigeria with merely weeks into the journey.

One would have hoped that the World Bank’s flagship report, the jewel in the crown of an enviable research and statistical machine, would offer an equally monumental edifice to the world of work in the 21st century, with the working woman, and her struggles, standing tall at the center. Unfortunately, on this (and other) fronts the report has a distinctly yesteryear feel to it.

The economic growth that has lifted countries from low-income status to middle-income status is profoundly unequally distributed. As a result, large parts of the populations in these countries are excluded from the benefits that accrue from this growth.
(...)
What’s clear from this is that we have to ask ourselves what a development policy based on redistribution in favour of the working classes in the global South might look like – because that, ultimately, is the key to ending poverty in an unequal world.

According to the U.N., virginity tests are often performed by inspecting the hymen for tears or for the size of its opening, or inserting fingers into the vagina, to determine whether a girl or woman has had sex.
WHO states that there is no evidence that the test can prove that a person has had vaginal intercourse or not.
"This medically unnecessary, and often times painful, humiliating and traumatic practice must end," the U.N. announced in a statement at the World Congress of Gynecology and Obstetrics in Rio de Janeiro.
In its statement, the U.N. called these tests a violation of human rights and a form of gender discrimination: "The social expectation that girls and women should remain 'virgins' is based on stereotyped notions that female sexuality should be curtailed within marriage. This notion is harmful to women and girls globally."

But instead of finding dark cloud hanging over the shrinking space for multilateralism - long seen as the world’s best tool for tackling our growing challenges – I am left with optimism. And that didn’t exist this time last year.
On my first night in New York, I was reminded that out of the rubble of World War II emerged the UN, NATO, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
“We are at a comparable moment of human history,” Sasha Chanoff, executive director of RefugePoint, told a room of government officials, philanthropists, NGOs and others at one of the hundreds of side events during UNGA week. He senses something better emerging from the “cataclysmic wreckage of human life” we’ve seen in the last few years. So do I.
Why such optimism?

#AidToo should be about well being, workplace safety and women’s labour rights. What we need now is more resources and more collaborations to take it from theory to practice. Well being in the aid sector is finally beginning to receive the attention that it deserves. The aid sector is not a paramilitary sector. Aid workers and activists shouldn’t be coming back from work shattered and burnt out. And if they do they should be able to access resources to recover. Generosity towards employees after an injury should be the default not the exception especially in the ‘humanitarian sector.’ If employers said ‘we’re going to give you the best care possible, we going to get the best investment out of our assets’ there would be no need for legal interpretation and judicial orders but without them we cannot rely on employers or regulators doing the right thing.

Superb and engaging presentation of a methodologically important and ambitious paper on inequality by @_alice_evans at the @WorldBank.

Here’s hoping she shifts some methodological norm perceptions and inspires a new mixed methods movement amongst development researchers! https://t.co/uaACOPK9ma

— Cathy Shutt (@excatwoman) October 22, 2018

Don’t be scared: both academics and NGO types seem petrified that someone is going to catch them out. That leads to defensive writing, with loads of caveats, or alternatively to a weird hectoring style, with lots of finger wagging (‘the IMF can and must…’). Boring, boring, boring. Much better to reach out to the imaginary reader, make friends with them, take risks.

We, the nationals of weak passports, cannot really plan for our trips in advance. We are usually forced to buy the tickets as expensive as possible because usually, we do not have the Visa flexibility to choose a better flight date with a better price.
(...)
Nationals of countries with weak passports are doomed to apply for visa applications, high visa processing fees, preparing loads of documents, long waiting and processing times, and high volume of visa refusal only because they are born in a different country.
I wish there was no nationality except the global citizenship. I wish the visa applications were being processed according to the personal characteristics and achievements, and not based on the nationality and politics. I wish the global citizens were being treated without concerning the race, nationality, skin color, religion and the other factors in which the people have no control over them.

So, as the #MegaMillions jackpot reaches a record $1.6B and #Powerball reaches $620M, here's my advice about how to spend the money in a way that will truly set you, your children and their kids up for life.

Ready?

Create a private foundation and give it all away. 1/

— Evan Sparks (@EvanSparks) October 21, 2018

Gmail’s suggested replies and auto-compose features rely on communication by mental proxy. An email reading, “I’m hungry!” can prompt the response, “Yum!” This is outrageous, but it has a primitive relationship to how we think and speak. The function of these replies is to eliminate complexity, to pare communication down to dumbness, to “acknowledge” or “affirm” without saying much of anything. How do we feel about the degeneration of language at the hands of monopolies? Looks good!

Our movements are in as much need for creativity as we are in need of self-care. In this edition we explore the emerging and startling voices of new ideas and campaigns - from what feminist bots can do for us to delving deeper into the politics of self-care. From using the internet to explore sexuality and desire to having incredibly tough conversations about violence and harassment. This bilingual edition is born of many conversations and moments at the two camps held in parallel in August this year (2018) at Dhulikhel, Nepal - the Take back the Tech! meet and the Feminist Tech Exchange.

Great conversation about @SKhojaMoolji s latest book in today's #SASIG#Webinar The book is open source and available for download!!!! https://t.co/DBRJ0aIWaf -- check it out and share with your friends and colleagues! pic.twitter.com/m2YY2LxQoy

— South Asia Special Interest Group (@SouthAsiaSIG) October 19, 2018

by channelling expatriates to specific locations in the capital, and by preventing them from occupying other zones in Port-au-Prince, the securitization practices contribute to the gentrification process around the Pétion-Ville area, contributing in their own way to the deep-rooted social segregation process in play in Port-au-Prince. Second, it will analyse how these logics of securitization are linked to an ‘imagined geography’ of the capital, where actual security risks matter less than logics of disassociation from areas perceived as having no interest for international actors. Finally, the article will look at how security mapping is reappropriated and resisted by local actors, displaying a mix of resilience and self-help strategies.

