My work was as much about restoring respect for their views, their autonomy and their normal life as about dealing with intrapsychic angst (p.43).

(Detachment) meant I could walk to work and sit in the social centres and cold welfare offices (in Sarajevo during the siege). I took obvious precautions like avoiding known sniper spots. (…) The worrying aspect was a kind of numbing. I could not shake off that feeling of detachment. The intake of breath still came if I heard someone killed, or saw a picture on the evening news, but the oddest thing was how the television footage of other people’s tragedies was somehow more real and upsetting than my own reality, which felt increasingly like a movie (p.61).

Translators are interlocuters with the community, cultural interpreters, co-therapists. They must have the ability to keep their thoughts to themselves and literally translate the person speaking-not easy when psychosis is concerned (p.69)

I asked what the long-term plans for the hospital were: “Deinstitutionalisation?” Dr B. laughed. “That is for the West. Here we institutionalise as much as possible. This society believes the mentally ill should be in an institution. We have no plans to put them in the community. Not here.” (p.159)

How to protect Annie and those like her from the abuses and torments of the crowd in the marketplace, in a country that had just crawled out of a twelve-year civil war? (p.205)
(…)
Annie came to me to tell me clients were buying her food. There is nothing as de-stigmatising as recovery (p.207)

PTSD gave psychiatrists a glamorous role in the emergency room and on the front line of disaster that had nothing to do with their usual emergency calls: calming and controlling a “crazy” person, listening to the miseries of a battered wife, arranging detoxification for someone high on amphetamines, or sorting out yet another teenager overdosing on paracetamol because of a bust-up with her boyfriend (p.79).
(…)
The trouble is that if you reduce the moral, social, economic and political complexities of a conflict to a disease category that can be universally applied, this appears to suggest that there is a simple medical fix to all the miseries caused (p.81).

There is now a manual (…) called Psychological First Aid. My worry is that, by manualising this common-sense approach, we are undermining people’s trust in their own empathetic responses. We have again created a technology that people think they cannot deliver unless they are trained, rather than empowering people to do what seems natural and right in helping others in distress (p.295).

It is not the suffering that keeps me here. It is the proximity to courage. I hope some might rub off on me (p.100).

Outside the Asylum adds important nuances to the aid worker memoir genre and I can recommend it highly to medical students and professionals who are thinking about leaving their Northern ‘asylums’ and engage in humanitarian work. Jones’ writing, at times marked with her frustrations of the global aid industry and an almost constant neglect of some of the most vulnerable people in crises, creates an important niche: As a professional closer to the end of her career, I enjoyed her positionality between a space often occupied by younger female aid workers starting their careers and older men who reflect on their live and work well into their retirement.
Perhaps not exactly a ‘stocking filler’, but a suitable gift for those who enjoy critical reflections on helping others, staying sane and the complexities of the aid industry!

AP reports that while some of the women were raped, most were in consensual relationships with the soldiers. Most of the children were therefore largely products of those relationships.
Even so, those relationships went against the code of ethics for both ECOWAS and the U.N., which forbid sexual contact with people under the peacekeepers’ protection because the potential for exploitation and abuse was high.

Most of the victims are short-term staff, youth volunteers and interns looking for jobs, the report said.
Those responsible "position themselves as 'gate-keepers' and 'king-makers'", it added.

It may no longer be possible to slow the momentum behind Indonesia’s palm markets. Sitting in the lavish dining room of the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Jakarta in July, over an awkward meal of mushroom consommé and blanched scallops, officials from Indonesia’s Palm Oil Development Fund made a case for their industry. I asked how important the American biofuels mandate has been, given that other countries buy more Indonesian palm oil than Americans do. The answer was unlustequivocal: It’s what got Indonesian palm off the ground. “The U.S. is not only a market,” said Ruddy Gobel, the chief political adviser to the director. “It also sets the global agenda.” Now, according to the Indonesian development officials, 80 million Indonesians depend economically on palm oil, and nearly half the industry consists of individual landowners like the people in Kotawaringin. “If you pull out biofuel, the whole system will collapse,” said Dono Boestami, the fund’s director.
In perhaps the final turn of the life cycle, Indonesia is now working to become its own largest customer. In 2016, it instituted a 20 percent biofuels mandate for its domestic fuels, and this August, it extended that mandate to cover railways and power generation, too. Then it upped the pressure further, simply making it compulsory that Indonesians buy and use biodiesel. Officials offer a simple justification for this push: Under the Paris climate accord, they say, converting Indonesia to renewable fuels is the only way the country can meet its own climate goals. The central problem, of course, is that the goals of Paris — slowing planetary warming just enough to allow humans time to adapt to excruciating and inevitable changes, including flooding coastlines, stronger hurricanes and perpetual famine and drought — are unlikely to ever be achieved without stopping deforestation.

So, Nooke's proposal is fundamentally hipster colonialism - attempting to reclaim colonialism by couching it in neoliberal trends or ideology while advocating for a return to an essentially exploitative system of social and economic organisation. Many of those speaking in favour of this proposal do so it in sterile and agnostic terms, focusing on the economic dimensions and the potential financial growth and leaving out the most important element - the people involved and affected. Underneath this is a reductive premise that human beings, and Africans specifically, are not as fully actualised human beings who deserve holistic life experiences - Africans are just labour or economic opportunities.

His only message, he said, is that guests should look at Sarajevo, now a vibrant, cosmopolitan city that hosts a celebrated annual film festival and is full of bars and hip clubs, and remember that “what happened here can happen wherever there are people.”
He has had few takers for the bunker, but demand has been reasonably strong for his less traumatic rooms.
He said he had initially considered cutting off the water in the hostel and forcing guests to collect it in buckets from outside, as most people in Sarajevo had to do during the war. But he decided that this would be going too far.
He also installed Wi-Fi, bowing to what he said was his young clientele’s one nonnegotiable demand.
An American guest had no problem with the constant sound of gunfire and sleeping on the floor without sheets, he said.

And the respondents generally agreed that using "negative imagery"— what the report defines as images of a person visibly suffering from war, famine or other crises — is an effective way "to pull on heartstrings to elicit a donation," says Girling.
"They said they need all the help they can get," says Girling, who attended a few focus groups in person. "As long as the images were an accurate representation [of the issue] and didn't exploit people, and the images didn't involve nudity or bloodshed, then they were OK for [sad] pictures to be used."
That surprised Beathe Øgård, president of SAIH and the report's co-author. These are precisely the types of images that her project Radi-Aid have been trying to eliminate from the aid sector.
"Stereotypes and over-simplification [of development problems] create a skewed view of how Westerners look at Africa," she says.
But perhaps, she adds, it's time "to start a new debate and reflect upon the findings we've seen. It should be possible to show both negative and positive imagery."

The French version of the online magazine Slate recently collated data to prove that tourists were much more likely to upload photos of children on popular travel website Routard.com if the country where they were taken was poor and African or Asian.
In Benin, a French-speaking West African nation, 13.7 per cent of the photos taken had children in them, and in Senegal, 8.5 per cent. In Cambodia this figure was 8.3 per cent.
In Canada? Just 0.3 per cent. In the UK and Spain, it was 0 per cent.
In the western countries where photos were taken, the images were more often composed from an angle where the children’s faces were not visible.
We would be naive to think British tourists are any different, even if the African countries are more likely to be former colonies like Kenya and Uganda, rather than Benin.

Laila and her son fled Syria's fighting.

She’s relieved to find safety but fears what lies ahead.

Will her family be given shelter?
How will they get food to eat?
Who does she turn to first?

A JOURNEY. CONTINUED
https://t.co/STxAJHdUtq

[THREAD] #DigitalID#DigitalIdentitypic.twitter.com/X8F35p24dg

— Caribou Digital (@cariboudigital) November 29, 2018

In Detroit’s ever-changing North End neighborhood, a new artist-run development project is challenging this unbalanced power dynamic. Ghana ThinkTank is a radical international art collective that identifies so-called “first-world” problems in American communities, then submits these problems to think tanks it establishes in third-world locations. These remote think tanks then propose solutions, seeking to “develop the first world.”

If Evidence Action hadn’t checked whether No Lean Season kept working when scaled up, it still would have had a lot of evidence that made it look like a promising program. It might have wrongly concluded the program was doing a lot of good, and continued spending a lot of money. That money would go to migration subsidies that, for whatever reason, don’t make a difference when distributed in that way, instead of to other, better programs like Evidence Action’s Dispensers for Safe Water or Deworm the World. Evidence Action would have missed the chance to fix whatever went wrong and make No Lean Season more effective, as they’re currently working to do.
So it’s crucially important that charities run tests of their programs, including tests at scale. But when tests like these are so expensive and can be devastating for the charities, realistically, most charities won’t conduct such research or won’t publish it.

Before joining MSF, I had thought that humanitarian work was straightforward: you see a crisis, you react. But, in practice, that principle becomes complicated, and helping often means doing what is needed. On the same day I secured the rape reports of three women over the age of sixty, I also recorded staff vacation days and changed the office printer paper. After the concussion, my being on the project had become a risk for the team; maybe the noblest thing that I did in Lulingu was admit that I needed to go home.
(...)
I now understand what my recruiter meant when he told me that MSF is not about saving the world. But I do know that the world needs people willing to do whatever they can to make it a better place, in big ways and small.

I suspect that academics exert a lot of their influence not through publishing, but in person, by being invited to talk to officials and politicians, speaking and networking at events etc. If that’s true (surely it could be researched?!), then universities should rethink the kind of support they give to researchers. Elevator pitches? Cocktail party skills, like how to break in on a conversation involving your victim target decision maker?

The fact that decolonization discourse is saturated with bourgeois concerns also tells us that something is seriously wrong with the academy. The marketization of knowledge-making processes over the last four decades—and the gradual insertion of South African higher education institutions into that global landscape in the post-apartheid years—has resulted in the assembly-line production of graduates who are quickly assimilated into the well-oiled machineries of a market-friendly economy. Yet decolonization activists, by and large, do not seem to take issue with the instrumentalization of their education, directing all their energies towards the attainment of what they call “free, quality, decolonized education.” Instead of a materialist reading of the asymmetries of academic life, they support an agenda that centers on high-level abstractions, such as “epistemic violence” and the like.

New @WorldBank report you may have missed in the Thanksgiving shuffle:

Child marriage costs 12 African countries accounting for half the continent's population upwards of $63 billion in lost earnings and human capital wealth.https://t.co/px5TsmOtfypic.twitter.com/LWr7UGRceL

— Erin Hohlfelder (@Global_ErinH) November 28, 2018

There are more paradoxes: while the region’s average spending on education is above the world average, learning outcomes are among the lowest and it has the highest gender gap among all countries, with girls far outperforming boys. Despite this, the region has the lowest female labour force participation rates in the world and the highest youth unemployment rates and these rates are mostly among the educated, especially women.
“In recent years, the region has witnessed the devastating effects of the unmet expectations and unrealised aspirations,” said Ferid Belhaj, the World Bank’s vice president for MENA.
Belhaj said while there had been a strong push for learning, an equally aggressive demand for skills in higher education from employers and parents had been lacking. Subsequently, the situation has resulted in the high production of unemployable graduates, which is now a key driver of frustration and despair in almost all MENA countries.

The report covers content from youth who responded to the YouthVoicesWB social media campaign which ran from September-October 2017 and asked youth to answer one question; “What would you do to make your community better?” Youth responded to the question through photography, poetry, original songs, painting, and other creative means. For the report, the RbD Lab also hired three young people from Wood Buffalo as Research Assistants who interviewed youth in the region to learn more about their ideas for collaborative resilience and how their experiences can inform policies and decisions that affect them.

this new publication offers clear guidance and real-world examples to all practitioners looking to use evidence, whether working in the field, or in the head quarters of donors and NGOs.

Ten challenges to organizing against precarity in anthropology:

— eli thorkelson (@unambivalence) November 25, 2018

Algorithms are not yet smart enough to allow an editor to accept or reject a paper solely on the basis of the information they extract, says Andrew Preston, co-founder of Publons, a New Zealand-based peer-review-tracking start-up acquired by Clarivate Analytics that is using machine learning to develop a tool to recommend reviewers. “These tools can make sure a manuscript is up to scratch, but in no way are they replacing what a reviewer would do in terms of evaluation.”

Nas has created a business off of his personal mantra of self-fulfillment. He sells themed T-shirts that spell out what percentage of your life is already over. Nas consults for businesses and people looking to produce multimedia content. He earns revenue from Facebook ads embedded in his videos. He puts his total net-worth at roughly $250,000, which he says is far less than what other travel vloggers earn.

At the beginning of the video I did briefly enjoy the social media-friendly content of the ICRC Landcruiser plowing through muddy roads and drone footage of the team driving over a bridge with a big, powerful river streaming underneath. It is contemporary visual aid communication language where the aesthetic of backpacker Instagram shots at Angkor Wat merge with the serious work of aid organizations in motion. 

Maybe a I am bit more sensitized as an academic who does communication for development as a job, but the mixture of ‘exploration’, ‘tourism’ and ‘aid work’ is usually not the best starting point to promote a professional global development organization.
Sending someone from the global North to ‘discover’ Papua New Guinea rubs me the wrong way right from the start of the 5 minute video.

But the UAE and Saudis weren’t the only ones to make a deal with the devil—so too did the United States. “There’s not a person at the CIA station in Khartoum who doesn’t know that Bashir and his inner circle are world class kleptocrats,” the former intelligence officer with whom I spoke said. “But you know, this is all about terrorism and Iran. So when the Saudis made a pact with Bashir, we looked the other way.” Yemen expert Michael Horton is even more outspoken: “It’s not a case of we should know better,” he says. “It’s that we know better and do nothing.”

The data shows that the mental health suffering on Nauru is among the worst MSF has ever seen, including in projects providing care for victims of torture.
(...)
Among the 208 refugees and asylum seekers MSF treated in Nauru, 124 patients (60%) had suicidal thoughts and 63 patients (30%) attempted suicide. Children as young as 9 were found to have suicidal thoughts, committed acts of self-harm or attempted suicide.
Almost two-thirds (62%) of MSF’s 208 refugee and asylum seeker patients were diagnosed with moderate or severe depression. The second highest morbidity was anxiety disorder (25%), followed by post-traumatic stress disorder (18%).

"We are not going to exaggerate figures to please NGOs who are looking for funding," he said.
Aid agencies said downplaying the number of people fleeing violence would impact their ability to help millions.
While violence has decreased in some regions allowing for people to return home, it has increased in other places - such as Ituri and North Kivu provinces - over the past year, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
"Globally the displacement problem in DRC has remained widespread and in parts of the country very dramatic," said UNHCR spokesman Andreas Kirchhof.
"We don't see that there is an enormous improvement in many areas over the past months. In many regions it has even deteriorated.

If and when children are reunified with their families, there is still no guarantee they won’t be recruited again. In such an impoverished country, Naili says youth are incentivized to join armed groups by the promise of “getting food, making some money, receiving a form of protection by the group itself and accessing an improved social status.”
Malnutrition in CAR is escalating, according to UNICEF. “It’s worse than anything I’ve ever seen,” says Harriet Dwyer, a UNICEF staff member who’s worked in northeastern Nigeria for 10 months, and recently returned to South Sudan – two other places near famine. With more than 43,000 Central African children expected to suffer from severe acute malnutrition in 2019, armed groups will become a more appealing option for many.
Girls are perhaps most in need of reintegration support. They are often stigmatized and rejected by their families because of the sexual violence they experience while under the control of armed groups. If they are recruited a second time, the chances of them entering a reintegration program drop dramatically.

Human Rights Watch looked at one of those consequences for a report forthcoming in 2019 focused on bride-trafficking from Myanmar to China. In Myanmar’s Kachin and northern Shan states, bordering China, long-standing conflict escalated in recent years, displacing over 100,000 people. Traffickers prey on vulnerable women and girls, offering jobs in, and transport to, China. Then they sell them, for around $3,000 to $13,000, to Chinese families struggling to find brides for their sons. Once purchased, women and girls are typically locked in a room and raped repeatedly, with the goal of getting them pregnant quickly so they can provide a baby for the family. After giving birth, some are allowed to escape—but forced to leave their children behind.

Increasingly, slavery eradication activists argue that child marriages should be considered a form of modern slavery when certain conditions apply. These include a lack of consent to enter the marriage, an inability to leave safely, subjection to physical threats and emotional control, and exploitation for sexual or labour purposes. Young children are unlikely to give informed consent, and may be pressured by parents or other family members to enter marriage. They are less able to flee. Although not all marriages between minors that involve dowries or bride prices should be seen as modern slavery, marriage negotiations that focus on financial transactions between families have a higher risk of commodifying children and putting them in servile positions.

Syrian teenage volunteers in Mafraq, Jordan, staged their own theatre show on child marriage and the risks related to it. We hosted the event together with local organisation Sama Al-Badia. Have a look! #child_marriage#GirlsNotBrides#Jordan#Syria@EU_ECHO@samaalbadeapic.twitter.com/BUcZlf51lJ

— NRC MiddleEast (@NRC_MiddleEast) December 6, 2018

We Shall Have Peace, the recent VR documentary produced by Al Jazeera’s Contrast media studio, explores South Sudan through the lens of trauma and healing. Watch how three South Sudanese are working for a better future by confronting their pasts.

How can someone who isn't mentally sound give consent? And about the others, knowing how mental health is heavily stigmatized in our part of the world it would have been wise to not reveal their faces. This is why it is important to HIRE LOCAL PHOTOGRAPHERS who understands this.

— Chirag Wakaskar (@chiragwakaskar) December 5, 2018

Procter tells me that the Pitt Rivers is a good example of a museum working hard to “rethink the role, power and status of museums”, and Van Broekhoven is refreshingly forthright. Fluent in the language of decolonial studies, she admits that the model of originating communities visiting for a week to talk about their customs is not sufficient and that the power dynamic between participants should always be carefully considered. “There are times [in these exchanges] when you think, ‘What are we doing here? Are we decolonising or are we neo-colonising?’” she says. “But that’s why it’s so important to think through the power balances in these relationships. It should certainly never be tokenistic. Decolonising really needs to be a process and as it deeply questions the institutional practices it will often be painful.”
Will the Maasai be able to facilitate the return of sacred objects? Van Broekhoven tells me over email that “in principle”, and provided they find funding, the museum is ready to “learn together how we might envision new ways of redress”. The words are carefully chosen. Nangiria, ever the diplomat, suggests an alternative solution in one of our conversations: inviting elders to perform a spiritual ceremony that will “disconnect” the objects from their cultural function, allowing the Maasai to actively donate them to the museum. The museum will wait to hear from the elders to “jointly decide” on the next steps in the partnership.

Great to see today’s positive coverage of the Gender Centre’s COMBAT approach to tackle #VAWG in Ghana. Rigorous evaluation by ⁦@WhatWorksVAWG⁩ showed physical & sexual IPV reduced by half! Thanks ⁦@sneweyy⁩ #16DaysOfAction#HearMeToohttps://t.co/ijCz2uRjdx

— Emily Esplen (@EmilyEsplen) December 6, 2018

More than four decades have passed since Mr. Reynolds embarked on what he portrays as an accidental life as an entrepreneur, an outgrowth of his fascination with mountaineering. He dropped out of college to start Marmot, the outdoor gear company named for the burrowing rodent. There, he profited by protecting Volvo-driving, chardonnay-sipping weekend warriors against the menacing elements of Aspen. Now, he is trying to build a business centered on customers for whom turning on a light switch is a radical act of upward mobility.

But while money certainly matters, the evidence suggests that development outcomes are determined more by factors like state capacity and national policies, and crucially, a supportive global environment. Rising trade protectionism, tighter immigration policies, and a lack of action on climate change by the world’s biggest economic players – particularly the US – thus pose serious threats to development, which a little extra money for the World Bank cannot offset. The ends do not justify the means: money may not matter that much, while ideas matter immensely in the broader fight against poverty

Development is about human dignity in a much wider sense and about sustainable future perspectives. For human dignity, you need to provide good health services, you need to provide education and you need to provide housing. All those things are integral parts, but they are not enough. We need other values and we must promote them. Development and human dignity would require articulating your views freely without being repressed and without being prosecuted. That is also part of human dignity.

Even with these limitations, our findings suggest that the NGO balance sheet tips more toward good than bad. Media outlets tend to focus on extreme cases of abuse, neglect or mismanagement in NGO programs. But according to our research on the many projects that don’t get media coverage but do make it into the pages of academic journals, these disappointments are not representative cases. Instead, most interventions we studied provide small, favorable benefits to the communities in which NGOs work.

But what went wrong with ‘You Stink’? Why did they lose momentum? Why did You Stink attract so many people initially, yet, lose support within a few months? Why didn’t they achieve what they wanted to achieve?
Well, if you’re aiming to create a losing social movement make sure to follow the 5 ground rules that ‘You Stink’ has followed:

We found a proliferation of press releases, white papers, and persuasively written articles. However, we found no documentation or evidence of the results blockchain was purported to have achieved in these claims. We also did not find lessons learned or practical insights, as are available for other technologies in development.
We fared no better when we reached out directly to several blockchain firms, via email, phone, and in person. Not one was willing to share data on program results, MERL processes, or adaptive management for potential scale-up. Despite all the hype about how blockchain will bring unheralded transparency to processes and operations in low-trust environments, the industry is itself opaque. From this, we determined the lack of evidence supporting value claims of blockchain in the international development space is a critical gap for potential adopters.

It’s not the device that’s the challenge—it’s systemic gender and educational issues that any tech will need to take on to succeed. When women in Nigeria were asked why they didn’t own a mobile phone, 40% said the barrier wasn’t money, but literacy. This creates a digital chicken-and-the-egg scenario, where women need mobile technology to gain access to an education, but they can’t use said technology unless they’ve already been educated.
To help solve this issue, we need to look to traditional school systems.

These challenges don’t mean that we should entirely write off education technology. Its use may not be what distinguishes the world’s best schools or school systems, but innovations that reduce teachers’ admin burden and improve lessons, or help students practice and build knowledge, are core to successful modern schools.
When applied correctly to a specific set of problems, technology has proven to be a useful tool that can have positive impact. But it must be accompanied by an honest discussion about what pedagogy actually works.
(...)
We can’t disrupt our way out of some simple facts: We need better teachers, curricula and accountability. We can achieve this by making entry to the profession more competitive and improving training; by African countries adopting, and holding schools accountable knowledge-rich curricula with international expectations that focus on foundational skills and knowledge. Technology can play a supporting role, but even in the 21st century, learning to read remains more important than learning to code.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that it is especially the use of narrative elements, testimonies and good practice examples from local families that enhanced the persuasive power of the videos. Another lesson is that the videos are unlikely to unfold their full potential if used as standalone resources. Instead, they should be embedded in existing training and community eventsand blended with discussions and/or practical tasks. Perhaps the videos’ greatest value is that they promote the participation of groups, such as females, older and illiterate people, in learning and community events from which they are usually excluded. It was particularly illiterate women who provided a highly positive feedback.

No one can be fully prepared to lead a base through evacuation in a rapid onset emergency. For those who have, you may remember the frustration in finding a carefully developed evacuation plan was not as developed as you had envisioned (at least I hope I’m not the only one). What had been the worst-case scenario on your risk assessment yesterday was the reality today. The road you could run on yesterday is now a no man’s land. All the missed details in planning are now gaping holes in the sinking ship that is your life. You’re forced to make critical decisions with no information and deal with a micromanaging HQ on the other side of the world.
Whereas the day before you espoused the principle of humanity, today you are making cold calculated decisions. Whereas the day before everyone in the base was one team, the current circumstances force you to categorize people as expatriates and nationals.
(...)
What I can’t reconcile is how quickly the humanitarian principles are discounted when it comes to the categorization of expatriates and national staff. In transitioning careers from military to humanitarian, I sought out a more idealistic way of living, but find my current role requires the same cold and calculated decision-making process for the sake of the “big picture”. As my career moves into more senior roles, I struggle to retain the same attitude of idealism which lead me to the humanitarian sector.

At the launch for @saih's report on aid communication and images used for aid fundraising, aiming at more diversity and dignity there.
👉 https://t.co/WVg7UORxqI👈

I wrote a poem about it, after hearing the concept of "African children as the face of global poverty". pic.twitter.com/tuslSyGcqs

— Enzo Nicolas Rossi (@EnzoNRossi) December 6, 2018

Some thoughts to consider related to this article from @NPRGoatsandSoda@MalakaGharib re: @saih study: https://t.co/gexTqnP6NU
1) Ads don't exist in a vacuum. #NGO communicators are being called to up their skill set in terms of narrative frame analysis. (See attached.)#DevCommspic.twitter.com/3o2kzJbQv2

— Jennifer Lentfer (@intldogooder) November 30, 2018

My feminist thinking about women and workplaces is now in pretty direct opposition to Sandberg’s Lean In message. I believe telling mothers to raise their hands and try harder in the open sea of hostility we face in the workplace is like handing a rubber ducky to someone hit by a tsunami. I think it also inadvertently encourages us to internalize our own discrimination, leading us to blame ourselves for getting passed over for raises, eased out of jobs, not getting called for job interviews, and being denied promotions.
I now believe the greatest lie of Lean In is its underlying message that most companies and bosses are ultimately benevolent, that hard work is rewarded, that if women shed the straitjacket of self-doubt, a meritocratic world awaits us. My own life, and my research and reporting, along with interacting with hundreds of mothers in the past two years, has convinced me this is untrue.

Quick thoughts on mediocrity, pulling back the curtain, and this Michelle Obama quote: "Here's the secret. I have been at probably every powerful table you can think of... I have served on corporate boards, I've been at G summits, I've sat in at the UN. They're not that smart"

— Lauren Dobson-Hughes (@ldobsonhughes) December 6, 2018

The articles here have been authored by young African scholars from the Matasa Fellows Network, convened by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in collaboration with Mastercard Foundation. These early-career academics from Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, and Zimbabwe were selected to consider the role that could be played by the formal private sector in job creation in Africa. Case studies come from their respective countries. While some aspects of the youth employment challenge are common to all six countries, the local contexts and situations are unique and sectoral.

Our book on dependency theory is soon ready for sale with University of Zimbabwe Publications 🤩 It includes interviews with Samir Amin, Peter Evans, @NakedKeynes, @Idemamba, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Patrick Bond & many more! pic.twitter.com/lSyYvTPEyc

— Ingrid H. Kvangraven (@ingridharvold) December 1, 2018

By mapping the research using a systematic review methodology it is shown that there is a lack of qualitative data on how Twitter is used by learners and teachers in MOOCs. Moreover, a number of methodological gaps exist in published quantitative survey research at the interface between Twitter and MOOCs, including issues in the trustworthy reporting of results and full consideration of tweet and tweet meta-data collection.

Sweden said Wednesday it was freezing its support to UNAIDS until its executive director is removed, after an expert report blasted the agency's leadership for systematically failing to address bullying, abuse and sexual harassment.
The Swedish government has no confidence in Michel Sidibe to lead the organisation, a spokesman for the ministry for international development cooperation told AFP, confirming reports in local media.
"We have no confidence in him. He has to resign now," International Development Cooperation Minister Isabella Lovin told daily Svenska Dagbladet, adding "I've even told him so personally".

It’s not complicated, says @shaistaAziz"Start firing these people who are responsible" Too many senior abusers in the aid sector have been allowed to leave on their own terms this year #devdebate

— Humanitarian News (@HNResearchNet) December 11, 2018

A statement from the UN agency on Thursday made no reference to last week's report, simply saying that Sidibe wants to "have an orderly transition of leadership at UNAIDS" and would resign the end of June.
Critics pounced. Paula Donovan, co-director of AIDS-Free World and its Code Blue Campaign, which works to end impunity for sexual abuse by UN personnel, said Sidibe "doesn't deserve to leave on his terms and on his timeline."
"A leader of any other major institution who was accused of the wrongdoing described in ... the report would have been summarily fired," she said, criticizing a "failure of leadership" by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres -- who can fire Sidibe -- and the UNAIDS board.
"This is the culmination of the abuse of power and authority that has marked Sidibe's tenure," Donovan said. "The culture of impunity remains intact. Zero tolerance is ... nothing more than empty slogan."

In many cases, calling on the blue helmets has become merely a convenient substitute for a serious grappling with what it would take to bring peace. The same story thus repeats itself, whether in Bosnia, Congo, East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Somalia, or South Sudan. After the outbreak of war, donor countries pledge millions of dollars in aid and ask the UN for help. Eventually, the warring parties call for cease-fires, sign agreements, and hold elections. But soon, sometimes just days later, violence flares up again. Often, it has never actually ended; in many cases, it lasts for years.
The international community’s preferred strategy for dealing with conflict simply isn’t working: peacekeeping as currently practiced is a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. The good news is that there is a way to rethink the current strategy so that it has a better shot at establishing lasting peace: rely more on the very people it is ostensibly trying to protect.

No one is blatantly racist to your face. It isn’t overt. But the careless treatment of professional black aid workers by humanitarian aid organisations suggests a hierarchy of worth, with workers from the Global South, especially if they are black, valued the least.
We came to this work naively thinking everyone would be treated equally regardless of race, gender or religious affiliation. It didn’t take us long to discover that equality is a charade in this sector.
The realities:
Hazardous conditions — black workers more likely to be put in harm’s way.
Housing conditions — better for whites than for black colleagues.
Promotions — white workers promoted over more competent black colleagues with years more experience.
Complaints about these and other injustices — ignored and dismissed.
(...)
There is still a touch of well-meaning, missionary zeal in the attitude of the northern aid workers towards the developing world. We need to see the talent among local workers, not imagine dependency. The ultimate aim must be to hand over control to local agencies. This would involve setting in place exit strategies for ex-pats and implementing transparent career ladders for local workers.

It’s not complicated, says @shaistaAziz"Start firing these people who are responsible" Too many senior abusers in the aid sector have been allowed to leave on their own terms this year #devdebate

— Humanitarian News (@HNResearchNet) December 11, 2018

DFID has today published its response to the findings of the IDC’s report and, in doing so, has sought to shift much of the responsibility onto the the wider international development sector.
(...)
Amongst the recommendations the government took slight umbrage with was conducting an audit of the accessibility to whistleblowing systems and protections for the people who use them.

"Combine that with what's happening to journalists and media outlets, and what you have is a dramatically shrinking space for civil society."
(...)
"In the absence of real financial pressure over this issue, the Pakistani state can withstand Western criticism," the former senior staffer wrote to NPR, particularly in a global environment of rising nationalism and a backlash against liberal institutions.
Kugelman, the senior associate for South Asia at the Wilson Center, said Pakistan would only change course if it was concerned with its reputation.
"For Pakistan, a country that already has an image problem, the optics of expelling charitable organizations are not good, to say the least. With Islamabad trying to capitalize on an improved security situation and attract more foreign investment, it may come to realize that now's not the right time to act in ways that cause its global image to take more hits," he wrote.

Unfortunately the questions in this consultation are somewhat broad and repetitive. Most have already been answered in the very extensive literature that exists, some of which we list below in Section V. We wonder how much time panel members actually have to read some of the most important texts on the subject? The answers to most of the questions herein are well-known; the challenge is to act upon this knowledge. It is a challenge of “will”.
We also noted above our concerns about the role of the High-Level Panel on Digital Co-operation, and remain unconvinced that it is the appropriate vehicle through which real change can be delivered. There are already UN bodies and structures that could readily have fulfilled this role. Why was there the need to create yet another high-level body? The structure of the Panel is also problematic if it intends to understand and deliver on the key issues noted above. Whilst efforts have clearly been made to get reasonable gender and regional balances, the panel is heavily made up of elite people, and has a strong private sector emphasis. Few members are from very poor or marginalised backgrounds, and although many might claim to know about poverty and marginalisation, few have really experienced it.

I made a nostalgic visit to the UN in Geneva last week to help the TDR team chew this over (about 20 people, Chatham House Rule, so no names/institutions, sorry). As prep, I went back to take a look at the most recent TDRs – they are beautifully written. Here’s a sample para from the latest one, on Power Platforms and the Free Trade Delusion:
‘The paradox of twenty-first century globalization is that – despite an endless stream of talk about its flexibility, efficiency and competitiveness – advanced and developing economies are becoming increasingly brittle, sluggish and fractured. As inequality continues to rise and indebtedness mounts, with financial chicanery back in the economic driving seat and political systems drained of trust, what could possibly go wrong?’
But that’s taken from a 27 page overview, with no accompanying blog, infographic or any of the other modern accoutrements. It’s like an elegantly crafted essay from a bygone era.
UNCTAD staff’s frustration is tangible

Forgive me, colleagues, but international development and humanitarian response — hungry for innovation — is driven by a fad. Everyone is an “AI”, everyone is a “blockchain’, yet we operate in a much more complex environment for implementation of tech solutions on the ground. Who is to sort things out? How to ensure, those social startups — the aspirational private sector effort in reality of humanitarian crisis — do what the private sector does best… ‘compete’ to create the best-fit solutions, yet support and multiply each others’ efforts for a unified social mission.

The author argues that instagrammable humanitarianism depends on “gestural images” such as selfies: Medina’s pictures “invite her followers into the sociability of her imaginary as celebrity humanitarian.” Yet, crucially, Møhring Reestorff writes that “while the youth might be interested in celebrities, they are not necessarily interested in charity work. In fact older groups tend to approve of associations between charities and celebrities more than younger groups.” Additionally, because of the ubiquity of social media, this type of campaign blurs the target group involving networks and platforms which pick up, repurpose and comment on both celebrity and social media engagement.
Paradoxically therefore, the reaction to Medina’s collaboration with Act Alliance creates further compassion fatigue in the audience, in an example of the “crisis of humanitarianism” which refuses to accept “‘common humanity’ as the motivation for our actions,” a tendency already singled out by Chouliaraki.