1. (This is Part 3 of my ‘Hostels’ project) 👉🏻👉🏻👉🏻The idea of urban hostels as a mechanism for total control was not a new one; the architecture borrowed heavily from “compounds” first established on the diamond mines near Kimberley. They were designed to enforce total control. pic.twitter.com/YRzOkeww1S

— Unequal Scenes (@UnequalScenes) October 20, 2018

The point being made here is that international courts need to be researched and theorised within and beyond the realms of their official actors, judicial cases and international governance in global society. They are not just elite transnational spaces. People from around the world are visiting to bear witness to grievous tragedies and the quest for peace and justice, or to review what they ate for lunch and the court security in ways not dissimilar to the emoji buttons used in ‘customer’ reviews of security at airports. International criminal courts are featuring in social imaginations and spectatorship across borders, in news media, cosmopolitan holidays, city tours, tourism campaigns, social media and consumer-style ratings. However these may be characterised, they warrant more attention from a publicly engaged social scholarship.

The classic paradigm of disposal crises and monetized costs and benefits misses the most important goals. A simpler life, the satisfaction of reducing one’s personal waste, a world where “plastics” is no longer good career advice, an environment free of packaging litter – these are the real reasons for recycling.

But now there is a growing body of research suggesting that microfinance doesn’t work for some communities – apart from generating income for lenders. It may have worked well in Bangladesh in the 70s, but it has failed to keep up with the changing needs and behaviours of business owners. One reason, say critics, is that repayment terms are unrealistic and old-fashioned. Inflexible contracts fail to meet the investment needs of poor borrowers such as Rashmi, whose income fluctuates over the year: “It can be extremely busy around the festival, and, then afterwards, there are some weeks when I can’t sell a piece of barfi [traditional Indian cake],” she says.
Even though Rashmi’s income is irregular, the microfinance institution demands fixed weekly repayments starting immediately after the loan disbursement. This means she cannot use all the money to give her supplier a downpayment for her order of Diwali sweets. She needs to retain 15% to make sure she can meet the repayments before she generates income. “It will take weeks to sell enough sweets to make a profit – weeks in which I still have to make regular repayments on the loan. This adds to the borrowing costs,” she says.

The document also sets out how all agencies receiving Saudi aid must share a summary of their publicity around the funding. The agreement adds: “We consider it very important to ensure that our dear fellow Yemenis are all aware of our donations. More emphasis should be placed on strengthening the local visibility plan by engaging local media … so that donors get deserved recognition and not to be overshadowed by the recipient’s agencies’ visibility.”
The UN, the plan sets out, will convene events at UN headquarters focusing on the humanitarian response in Yemen, and the impact of all donor funding. These events will acknowledge the roles of all donors including Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The agreement also requires agencies receiving the aid to document Saudi- and UAE-supported activities in photographs and video material in Yemen.
The document then sets out 48 specific steps UN agencies have agreed to take this year to publicise Saudi activity covering five different UN aid-linked agencies, including the UN Development Programme, Ocha, the World Health Organization and Unicef.

I wonder how original author & @Refugees spokeswoman @melissarfleming feels about this wide-spread critique https://t.co/6PzjG6R0Sg

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) October 29, 2018

The book is a true story entrusted to me by Doaa. If I hadn't written it, I am afraid it would have not been told, her voice a one-day news story. I have been given every assurance this screen adaption and movie will remain true.

— Melissa Fleming (@melissarfleming) October 29, 2018

This is a hungry industry, with 5kg (11lb) of fish required to produce just 1kg of fishmeal. There are already some 20 plants in Nouadhibou alone. But critics say this industry is creating very few jobs.
"The Senegalese were replaced with mainly Chinese and Turks who now catch the fish being processed by fishmeal plants, mostly owned by the Chinese and Russians," Alassane Samba, a former director of Senegal's oceanic research institute, tells me.
"Mauritania is protecting its waters not for its people, but for foreigners."
He adds that despite the lack of fish, there are around 15 fishmeal plants in Senegal also, including one in St Louis. Some are being built further down the West African coast as far away as The Gambia.

When times were good, the thousands of workers at this outdoor fish-drying facility – almost all of them women – could make more money than the fishermen many had married, saving enough to buy them new engines, or even boats.
Among them was Rokeya Diop, a matriarchal figure of good standing among the community that dries, smokes and salts fish for sale in local markets. These days, the acrid pall hanging over the near-deserted complex matched her mood.

The arsenic trioxide dust, released from the rock as it was roasted to get the gold, was pumped underground during most of the mine’s life. Better there than in the air (in the early days of the mine, it was sending up to 7,400 kg of the dust out into the environment, sickening locals and even killing a Yellowknives Dene child) but it presents its own problems underground.
Dealing with the arsenic trioxide has been the central headache for the federal government since 2004, when it took over remediation of the mine from its bankrupt owner. The dust has meant that, barring an unforeseen technological breakthrough or unthinkable disaster, there will never be an end to the government’s role in keeping the site secure.
“This will never be a walk-away solution,” Brad Thompson, senior project manager for Public Works and Government Services Canada, told a group of reporters at the mine in mid-September.
He means that the government, and therefore taxpayers, will never walk away from Giant Mine — a feat that, for its owners, took just a flick of a pen. They mined $2.7 billion worth of gold, and then Canadians were left with the billion-dollar cleanup.

When we talk about job losses and gains in the developed world, we are generally thinking of formal sector jobs with regular hours, regular pay, various legal protections, and registered for income taxes. But in most of Africa the situation is completely different: almost all workers are in the informal sector, whether in agriculture or informal manufacturing and services. Those who can work, must, as the state social safety net barely exists.
(...)
At present we don’t have a good answer to how government should best ensure that platforms give a fair share of the profits to workers; rather the trends seem to be that platforms concentrate the returns to capital and intellectual property. But perhaps African governments will be able to lead the way in policy, starting with a realistic recognition of where the workers are: in the gig economy.

“Some of the biggest national development agencies around today were actually created before colonialism ended. They worked in places like Africa and Asia. Their initial work was actually under the governing structures of colonialism, right? So there is a deep history that’s connected to that, and what that means is that it permeates some of the cultural practices and even the discourse around international development in philanthropy that’s practiced today.” – Solome Lemma

Here’s the thing, though: Katie Meyler didn’t build More Than Me on her own. She had lots of help. She has been financed by foundations and U.S. government agencies that, arguably, should have known better, especially once the rapes came to light; she won a popularity contest funded by JPMorgan Chase that awarded More Than Me a $1m prize to build MTM Academy; she was repeatedly lauded by credulous reporters; and she benefited from the persistent appeal of what has been called the white savior complex, a mindset that regards people in Africa, especially children, as helpless victims awaiting rescued by western do-gooders.