This year was full of spectacular fiction, spine-tingling poetry and hard-hitting non-fiction from Africa. Here is some of the best.

“She defined in her own terms the way she wanted to live in the public space; the image she wanted to have,” says human rights lawyer Sherizaan Minwalla, who has worked extensively across Iraq. “She was making her own choices about the way she lived and travelled. Why shouldn’t she go to Baghdad? Violence serves to restrict women’s public role in society. Who wouldn’t be terrified? When women are killed, others will think twice before taking part in a public demonstration, or stepping outside of traditional roles.”
“The message the violence sends is that women don’t get to be political unless it’s on [society’s] terms. We don’t always analyse violence against women in political terms, but standing up to traditional power structures and patriarchal norms is inherently political, because it challenges the status quo. It is political that Fares got up and said no to this and then set out on her own path.”

That disease stems, in part, from political choices that have rotted the social safety net and made access to a good education the birthright of only a tiny elite. But the disease is also, more perniciously, the legacy of the demand that black children be raised as John Henrys, no matter if it kills them in the process.
We need to stop substituting hopeful stories for justice. We must ensure that all children have a true opportunity to realize their potential. We ought to subscribe to a new vision of success, where the goal is not just great kids, but free and whole ones too.

Current and former Facebook factcheckers told the Guardian that the tech platform’s collaboration with outside reporters has produced minimal results and that they’ve lost trust in Facebook, which has repeatedly refused to release meaningful data about the impacts of their work. Some said Facebook’s hiring of a PR firm that used an antisemitic narrative to discredit critics – fueling the same kind of propaganda factcheckers regularly debunk – should be a deal-breaker.
“They’ve essentially used us for crisis PR,” said Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor of Snopes, a factchecking site that has partnered with Facebook for two years. “They’re not taking anything seriously. They are more interested in making themselves look good and passing the buck … They clearly don’t care.”

So, ideally, Google would take the high road. If it wants to “do the right thing,” as its motto goes, it can hire most workers full-time. But that’s admittedly costly in terms of administration, benefits, compensation, and potential liability. And what it’s doing isn’t unique—many Silicon Valley corporations rely on contractors for a bulk of their core work. Microsoft did this too, until it settled a massive class action lawsuit in 2000 with “permatemps” for $97 million.
Someday, perhaps Google will also end up paying out to those who work for less just to be at “the best” workplace in the world. For now, however, it seems that until labor laws change to reflect the current employment reality and incentivize full-time hiring, inequality will persist—even as the company appears sweet on the outside.

Advocacy groups are concerned about the little that we do know about the use of the technology at the Swift concert. “Companies have a responsibility to respect human rights, and they need to make sure any monitoring that they do is really limited to what is strictly necessary to achieve a legitimate aim,” says Sarah St. Vincent, a researcher and advocate for Human Rights Watch. “If this company is learning that this person is attending a Taylor Swift concert and maybe stood next to certain other people or went to the bar to get a drink or engaged in other things, that’s data that’s valuable for them to sell.” This makes it all the more important, argues St. Vincent, for companies to notify people when facial recognition is in use and give them the chance to opt out.

A human AI also requires developing incentives and means for civil society organizations, researchers, regulators, and others, to demand that public policies and programs be evaluated systematically using the best available data and methodologies, to adjust future iterations and contribute to a body of evidence on what yields which results.
Data for transparency and rational compassion are a recipe for dealing with fake news and demagoguery.

This by Casey, @rglenner, @tedmiguel + Voors is intriguing. 'Skill versus voice in international development'.

Village 'technocrats' are good at winning a devt grant for their area; they beat proposals written by old chiefs or inclusive groups (CDD). https://t.co/I4jopRqKyY

— Tom Wein (@tom_wein) December 12, 2018

An independent study compiling the latest statistics and analysis on the size,
shape and scope of the humanitarian system and assessing
overall performance and progress.

This compendium of 15 SBCC cases presents results and learning from the Communication for Development (C4D) cross-sectoral interventions from 15 states of India – all implemented during the country programme 2013- 2017. Additionally, a national level C4D Results Report ‘Resonating Change’ has also been compiled.

So, what can be done? We could start by requesting fewer letters. In most situations it is more effective to simply ask for names of referees and their contact information. This would limit the letter writing to only those who are being seriously considered, saving countless hours of work for everyone. Or why not simply stop asking for letters altogether?

when you think of our country's crippling student debt, the rise of tuition, the decline of tt faculty, the lack of public access to research, remember we produce billions of dollars of revenue for a company that calls all the shots https://t.co/TbSbVXspND

— erin glass (@erinroseglass) December 7, 2018

A predominantly quantitative and output-driven academic evaluation process makes way for talent development and growth, prioritizing vision development and strategy – at the personal as well as the group level. Quality prevails over quantity. Needless to say, we are confident that the intrinsic motivation of each ZAP member ensures that no one needs a priori objectives in order to perform well in the core tasks of our university: education, research and institutional or social engagement.

Exciting news! New reading lists written with #decolonising in mind on @globalsoctheory: Classical Sociological Theory, Introductory Social Anthropology, Introduction to International Relations, First Year Politics Course. Read (and use) them here: https://t.co/Kip8d4vls8

— Lucy Mayblin (@LucyMayblin) December 13, 2018

In conclusion, we would like to remind you
That these changes won’t affect
Too many faculty members as
No one is really on
The tenure track anymore.
Indeed, the tenure track is
Sort of like a creepy and abandoned
High-school running track
In a poorly-produced horror film.
But the happy few who are on this track
Can rest assured that
We will be checking up on you.
Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
We’ll be watching you.

Excellent coverage by @rebeccarat on #NGOSafeSpace critique of @amnestynl now cancelled refugee campaign, and @MSF pulled campaign. Here's to 2019 @shaistaAziz
https://t.co/Gy1Gzf666S

— Alexia Pepper de Caires (@je_ne_tweet_pas) December 20, 2018

Something is rotten in Dutch #globaldev comms-first Amnesty, now MSF: "Dutch Instagram Influencers Face Backlash for Ebola Selfies"https://t.co/2a6VzYTK9Qpic.twitter.com/W9xba2VZcE

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) December 19, 2018

Incredible comment on @amnestynl facebook page from a refugee following outrage at their Benetton style advert. This is what happens when charities lose faith in the power of the stories of those they are mandated to help. pic.twitter.com/j8dHKHAjQ7

— duckrabbit (@duckrabbitblog) December 17, 2018

Our new book 'Communication in International Development: Doing Good or Looking Good' (edited with @FlorenciaEnghel) explores intersections between #commisaid#comdev#mediadev (etc.) and #PR Free for the next 50 days at https://t.co/1QefbyLI5k! Please share! pic.twitter.com/qwd49sbAZH

— J Noske-Turner (@jnosketurner) September 5, 2018

Christmas Tree in Milan, Italy Source: Wikipedia

A “quick fix” is not to work with “influencers” that have no sustainable connection to aid work, NGO campaigning & meaningful global engagement.
I can’t see any benefit coming from these engagements and generating a few tweets, Insta posts and signatures to an online petition are some kind of development communication plastic engagement that will only pollute an ocean of mediatized engagement and get an innocent sea turtle entangled in your web of single-use campaign fast food waste.
I would also urge organizations to be more careful, perhaps even conservative in their approaches of working with agencies.
At the end of the day development communication is neither a new product nor are some of the topics suitable for viral outrage. At the end of the day communicating solidarity, complex global problems, local approaches to address them and positive multi-cultural messages is difficult in an age where Northern charity brands are struggling to (re)define their roles while their money is still needed in humanitarian crises and shrinking civil society spaces in many countries.

"Given its scale, it's incredible how neglected the situation in Venezuela is," said CARE humanitarian expert Tom Newby. "The world needs to wake up to this crisis."
Afghanistan was ranked the most neglected crisis by Islamic Relief Worldwide, and South Sudan by Save the Children. The UNHCR named Burundi while mixed migration was highlighted by the Danish Refugee Council.

"We have used [hakuna matata] as our Kenyan slogan since l was born almost 5 decades ago ... Disney, no way you are getting this one. You borrowed it during Lion King, now you think you can keep it? ... Create your own original stuff," wrote Florence Maina, a signer on the petition page.

Using a GBA+ lens involves asking deliberate questions about not only gender but also diversity impacts and outcomes, focusing on who receives most of the benefits and who bears more of the costs in policy planning and decision-making, including decisions about resource development. In this case, it also involves making sure that environmental impact assessment processes seek out and listen to the voices of Indigenous women and other community members whose experiences have historically been overlooked.
Culturally relevant gender-based analysis recognizes the diversity among members of communities. It is an important analytical tool that can help to identify gendered impacts and aid in the development of plans to mitigate the worse impacts on women, to ensure that all members of our communities (Indigenous and non-Indigenous, women and men) can share in the benefits of resource extraction and to make it less likely that more marginalized members of communities, including women and girls and people with disabilities, will face more negative impacts than positive ones.

Yet during the entire 200-year history of British rule in India, there was almost no increase in per capita income. In fact, during the last half of the 19th century - the heyday of British intervention - income in India collapsed by half. The average life expectancy of Indians dropped by a fifth from 1870 to 1920. Tens of millions died needlessly of policy-induced famine.
Britain didn't develop India. Quite the contrary - as Patnaik's work makes clear - India developed Britain.
What does this require of Britain today? An apology? Absolutely. Reparations? Perhaps - although there is not enough money in all of Britain to cover the sums that Patnaik identifies. In the meantime, we can start by setting the story straight. We need to recognise that Britain retained control of India not out of benevolence but for the sake of plunder and that Britain's industrial rise didn't emerge sui generis from the steam engine and strong institutions, as our schoolbooks would have it, but depended on violent theft from other lands and other peoples.

The question remains, though: will any of this really change the future of India's farmers?

Non-lethal weapons are a multibillion-dollar-a-year business and the industry seems to be growing. The industry could be worth more than $9bn by 2022, according to Allied Market Research, a company that does industry forecasting. CSI supplies not only Egypt, but also Israel, Bahrain and US police departments, like the one in Ferguson, Missouri.
(...)
Companies don't broadcast their profits, but at the trade conferences that Feigenbaum attended, they projected growth
"The claim by the industry is that this industry is growing, that during 2011 where we had mass global protest, that sales in tear gas actually tripled, that we're continuing to see market growth particularly in East Africa, in the Indian subcontinent - so, in places where there's ongoing conflict, and where there's less international and national regulation, that we've got growing markets," Feigenbaum said.

Thus, many groups without a drop of activist spirit in their blood, whose stance completely contradicts the ideological needs and the essence of feminism and women's rights, are promoted haphazardly because they comply with the regimented terms of engagement (the rules of the game).
On the other hand, activists who struggle to own the agenda have to stay under the radar and are often stigmatised as being "too political".
Moreover, most of the current modalities of Northern support to the South are heavily merchandised. Work on social change and gender equality is gradually being turned into a commodity under the claim of addressing corruption and taking control of resources and spending. In the past 20 years, USAID and the UK government have channelled the majority of their resources to developing countries through private companies.
These types of sub-contracting companies who act solely based on financial calculations were put in control to engage on extremely complex issues, including peace and reconciliation, sexual violence, anti-terror and others. These entities lack not only expertise and knowledge but also the genuine interest and empathy that would qualify them for a role within local civil society.

The architects of this effort had every degree, pedigree, and piece of resume candy on offer in the Western world. But while they may have outclassed Meyler on credentials, what they shared in common with her were good intentions. Like Meyler, most of those in charge of aid efforts believed they were improving the lives of long-suffering Liberians. But good intentions are tricky. They can absolve us of the responsibility to engage in critical self-examination and provide cover for us to downplay or brush off our failures. And more importantly, they often serve to mask the ideology that underlies our efforts to “help,” blinding us to how conditioned those efforts are by our view of who we are and whether our solutions are, in fact, the right ones…

We need a systematic, timely and cost-effective approach offsetting the biases and for finding and exploring the seas between the islands. Here is what, again and again, I have found works astonishingly well, and far better than one might suppose.
Ring fence a day. Take a day’s leave if necessary. Do not have any government or NGO person with you – just a driver, perhaps a colleague, and (in my case usually) an interpreter.
Hire an unmarked vehicle.
Drive out from your urban centre in any direction for 15-20km.
Turn off left or right and drive for 5-10km.
Turn left or right again and stop anywhere, perhaps a poor or typical village or other settlement.
Wander around on foot, meet people, explain who you are and your interests, notice and ask about things, be friendly and interested, ask what people would like to show you, seek out those we might not meet – women, children disabled, low status, living on the fringes, key informants like teachers, local representatives, masons, health workers and so on.
Tea shops can be brilliant. Go to a tea shop and chat. A male bias can be expected, but discussions can be immediately frank and revealing. You can carry out quick order-of-magnitude surveys based on people’s knowledge of different villages and other questions.
Follow up on offers to show you things, or take you to see people or things.
Go to several contrasting places during the day.

Their attacks felt reminiscent of the verbal and emotional assault many women experience when they share stories of sexual harassment or rape but aren’t believed, only blamed. Instead of receiving empathy and support for speaking up and, trying to prevent future harm, we were punished. Constant denial of your harm can cause you to doubt yourself. At times, I wondered whether the emotional toll was worth my advocating to prevent others from being harmed.

In 2019, the panel will put forward practical proposals on how to strengthen cooperation in the digital realm across sectors and geographies. As part of putting together this report, they want to hear from digital innovators and interested parties like you.

We spent two years developing the concept and researching the idea at CharityComms before publishing an episode, spending as much time a possible talking to podcasters, shadowing podcast recordings and attending events. The length of time doesn’t matter but getting to the heart of whether this is a channel your audience wants to hear this content on, and how podcasting suits the content, is critical.

He and DiCampo are trying to take the project further, with an educational focus: they are going to middle schools and high schools in America, using it as a launching point to teach storytelling and how to use photography to tell your own story. They talk to kids about misperceptions, using Everyday Africa and the other Everyday feeds to help them discuss the stereotypes they’re burdened with and to help them tell their own local story.

Algorithmic Accountability: A Primer explores issues of algorithmic accountability, or the process of assigning responsibility for harm when algorithmic decision-making results in discriminatory and inequitable outcomes.
(...)
This brief explores the trade-offs between and debates about algorithms and accountability across several key ethical dimensions, including:
Fairness and bias;
Opacity and transparency;
The repurposing of data and algorithms;
Lack of standards for auditing;
Power and control; and
Trust and expertise.

This joint report by Privacy International and the International Committee of the Red Cross aims to provide people who work in the humanitarian sphere with the knowledge they need to understand the risks involved in the use of certain new technologies. It also discusses the “do no harm” principle and how it applies in a digital environment.

Since its inception, the journal has undergone a number of name changes and has been published by a range of publishers. Its publication histories, and the formats and platforms through which it has been published, usefully track the shifts in institutional histories and the trends in teaching and researching African Languages and Cultures at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), from where a journal focusing on African Languages and Cultures has been edited (with some interruptions), since 1960.

Campos says that the results might seem intuitive, given that researchers attend conferences in part to seek collaboration. But, she says, the study quantifies what many academic researchers already believe to be true. Furthermore, it gives weight to the idea that even though scientists have many ways of meeting virtually and beginning professional relationships, in-person meetings trounce online ones. “Even in this connected world, personal communication — face-to-face interactions — still matter, to foster collaboration and launch productive scientific partnerships,” Campos says.

Social media can be enticing for scholars because of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu described as their “excessive confidence in the powers of language”. It is easy to get sucked into social media in the belief that continuing to talk will improve the conversation. For instance, in an usual article the physicist Philip Moriarty vividly describes the grim realisation that half a million words of comment and response he’d produced as one of the most enthusiastic digital engagers I’ve met in academia produced nothing of lasting value for himself or for others. It can be remarkably easy to get sucked in, consuming vast amounts of time and energy while exposing yourself to the risk of abuse and harassment. To point this out isn’t a case against engagement, as much as a reminder that there are no intrinsic limits to how much time you can spend on this.

A quick look at this list of Stephen Ellis’ publications shows the breadth of his research: from South Africa to West Africa, from the history of Madagascar to the role of religion in Africa, and from aspects of Nelson Mandela’s past to crime in Nigeria, to name just a few. Stephen Ellis was a fascinating man and a first-class researcher. I hope that this bibliography makes all his works even more accessible to readers.

It didn’t take long for me to see grown-ups (mostly men) abuse their power and do remarkably offensive things (p.120).

I wrote positive, happy news for our inhouse propaganda machine that churned out glossy magazines every month (p.128).

Those early UNDP overseas assignments didn’t take place in meeting rooms, PowerPoint hadn’t yet poisoned our thinking or stymied the way we worked. I could see, touch and take pictures of people and our projects. The words “upstream policy dialogue” – UNglish for getting people together for international gabfests to hash out policies – hadn’t become the norm (p.147).

I certainly saw UNDP families split up over ambition. Women had few options if they wanted to climb the career ladder. Only a handful of women ran field offices, and rarely, of ever, were those women married or had a family in tow (p.180).