Listening to the @LSE_WPS#AidToo podcast on my commute this morning - fantastic to see a variety of feminist voices having such important conversations addressing the structural inequality that facilitates sexual misconduct. A necessary listen for anyone in the aid sector. https://t.co/tThM0TMGog

— Florence Waller Carr (@FlorenceWallerC) October 25, 2018

Delegations approach us with their project that must ideally be small, concrete and easily implementable on the ground.
There is a list of criteria that helps our team to choose the type of projects we select:
Projects must improve the situation of people affected by armed conflict or other situations of violence very concretely. They need to help categories of people with specific vulnerabilities, such as, for instance, children, people with disabilities or the elderly. It should also be projects that are appealing to the public – something that will provide a compelling message or promote a very specific cause so that the audience can really connect to it. As mentioned, projects should be easily and quickly implemented, with simple and measurable outcomes. Finally, the final amount to be raised should be reasonable to guarantee the success of the project.

Watson, et al. show an intervention focused on motivations without health-based messaging in a non-school setting for older kids can be successful, even in an emergency context. That’s good news for a few reasons. Previous handwashing with soap research has shown that health is not an effective behavior change motivator. Additionally, the toy-in-soap intervention can be implemented by field staff without requiring additional formal training which can save time and money by avoiding time-intensive trainings. Response times are key during emergencies, and the authors provide evidence that an intervention could be scaled quickly and in a cost-effective way. Before reading this new article, I never thought that toys inside soap could make such a difference with increasing handwashing. It feels like common sense though, yes?

firstly, there is almost no evidence cited from research on the actual impact of volunteering – just a string of anecdotes and reminiscences. There must be more than that out there, surely? What impact does sustained exposure to volunteering have on norms, community cohesion, social mobility and income? Would appreciate some links and references. Even more alarming is the almost total absence of the volunteered-upon – the families and communities who host those 10 million arrivals every year, with all the attendant disruption and mutual incomprehension. Hundreds of volunteers are quoted in the book, talking about how much they’ve learned, how naïve they were at first etc etc. But there is hardly anything from members of the ‘community’ they are trying to help, and precious few thoughts from local NGOs either. That just feels wrong.

This inequality represents a fundamental unasked question facing the humanitarian sector. Given its increasingly clear role in the conflict and suffering to which we respond, what is its role in the donations that pay for our salaries and services? In grim terms: To what extent is an enormous chunk of our support produced in the factories of inequality? As I set it down in a previous blog, perhaps Peter Buffett explains it better: Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left.

Is it just me who thinks #globalhealth has too many meetings, summits & declarations- and not enough of the actual substance of getting things done?

— Devi Sridhar (@devisridhar) November 1, 2018

History is the only laboratory that the scholar of the social sciences has. The holocaust in Bengal holds important lessons for analysing the current situation. It tells us that large-scale resource extraction entailing economic genocide, is something that imperialist countries could get away with quite easily, attributing it to natural causes and abnormal external conditions. Owing to such misinformation, not a single demand was raised in India by patriotic political leaders or by any public intellectual, that the Allies should pay reparations for the lives wantonly lost owing to the extreme and inhumane measure of resource extraction from a population already greatly impoverished by preceding decades of tax-financed transfers and by the Depression. Barring individual exceptions, even the most intelligent persons in the country who actually lived through the famine period, could be conceptually quite blind as regards its real cause. Or, if they did know the real cause, as perhaps some of Keynes’s brightest Indian students did, they found it expedient to maintain silence.
It should not surprise us that there continues to be neo-imperialist resource extraction from the peasantry in India as indeed in other developing countries today, which is neither recognised nor analysed as such, imposing a prolonged toll on the lives of peasants and of petty producers generally. Demand management is a two-edged weapon: it can be “virtuous finance” when used to expand public spending judiciously and reduce unemployment. Equally, when particular dominant Northern imperialist interests require a compression of mass consumption in developing countries to release primary resources for their own benefit, then these dominant interests can and do push for the implementing of “vicious finance” by national governments, by peddling incorrect and self-serving theories.

The Polish government and its agencies were totally technocratic. This was very different from Yugoslavia where its home-grown system of “socialist workers' management”, complete with complicated ideological “baggage”, made the government thoroughly ideological. In Poland, the communist ideology was dead--since 1968. Only the language of technocracy existed.

Tomorrow will probably bring a 30th death for the month. It will probably bring some disappointment, some mistakes, something important we miss, some longing for those we love, some awareness of our weakness and temptation to hide or pretend. But we pray for ourselves and those we supervise that tomorrow will also bring eyes wide open to the deeper realities, curiosity to investigate and delve deep, connection with others, and a few laughs. And a rhythm that paces us into the next 25.

Despite espousing a belief in freedom of expression and frequently criticizing other countries for their lack of press freedom, countries in the EU often present astounding barriers to journalists traveling here for professional reasons. From large, non-refundable fees, to invitation letter requirements, to pre-booked flights and random, unexplained rejections, the EU makes it hard — and sometimes impossible — for journalists from other countries to travel here for conferences, work and research.In order to bring journalists to Warsaw for less than a week for our conference, we had to navigate a breathtakingly arbitrary set of standards for each country that appeared chiefly designed to make the applicant give up on their desire to leave their country, even briefly.

Just because a job is bad does not mean it is not a “real job.” When sex workers assert that sex work is work, we are saying that we need rights. We are not saying that work is good or fun, or even harmless, nor that it has fundamental value. Likewise, situating what we do within a workers’-rights framework does not constitute an unconditional endorsement of work itself. It is not an endorsement of capitalism or of a bigger, more profitable sex industry. “People think the point of our organization [the National Organization for the Emancipation of Women in a State of Prostitution] is [to] expand prostitution in Bolivia,” says activist Yuly Perez. “In fact, we want the opposite. Our ideal world is one free of the economic desperation that forces women into this business.”