What a life. While I wrote stories and editorials about poverty eradication and growing inequality in Asia and helped launch handwringing reports about social and economic gaps between men and women, rich and poor, urban and rural, we played tennis at the British Club and had drinks at embassy parties (p.187).

I was running on adrenaline and fear, not because of the war (in Afghanistan) but because my own insecurities that continued to haunt me. I wanted so much to get (UNDP Director) Malloch Brown all over the media and to prove that I could pull in interviews with journalism’s heavy hitters. I was so nervous in the lead-up to their arrival that I’d retch at night (p.207).

For me, the innovation lexicon stifled any kind of free thinking (…). So many meetings, conferences, reports and reporting mechanisms, either demanded by donors or internally generated to justify our existence. Too much of the communications work now involved promoting ourselves to ourselves through self-congratulatory Tweets, Facebook posts and web stories (p.266).

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

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

Dear Colonialism,
I’m writing a letter to you, because I’m not sure you’ll listen when I talk. You claim that you want to come back to my house, and that in fact, your visit will be good for me. Dear colonialism, I do not agree.
Especially since you have yet to leave my house.

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...

At the end of the video I am left confused: Clearly Nas Daily had a great time in Papua New Guinea. But what am I supposed to do now?
Give money to ICRC? Travel to the island? Remain in my ‘humans of late capitalism’ bubble of exploration, travel and happiness?
You do amazing work, ICRC!
You can do so much better than relying on social media influencers and going down an exoticizing path that seems problematic to say the least in these decolonial times!

I looked at the top blog posts and book reviews for 2018 and I think that they quite nicely represent some of the bigger debates the #globaldev community grappled with last year.

In the end, From Hollywood to Holy Wars (despite the slightly cheesy title…) delivers a well-balanced memoir in which Cherie Hart finds a really nice balance between critical reflection on her UN work without descending into snark and sharing an aid worker life with the right dose of work-life balance. Hopefully her easy-going book will inspire more women to write about their experiences ‘in development’ and add more nuances to more traditional accounts of how the aid industry really worked and the challenges on personal relationships and families while ‘saving the world’.

5 stories that shaped global development in 2018 pic.twitter.com/a2X8Ta2PeS

— Devex (@devex) December 29, 2018

In this week-long series, IRIN’s editors highlight five themes from across our reporting that will continue to inform our coverage of the humanitarian sector in the new year: local aid; women and girls; returns and rebuilding; policy and practice; and migration.

So what should we expect in 2019? We reached out to pundits in global health and development and they came up with nine bold predictions.

The Dart system boasts bus lanes separated from other traffic, mostly in the middle of the road to reduce stoppages. Ticket payment and control takes place at stations rather than on board, while step-free stations and boarding mean the entire route is accessible to people in wheelchairs or with buggies.
We get on the first bus fine, but for the return journey have to wait for three buses before there is space to board. You should have seen how bad it was before, says Navarro.

Amid a busy December, when the United Nations was focusing on important conferences on climate change and migration and year-end holidays loomed, a case of harassment that never got the traction it arguably deserved ended in a traditional UN way: it disappeared.
On Dec. 14, the chairman of the International Civil Service Commission, which regulates salaries and working conditions for staff members across the vast UN system, quietly resigned, after a year of dodging allegations that he had created a hostile and “unhealthy” environment for women who rejected his sexual advances.

Many aid workers arrive in these countries full of hope and good intentions (especially the young ones). They leave, winded, after two or three years trying hard. For those who choose a career in this sector by pure altruism with the aim to serve and help people in need, this might be hard to swallow. On the other hand, the aid sector is also filled with complacent staff who are here for the paycheck and the R&Rs (rest and recuperation) and who prefer to stay away from thorny issues. Isn't it time for us, aid workers, to question our methods and approaches to protracted crises in Central and West Africa? Haven't we also taken an active part in allowing these crises to go unnoticed and unresolved for too long? Shouldn't we opt for bolder advocacies that rise these crises on the international agenda, and take proactive steps to shape the public debate and perceptions ? In fact, too many aid agencies in Central and West Africa, including NRC, invest in programmatic staff while overlooking the importance of investing in experienced and skilled advocacy and communications staff. A balance of both is critical because while we provide relief, these crises can be only brought to the public and stakeholders' attention through advocacy and communications efforts.

So where do the numbers take us? If many of the world’s poor are outside of agriculture, and the urban poor experience malnutrition and child mortality despite better economic opportunities in principle, then what is going on?
First, the good news: most of the world’s multidimensional poor live in countries with good growth history. In fact, three-quarters of global multidimensional poverty is in fast-growing countries (see table below).
So, no need to worry as growth will take care of poverty in due course? You’d think growth was always good for the poor, right?

I made a draft cheatsheet on order of magnitudes relating to international development. (1/3) pic.twitter.com/Yi7uZVbVW8

— David Mihalyi (@davidmihalyi) January 10, 2019

We shouldn’t protect everything. If we protect everything we are preventing other cultures from emerging. We need to create breathing room. The question is how we select. It’s something to be left to democratic processes, what people call dialogical democracy based on hybrid forums. It’s not just experts and governments that are in the room as the representatives of democracy but people who live in the areas as well, and people from different parts of the population. Something that happens is that people use the idea of heritage value to prevent development and, for instance, put pressure on access to housing.

News flash: Internet users in the developing world have the same motivations you do. They go online, as digital anthropologist Payal Arora explains in her new book, because they’re hungry, horny, happy, lonely, or bored.

"We have not grown up being given sex education or having normal adult conversations about these things," says filmmaker and writer Paromita Vohra. She runs the website Agents of Ishq (Romance), which encourages open discussions about sex.
"When people only watch violent sexual content, it is very desensitising because they start believing that violence is the only way to get pleasure and that female consent is unimportant."
India has 400 million smartphone users, and more than half of them use WhatsApp, which is the medium often used to share such videos.

While supply was not such an issue for menstruators on the caravan, finding clean bathrooms and a private place to change were another story — a challenge displaced people often face. Dr. Marni Sommer, DrPH, who has worked with the International Rescue Committee to see how organizations can better manage menstrual hygiene in emergency situations, spoke to displaced women and girls in Myanmar and Lebanon for research. Afterwards, she wrote in The Conversation: “What we found was that the main difficulties women and girls faced went beyond a need for materials and included a lack of privacy and facilities to manage their menstruation.”

How does cultural change happen? It's mostly because people die and are replaced rather than because they change their minds. https://t.co/m4Qe4alvbYpic.twitter.com/d1oQvTQBUv

— Stephen Vaisey (@vaiseys) December 21, 2018

As global connectivity has deepened, the number of fences, walls, border controls, visa restrictions, and nationality derogations has exploded. International space has physically striated into fast, slow, and stopped lanes. The positivity of techno-populism is a function of the ability of connectivity to leap across such barriers and, at the same time, effectively disregard the growing anger and ground friction associated with them.
(...)
Rather than understand the age of anger politically and historically through face-to-face engagement on the ground, techno-populism is complicit containment and late-capitalism's expanding off-grid wild. If technology is to play a useful humanitarian role we have to make a choice. The easy road is to do nothing and submit to ever deepening automation, remote management, and the robotisation of behaviour. The more difficult task – and one that will define progressive politics for years to come – is to bring the oligarchic electronic atmosphere under democratic control.

Yet the ghost statistic should be a cautionary tale. Even when quantitative data are valid, they often produce very limited understandings of the complex realities of girls and women’s lives and the conditions that produce poverty and inequality. These simply cannot be captured by a trial or a survey alone. The Gates Foundation spokesperson, for example, sent me recent studies showing that investing in women is a highly effective development intervention. Among them was Duncan Thomas’s paper demonstrating that, as the spokesperson put it, “maternal income increased family nutrition by 4-7 times more than the income of fathers,” and that “child survival had a highly positive relation to unearned income of mothers, and that the effect is 20 times larger compared to fathers.” Unlike the ghost statistic, these results are reliable. But they don’t simply reveal that “when women have access and control over the household income, they are more likely than men to invest in the health and welfare of their families,” as the spokesperson wrote me. They reveal a shocking depth of gender inequality at the level of the household.

Does living in a developing country make Westerners care more about development?

I surveyed returned Mormon missionaries (who are quasi-randomly assigned to different countries for 2yrs)https://t.co/4QgMbGs0gvpic.twitter.com/rWzDvV4oGY

— Lee Crawfurd (@leecrawfurd) January 9, 2019

The psychiatrist Anthony Feinstein explores this complexity in his book, “Shooting War” (Glitterati Editions). Starting with a single, striking image from each photographer, Dr. Feinstein profiles 18 conflict photographers, including Don McCullin, Tim Hetherington and Corinne Dufka, and examines their motivations, traumas, and, most important, their resilience.
(...)
So why do photographers risk being beaten, jailed, tortured, held for ransom, and even maimed or killed? And how do they cope? By Dr. Feinstein’s reckoning, they are both driven and bolstered by their convictions and principles. These act as a kind of emotional armor and a source of resilience.

Faced with an array of choices and limited time, when it comes to literature, there’s a part of me that I’m not particularly proud of that chooses not to make the effort, even when there is little to no translation necessary. Somewhere deep in my subconscious I must have decided that books by African women would be harder than those by some other demographics. They weren’t. On some level I must have had reading African women down as self-improving but not necessarily enjoyable, when in fact it was mostly the latter and often both.

Brandon Ballinger, a former Google engineer, spent months working with doctors, and even watched a heart procedure at the University of California, San Francisco, before starting his company, Cardiogram, which looks for signs of common medical conditions in data generated by consumer wearables. That experience gave him a sense of how to gain the approval and trust of physicians when Cardiogram embarked on studies of its own.
"Brandon volunteered with us at about full-time for a year, sat in on research meetings and helped us in return with data science projects," said Greg Marcus, a cardiologist at UCSF. "Frequently entrepreneurs without clinical expertise, without adequate consultation might be misled in thinking their flashy tech by itself is sufficient, without thinking about how it will actually aid us. I'm a strong advocate for entrepreneurs reaching out, and I think many physicians would want to help."

These polls and surveys about millennial anti-capitalist angst are the foundation of the corporate-purpose zeitgeist, which seeks to win the trust of the millennial and channel her radical energies along market friendly lines.
Contrary to its purported aim, the point of purpose isn’t to drive change. It’s to make sure any change stays within the tightly bound comfort zone of the world’s most powerful executives.
(...)
Neither Unilever and Polman weighed in on the proposed treaty; Unilever did not answer four e-mails inviting the company to share its views. But the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), which Polman chairs, has actively lobbied against the treaty. Why? Because the purpose of the treaty is to turn unenforceable, voluntary self-regulatory initiatives of corporations into legally binding obligations.
(...)
A fast-growing body of reports, analyses, and research, including reports from Amnesty International, shows how self-regulating business initiatives, including the palm-oil certification scheme of Unilever, make no real impact or worse, inhibit real change with a false illusion of progress. “One of the systemic problems that Unilever’s ‘sustainable’ palm-oil scheme refuses to acknowledge,” says Eric Gottwald from the International Labor Rights Forum, “is that workers on plantations need independent trade unions to improve their working conditions, not corporate-sponsored “certifiers.”

But when it comes to international news — including about some of the defining issues of our era — we haven’t seen the same surge in quality, nonprofit journalism — yet. This, despite the fact that readers want more international news — and may be willing to pay for it.

That kind of support by foundations, some would argue, distorts editorial decision-making by nonprofit editors. However, without such funding important issues of public interest would go unreported. It needs to be recognized that the nonprofit sector’s business model differs from that of the commercial media.
What may seem questionable at a newspaper – such as advertisers suggesting story topics – may not be so at a nonprofit site because foundations do not have a commercial incentive. Foundation funding of broad topic areas creates more quality journalism that is good for an informed citizenry as long as the funding is transparent and funders do not determine the actual stories or the content of the stories. That is an ethical line that should never be crossed.

The gentrification of African studies has altered the social character of its community and generated a new set of problems such as visa issues, academic hipsterism, and restricted access to critical research, which risks to permanently exclude continent-based scholars, undermine their crucial contributions, and eventually converts African studies into another impotent, banal field.

Excellent thesis examination day so far! From #Myanmar to #Scotland, #Venezuela, #Sweden& #Chile our students cover amazing #globaldev& #C4D ground!

— ComDev Malmö University (@mahcomdev) January 18, 2019

“Sitting in the literal back row and listening to female participants is an important role to show the physical presence but at the same time take yourself back and say ‘I’m actually here to listen,’” he said. “Men as listeners is still an important way of showing solidarity, support, and empathy to the issue.”
Research has also found that women are less likely to ask questions at a panel discussion if the first person to speak in the audience is a man, Denskus explained. Therefore, making a conscious effort to ensure a woman speaks first will encourage other women to speak up.
“It is also important, not just when it comes to outside meetings or fancy conferences, but also when you have meetings inside the organization that you are aware who is attending meetings, who is speaking up, who is asking the questions first,” Denskus said.

In a season of lists and predictions, many of them dark, it’s easy to forget what underpins much humanitarian work: hope for change.

The increase in the number of laws and policies closing and shifting civic space remains a huge threat to voice and public accountability. The ongoing clamp down on fundamental rights and freedom of association and expression in Nigeria, Niger, Uganda, Mozambique, Cameroun and Rwanda, as well as the upcoming elections in at least 12 countries this year, raises the need for a continuous engagement in existing space and creating new spaces (formal and informal).

The world is facing multiple health challenges. These range from outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases like measles and diphtheria, increasing reports of drug-resistant pathogens, growing rates of obesity and physical inactivity to the health impacts of environmental pollution and climate change and multiple humanitarian crises.

"The Commission has heard multiple staff raise concerns of elitism... racism and colonial behaviour... sexism, rigid hierarchies and patriarchy that affect relationships among Oxfam staff and between Oxfam staff and its partners and program participants."Staff were highly critical of both management behaviour and company procedures for dealing with bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct.

The online survey, carried out by Deloitte in November, was completed by 30,364 people from the United Nations and its agencies - just 17 percent of those eligible. In a letter to staff, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the response rate as “moderately low.”
“This tells me two things: first - that we still have a long way to go before we are able to fully and openly discuss sexual harassment; and second - that there may also be an ongoing sense of mistrust, perceptions of inaction and lack of accountability,” he wrote.
The survey comes amid the wider “Me Too” movement around the world against sexual harassment and assault.
According to the report, 21.7 percent of respondents said they were subjected to sexual stories or offensive jokes, 14.2 percent received offensive remarks about their appearance, body or sexual activities and 13 percent were targeted by unwelcome attempts to draw them into a discussion on sexual matters.

The world’s developing countries, comprising over two-thirds of the 193 UN member states, are complaining they are not being adequately represented in the higher echelons of the world body –- despite competent candidates with strong professional and academic qualifications vying for these jobs.
The 134-member Group of 77, the largest single coalition of developing countries, says “persistent imbalances in equitable geographic representation in the UN Secretariat are a major concern.”
While the UN is being commended for ensuring equitable representation of women in recent years, it still stands accused of neglecting qualified nationals of developing countries, including from Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean.
The high-level jobs go mostly to nationals of either Western nations, big donors or the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (P-5), namely, the US, UK, France, Russia and China.
“Every Secretary-General, with no exception, caves into the demands of big powers,” one Asian diplomat told IPS, “These countries think high-ranking UN jobs are their political birthright”.

The attack wasn't over when the picture of the dead men slumped over the tables in the Nairobi restaurant where they had been having lunch was published.
The decision of a number of US and European outlets - including the UK's MailOnline and Germany's Bild - to use the photograph was instantly condemned on Kenyan social media. The New York Times came in for the most criticism. The newspaper, angry users said, was using the "misery and tragedy" of Tuesday's terror attack on the Dusit hotel for clickbait.
What's more, the speed with which the picture was published meant many were still unaware their loved ones had been caught up in the attack.

I feel like a lot of foreign correspondents in Kenya are missing the point of the critique of the @nytimes over the #RiversideAttack photos. /1

— Rachel Strohm (@RachelStrohm) January 17, 2019

On a personal note, thinking purely as an editor, I could see news value of the photo in question. It’s visceral, disturbing, and heartbreaking. It gives the viewer a sense of being in the room where the horror of yesterday’s attack happened (BRIGHT Magazine’s offices are just a few kilometers away). However, I don’t think I would have run the photo while the attack was still ongoing.
BRIGHT’s visuals editor, Marion Durand, agrees. “As a photo editor, I don’t think we can shy away from images of dead bodies,” she says. “It’s not the answer. You have to show what’s happening. But then there’s the question of timing. You don’t want people to learn of their loved ones being dead via press.”
Yesterday’s attack was a tragedy for Kenya, especially those who lost loved ones. It was also a teachable moment for journalists, and especially editors, who have to make snap decision in the midst of tragic breaking news. How much bloodshed do we show? Do we cover deadly events taking place a world away the same way that we would cover events in our own communities?