Interesting and provocative #infographic that lays out the myths and "facts" of the challenges (some real, some perceived) with #AI. Fun and easy read!
Benefits and Risks of #ArtificialIntelligencehttps://t.co/y94bNoVVMopic.twitter.com/DlNUR2YgPs

— Dean of Big Data (@schmarzo) November 1, 2018

When a story or column does not adequately, if at all, understand or consider the perspectives of the nonwhite people it involves, what do you say? When a story involving people of colour is assigned with a colour-blind lens and a false sense of objectivity, what do you do? When you pitch projects on race and multiple times see the boss prefer a race-related project pitched by a person who is white, regardless of your read of the room, what is your recourse? When you ultimately stop pitching stories on race to preserve your own sanity, what good are you doing the very nonwhite people whose perspectives you deem yourself to be in the newsroom to share?
How many battles do you have in you?
I decided to leave The Globe and Mail because that final conversation inside the bureau chief’s office crystallized what I had felt: What I brought to the newsroom did not matter. And it was at that moment that being a person of colour at a paper and in an industry that does not have enough of us — particularly at the top — felt more futile than ever before.

By harnessing psychological research, governments across the world are trying to shape our behavior. While they are popular, our findings reveal that based on the OECD report, these psychological techniques are unreliable. The common argument in support of using them is that they are cost effective, but here also there is nothing in the report that helps the public assess if these psychological methods, when they work, are more cost effective compared to typical methods used by governments (e.g., taxes, bans, tariffs, mandates).

We were unable to confirm DFID’s global results claim on saving maternal lives, owing to shortcomings in the way it estimated the impacts of its programmes.
DFID’s policies prioritised reaching poor and young women but only a few programmes identified specific mechanisms or set targets for reaching these key groups. Furthermore, very few programmes disaggregated their results, making it impossible to determine the impact of DFID programming on poor, young or otherwise hard-to-reach women and girls.
DFID has been a strong advocate for women’s and girls’ rights internationally but could do more to reinforce this at community level in priority countries.
We found that DFID’s maternal health programming during the Results Framework period had a limited focus on the long-term development of health system infrastructure and institutions.

Air pollution increases gender inequalities in the labour market.

When #airpollution rises women work less than men to care for those who get sick: https://t.co/o10s8oVvLMpic.twitter.com/N4IdEWUFK7

— ILO (@ilo) November 1, 2018

The Information and Communications for Development report takes an in-depth look at how information and communication technologies (ICT) are impacting economic growth in developing countries. This new report, the fourth in the series, examines the topic of data-driven development, or how better information makes for better policies. The objective is to assist developing country firms and governments to unlock the value of the data they hold for better service delivery and decision making, and to empower individuals to take more control of their personal data. The chapters of the report explore different themes associated with the supply of data, the technology underlying it, and the demand for it.

This article presents an analysis of impact evaluations in the case of Fairtrade International in order to track the political effects of metrics and measurement procedures in development practice today. Metrics or ‘indicators’ have long been understood to have the effect of transforming the political visions of socioeconomic change that shape development interventions into seemingly non‐contentious, technical models. (...)
The authors find, first, that debates over competing visions or definitions of development became concealed in technical debates over adequate metrics and measurements; and, second, that such debates over metrics and measurement consolidated the roles of experts and expert knowledge as mediators of what development can or should be.

While I’m happy to see evidence of something that works to reduce gender disparities, I’m disheartened that it would fall on the shoulders of individual (already over-burdened) senior women. Do we know anything about the effects of chairing on research productivity? https://t.co/sxEwEa0eEu

— Lucie Schmidt (@LucieGSchmidt) October 31, 2018

Understanding what happened in Puerto Rico paints a picture of what could happen again elsewhere in the region. It is important to acknowledge, too, that more than its electrical grid is in disrepair. Similar problems of governance, financing, and equity are reproduced across various sectors as the island rebuilds, among them: housing, forestry, tourism, healthcare, education, water, coastal management, and more. Yet, the enduring spirit of Puerto Ricans is captured by a slogan that began to circulate not long after the storm subsided: Puerto Rico se levanta. Puerto Rico will rise. In this critical moment of rewiring comes an opportunity to bring ideas about innovative approaches for resilience into light.

In connection with my 300th weekly link review I reflect on 20 years of #globaldev learning since I took my first undergrad class!https://t.co/kQAXjsKF0Kpic.twitter.com/gvhkU50ClQ

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) November 13, 2018

"Fieldwork" next to a brand new Toyota Landcruiser, #globaldev's most iconic car! @ #AidEx2018pic.twitter.com/CMrcZ9pY0J

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) November 14, 2018

Thanks to our amazing speakers @AsmitaConsult, @je_ne_tweet_pas& Hannah Clare who presented our first session on safeguarding and communications. Feeling inspired! #AidEx2018pic.twitter.com/dSdSL6ROy4

— 89up (@89_up) November 15, 2018

I want to hear from black women who benefit from development assistance, but I also want to hear from those who are leading it; from the ministers, the academics, the journalists, the health professionals and the CEOs. Numbers in every one of these categories are depressingly low. People of colour who work in the UK’s development sector will often share the same nationality and some of the privileges of the white aid worker, but may look like, and feel closely connected to the recipients of development.

In recent conversations with more than half a dozen aid workers and food security experts, some, including technical staff with access to UN figures on hunger in Yemen, said they believed the threshold for famine had already been crossed in certain parts of the country.
Others were less sure and said famine “could” be present, or predicted that it would not be declared at all – possibly because the required data remains unavailable. In a grim irony, famine may prove impossible to declare because humanitarians are unable to count the dead in pockets of the country from that very famine.

Traffickers have worked out that orphanages are good business and can attract large donations, leading to a global boom in orphanages, from Cambodia to Haiti, which often lure children from poor rural families with promises of an education.

Contractors find themselves in compromised situations, with complex loyalties, which may affect the conduct of the war itself. Raj was doing nothing to actively try to extend the war in Afghanistan, yet it was also clear that he did not want it to end—because that would mean termination. The majority of those that the U.S. is employing to fight its wars have a vested interest in seeing those wars continue despite their dangers.
(...)
With the drawdown of troops from Afghanistan, some might hope that democratic control over U.S. foreign policy will improve, but exactly the opposite is happening. While the number of contractors the U.S. is employing in Afghanistan has decreased, it has not decreased as quickly as the number of troops. This means that while in 2011 there were approximately 1.5 contractors for every U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, there are now three contractors for every soldier, making contractors increasingly the face of the U.S. presence. Furthermore, as the war wanes, contractors like Raj are looking for work elsewhere: Syria, Yemen, Russia and the Central African Republic

Was interviewed on @undispatch about the situation in Libya & my daily contact with refugees there. https://t.co/gv8Va8hZX8 Since we recorded this, I've been told of another death, a suicide attempt, 200+ escaped in protest & brought back to detention, & a big TB outbreak.

— Sally Hayden (@sallyhayd) November 13, 2018

The report’s second main argument is that the formal, externally- backed mechanisms intended to stabilize Mali and resolve its conflicts are implicated in perpetuating violence. The peace process envisioned by the 2015 Algiers Accord has been rocky and problematic. Alongside implementation problems, the design of the Accord unwittingly encourages ambitious politicians and violent entrepreneurs to create new militias as a means of seeking representation in the structures established through the Accord. Nevertheless, foreign powers appear comfortable with both the Bamako-based political class and the Tuareg hereditary elite in Kidal, occasionally contemplating sanctions against members of the latter but showing no appetite to displace either group.

It is unusual for unlicensed drugs to be used in such quantities outside of the context of a clinical trial. In this case, the authorization came through a sort of compassionate use protocol established by the WHO.
The idea was that the protocol would serve as a bridge to allow use while a clinical trial was being designed and signed off on by the numerous parties that have a stake in the process. But that process has taken longer than many people anticipated, and there has been frustration and concern about continued use of experimental drugs that have been shown to increase survival in animal studies, but may or may not work as well in people.

I love this campaign. pic.twitter.com/Z9bln4IArb

— King Sola (@Solar_unique) November 10, 2018

Developed in a ‘bubble’, many apps duplicated existing well-used communication platforms. They didn’t take into account complex issues of trust, how information (and rumors) spread, nor how rapidly the political and protection landscape changed. Additionally, there was demonstrated naivety around data protection and the political sensitivity related to information being shared. I spoke to several disheartened developers who had challenges accessing the information they needed for their app, they also shared their frustrations with lack of resources for roll-out and updates. Developers were lost in humanitarian coordination structures and inhibited by agencies’ financing constraints. Yet, the hype continued, hackathons were rife, and the number of ‘you need an app’ calls I received increased.

I found that media relations employees at WVUS employed a set of strategies to elevate particular factors of newsworthiness and reduce barriers to news coverage for campaigns and topics where news coverage would best align with organizational goals. In day to day work, the main strategy revolved around compliance, which involves intentionally adapting to news organization needs. In following this strategy, the NGO emphasizes the newsworthy elements of campaigns or topics that are of interest, even going so far as to create news events that are timely, novel, and near the media markets of interest in order to attract coverage.

“I used to have to wash clothes for everybody, and long ago you had to iron the clothes and you would have to cook, and if you wanted to use coconut you would have to grate the coconut. I would cook for everybody, make breakfast in the morning, cook lunch 12 o’clock, make dinner again. That was plenty, plenty work. Then I would comb my two sisters’ hair then I would do mine. And then I would go to school.”
After leaving school she went what is called in Tobago “walking for sewing”, sewing classes which were customary for girls at the stage in their lives. She also began to learn shorthand and bookkeeping.
(...)
This commercial turn to get by as a widow was met with a creative zest that is still on display in her living room today: Tall white ceramic vases sit on the floor; on the shelf a green eyed ceramic white cat sits among red flowers and a white ceramic unicorn rears up on its hind legs; floral crochet work adorn the tops of sofas and armchairs which host plump satin cushions, deep red, too pretty, in fact, sit down on, let alone touch. All were made by her.
She also applied this burst of creativity and passion to her food and baking, displaying kitchen skills that would make her famous locally and have her grandchildren salivating whenever they knew she was coming to visit them in Canada or England.
Her mother taught her to cook from a young age. She would cook for the whole family, but, she said ” it was no fancy dishes”, mostly stew peas, rice, provisions and the big Cavali fish her father used to bring home from the village. A woman’s cooking group she joined in Fyzabad opened her eyes up to even more ideas.
Soon she was bringing hot sponge cakes out of the oven and pone and macaroni pie too. Taking advantage of that great abundant mango tree that stands guard, arms outspread, in the middle of her back yard she would make red mango, and if you were lucky – very, very lucky – mango ice cream, too.

In July 2016 she shocked the country and her supporters by abruptly announcing an end date to her fast. “Nothing had changed in people’s mindsets after 16 years,” she says. “I really wanted to change myself, the environment, the tactics, everything.”
Instead, Sharmila said, she would marry Coutinho and continue her struggle by running for Manipur’s parliament.
To Loitongbam, the plan was hopelessly naive. Democracy in India can be grubby; most citizens still vote along caste or religious lines, and votes are brazenly traded for money or gifts. It is no place for saints.
“I told her, Sharmila, you are like uranium, you have enormous spiritual power,” he says. “But just as you need technology to convert his uranium into atomic energy, you need a whole infrastructure behind you. Without it you cannot convert spiritual energy into political power. But she just didn’t listen.”

Simon will discuss further the creation of the comic Parables of Care: creative responses to dementia care, in terms of hypotactic correspondences of form, emotional ambiguity and story.
Amsterdam Comics aims to further the interaction between the academic study of comics and its practice.

This app wasn’t designed for me. It wasn’t designed for anyone who wants to track their period or general reproductive health. The same is true of almost every menstruation-tracking app: They’re designed for marketers, for men, for hypothetical unborn children, and perhaps weirdest of all, a kind of voluntary surveillance stance.
(...)
“The act of measurement is not neutral,” Levy wrote. “Every technology of measurement and classification legitimates certain forms of knowledge and experience, while rendering others invisible.” Sex tracking apps and their ilk “simplify highly personal and subjective experiences to commensurable data points.”