Congo's election was stolen -- and the FT has the data to prove it.https://t.co/1yNab7qpJV

Data journalism bombshell from @davidcblood, @thomas_m_wilson, and @davidpilling. pic.twitter.com/lgBcjfpApA

— Justin Sandefur (@JustinSandefur) January 15, 2019

Exclusive research reveals that a British-trained Belgian mercenary admitted the killing of Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961

In Dadeldhura district, meanwhile, local government support is now denied to families who keep their daughters out of school during menstruation. The chairperson of the district’s Bhageshwor rural municipality, Kaushila Bhatta, says: “In our area, many girls are not allowed to go to school during their menstruation, which is putting our girls behind. We decided to cut off government services and facilities to those families who stopped their girls going to school during their period.
“This ill-practice has to end soon and we are working on this.”
Ramaroshan rural municipality in Achham district is running a major awareness programme under the banner “Inside chhaupadi, outside god”.
The vice-chairwoman of the municipality, Saraswati Rawal, said: “We are building a big temple in the middle of a village and have asked people to keep their gods respectfully at the temple and let woman and girls stay at home during their period.”
In some parts of Nepal, people think they will be punished by God if women enter the home during menstruation.
“Here, we solved our problem,” says Rawal. “Keep god at the temple, let woman stay at home then god will be happy and women will be safe too.

The education system in Haiti is doing exactly what is was designed to do. It creates the atomization of our people, separating us from a common cause and perpetuating exploitation and distrust among Haitians. It has been stripped of the elements once rooted in citizenship, rigor, and high expectations, including removing civics education from the national curriculum and allowing private schools to proliferate with little oversight from the Ministry of Education

An old adage has it that councils of war never fight, meaning that decision-makers often get caught up in deliberations rather than making and implementing decisions. That may not be so bad in the case of war, but what about peace? Do the councils of peace or UN peacekeeping operations deliver what they set out to do?

Perhaps most difficult of all, there are a range of equity and oversight issues that come with shipping expatriate staff into places with weak regulatory systems.
Against this background we talk about:
the importance of a principles-based approach to so-called back-office functions
the duty of care to protect staff physical and psychological health, and how longevity in the sector can be achieved;
safeguarding and abuse, and the efficacy of current initiatives in the sector.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN ABOUT IN THIS EPISODE:
What are the entry-level jobs to look out for in this field
Why emotional intelligence is a critical skill to have for this industry
Why being on a sports team (or another kind of team) is a great life skill
What is the best and worst part of being a Chief of Staff
How to create meaningful connections with your colleagues
Why learning to listen really well is so important in any career

Thirdly, the period of SDGs is also a highly sensitive one when lifethreatening environmental changes like climate change are likely to increase and cause a lot of destruction and distress. This has been well recognised for about three decades, yet the world has badly lagged behind in terms of the steps necessary for checking this. There are powerful forces which are responsible for this and there are also important weaknesses in the efforts. The SGD documents do not tell us how these forces will be challenged, and how these weaknesses will be removed.
As there are no details of any specific initiatives which are significantly different from the earlier efforts that failed, there is no assurance at all that the inequalities (and the huge wasteful consumption which inevitably accompanies big inequalities) will be curbed, and there is even less assurance that the destructive arms proliferation will be checked. Again there is no assurance that climate change will be checked before it is too late and tipping points are reached.

Migration for work within India is highly circular, with migrants working in multiple destinations during their lifetimes, and retiring in their native places. As per the Economic Survey of India 2016-17, there are over a hundred million migrant workers in India, of which most are circular migrants. The durations can be as short as a day or a week, in which case they are referred to as commuters, numbering in the tens of millions, who frequently board trains and buses bound toward a nearby town or city.
A few more tens of millions migrate seasonally for work—for a few months of the year, drawn disproportionately from the Scheduled Castes and Tribes and from particular clusters in central India (see map). They work in precarious worksites in sectors ranging from construction and brick kilns to rural harvesting operations.

Regardless of the development and use of information and communication technologies (ICT), the practice of mediation still relies first and foremost on the trust built between a mediator and conflict parties, and the ability to generate and maintain buy-in to peace processes.
Mediation teams have a responsibility to be generally literate about the technologies present in the mediation environment and their effect on the mediation process, and to make informed choices about their use. At the very least, mediators need to understand the risks associated with these technologies, and how to mitigate them.
The use of ICT should never be assumed to be fully secure.
Several mediators report that accepting the threat of information disclosure through network monitoring by governments is often the only realistic approach.

‘What we can do depends on who we are and where we are. Innumerable small acts mount up and reinforce one another. From whatever we and others do, large and small, we can strive to learn and find better ways of knowing and doing. Ideals like equality, justice, well-being for all and putting the last first will always be there for us to strive towards. As our unforeseeable 21st Century unfolds, it is a privilege to be explorers looking for good ways forward. The enthralling adventures of our human struggle to know better and do better should have no end.’

Creative work promotes fundamental rights, such as respect for human dignity, equality and democracy, all of which are essential for humans to live together in peace. Its potential to make a significant contribution to the achievement of the sustainable development goals continues to gain international recognition and support.
Whether it be arts and crafts, books, films, paintings, festivals, songs, designs, digital animation or video games, the creative industries are more than just sectors with good economic growth performance and potential. They are expressions of the human imagination spreading important social and cultural values.
This report outlines trends in the world trade of creative goods and, for the first time, services by country for the period 2005 to 2014, and provides an outlook on the global creative economy for the period 2002 to 2015.

Large quantities of data = High quality of science. My new Nature Human Behaviour paper published today with @ShuhBillSkee shows that this could not be further from the truth. https://t.co/kRGZmYL0eJ (1/10) pic.twitter.com/27ycxAek7Q

— Amy Orben (@OrbenAmy) January 14, 2019

Multiparty elections have become the bellwether by which all democracies are judged, and the spread of these systems across Africa has been widely hailed as a sign of the continent’s progress towards stability and prosperity. But such elections bring their own challenges, particularly the often intense internecine violence following disputed results.While the consequences of such violence can be profound, undermining the legitimacy of the democratic process and in some cases plunging countries into civil war or renewed dictatorship, little is known about the causes.
By mapping, analysing and comparing instances of election violence in different localities across Africa – including Kenya, Ivory Coast and Uganda – this collection of detailed case studies sheds light on the underlying dynamics and sub-national causes behind electoral conflicts, revealing them to be the result of a complex interplay between democratisation and the older, patronage-based system of ‘Big Man’ politics.

“It’s often said that to embark upon a PhD you must be passionate about your topic. But when it comes to writing up your thesis, being passionate can seem at odds with the need to maintain an academically cool and objective writing voice.”#writing#PhDlifehttps://t.co/qlEAuo6QKu

— Patricia SnellHerzog (@snellherzog) December 30, 2018

Perhaps the answers to the title of the post are less rhetorical than the title suggests, but I have been wondering lately what the role of Thinks Tanks in the international development industry really is.
(...)
It’s 2019 after all and I wonder what would happen if they/many/some weren’t around anymore.
Haven’t other institutional arrangements caught up to think-tanky ways of working?

In the Sahel a new frontier is emerging: climate change is exacerbating the already devastating impacts of conflict, poverty and underdevelopment. People in the resource-scarce region already walk a tightrope of survival. With temperatures rising at almost twice the global average, we can only expect that without action, fragility and insecurity will escalate, as will the needs of the population.
There are no shortcuts for responding to or preventing the harm from these large-scale, complex dynamics. Emergency humanitarian relief will always be needed but it is not enough to meet the great demands.

If only refugees had private cars waiting for them. The oddities of Davos. #WEF2019https://t.co/4bdERJ1p1qpic.twitter.com/HAvxcSqjwc

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) January 23, 2019

In her previous work in Afghanistan, many of the trauma patients had survived car bombs and explosions, but Safieddine said the majority of those in South Sudan had experienced something more intimate and personal, including abductions, being held at gunpoint, and the rampant use of rape as a weapon of war.
Witnessing someone be sexually assaulted or beaten perpetuates a feeling of helplessness because people are watching things they can’t do anything about, explained Safieddine. These attacks also take more time, which means people have longer to think about it while it’s happening.

Sharmila and her daughters are among the millions of people across Asia's third-largest economy who have benefited from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ambitious Swachh Bharat, or Clean India, mission. The campaign, launched in October 2014, aims to make the country open defecation free (ODF) by Oct. 2 this year -- the 150th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi, who also propagated cleanliness, hygiene and sanitation.A staggering 111 million toilets are being built under the program, mainly in rural India, at a cost of more than 1 trillion rupees ($14 billion). It is the largest toilet-building project in the world, and is expected to dramatically improve the nation's health and economy.

The UK is distinct in having a department for development with a cabinet-level Minister. Merging it with other departments seems likely on balance to make the UK less effective internationally, incur costs, reduce transparency and will only embolden those that think the UK does too much on development.
The Government could better-improve the efficiency of its development efforts by giving more through the multilateral system; developing a joined-up HMG strategy for each partner country; applying the fusion doctrine to all government objectives and exploring where Departmental policies could do more than aid in accelerating mutual development.

‘More than half of the #humanitarian aid distributed around the world is delivered by the UN. The humanitarian work the UN does is absolutely irreplaceable’ - but he goes on to say that the UN needs to accelerate its added value... @antonioguterres#WEF19

— Sara Pantuliano (@SaraPantuliano) January 24, 2019

The T-shirts, which also have the words “gender justice” on the back, were made by workers earning significantly less than a living wage. The factory is part-owned by a minister in Bangladesh’s authoritarian coalition government, which won 96% of the vote last month in an election described as “farcical” by critics. There is no suggestion any of the celebrities were aware of conditions at the factory.
A spokesman for the Spice Girls said they were “deeply shocked and appalled” and would personally fund an investigation into the factory’s working conditions. Comic Relief said the charity was “shocked and concerned”.

The question of their organisation making no mention of Sudan’s uprising, and the deaths of protesters at the hands of such a brutal and vile regime can only be answered by the simplest of terms. Probably, they just don’t know.

But over time, we realised that naming and shaming the regime and exposing its complicity in mass atrocities were not having sufficient impact on the policies of governments in Europe, America and Africa, so we decided on a new approach.
We assessed the most significant point of vulnerability of this unshamable regime to be all the money it has been stealing from its people and squirrelling out of the country into hidden accounts, real estate and shell companies, funnelling the rest of the funds into the machinery of state repression now responsible for killing and arresting protesters. So we decided to go after the regime’s massive corruption and illicit financial flows by creating an organisation called The Sentry, aimed at making it harder for them to loot the natural resources of the country to line their pockets and finance their repression.

A woman who has been running a local non-governmental organisation and whose alleged activities involved treating malnourished children with some dying in the process, has been sued for her alleged actions on grounds that she was not a qualified medical doctor.

Hello #XChange2019 and #ewb! I am here to interrupt George Roter's keynote speech with a very important speech of my own. I encourage you to ignore GR, who should have shut up by now given the horrible shit he has presided over in past. So, listen, we need to have A Talk. /1

— Chelsey Rhodes (@chelsey_rhodes) January 19, 2019

Until humanitarian aid workers stop pretending that women don’t have periods how can we truly understand the people we’re serving? How can I expect my male colleagues to understand what the women in that water line are coping with if none of their closest friends has ever mentioned the pain, inconvenience or necessities of a period?
I’m not saying that putting menstruation products in hibernation kits is the solution. But I am saying it’s a start.

In October 2018, Univision produced a written story and video about the journey of Adayanci Pérez, a 6-year-old girl from Guatemala who came to the United States with her father and was immediately separated from him.
(...)
BRIGHT Magazine commissioned graphic novelist German Andino to retell the true story of Adayanci Perez and her father, in comic form.

Thus, in the midst of rightfully scandalizing Nooke’s racism and denialism, and discussing how it has become acceptable for government representatives to mull over openly neocolonialist models of migration control, it is also important to keep in mind that radical proposals like Nooke’s are very much embedded in technocratic, economically and geopolitically-driven migration and development policy strategies. These, in turn, interact with a public discourse that, under the influence of a growing far right, veers increasingly towards racism and economic nationalism.

By its nature, charity reinforces social inequities and encourages a deference to wealth incompatible with democratic citizenship. In a healthy democracy, taxes should be as “uncharitable” as possible: based in solidarity, not condescension for the poor and privilege for the rich. The first step is to recognize what opponents of democratic governance understood hundreds of years ago: that democratic taxation has within it the power of emancipation.

Feminism, as the most recent wave of imperial-feminist articles shows, is increasingly being co-opted to promote and sell the US military-industrial complex: a profoundly violent institution that will never bring liberation to women — whether they are within its own ranks or in the countries bearing the greatest brunt of its brutality.
(...)
“It’s a very white, imperialist, liberal understanding of feminism to think that the promotion of women at the top of militarization and militarism is advancing women,” says Kara Ellerby, author of No Shortcut to Change, who derides what she calls the “add-women-and-stir” approach. “Sure, it’s great that you have a woman at the head of Raytheon, but what about the women who those bombs are being dropped on?”

Watch wealth work.

Here's how the plutocrats do it.

They go to Davos and talk about charity, Africa-saving, inequality.

This elevates them from mere businesspeople to sages. Then they use that loftier platform to stealth-lobby against policies that help others but hurt them. https://t.co/Cc7PQ2vTnP

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) January 23, 2019

However, their involvement did make a difference. It created requirements and incentives for journalists to do new, non-editorial tasks, as well as longer-form, off-agenda, “impactful” news coverage in specific thematic areas. As a result, foundations are ultimately changing the role and contribution of journalism in society. We argue that these changes are the result of various forms of “boundary work”, or performative struggles over the nature of journalism. This contrasts with most previous literature, which has focused on the effects of foundation funding on journalistic autonomy.

A classic! Walter Rodney's "How Europe underdeveloped Africa" for free.
See link below 👇👇👇 https://t.co/BU7KTKKOuR

— Jürgen Zimmerer (@juergenzimmerer) January 20, 2019

Reporting on digitalization in countries ranging from Chile to Kenya to the Philippines, the contributors present a diverse set of case studies and develop a broad range of theoretical positions. They consider, among other things, data-driven disintermediation, women’s economic empowerment and gendered power relations, digital humanitarianism and philanthropic capitalism, the spread of innovation hubs, hackathons, the gig economy, and a rethinking of how a more progressive politics of connectivity could look.

“I’m looking around to see whether there are any of the McKinseys and Boston Consulting Groups, and if there are please listen to me.
“I see many, many low-income countries and emerging-market economies spend millions of dollars commissioning consultants to build their strategy plan. I would recommend some saving be made by taking the 17 principles, the actionable items, and start with that.
“From there, the consultants can actually do their job of putting it into reality. But don’t reinvent it — it’s right there. So much is wasted. That’s part of the inefficient spending that can actually be saved.”

Jérôme Jarre: It doesn't take 20 years of humanitarianism to know how to help someone.… If your mom is starving, are you going to figure it out? What are you going to bring her, are you going to bring her a bag of rice? Are you going to bring her a restricted car? … Or are you going to ask her what she wants and really, really empower her?

The international development secretary told cabinet ministers she would aim for her department to become a fundraising department rather than a spending department, telling them it was unsustainable to continue to meet the spending target with taxpayer cash.
(...)
Dan Carden, the shadow international development secretary, said it was a cynical attempt to undermine the target. “Suggesting that poverty be turned in to a profitable business opportunity will do nothing to tackle the root causes of poverty or inequality,” he said.

What Roser’s numbers actually reveal is that the world went from a situation where most of humanity had no need of money at all to one where today most of humanity struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of money. The graph casts this as a decline in poverty, but in reality what was going on was a process of dispossession that bulldozed people into the capitalist labour system, during the enclosure movements in Europe and the colonisation of the global south.
(...)
This is a ringing indictment of our global economic system, which is failing the vast majority of humanity. Our world is richer than ever before, but virtually all of it is being captured by a small elite. Only 5% of all new income from global growth trickles down to the poorest 60% – and yet they are the people who produce most of the food and goods that the world consumes, toiling away in those factories, plantations and mines to which they were condemned 200 years ago. It is madness – and no amount of mansplaining from billionaires will be adequate to justify it.

Shame on the bourgeois academics and commentators who promote this lazy argument. The gig economy encourages a race to the bottom, offers no worker protections, & absolves clients and platforms of all responsibility. But, that's fine because of a few individual success stories 🙄 https://t.co/Q7U8mJ3OCE

— Mark Graham (@geoplace) January 31, 2019

In a speech to his executive board on Jan. 21, Steiner acknowledged that the new structure of UN development work will require significant staff changes. But he assured board members that “we made an extraordinary effort to re-staff UNDP’s leadership cadre at country level in minimal time. . . . This exercise marked one of the largest and most complex leadership recruitments in UNDP’s history.”
Steiner said he had recruited 140 candidates qualified to serve as resident representatives under UNDP control to compensate for the loss of those representatives who became resident coordinators, working for Mohammed. (Robert Piper of Australia is heading the transition team, reporting to Mohammed.)
Through all the reshuffling, Steiner reported, “Our RR [resident representative] candidate pool is now 50/50 gender balanced and equally geographically diverse.”
(...)
“With the rearrangement of the chairs,” she said, “my fear would be that there would be more politically motivated appointments as RCs [resident coordinators] and less ideas-driven entrepreneurial individuals committed to cosmopolitan values and knowledge of development.”