Brooklyn, NY students revolt against online school created by ⁦@facebook⁩. Kids on screens for hours under names like "personalized" or "blended" learning. Similar online programs happening in Hartford, CT too...other cities? https://t.co/hhoD0MLsns

— Robert Cotto Jr (@RobertCottoJr) November 12, 2018

But to my mind, her core philosophy itself is emblematic of a huge division in American thought that dominates our national discourse: Are people who have problems responsible for fixing them themselves? Or is there some collective responsibility that we are shirking — does a society owe something to all its members? There are dark implications in making everything a matter of personal responsibility, which is Hollis’s bias. She asks us to interrogate and deconstruct the lies that we’ve believed about ourselves, and I wonder how that lens would function if we turn it on the lies she promulgates in Girl, Wash Your Face.
(...)
Being empowered to let go of my anxiety or self-criticism as a wealthy white woman is certainly helpful to me, and I appreciate that message from Hollis on a certain level. But my anxiety is largely rooted in unrealistic fears, whereas many women don’t have the opportunity to go back to college or own a house from which to be liberated. Hollis’s book is in many ways a return to the kind of second-wave feminism that privileged the liberation of middle-class straight white women from the domestic sphere while at the same time completely ignoring — or actively opposing — the rights and needs of poor and queer and nonwhite women. Hollis, who has four children, doesn’t mention child care at all in the book until the acknowledgments, when she thanks her nanny

What has kept my attention, fueled my intellectual interests, and allowed me to endure, even prosper, as the odd person out during the last 36 years—after all, my colleagues are still primarily physicists, chemists, mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers? My response to this question requires a brief and partial tour of some of the intellectual terrain I’ve explored as an anthropologist in Silicon Valley. Along the way, my research has allowed me to disrupt normative views of work and workplaces and to nudge corporate imaginaries—in small but still important ways—toward consideration of a broader range of human experience.

No, @Justin_B_Smith.

We don't need the private sector leading the solution of public problems. We just need them to stop causing them.

1. Don't avoid taxes.

2. Don't stiff workers.

3. Don't befoul the environment.

4. Don't lobby against the public good.

5. Don't monopolize. https://t.co/znkYoT6Ico

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) November 12, 2018

Characters gather in a room, and on each wall, there is a door. The doors are marked FOOD, ECONOMY, CLIMATE, and LEADERSHIP. A tattered book (representing the past), a ticking clock (representing the present), and a pair of goggles (representing
the future) discuss which door to go through. Characters know that each door leads to a different future future.

PEKKA’s combination of national advocacy with grassroots organizing and countervailing power has influenced national social programs and broadened women’s access to the legal system. Improved access to the courts allows women to obtain legal documentation of their own civil status. This allows women to legalize a marriage that was valid under Islamic law or file a divorce case that will enable her to be recognized as the head of her family. The experience of gaining legal documents may build the knowledge and confidence required to obtain a birth certificate for their children, thereby securing opportunities and access to social services, including education, for the next generation.
PEKKA engages in cross-sector alliance-building with local government, Islamic authorities, national policymakers, and international development agencies. This creates the political space and legitimacy needed to navigate complex cultural and political dynamics and deflect those forces opposed to public accountability and social inclusion.

It's job market season! My colleague Erin #Strumpf sent me this. For those writing reference letters: read through your letter again and imagine you were writing it for a candidate of the other gender. Would you choose the same adjectives? pic.twitter.com/QHtJZ5g1Dp

— Francesco Amodio (@fscoamodio) November 9, 2018

A new school of thought is emerging in East Africa which challenges the rise of the academic capitalism inspired by rabid marketisation of university programmes and challenges the idea of the current university system as an effective vehicle for social and economic development.
(...)
“The issue is that just like the colonial and national development models of universities in Africa, the neo-liberal epoch is foreign initiated,” Munene told University World News.
He said attempts to transform a system that had foreign roots by adding more foreign concepts in order to make it more relevant only masks the maladies affecting the sector and hence its failure in national development.

Whether taking place in North America, Europe, or the global South, the nodes proved to be spaces for unusual forms of conference participation and interaction. “It’s ethically righteous and strangely intimate,” one node organizer reflected once the conference was over. “Our conversation was much more open and participatory than a Q&A would have been.” The organizer of another local node reported that “a nice unexpected result was the attendance of a host of people (particularly students) who were not affiliated with local universities, but were based in the area and found their way to the node events.” We could see through social media that these local convergences were happening in different places: the many New York City–based anthropologists who came to watch the plenary together at the Wenner-Gren Foundation, or the thirty professors and students from various Toronto universities who gathered for two days of panel screenings and discussions at that node. Em had developed and circulated a series of ways by which node organizers could facilitate collective forms of place-based participation, such as brief critical commentaries, modes of affective response, and creative forms of expression. Many nodes shared post-it notes that they had used to facilitate discussion.

Item: In preparing a tenure review report, or assisting in an entry-level appointment process I read the file – a dozen articles or so. One is strikingly good. A handful, truly mediocre. One or two, real garbage. From the same hand, from the same mind. How so uneven? We cannot be at our best in everything we put out, but I am talking discrepancies that go beyond that standard distribution. Item: I’m a commentator in our post-doc workshop. I later meet with the young scholar to give detailed comments and suggestions for the work. You’ll need, I say, a good few months, maybe half a year’s more work to produce what could become a splendid piece. The post-doc looks at me forgivingly: ‘It won’t happen. My dean expects us to publish seven pieces (!) in two years. I have to move on.’ This ‘quota’ may be at the higher end but is not atypical. I later see the piece, in its original form, on SSRN and eventually in some journal.

The institute made it clear misconduct was underreported. Of the 119 organisations that belong to ACFID, 33 did not respond to requests for information.
Of the 76 claims, 31 were substantiated, the institute found. Of those, 17 were cases of sexual harassment and 14 were abuse and other forms of misconduct.

Numerous Unep staff have contacted the Guardian criticising Solheim’s perceived closeness to China and the project he initiated related to the environmental sustainability of China’s huge infrastructure Belt and Road Initiative. The US in particular was concerned and its representatives raised a long list of questions as far back as April, including about how the project was funded and how intellectual property rights would be protected.
Another concern to staff was the $500,000 sponsorship Solheim agreed to give the Volvo Ocean Race, despite it not being mentioned on the VOR sponsors’ web page or announced by Unep.
Solheim emailed staff on Tuesday and said: “I wanted UN Environment to be a lead agency for reform, even if it raised some questions. Doing things differently is never easy and I will depart knowing I never spared a moment in my effort to implement this vision and leave UN Environment more capable and more impactful.”
One senior employee welcomed Solheim’s resignation: “It will let us get on with the job we have to do, which is a big one. This was getting in the way.”

Race and class, too, may play a role in the Marianas’ relative invisibility in political and media arenas. People in the CNMI are predominantly Chamorro, Filipino, Chinese, Korean, Carolinian, Bangladeshi, and members of other ethnic groups that are often marginalized in the U.S. As of 2015, 51 percent of people in the CNMI were living below the poverty line, a figure that’s only exacerbated by traumas like Yutu. Keith Camacho, an associate professor of Asian American studies at UCLA, sees parallels between the CNMI and other impoverished groups across the U.S. “The way the United States treats the territories in the Caribbean and in the Pacific Islands is very much akin to how the U.S. government treats poor and working communities in Detroit, in the heartland, in the rank and file of white workers in the South, in poor communities in Los Angeles, in disenfranchised communities in Philadelphia,” he said.

“Family-based care is a sixth of the cost of an institution, but when we are working to close orphanages not everybody likes to hear that.
“It’s entirely possible to get children back to their families. Typically we trace the family, then we work on psychosocial support. Nobody is suggesting getting the orphanages closed right away but if you slowly redirected the money towards family care it would be very easy.”
For Otiende, there is too the question of why a “tourist” volunteer could do work that a local might be far better qualified for. “For the cost of a flight from the US to Kenya, we could pay for a senior psychotherapist to treat around 20 children and families a month.
“There are some great funders, UBS for example. Potential funders only want to support one child. They don’t want to hear work you are doing with a family. We get letters that say, ‘We would like to sponsor a little boy or girl so I can show my daughter how lucky she is.’ Well, why does teaching values have to be at the expense of a vulnerable person?”
Otiende wants people to look at why they think they can help. “I ask people, ‘Could you volunteer in your own country in this type of work?’ No. You can’t just come with a dose of optimism.”

I really hope the volunteer will return & not be harmed. I also hope to read fewer #globaldev stories that start "A 23-year-old Italian volunteer at an orphanage in Kenya..." sent by an organization with a stereotypical "African" sunset on their website. pic.twitter.com/d9WfRKHmsp

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) November 21, 2018

On October 22nd I posted a picture of myself where I looked like I altered my appearance and metamorphosis to match the ‘Eurocentric beauty standards’. I fearlessly addressed an issue that has been swept under the rug and boldly took the stance in bringing a taboo topic to the forefront. I chose to do this in the manner I did because I believe Colorism is plagiarizing (sic) our black community … I want to openly say it was not a ‘publicity stunt’. I wanted to create awareness of ‘Colorism’ and it was more so done intentionally to create shock value so that I could have the world's undivided attention to deliver the message in my music.
There are dark skin[ned] women across the world complaining every day that they are being downplayed and degraded, but the raw truth is it is us ‘black women’ and ‘black men’ that are fighting against each other and tearing down our own race.

For international organisations like the ICRC, one crucial step towards meaningful cultural change is to build a truly diverse, gender-balanced workforce. We also need a fully inclusive workplace that is respectful of our diverse staff. This is essential for staff motivation and engagement, and ultimately for operational effectiveness and sustainability. Diversity without inclusion is mere window-dressing – a hollow achievement.
To that end, we have consulted hundreds of staff in delegations around the world about the issues that matter to them, focusing on what they see as the key barriers to inclusion and how they can be overcome. This unprecedented global conversation unlocked sensitive issues that many staff had previously felt unable or unwilling to speak out about. Resident (local) staff, particularly women, and LGBT and disabled staff were among those to speak out about issues of sexism and discrimination. Their voices and ideas – and sometimes hard truths – have formed the basis of a new global approach to ensuring diversity and inclusion, one with organisation-wide ownership. The overarching priorities are clear: to ensure inclusion of resident staff and to achieve gender balance – not just in terms of numbers, but also in terms of creating an enabling culture that makes people feel connected and respected, and which allows them to grow.

While every sector has its challenges (rising health care costs and labor shortages are impacting just about every type of employer in every part of the country) what is particularly insidious about the continuing pressure on nonprofit salaries is that this is largely a choice that funders (individual or organizational) are imposing on the very causes they are intending to support.
Perhaps it is beyond time that this issue is not relegated to the subtleties of nonprofit surveys and executive summaries. How can we hope to change the hearts and minds of the individual citizen (from whence all funds originate, regardless of how they are ultimately distributed) when our own community continues to perpetuate, through both silence and acquiescence, this ritual of gradual decline?

We cannot write off an approach to development that moves power closer to citizens. We cannot decide to pull funds out of a program objective when the most critical element was underinvested in, to begin with. Rather than dropping our ideals, we must invest in them through clear program objectives, funding, and evaluation efforts. We must stay the course, replicate what we know works, change what doesn’t, and continue to pursue a world in which all people are empowered to determine their own futures.

If we want to give the country the space to experiment, we will have to find enough unrestricted funding (not tied to specific projects) and spend time identifying a country director with the right instincts and drive, then let them appoint their team.
What kinds of experiments they decide to try would depend on context and skills, obviously, and an extended inception phase of listening and incubating ideas with local partners before designing a programme, but some possible ideas, which could cover the three main areas of long term development, humanitarian response and advocacy, include

The Right to Food Campaign said in another Aadhaar-related death, 75 year-old Seeta Devi, who lived alone, starved to death in Gumla district on October 25. She did not have any food or cash at home before her death. Even though she had a ration card, due to illness, she could not go to the ration shop in October to authenticate her identity. She was also denied old age pension as her bank account was not linked with Aadhaar.

If your lead is "Few South Sudanese see a link b/n their civil war & polygamy," maybe ask yourself, "So why would *I* know better?"

And if yr 'evidence' is correlation mistaken for causation, and your narrative all sexist tropes, maybe just stop typing?https://t.co/BhcQKvOsI8

— Jina Moore (@itsjina) November 18, 2018

I can't blame my mom for her reaction. She just has a really different view of mental health — what it means and how to treat it. And by caring so much about what she thought, I was just being a dutiful Filipino daughter, concerned about my her and my family's reputation; but also a dutiful American one: hoping to foster a more open relationship.
I told my mom what I'd learned. She agreed with pretty much all the researchers' points — except the last one. She could talk to Nanay, my grandma, about anything, she told me. In high school, she had a terrible breakup with her boyfriend and cried for a whole month. She remembers that her mom helped her get through it.
So I tried again. I asked her, why didn't she take my troubles seriously when I told her about them this summer?
She was scared, she said, "that I didn't make you strong enough to stand on your own."
"I wanted you to think, maybe, that you could overcome it," she added. "That this was only a temporary situation."
They were lovely words, words I needed to hear from my mother.
I just wish, I told her, you could have said them to me then.