Scammers are suspected of duping the Finnish Foreign Ministry into handing over some 400,000 euros in development funds last February, according to the National Bureau of Investigation.

"Stigma compromises healthy engagement with one's body. It undermines self-care, critical thinking and informed decision-making. It also hurts self-esteem and social status," says Bobel.
In recent years, Bobel, an associate professor of women's, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, says a major movement has emerged to support these girls.
But some of the activists' efforts have been misguided, says Bobel. "While these [groups] are busting [some] myths about menstruation, they're perpetuating other myths," she says.

A female participant expressed that “most men do not want equal life partners and do not let their wives work” whereas a male participant added that while “every man wants his daughter to be a doctor, most men do not let their wives [practice].”
(...)
The solution lies in resolving the structural barriers within medicine for both women and men by improving the quality of training programs, increasing salaries for trainee physicians and providing facilities for women, such as flexible working hours and day-care centres, practical steps which have been taken by other countries.
Moreover, considering the embedded social norms of gender roles within the Pakistani society, it would seem to us that the Chief Justice’s suggestion to women to convince their families to work is unlikely to lead to practical results. Allowances and social changes must evolve from within the system with the hope that the society will evolve gradually, and thus break down strict gender roles that entrap men and women both.
However, in the short run, addressing some of the immediate issues the study highlights including poor and unstructured postgraduate training systems, and lack of basic facilities would pave the way in resolving the issue of physician shortages.

If we are being honest, isn’t this why instrumentalist narratives persist even in organizations with transformative missions? CARE struggles to clearly explain the complexity of our work to an audience that is sometimes uncomfortable with and potentially hostile to the requirements of profound systemic change. So we offer simplified narratives, ghostly or not, and speak the incontrovertible language of investment returns as an alternative to deeply political concepts of gender justice and human dignity.

To some extent, this kind of geographical slipperiness reflects wider trends in the corporate world. It’s never been easier to locate assets offshore or create a shell company. Private-security firms are particularly well suited to slip between jurisdictions, because they don’t typically have a fixed employee base.
“Like any organization, they’re looking for loopholes, tax advantages, opportunities,” Ori Swed, an expert on military contractors at Texas Tech University, explained to The Bureau. He continued, however, that in the case of this industry, “we’re talking about someone that replaced a police, that replaced a military—it’s not just like getting scammed on the price of coffee.” Swed argues that only binding international regulation will lead to the sector’s accountability, though there are few signs of the political will to push for this.

“The restitution of Africa’s stolen assets should not be dependent on us having space to display it,” says Hamady, to explain the role the museum will play in the great debate on the restitution of Africa’s looted assets. “Those who stole our assets cannot dictate what we do with them. For example, if a community wants to restore their assets to sacred forests from which they were taken, that is their right!”
The museum never loses sight of its aim to educate and enlighten the visitor of the role of black African art and ingenuity in human civilization. This includes a display that focuses on the contribution of Africa to medicine, mathematics, architecture, which of course would not be complete without mentioning the work of Cheikh Anta Diop, the Senegalese historian, anthropologist and physicist who studied the human race’s origins and pre-colonial African culture.

137 votes from 37 countries revealed these top 10 trends in ICT4D for DFID:
Big Data
Circular Economy
Financial Technology
Blockchain
AI & Machine Learning
Satellite Technology
Refugee Applications
Micro-Grid Batteries
3D Printing
Alternate Internet Delivery

Choco4Peace is looking to mitigate child labour in not one, but two sectors. Using hyperledger blockchain technology can create a decentralized, integrated economic network to finance cacao entrepreneurs’ ventures. The use of blockchain creates an opportunity for investors to directly access farmers who would otherwise be deemed too high-risk to be worthy of investment, due to their lack of access to markets, insurance, technology, and their rural and remote location. The transparency and traceability that blockchain ensures will enable investors to trace the origin of the cacao, and keep the supply chain child- labour and cruelty-free.

What's wrong with philanthro-journalism? https://t.co/64kQSUd9xA I have some thoughts.

— Molly de Aguiar (@MollydeAguiar) January 31, 2019

Hennings said the trip was beneficial because it helped her learn more about northern Canada, saying “many of the most striking features of the community could only be captured by visiting and creating connections [within it].”
Her only concern with the program was that, as an intern, her project was prirotized last, which isn’t an uncommon occurrence.
After leaving, Hennings felt she’d had an impact, albeit small, in the community. This isn’t a failure to her: she was aware the time frame couldn’t allow for a complete overhaul of the community’s waste management.
“We travelled to Arviat under no false assumptions that we would revitalize their waste management system, or change the community’s perspective on environmentalism in a summer,” Hennings said.

A research article by Dr. Benjamin Meiches examines how non-human actors are perceived in humanitarian literature, and the opportunities and questions their use raises. We picked two different case studies analysed in the article – dogs and drones – and summarised the research’s main views about them in this post.

colleagues floated the idea of shooting the Malawi-set film in tried-and-tested locations like South Africa or Kenya.
Ejiofor demurred. “It just didn’t seem plausible to me,” says the director, who was captivated by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer’s story about a 13-year-old boy who builds a windmill to save his village from famine. “There was no way that we could shoot the film anywhere else. For me, it was really a question of diving in feet first and just seeing what happens.”

Popular musicians in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), like many of their compatriots, have often been forced to depend on political patronage networks for their livelihoods. It dates back to colonial times, but has lived on through the country’s nearly six decades of independence.

Yesterday morning I had a job interview for a position at a company called Web Applications UK. After a brutal 2 hour interview, in which the CEO Craig Dean tore both me and my writing to shreds (and called me an underachiever), I was offered the job. This was my response today. pic.twitter.com/gijDpsEVHY

— olivia (@oliviaabland) January 29, 2019

At a time when Facebook has been under increased public scrutiny like never before, the company is now hiring at least one of its fiercest antagonists.
On Tuesday, Facebook acknowledged that it had hired three veteran privacy law activists, including Nate Cardozo, an attorney formerly of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who has been very publicly critical of the company in recent years.
(...)
The announcement drew widespread praise from their colleagues

Four weeks without Facebook leads to:

(i) reduced online activity

(ii) less news knowledge and political polarization

(iii) increased subjective well-being

(iv) a large persistent reduction in Facebook use after the experimenthttps://t.co/4jw0mqB8uv

HT @ProfEmilyOsterpic.twitter.com/I479pBWkAI

— Robert Dur (@DurRobert) January 30, 2019

We hope that what we’ve shared will motivate you to have the courage to engage, to make mistakes and keep learning as you do the hard work of allyship. Better allies and guests in the world means that more women, people of color, LGBTQIA communities, indigenous peoples and others from the global South will have the support they deserve to continue their own fight to have their stories and knowledges recognized and valued.

New challenges and opportunities brought about by these transformations now intersect with longer-standing challenges to media pluralism, freedom and independence.

Moving away from the strong body of critique of pervasive ‘bad data’ practices by both governments and private actors in the globalized digital economy, this book aims to paint an alternative, more optimistic but still pragmatic picture of the datafied future. The authors examine and propose ‘good data’ practices, values and principles from an interdisciplinary, international perspective. From ideas of data sovereignty and justice, to manifestos for change and calls for activism, this collection opens a multifaceted conversation on the kinds of futures we want to see, and presents concrete steps on how we can start realizing good data in practice.

The issue isn’t simply about the quality of daily sleep. What I need in order to finally, truly, rest is not just better sleep hygiene: I need agency and autonomy over what I do with and demand of my body. No number of good nights of sleep or nap scheduling can substitute for being able to fully dictate what kind of work you do, how you do it, and when you do it. It isn’t simply a lack of sleep that exhausts: I am exhausted by the way I am alienated from the work that I genuinely love—and, ultimately, my humanity. I am exhausted by the fact that, for reasons I can’t control, I must choose between either working until I can no longer stay awake or putting myself to sleep in order to be more efficient—never leisurely letting myself fall into slumber.

Inspiring talk btw Ben Fine @SOASEconomics and Michael Alvarez @UiB at CMI @cmi_no

How #PoliticalEconomy became economics by desocialisation and dehistoricisation processes. Current economics lack theory, a focus on processes, relationships,dynamics & an open-minded reflexivity. pic.twitter.com/p6NoEi3V00

— Hannah Pilgrim (@FRLXPilgrim) January 31, 2019

The authors of the study, Justin Reich and José A Ruipérez-Valiente, say the promise of a disruptive transformation of post-secondary education heralded in 2012 – when it was first announced that video lectures from the world’s best professors could be broadcast to every corner of the world via MOOCs – has not been realised.
The hope of extending access in areas barely reached by traditional tertiary provision, with students being able to demonstrate their attainment online by using computer graded assessments, has not been fulfilled.
(...)
It also calls into question the ability of MOOCs to extend higher education participation into areas of the world that traditional provision doesn’t reach and predicts in future a greater concentration on those with the ability to pay.

This autoethnographic study provides an insider perspective on the intellectual, emotional, and physical experience of grant writing. A team of scholars document the production of a research grant for their major national funding agency, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The story is presented through epistolary narrative in the form of a series of unsent letters addressed to the funding agency. The letters foreground themes of expertise, identity, and time as they were shaped through the grant-writing process. The analysis draws attention to unnecessary complexities and challenges that could and should be eliminated from granting processes if the intention is to foster quality research and strengthen research capacity.

But Beck’s book is also an important reminder how traditional and ‘innovative’ manifestations of capitalism are constantly expanding, looking for new places, subjects and capillary systems such as ‘microfinance’ to spread a message that ‘there is no alternative’ to Western understandings of progress.
I doubt that many organisations in the development industry would disagree with the findings. Is this not a success story that in the end women are created as neoliberal-capitalist agents – no matter how these agents try to play ‘development’ along the way? After well over two decades, development anthropology has no longer the standing to ‘expose’ hidden aspects of local power struggles, individual agency and development processes that tweak, ignore or ‘remix’ the development tool box.
Beck’s book confidently confirms a space for development anthropology in the discipline, but her comparative ethnography also raises important questions of where a more radical locus of ethnographic storytelling resides these days.

The California-based contractor, best known for its work in intelligence and immigration enforcement, will provide software and expertise to the UN’s food relief agency over five years to help WFP pool its enormous amounts of data and find cost-saving efficiencies.

WFP welcomes a mature debate on responsible use of data in the humanitarian sector founded on facts and not on speculations. We wholeheartedly hope that the conversation on this subject continues and we pledge to be a central part of it.
Recognizing the domain of data management is an evolving and critical field and affects all of us, WFP looks forward to working with humanitarian data stakeholders to review models for responsible management of data and collaboration with private sector partners at the level of the humanitarian ecosystem.

Luxury fashion brand Gucci has withdrawn a woollen jumper from sale after the item was criticised for "resembling blackface."
The black "balaclava jumper" covered the lower half of the face and featured a red cut-out around the mouth.
The item prompted a backlash on social media by users who claimed the design was offensive.

Greenhill said: “The lion’s share of UK aid is poverty-focused, effective and transparent – it’s real aid that we can be proud of. But some parts of government don’t adhere to these principles – in short, they’re not delivering ‘real aid’.

It is time for an open, fair, merit-based process to appoint the next President of the World Bank. And I’ll explain below why I think the Europeans may, at last, break the cartel that has prevented this.
(...)
There is time to nominate an alternative to David Malpass. Excellent candidates might include Nancy Birdsall, José Antonio Ocampo (again), Suma Chakrabarti, Kristalina Georgieva, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (again), Maria Ramos, Minouche Shafik, and Tidjane Thiam. Let the candidates—including David Malpass—make their case, and see if the world can coalesce around the best person. It is time to call time on the Gentleman’s Agreement.

Despite major increases in humanitarian assistance, appeals requirements are out-pacing funding. By the end of 2018 there was a record US$10.9 billion shortfall. But though we are familiar with the scale of underfunding, we know much less about its impacts.
Research into the appeals for Chad, Haiti and Somalia suggested that underfunding undermines the localisation, presence and effectiveness of response. For affected people, as well as having immediate effects, shortfalls can erode resilience, protection and security. However, these impacts are not systematically reported – the evidence is patchy, illustrative and ad hoc.

The programme is tapping into an often-overlooked resource for disaster preparedness and response: women. In rural Fiji, women run the households and make sacrifices to protect their communities – often in ways that men don’t grasp.
Consecutive years of drought and storms have shrunk crop yields and income for farming families. When food stocks run low, Maitoga said she skips meals so that her children and husband can eat. When there’s no rain and the government’s emergency water trucks don’t show up, she treks two kilometres to a shallow river to fill a bucket. Gounder said women routinely share what food they have and cook communally so that families don’t go without.
“Men don’t ask the neighbours. If they have money, they can go and buy food,” she said. “But the women, we talk to each other. That’s why women are the first responders. We do everything first.”
Many of the women now take the preparedness lessons they’ve learned in the programme and spread them within their own communities. Gounder, for example, said she meets with some of the women from the 465 homes in villages near her own home.

Uganda's tourism minister has suggested showcasing curvy women in order to attract more visitors. Godfrey Kiwanda made the comments at the launch of a new pageant, Miss Curvy Uganda, in the capital Kampala.
It has sparked a heated conversation online. Angela is Ugandan and thinks the idea 'embarrasses' her country.

The AI Staff Wellbeing Review, published last week illustrates that the largest and most well known human rights NGO has a deeply entrenched, almost insurmountable martyrdom culture.
(...)
The review finds that a shocking 64% of staff either “strongly disagreed” or “disagreed” with the statement that “my wellbeing is a priority for Amnesty International leaders”. And 10% said they “did not know”?!
That’s a whopping 74% of staff working for an organisation that has a raison d’être to protect human dignity that either disagree, or do not know if their managers care about their their wellbeing.
That’s tragic irony. It is shameful and it is terribly sad. The result – to use the language of AI’s own reports – is “broken promises, human beings and shattered lives”.

In light of the Staff Wellbeing Review. May I respectfully request that you turn your attention to playing different "game" and remove leaders who fostered and sustained the toxic culture within the IS #NGO#accountability#amnestywatch#notagame#wellbeingpic.twitter.com/AJMY6YKlHY

— Liz Griffin (@ProfLizGriffin) February 6, 2019

The new Aftershock (by Bobby West and veteran game designer Alan R. Moon) is an earthquake-themed Eurogame. You actually cause earthquakes in this game.
The original AFTERSHOCK is a serious (but enjoyable!) game designed to teach about humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. It has been used for training humanitarian aid workers, medical students, UN peacekeepers, and military personnel. We have run games for the US State Department, USAID, the Department of National Defence, the UK Ministry of Defence, and others, and it was a featured game at the Military Operations Research Society’s wargaming conference and the recent Serious Games Forum in Paris. The original AFTERSHOCK is also a non-profit fundraiser for frontline UN humanitarian agencies who respond to actual earthquakes and other humanitarian emergencies.

For example, many of philanthropic organisations say they want to be multicultural and embrace diversity but then only allow diverse people and cultures to come in if they adapt or conform to already existing institutional cultural norms to become insiders. This is often apparent by the phrases you will hear such as: “will she be a fit for us?” or the following phrases will be heard in the context of the successful black African woman: “she is very eloquent” and “not a troublemaker getting on well with everyone and making lots of friends – integrating into the culture.” For those black African women who enter the social justice workplace and leave shortly thereafter one often hears phrases such as: “she was out of her depth”, “did not know her own limitations”, “she had a chip on her shoulder about race and was too angry/too assertive/too bossy” or “she was just so quiet never contributing and saying anything in meetings” or “she could not take initiative, needed too much hand-holding and couldn’t integrate into the team.” When speaking to black women who leave we will almost always tell you, if you really listen, that we felt like an outsider in a room where no-one had a race or gender analysis but everyone accused us of making everything about race and gender. We will tell you that we were expected to assimilate and not critique and were never made to feel welcome on our own cultural terms or asked our opinion. The most common thing we will tell you, if you will hear us, is that we were left alone, ignored, rendered invisible and not mentored or guided by anyone. Being able to interrogate what success looks like and what standard we set for people is important particularly when we use ‘coded’ and vague language to define success often shrouded in our own implicit bias or institutional racism around the ability of black women to perform. We must identify, debate and name these cultural norms and performance standards within our organisations as a first step to making room for developing a truly diverse, multi-cultural organization where dignity and respect permeates everything we do.

W: We must go out and mobilise and create new norms, and say, for instance, that it’s wrong for people not to have help when they are sick, they should have free healthcare. That idea was alive after the second world war. Everyone all over the world understood and agreed that healthcare should be a right. What I’m hopeful about is there is such anger at the few who are running away with wealth and power, these monopolies, these big tech companies taking our information, not paying their taxes. So much concentration of wealth and injustice by those few at the top. That is going to help us to shift the norm back to what is good for society, a human economy that works for all, a society that cares for all, including those who may not be able to work and earn. We are now a movement building.