You were raised on welfare in England, a low societal rung in a globally rich country. How does growing up with this dichotomy affect your work today?
It gave me a sense of the important role the state can play. Economics is quite a conservative discipline relative to other social sciences, so I often battled against the idea that welfare is simply a state handout. I always say that it can be a hand up – it’s just how you design it. If you design it in a way that builds skill, builds asset, builds capabilities, then people can get off welfare. They want out of that situation, because it’s not exactly great for your self-confidence. I think I was lucky in that my mom shielded me from a lot of that stigma, but I know she felt it, and was quite ashamed. It also made me realize that inequality is a really important shaper of people’s confidence and drive, and appreciate the relativeness of inequality – if I have a safe, dry, warm house and decent diet, but someone who I consider my peer has much better than me, chances are I will still feel bad.
So, I think my feelings around inequality, gender issues, and a sensitivity about stigma – I think all of those things are reflected in my work.

I call the following 6 ideas “core falsehoods” because they are not held and argued by just one specific stakeholder group: It’s not “what technologists believe” or “what technology sceptics and critics believe” or “what politicians, the general public or journalists believe” but a set of ideas argued by key figures in each of the relevant social and political groups. Ideas that tech evangelists and the most harsh critics do (at least to a significant degree) share.
(...)
In reality what happens is that existing, formalized, structured patterns of discrimination, violence and power are being automated through software systems: Yes a machine makes the call not to give you health care very quickly when the person who used to make that call using the same criteria and formal decision trees used to take weeks to come to the same conclusion.
And there is something to say about the way people targeted by that kind of violence could try to talk to a human being on the other side and get them to change their minds but in reality that has very little if any effect: The person “making the decision” is not making the decision at all, it’s just going through the established processes and communicates the result. The “deciders” are more often than not just the friendly – or not so friendly – faces for systemic violence. But you can be sure that they are sorry (they really are!) and probably depressed.
Making discrimination quicker through automation is not the issue. You could even argue that code might be auditable to detect bias and discrimination (I wouldn’t given how currently audits rarely do anything because of “trade secrets”).
The issues are discrimination and violence. Talking about it as a tech problem dilutes the issue and implicitly accepts the actual problems.

The boundaries between different types of news (information, analysis, opinion) has collapsed in India. “With the definition of news becoming expansive and all encompassing, we find that anything of importance to the citizen is now considered ‘news.'”
(...)
The researchers found that the respondents’ default behavior was to keep notifications on and “we believe this behavior is quite widespread, for many respondents, when asked how they come to know about a news event, say that it’s ‘because of notifications’…In India, citizens actively seem to be privileging breadth of information over depth.” In a striking difference from America, the researches found that “Indians at this moment are not themselves articulating any kind of anxiety about dealing with the flood of information in their phones. If anything, they only see the positives of social media.”

This qualitative research study explored the conscious and unconscious impact of emergency aid work on the personal relationships of those who deliver it. Six experienced staff members of an international non-governmental organisation (INGO) were invited to reflect freely on their
relationships in unstructured interviews. Using psychoanalytic theory, the data were analysed for both surface andhidden content. Every participant identified the significant external split that aid work created between home life and the field and described conscious strategies to manage this challenge. Their narratives, however, also indicated deeper inner dilemmas along with more unconscious strategies for protecting themselves against the anxiety generated by those dilemmas. Although deployed in response to the relational demands of the work, these strategies also appeared to form part of patterns of relating developed prior to entry into the sector.

Authors do not cite works they perceive to be below a minimum threshold value of quality, supporting the normative view. However, above this threshold, frequency of use is unrelated to quality. Instead, usage is determined by social constructivist elements: scientists tend to cite works they are not influenced by and that they do not know particularly well.
Although normative considerations play a role, the threshold-nature of the role makes it invalid to infer differences in perceived quality between highly and lowly cited items. In sum, our findings elucidate what drives citation decisions, severely undermine the normative view of citation practices, and require a radical reassessment of the role of citations in evaluative contexts.

To help bridge this gap, we’ve come up with a series of questions to encourage academics across faculties to unearth some of the norms, assumptions and everyday practices that are taken for granted and which may be entangled in the “hidden curriculum”. This might help us to think through the “how” as well as the “what”, as a first practical step towards “decolonising” our teaching.

If we are to truly embody an ethic of decoloniality in our academies, we must look outside our classrooms and reading lists. We must actively challenge practices that continue to make our universities unequal and create a space that is truly intersectional. Proper representation to minority staff and students in the governing structures of universities, addressing the social and economic inequity between white and minority ethnicity staff and students and providing them space and agency to voice opinions that question the privilege of their peers. To decolonise means to have difficult discussions about race, class, gender, and privilege. It is to disrupt the accepted status quo and rupture the “comfortable ignorance” of those immune to the ramifications of race.

At the #BeyondIFs workshop in Bern, Ellen Hazelkorn is speaking about the dangers of a rankings-led strategy for universities & nations https://t.co/s4a2ONeRbF@UWankingspic.twitter.com/2cQudtvren

— Responsible Metrics (@ResMetrics) November 21, 2018

The first thing to note is that, although we identified over 300 papers on the use of research in health policymaking, the vast majority of these were descriptive. Very few – in fact just 14 of 304 articles – actually concerned testing interventions to see whether they worked. There is a serious discrepancy, therefore, between surging interest in this area and the small number of studies actually testing strategies.
The 14 articles we did find (reporting on 13 intervention strategies) tended to be methodologically weak. Only one study used an experimental design, while one other used a pre/post-test design. The others used a range of approaches and were characterised by an absence of control groups, small sample sizes, and self-report data. Most measured outcomes related to factors that influence research use rather than actual research use.

A jetlag-induced thread of entirely personal thoughts on #AmAnth18. This meeting was overshadowed and, in critical ways that we must not be allowed to forget, defined by #CaliforniaWildfires and the ensuing smoke that hung over and draped us in a toxic haze for the full meeting.

— Nayanika Mathur (@NayanikaM) November 20, 2018