So apparently some famous writer was disgraced this week and a venerable literary organization asked me to fill in for him at a dinner to raise money for imperiled writers around the world.

You won’t believe what ensued.

— Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) February 6, 2019

Africans are not here for this influencer lifestyle y'all LOOOOOOOOL pic.twitter.com/HyByLSFLTA

— Flightbae™☻ (@justcallmeBABA) February 6, 2019

Key to Zuboff’s latest theory of surveillance capitalism is the notion of “behavioral surplus,” a refinement of the more vulgar term “data exhaust” used by many in the tech industry. It harkens back to the distinction between informating and automating laid out in her first book. Recall that the electronic text, reborn in the latest book as the “shadow text,” has immense value for different, often antagonistic actors. When “advocacy-oriented firms” deploy it to empower customers—as, for instance, Amazon does with book recommendations drawn from the purchases of millions of customers—the electronic text follows the utopian path of informating, feeding into what Zuboff calls the “behavioral reinvestment cycle.” When tech firms use the extracted data for targeting ads and modifying behavior, they create the behavioral surplus—and this key breakthrough creates “surveillance capital.”

The delight of the in-person experience doesn’t change the reality that most people will continue to buy their books online. But as our physical and digital worlds converge, books — or at least their covers — are finding a way to straddle both. You can have your eye candy and read it, too.

We called BS on AI.
Here's a thread of what we learned.
(1/15) pic.twitter.com/sSFfsTfXex

— Prof Gina Neff (@ginasue) February 3, 2019

It’s a phenomenon born on YouTube, which is just as popular for music discovery as it is for beauty tutorials or long-winded, semi-sincere apology videos. The two most popular lo-fi streams on YouTube have millions of subscribers, with thousands of people tuning in at any given time, and both have “study” in their titles. Usually paired with some serene, calming visuals, the channels—which broadcast morning, noon, and night, the most prominent tended to by a mysterious DJ who doesn’t grant interviews—the act of studying, concentrating on a task, or otherwise working is now inextricably linked to lo-fi. It’s now so associated with productivity that Spotify’s “Lo-Fi Beats” playlist, which recently surpassed 1 million subscribers, describes itself as “beats to relax and focus.”

There are now more than 120 resources featured in this bibliography!

For substantial and longer-term changes building up structures will require generous and patient donors, a nuanced media coverage and a general public willing to engage with complicated processes of social change. That’s a lot to ask for. Paying for experts, paying for capacity development, paying for time to get things right and paying for scaling up organizational structures is not what donors are keen to fund and Silicone Valley-type disruptors keep promising.
The risk is that for large organizations (e.g. UN organizations and large INGOs) it may become part of ‘bureaucratic capture’, of box-ticking and dodging hard decisions. For small organizations it could be expensive and time-consuming, possibly paralyzing their work.

Staff were also impressed by his many positive qualities. He is energetic, passionate and approachable. He insisted that the normally deferential UN staff call him by his first name. He encouraged people to dispense with their customary linguistic cloaks of acronyms and scientific jargon. He implored them to communicate their work in a way that was comprehensible to the average person on the street (his acid test was to ask whether a report would be understood by his 90-year-old mother). He pushed people to think outside the box.
In short, he was a welcome breath of fresh air in what often felt like a staid and unhurried bureaucracy.
(...)
But Erik has an unshakable belief in his own righteousness that is both an asset and major weakness. When the audit storm clouds were gathering, he doubled down, angrily rejecting much of the OIOS criticism of his travel schedule, lack of documentation and disregard of the HR rules. As a damning op-ed in Deutsche Welle concluded: “his actions paint a questionable picture of a corrupt politician using a position of privilege to his own advantage”.
After he left UN Environment, he gave an interview to a Norwegian newspaper in which he insinuated that he was fired because the UN simply wasn’t ready for his style of radical reform. The fact that he was willing to tarnish the organisation as part of a ‘burn the houses’ attempt to rehabilitate his reputation must have chipped away at any residual goodwill that staff may have felt.

Jolie is visiting for three days before launching a global appeal for $920 million, chiefly to support the refugees’ needs for 2019. She met and talked with refugees, including children and rape victims.
“It was deeply upsetting to meet the families who have only known persecution and statelessness their whole lives, who speak of being treated like cattle,” she told reporters at the Kutupalong refugee camp.

In some ways, Oxfam was unlucky. As the countless stories that have come out since have shown, the issue was much wider than one organisation.
For years, there had been concerns about "a certain type of man" who was attracted to the power afforded by working in front-line development, and about the ease with which perpetrators could move around organisations and avoid accountability.
Oxfam just happened to be the charity holding the bomb when it went off.
That’s not to excuse what happened in Haiti – quite the opposite.
The conversation about how the aid sector and charities as a whole respond to allegations of sexual misconduct, harassment and abuse has been protracted and painfully public. But it was one that needed to be had.
Charities are approaching a time of upheaval and uncertainty as global politics, global warming, technology and changing donor demands mean the charity sector will need to renegotiate its relationship with the public and, crucially, with beneficiaries.

Andrew Mitchell, a former Conservative international development secretary, said: “Boris is a bit like a medieval pirate whose eyes have alighted on this plump Spanish galleon loaded with bullion and he wants to board it and plunder it.”

“The root causes of present-day human rights violations lie in the lack of recognition of the true scope of the violence and injustice of colonization,” the U.N. Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent said in an interim report on Belgium.

The international community has invested many billions of dollars in DRC over the past two decades to try to stabilise the country and the region, and to steer the republic towards a democratic, just and prosperous future. By passively accepting this fait accompli, all that investment will have been compromised.

For those who had watched Canada disingenuously label its international-assistance policy as “feminist,” the summit was depressing. The perfect rhetoric and substantive emptiness was another indictment of women-empowerment efforts that tend to view “feminist” as a branding tool rather than a realignment of power relations.
(...)
Truly freeing women’s economic empowerment from the clutches of this exchange would require dissecting and dissipating the myth of its altruism and allowing empowerment programs to account for the complexity and flexibility that would emerge from grassroots actors instead of expatriate overlords. The word “feminist” is often reduced to a catchy adjective that flits then flops in front of whatever matters are du jour. When it comes to international aid, look past the branding and look at whose power it really builds.

The media and society continues to reinforce these contradictions. Today, you’ll read about “bummy” women causing “scrotal eruptions”, how “juicy woman” A is causing problems in the marriage of a “juicy-less” woman B, etc. The next day, the same media will body shame a woman for putting on weight; they’ll praise the slim and “portable” woman. In school, the slim, tall, light skinned girl will become Prom Queen while the short and chubby one will be called ugly. But there are also cases of small bodied students nicknamed “stick” and taunted for their “feather” weight. In music videos, including those titled African Queen or African Beauty, the “queen” is always a tall, light-skinned woman – perfect set of teeth, smooth skin, long neck, full lips, round glittering eyes.

In a way, this is exactly the problem. In order for us to speak and write about women (or women as innovators), we needed to make a series on its own. And that really bothers me.
(...)
So, after completing our experiment, I’ve decided these are the actions I will take in my role to help bridge the gender balance gap in our stories:
Interview more women on humanitarian innovation. Interview them about their work, their impact and their opinions.
Track this. Be diligent and accountable to these statistics.
Encourage and mandate contributors to our blog to include women’s voices, ideas, opinions, and expertise in their stories.
Have an evolving list of women with expertise throughout the humanitarian innovation space that can be interviewed.
Hire more women writers. Hire more diverse writers in general. Purposely seek out and highlight these voices.

Last month, the Kenya Parliament passed a seriously concerning amendment to the country’s national ID law, making Kenya home to the most privacy-invasive national ID system in the world. The rebranded, National Integrated Identity Management System (NIIMS) now requires all Kenyans, immigrants, and refugees to turn over their DNA, GPS coordinates of their residential address, retina scans, iris pattern, voice waves, and earlobe geometry before being issued critical identification documents. NIIMS will consolidate information contained in other government agency databases and generate a unique identification number known as Huduma Namba.

In order to promote the sharing of these experiences and learn from each other’s successes and failures, UNICEF co-funded, together with the World Food Programme (WFP), the UN Innovation Network — an informal, collaborative community of UN innovators interested in sharing their expertise and experience with others to promote and advance innovation within the UN System.
Similarly, frontier technologies and digitalization are one of the main priorities of the Secretary General. To strengthen digital cooperation and advance proposals among governments, the private sector, civil society, international organizations, academia, technical community and other relevant stakeholders in the digital space, the High-level Panel for Digital Cooperation was set.

But why are so many foundations so risk averse? Never understood that https://t.co/j8AQHVEzNE

— Duncan Green (@fp2p) February 13, 2019

Campaigns like PWYP and EITI have done a huge amount to gain greater transparency of revenues. Now they – and the donors who support them – can also do more help to convert information to action, support mobilisation from below, and help shape the larger political incentives that can give teeth to voice. In a time of increasing threats against those who use information to challenge powerful extractive companies, this work is more important than ever.

Ironically, aid agencies’ efforts to improve African media have only exacerbated the problem. That’s because today, a typical journalist in Africa is a professional workshop attendee. NGOs from every sector “train” journalists in their subject matter, often with content conceived in Western capitals by people with no experience in journalism or in the target countries. Journalists go from workshop to workshop, turning up long enough to collect their per diems and write a puff piece.
This approach is as costly as it is regrettable. In one African country, a media-development organization with which I have worked spent more than $1 million of taxpayer money to produce a one-hour program on governance, which was then aired on community radio, its content so sanitized to appease local officials that few people tuned in. But even more problematic was the distortion to the domestic media market. To produce the program, the NGO recruited ten top journalists from established outlets and paid them as much as ten times their normal salary. Once the project was over, most of the journalists quit their old jobs in search of better pay in the aid and government sectors.

To its credit, DFID’s strategy acknowledges this. “Too often, data is not presented in an understandable way that enables citizens to find, interpret and use it”, it argues. “Evidence must also be accessible to parliaments, audit offices, media and civil society organisations that can monitor and champion improvements in services.” But in many places media that can “monitor and champion” struggles to exist. Media needs support to develop the skills, systems and mindset to do this and to survive long term. We are witnessing a global assault on independent media especially in the fragile states that DFID prioritises for support. The closing of civic space by often authoritarian government is reinforced by increasing attempts to co-opt and capture independent media by multiple commercial, factional, religious, ethnic and other political interests. Independent media, especially in fragile states with weak economies, are simply not able to afford to able to resist such co-option.

But it continues. “Working with elites is to a large extent deliberate policy,” comments an independent consultant with a 20 year track record in monitoring aid projects in southern and east Africa. “As a donor you need to incorporate partner countries in your political agenda -whether that is fighting ISIS or decreasing migration to the West. The higher up your partners are, the better. It is also easier for donors to give away big sums at the top. Small amounts need too much admin. But aid given in that way may have a counterproductive effect with regard to the poor.”

The German government says it has allocated €1.9m this year to provenance research for artefacts that entered museum collections during the colonial era, with the funds to be administered by the German Lost Art Foundation. An eight-member committee including Bénédicte Savoy, the co-writer of a report urging French museums to repatriate works taken without consent from African countries, will select grant recipients on the basis of applications from German museums, a statement from Culture Minister Monika Grütters said.
(...)
Grütters says that colonial history has for many decades been a “blind spot” in Germany. “Provenance research of items with a colonial context is an important contribution to a closer examination,” she said in the statement.

Has global poverty declined dramatically?
That might seem like a straightforward question to answer, but it’s become the topic of fierce debate among development wonks, economists, and scholars.

However, all that hollering on social media wasn’t indicative of how the average American thought about Gillette after seeing the ad. In fact, studies show that Americans are smart enough to know the difference between toxic masculinity and masculinity in-general and liked the ad.
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“These results suggest that (once again) the naysayers on social media do not necessarily represent the majority opinion,” Ace Metrix wrote, “and that consumers overwhelmingly support and applaud the messaging in Gillette’s new ‘The Best Men Can Be’ creative.”

"The movement has brought a reckoning to some of the most powerful men on earth.. Yet it has had little effect on the broader problem: sexual abuse, harassment and violence by men who are neither famous nor particularly powerful — merely unchecked."https://t.co/so1lSmBUq1

— Stephanie Schwartz (@stephrschwartz) February 11, 2019

In July 2011, the Pakistani public unexpectedly learnt that the CIA had used a vaccination campaign as cover during the operations to locate and capture Osama Bin Laden. This episode lent credibility to conspiracy theories against vaccines that had been spread by the Taliban. We evaluate the effects of these events on immunization by implementing a Difference-in-Differences strategy across cohorts and regions. We find that vaccination rates declined 9 to 13% per standard deviation in support for Islamist parties. These results suggest that the disclosure of information discrediting vaccination campaigns can negatively affect trust in health services and demand for immunization.

In the end, I have negative 2 hours per working week to conduct my world leading, 4* research during the teaching term. Under-performing in research can lead someone to not pass probation, to be placed under informal performance review measures, or even to be pressured to leave under a voluntary (or not) Staff Release Scheme. And yet: negative 2 hours.

First, we can see a “core” of prestigious universities who are fairly closely connected with each other: Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, Columbia, University of Chigago, Yale. In fact the top-5 granting institutions alone (Harvard, Berkeley, Michigan, Yale and Stanford) account for 40% of all the political scientists in the top-400. Harvard alone supplies 49 of the 400 top political scientists. The structures that comes out is indeed hierarchical: the “inner circle” of universities at the top mostly recruit from within the top-circle, other universities outside the circle recruit from the top, but there is fairly little “upward” mobility: few top universities recruit people from outside the top circle. Finally, access to the upper tier of US political science (and probably the whole field) is not very open to academics with a foreign PhD: only 22 (5.5%) of the top-400 have a PhD from a foreign institution.

Horse racing’s labor shows the tension of a system that relies on the skills of workers within an unequal labor structure. Rather than simply performing manual labor, grooms and others who work behind the scenes in the horse racing industry are using skills subtly based on touch and affective interaction with the animals. The skills on which the industry depends are acquired by equine workers and preferred by employers. At the same time, equine workers are towards the bottom of a labor hierarchy. Currently, immigrant workers are primarily the ones who view these jobs as opportunities, where they learn and practice important skills despite the poor work conditions and a lack of public acknowledgement of their skills.

Another rejection! My third this week. Ever since coming home, I’d learned that volunteering wasn’t as easy as it sounded.“No charity wants me,” I told my dad. “I guess promoting nightclubs isn’t high on the list of skills they’re looking for.” (p.68)

We had no cash, but plenty of energy and way too much confidence…It felt like building a start-up…I was on a mission, with no bureaucracy or approval process to slow me down…My story read like a satire from The Onion…
The signs and handouts promised that 100 percent of every purchase would go toward building wells with our NGO partners in Uganda, Ethiopia, Malawi, and Central African Republic. (pp.144-152)

I wanted to build an optimistic, imaginative, hopeful organization that people would donate to because they felt empowered and inspired-not because we’d guilted them into it. (p.161)

We needed someone with years of international NGO expertise-in other words, a bureaucrat, but without all the baggage.

Having worked for top global NGOs, but then they’d expect to clock out at 5 p.m. (p.260).

Great to see so many familiar faces at @BrandAid_World's inaugural lecture on "commodifying compassion"; expect some #globaldev live tweeting :)

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) February 21, 2019

Like the pinkification of breast cancer awareness, the commodification of mindfulness or the depoliticization of Oprah’s book club, this mix of American ‘can-do-ism’, a good dose of ignoring learnings from the past and a firm neoliberal outlook that avoids any tough political questions (I don’t think ‘climate change’ or any other cause for dry wells is mentioned in the book) are bound to write a charitable success story!Water is always a source of life-never one of conflict or power. Wells are not part of broader civilian infrastructure, but holes in the ground that at worst pose technical challenges.
And similar to Silicon Valley-invented platforms all of this can be managed by a group of spiritual, dedicated Americans from an old printing warehouse in New York City.

Amnesty International’s seven-member senior leadership team has offered to resign after a damning report warned of a “toxic” working environment and widespread bullying.A letter, signed jointly by the human rights group’s leadership team, acknowledged mistakes had been made, adding that the seven senior leaders took shared responsibility for the “climate of tension and mistrust” across the organisation.

The UN secretary-general has picked the Danish economist and environmentalist Inger Andersen as its new environment chief, according to a letter seen by Agence France-Presse, turning the page on a scandal over expenses that rocked the UN agency.

“RED Team development officers would be deployed as two-person teams and placed with ‘non-traditional’ USAID partners executing a mix of offensive, defensive, and stability operations in extremis conditions,” it says.Those “non-traditional” partners might include U.S. Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command, U.S. Army Special Forces, the State Department Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, according to the study.In order to gauge potential interest in the idea of RED Teams, the study’s authors consulted with representatives from a variety of military and civilian agencies where development officers might be embedded — including the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group, also known as SEAL Team Six.

So this is really incredibly unwise.

Misunderstands what aid can achieve in fragile contexts, and misdiagnoses why USAID has struggled to deliver it effectively.

The whole thing reads like CERP & PRTs on steroids. [THREAD] https://t.co/obc88xT5Yt

— Jeremy Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) 20. Februar 2019

Leading aid agencies received at least 539 reports of sex abuse and harassment last year, an exclusive survey showed on Monday, a 13 percent increase on 2017 which charities said shows abuse victims are more willing to speak up.The reports have led to the sacking of 91 staff, with many other cases under investigation, according to the Thomson Reuters Foundation's second annual survey of 22 leading global charities, including the United Nations (U.N.), Oxfam and CARE."If we sustain momentum on this issue and keep working to ensure people feel safe coming forward to report abuse, the numbers of reported incidents will inevitably go up in the short term," said Mike Wright, of Bond, a network for UK aid groups."But as we reinforce the message that abusive behaviour will not be tolerated and continue to improve our safeguarding practices, in the long term they will fall," he said.

But the strategy has raised alarm among leading aid groups like Mercy Corps, Oxfam and War Child, which have warned that the politicization of humanitarian aid could put those most in need at risk.“It is regrettable that aid has become a pawn in the political chess match between the governments of the United States and Venezuela,” said Provash Budden, Americas Regional Director at Mercy Corps, in a statement. “Aid should never be used as political bait. Both the people who need it and those who risk their lives to deliver it deserve better.”

"They were created to make crisis-related information easier to understand," says Russell Geekie, Jr., a spokesperson for UNOCHA. "When an emergency unfolds, it is important that humanitarians are able to gather and share data on the location and needs of affected people so that we can better coordinate our response."The icons were a hit. They've been downloaded more than half a million times from nounproject alone since 2012. "We soon realized that there was a great demand for icons, getting requests for downloadable files all over the world," says Geekie.

“What Went Wrong?” is a citizen journalism project that focuses a critical lens on failed foreign aid interventions — whether they are stalled, unfinished, broken, insufficient, unusable, or otherwise unwanted. The project does this by inverting the traditional power dynamic and putting impact evaluation in the hands of the people directly affected by aid interventions: the recipients. The team spent six months collecting 142 citizen reports from aid recipients across Kenya and investigating the projects that these reports unearthed.Devex has collaborated with the team behind What Went Wrong? to produce six investigative stories exploring why some of these projects failed to deliver.

The F-Word of the Development WorldSometimes we see organizations not being able to articulate well enough their vision towards solving a problem. Solving a problem is very important, but the process is equally important. If the process is not anchored towards the community, if it’s not anchored towards actual real insights from the people themselves, then you are opening yourself up to a bigger risk of failing in a way that post-correction would be so much more expensive.

DFID's 'branding guidelines' are enough to make the heart sink:https://t.co/kB4Q3BBARshttps://t.co/vsE4k6o5eT

— Jeff Crisp (@JFCrisp) 15. Februar 2019

Despite the absence of obvious forms of poverty porn, the use of NGO material in news about sub-Saharan countries remains suspect, partly because it does not supplement other, varied sources of news about sub-Saharan countries. Instead, NGO content risks replacing other sources, at least in some international news outlets, which offered little other African news. Yet this colonization of African news by NGO content is invisible to Western audiences because it was only attributed half of the time.

The hope was that by now they should have left the Italian Embassy in Addis Ababa where they have been given refuge for the past 28 years, and walked free. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed embarked upon a new course of politics in the country and talked in a speech in the Millennium Hall on May 2018 about a culture of forgiveness and reconciliation that could even be extended to the two Derg officials, Berhanu Bayeh, 82 and Addis Tedla, 73, who are under the protection of the embassy walls. On June 2018, a local newspaper, Addis Admass announced their stay at the embassy could finally be drawing to a close.

Our book takes readers deep into the heart of Indian democracy. Within the chapters readers will encounter citizens talking to the state – conversing and arguing with public officials and demanding accountability about village infrastructure and services, expressing their needs and demands, pleading for attention, critiquing the local government, and even directing sarcasm and scorn at elected leaders and public officials. Immersed in these state-citizen deliberations are two of our most important findings, one regarding the role of the state and the other concerning the necessity of literacy for a vibrant deliberative democracy.We find that the quality of deliberation can be substantially influenced by state policy. States that prioritize citizen participation in local government have substantially better deliberative quality than states that de-emphasize local decentralization. For instance, citizens exercise pressure for public accountability much more forcefully in states that play an active role in sharing information and mandating the presence of public officials from line departments. States that adopt a system of selecting government subsidy recipients through the gram sabha significantly improve the volume and quality of public deliberations.

According to Richard Florida, the world is in the grip of a ‘New Urban Crisis’. In his most recent book Florida recounts a visit to Medellín that provoked an epiphany in which he realized that the New Urban Crisis is global in scope. Unfortunately, Florida's discovery of the global South is informed by a deeply Eurocentric understanding of urbanization. This leads him to conclude that Southern cities should ‘unleash’ creativity, and he proposes that the United States should develop a global urban policy that would export a version of American urbanism. In this essay we deconstruct Florida's notion of the New Urban Crisis and show that its Eurocentric assumptions obscure the very real environmental, economic and political challenges facing cities in the global South and their residents.

One of the most distressing trends is the increase of participants (both new and experienced) who don’t seem invested in co-creating Black Rock City, and are attending as consumers. Mass consumption in our default world, ticket scarcity and some elaborate luxury camps have contributed to the rise of a playa “convenience culture.” In some cases, camps or companies are offering “all inclusive” pre-packaged Burning Man experiences, claiming they will preemptively meet all of their client’s needs. Burning Man is anything but convenient, and therein lies its transformative potential!

University students, like many in society, demonstrate bias against women and particularly women from non-English speaking backgrounds.That’s the take home message from a new and comprehensive analysis of student experience surveys.The study examined a large dataset consisting of more than 500,000 student responses collected over 2010 to 2016. It involved more than 3,000 teachers and 2,000 courses across five faculties at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney.

This syllabus was assembled collectively as a final project of the graduate Social Theory class in the Applied Anthropology program at Oregon State University. It offers several in-class activities for the project of “decanonizing anthropology,” and overviews the work of ten theorists whose contributions to anthropology should be acknowledged and celebrated. The authors welcome new sections or additions in the comments. Keep in mind the core objective of this syllabus: to challenge the Eurocentricity of anthropological thought and education by exploring influential, though historically ignored, voices in anthropology.

Requiring students to ante up conference funds up front without the hope of being reimbursed for months makes academia less welcoming for scientists who are financially disadvantaged. Yet universities and funding agencies seem unwilling or unable to do much to change the system. Perhaps changing the status quo requires too much work. Maybe it’s not a priority because many students come from privileged backgrounds that insulate them from the issue. Students for whom this is a real problem may feel ashamed to ask for help and be treated as an exception.

Stacey had been sharing moments from her trip to Uganda via Instagram while she was there - posing for pictures with some of the local children and women she met while there.
As a result, supporters of the No White Saviours organisation began posting messages in the comments section of her posts.
“For anyone who doesn't see the problem with this image please go to @nowhitesaviors and @rachel.cargle to learn,” one angered follower wrote on an image of Stacey hugging a child.

Lammy said it was “simply not true” that he had not responded to the offer, adding he had held two meetings with the organisation. Lammy claimed Comic Relief had “fallen short” of what he called its “public duty” to promote racial equality and serve minority communities.
Comic Relief on Thursday made no apologies, saying the offer of a collaborative film was “still open”. It thanked Dooley for helping people “working with or supported by Comic Relief projects tell their own stories in their own words”.
Lammy initially had responded to the pictures posted on Instagram by Dooley by tweeting: “The world does not need any more white saviours.

Stacey Dooley has challenged MP David Lammy after he said "the world does not need any more white saviours" following her Comic Relief posts from Africa.
She tweeted: "David, is the issue with me being white? (Genuine question)... because if that's the case, you could always go over there and try raise awareness?"xc

I suspect this could be the day I finally alienate myself & make enemies for life but here goes.... 1/ I’ve never been of 99% of international development charities cos like @comicrelief they’ve peddled poverty porn for years ignoring complaints by Africans & Asians #ComicRelief

— Elizabeth Bananuka (@ebananuka) February 28, 2019

This @DavidLammy vs @StaceyDooley debate links to audience research I did a few years ago on Celebs, Comic Relief and Distant Suffering – suggested vast majority of audience reactions were (1) indifference (2) identifying with the celeb or (3) pity https://t.co/LhK4sCTOqHpic.twitter.com/Nkgar2dBot

— Martin Scott (@martinscott2010) March 1, 2019

The World Food Programme is investigating how up to 50,000 tonnes of nutrition-boosting porridge mix it purchased for distribution to nursing mothers and malnourished children in Somalia, Yemen, Bangladesh, and elsewhere was of substandard quality, despite its quality inspection process.

Conclusive proof of German-made arms and technology in Yemen — in the air, at sea, and on land, despite German arms guidelines that expressly forbid exports to countries involved in armed conflicts, unless they are acting in self-defense.

Yet, some crises receive less media coverage than others. Displacement in the Democratic Republic of Congo rivals that of Syria but has received far less attention. In the Central African Republic widespread starvation has set in, which has gone largely unnoticed. And while the catastrophic 2010 earthquake in Haiti hit the headlines, the food crisis in 2018 barely made international news.

In a historic 7-1 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court decided today in Jam v. International Finance Corporation (IFC) that international organizations like the World Bank Group can be sued in U.S. courts.
The Court’s decision marks a defining moment for the IFC – the arm of the World Bank Group that lends to the private sector. For years, the IFC has operated as if it were “above the law,” at times pursuing reckless lending projects that inflicted serious human rights abuses on local communities, and then leaving the communities to fend for themselves.

Justice Stephen Breyer filed a dissenting opinion in which he emphasized that, after World War II, “many in this Nation saw international cooperation through international organization as one way both to diminish the risk of conflict and to promote economic development and commercial prosperity.” In response, Breyer wrote, Congress enacted the IOIA. “Given the differences between international organizations and nation states, along with the Act’s purposes and the risk of untoward consequences, I would leave the” IOIA “where we found it—as providing for immunity in both commercial and noncommercial suits.”

The first step, called “increasing our understanding”, included plans to give all employees further training as well as to assemble an advisory board of external experts. The fashion house has also developed a plan to “increase our consciousness and understanding of social issues”.
The brand said it would increase staff diversity by expanding its creative arts scholarship internationally and providing full-time employment for 50 graduates from the programme over the next five years, among other initiatives.

Brumagne says that whether the item is a used tent or unused medical equipment, they try to donate it to a similar actor in the area – possibly the ministry of health, a local health clinic or another medical charity. If they can't find someone in the medical field who can use the item, they donate it in a way that still helps the local population. For example, Doctors Without Borders has donated tents to create more classroom space for schools.
The one thing they try to avoid is giving supplies to someone who will then sell them.

Though cash transfer programs have been touted as efficient and dignifying alternatives to project-based aid, some residents of Wajir who registered with the programs reported not receiving cash when expected. While there may have been an explanation for why payments stopped, Saney and Garore told Devex they didn't know what it was—and the lack of information about when they would and would not receive payments was echoed by many other residents of Wajir.
(...)
“The beneficiaries who did not give correct details at registration, like phone numbers that were not registered to them, did not receive their cash entitlement. Most of the complaints that we received were of this nature. The complainants were advised to register their phone lines and provide this information to WFP, which in turn verified the details again on the M-Pesa system [a mobile money transfer service] and if found correct, the cash was disbursed to the new numbers,” he said.
(...)
It is evident that the people targeted by the program, and especially those who are supposed to receive money only during emergencies, do not understand why a neighbor will receive regular money while they do not. Ndoka said HSNP has done campaigns in the area to inform people.

Despite making strides toward representation across the continent’s militaries, women continue to fight harassment and discrimination at all levels of service. And when conflicts subside, they often receive fewer recognitions than their male counterparts.

In the trailer, Amber Ruffin plays a "world-renowned scientist, an accomplished cellist and activist" while Meyers plays "a man who was white while she did it" and needlessly intercedes in moments that show Ruffin's character showcasing her accomplishments.

When Annick Wibben became the newly inaugurated Anna Lindh professorship for Gender, Peace and Security at the Swedish Defence University in Stockholm this year, she made some historic firsts. She may be the first professor in gender, peace and security studies in an institution that educates both military and civilian students. She will certainly be the first female professor to join the department of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University.

This is the text of a speech delivered at the Cambridge Union in defense of the proposition: This house believes that British aid is not working.
(...)
There’s much that Britain could do toward this end, if we were serious about it. We could push to democratize international institutions, ensuring that poor countries get a fair voice in the decisions that affect them. We could close down the tax havens that Britain controls in its overseas territories. We could push for new rules that protect public services, and even for a global minimum wage, which would guarantee a decent livelihood to the workers who produce the mountains of stuff we consume. And here’s the best part: all of this could be accomplished without a single pound of aid. It would, however, require a fight – a fight against those who benefit so tremendously from the status quo. But then, so has every struggle for a better world.

Tugnoli modestly puts his World Press Photo nomination down to the sheer scale of his work in Yemen – commenting that “it’s one of the issues that has to be in World Press Photo this year, and we were the only Western media able to get this coverage” – but it’s easy to pick out other possible reasons, from his mix of images of conflict and everyday moments, to his restraint in showing harrowing suffering. Tugnoli says Laurent at The Washington Post has had an important hand in this, creating edits that include “pictures that are more poetic” alongside the “the ones that are more gruesome”; but he adds that he feels it’s essential to “balance these two aspects.”

Perhaps jargon is a way to signal that this, too, is a professional space. Perhaps complicated language is the easiest way for people to feel justified in choosing a career at the United Nations instead of Goldman Sachs. Perhaps the language is purposely vague and celebratory, patting on the back anyone who decides to “do good.”

These days I’m having tough conversations with family members, friends as I learn more about the roots of all these things. It necessitates changes in my own life too. Those are sometimes really painful things. So that’s why this heart thing really matters too. Our brains struggle hard to be resilient. Your brain thinks one thing and keeps thinking that thing. But your heart feels something and then processes it differently. It actually expands the more it gets broken, and wow, isn’t that…talk about capacity! Hello, shouldn’t we be building our own capacity to do that?!
Our hearts hold unimaginable potential.
Yes, there is so much overwhelming pain and grief. But when you dare to look at it, you can’t help but remember that there’s also an insane amount of care and hope and acceptance being offered to people at this point in history. Holding both of those together at the same time is where healing happens and where we get crazy effective.

Now, a new database, launched by the Nobel Women’s Initiative, wants to increase the number of female experts who are interviewed and quoted in news stories on conflict and security, to better balance reporting by journalists.
The venture, called InterviewHer, consists of a large free database of female experts globally. Journalists can browse by region and expertise and send interview requests through the database.
“The numbers are startling — it’s clear women’s voices are excluded from experts’ narratives,” said Ketty Nivyabandi, a media associate with the Nobel Women’s Initiative, an organization based in Ottawa, Canada, and founded in 2006 by six female Nobel laureates. It was set up “to magnify the power and visibility of women working in countries around the world for peace, justice and equality,” according to the mission statement.

They impact on women’s lives, every day. The impact can be relatively minor – struggling to reach a top shelf set at a male height norm, for example. Irritating, certainly. But not life-threatening. Not like crashing in a car whose safety tests don’t account for women’s measurements. Not like dying from a stab wound because your police body armour doesn’t fit you properly. For these women, the consequences of living in a world built around male data can be deadly.

The person who finds out how to counter bias in AI will know that capitalism is incompatible with equity, making this claim a contradiction in terms https://t.co/2pWoNK2yyq

— Goth Merenghi (@farbandish) March 1, 2019

The study is divided into four broad empirical categories: ICT-based information services (Section 2); mobile money (Section 3); various direct associations between ICTs and working-age men and women (Section 4); and fast internet (Section 5). This is followed by a discussion on policy options (Section 6), and a conclusion that is forward-looking and points to some future research options (Section 7).

On the day they start their first jobs, new assistant professors in recent years have already published roughly twice as much as their counterparts did in the early 1990s. Trends for promotion to associate professor are not as dramatic but are still remarkable. I evaluate several potential explanations for these trends and conclude that they are driven mainly by changes over time in the fiscal and organizational realities of universities and departments.

In negotiating with Elsevier, UC aimed to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery by ensuring that research produced by UC’s 10 campuses — which accounts for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. publishing output — would be immediately available to the world, without cost to the reader. Under Elsevier’s proposed terms, the publisher would have charged UC authors large publishing fees on top of the university’s multi-million dollar subscription, resulting in much greater cost to the university and much higher profits for Elsevier.

The composition of research and doctoral committees has become increasingly international in nature, and collaborations are more frequently taking place between institutions from different countries. In addition, the expectation that researchers attend international conferences has grown exponentially. The extent to which many of ones’ colleagues are jetting around the globe is often noticeable from the emails one receives from them: signed off with a carefree, “Greetings from Beijing, Tokyo or Berlin”. However, the damage of international conference tourism by academic frequent flyers is considerable.