The Sheeran-fronted Comic Relief video, during which the singer offers to pay hotel costs for street children in Liberia, verged on “poverty tourism”, according to the jury.
(...)“Ed Sheeran has good intentions,” she said. “But the problem is the video is focused on Ed Sheeran as the main character. He is portrayed as the only one coming down and being able to help.”

After watching Ed Sheeran’s video, people want to immediately “do something.” International NGOs offer a ready-made click to assuage that sadness, pity, guilt, or shame. We have an opportunity to persuade, influence, motivate, and educate. But instead, potential donors are coddled and/or prodded, e.g. read/watch this and give us money, rather than involving them as part of a greater collective effort. 

In its 2018 ads, Comic Relief says it is working to highlight local voices.
"We should give the strongest possible voice to people we work with, whether those are people here in U.K., or our work in Africa, because it feels right," says Ben Maitland, head of national media for Comic Relief.
But they're also not giving up on the celebrity angle.

Following her win on Strictly Come Dancing last year, Stacey flew to Uganda to use her renewed star power to highlight the struggles of people living in poverty there.
However, although trying to do something good with her platform, Stacey has found herself under attack from a group called No White Saviours who disagree with white people spotlighting poverty in Africa.

The world does not need any more white saviours. As I've said before, this just perpetuates tired and unhelpful stereotypes. Let's instead promote voices from across the continent of Africa and have serious debate.https://t.co/LySa0BXeyi

— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) February 27, 2019

"We are really grateful that Stacey Dooley, an award-winning and internationally acclaimed documentary-maker, agreed to go to Uganda to discover more about projects the British people have funded there and make no apologies for this.
"She has filmed and reported on challenging issues all over the world, helping to put a much-needed spotlight on issues that affect people's lives daily.
"In her film, people working with or supported by Comic Relief projects tell their own stories in their own words. We have previously asked David Lammy if he would like to work with us to make a film in Africa and he has not responded. The offer is still open."

Lammy said he “was not prepared to become part of a PR exercise”. On Twitter, he wrote: “It’s simply not true to say I did not respond: we had two meetings in my office. I had hoped – and still hope – your coverage would improve but Stacey’s post was more of the same tried [sic] tropes. As I told you before, I’m not prepared to become part of a PR exercise.

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? Comic relief have raised over 1 billion pounds since they started.
I saw projects that were saving lives with the money. Kids lives. https://t.co/pPgez9OxN8

— Stacey Dooley (@StaceyDooley) February 27, 2019

The irony is that they must have seen in Dooley a rare combination of stardust and the ability to report from, rather than merely be photographed in front of, challenging environments. For while it was Strictly that catapulted her into the big league, she’s also a documentary-maker who has presented films on everything from people trafficking to arms dealing, someone used to being behind as well as in front of a camera. Choosing her was presumably meant as a step towards the aims of the campaign group No White Saviors, which in criticising the Dooley picture made it clear it doesn’t want to stop white people coming to Africa, merely to stop white people making themselves the hero of the story. What makes that so difficult for some to take is that it isn’t just about asking one presenter to take a back seat, but also all those viewers who unconsciously identify with her.

The continued fundraising drive at the heart of Comic Relief’s mission has conveniently twisted all moves to acknowledge Britain’s historical and ongoing role in WHY countries lack strong governance, and wealth from their natural resources and stability from the politics of citizenship, not global charity.

NWS, which emphasises on its website that it is a “majority female, majority east African group”, extended an invitation to Dooley, saying it hoped she would take it as an opportunity to listen and learn. But it said she did not reply. The group wrote on Instagram: “Ms Dooley, we need you to know our invitation is still open, we provided feedback about how you could do better, so has David Lammy as well as countless others. You’ve chosen to disregard, double down and ignore the constructive feedback.

While it’s good to learn that experts and locals are to feature more prominently in on-the-ground charity appeals, in the UK and abroad, could cynicism about the use of celebrities be taken too far? It’s as though they must be kept away from affected regions in case they invalidate the appeal. The brutal truth is that celebrities are there for a reason. Presumably people are aware of how difficult it is for charities to raise awareness and funds. That, with someone such as Dooley, it’s about using a celebrity, black or white, to draw people in.Then there’s the issue of celebrity motivation. Sure, some celebrities might be egomaniacal monsters, whose only concern is that they look hot in cargo pants, but with most, the basic human instinct would be to want to help. If that’s your motivation, then why the grim rush to question theirs?

The David Lammy/White Saviour versus Stacey Dooley/Comic Relief debate is an excellent opportunity to look at some of the core elements of ritual communication behind many debates in international development-especially when charities and celebrities are involved!

In a company such as ours, where so many of our women authors work in male-dominated fields, we’re taking a look at what IWD means to them, and its relevance to the work they do.

Happy International Women’s Day! #IWD2019#wecandoitpic.twitter.com/mDnjvsb5jQ

— Catherine McKenney (@cmckenney) March 8, 2019

Who gets to tell stories in Nepali media?

Mostly men.

[via @ForumFreedom] pic.twitter.com/wRlt2RNGtv

— Anup Kaphle (@AnupKaphle) March 7, 2019

So if that's you, and you're wondering how to manoeuvre around this minefield without being called out for being racist, then go ahead, but paste this question on your bottle of Factor 50+: How would I act in a homeless shelter in London?
Would you ask everyone to stop what they were doing to pose for a photo with you as the centrepiece? Upon seeing a child going about their child-like business, would you hold them aloft like a trophy? I assume not. So resist the urge when walking around a village.
And if you do find yourself in an African country and feel the urge to post a photo of something, I highly recommend fruit. The fruit is amazing. Post photos of fruit.

I managed a week in Uganda without taking photos of children. It's possible.

— Seyi Akiwowo (@seyiakiwowo) March 7, 2019

The soldier was arrested, and a park-affiliated committee tasked with improving local relations stepped in. The woman and her family told BuzzFeed News she was pressured not to press charges against the soldier. “I didn’t get justice,” she said. Her knee is still so damaged that she’s unable to work.
“I am still suffering,” she said.
The sexual assault made national headlines. Despite WWF’s deep involvement with Chitwan National Park and its commitment to protecting indigenous people from abuse, no one from the charity ever met with the woman to discuss the attempted rape, she said. A few months later, WWF gave the soldier’s army battalion an award for combating rhino poaching.
Chitwan park officials continued to lock people up. As of November 2013, there were 80 people detained in Chitwan custody, some whom had been there more than 15 years, according to the Kathmandu Post.
Chitwan National Park did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
During this time, Chitwan’s former chief warden, Tikaram Adhikari, continued working for Nepal’s forest department — and closely with WWF. In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Adhikari denied any involvement with Shikharam’s death and said he was only arrested because of political pressure from Maoists. Shikharam’s autopsy results were fabricated, he said.

Organizations have very low capacity, and we are siloed. “Program officers do not have tech capacity. Tech people are kept in offices or ‘labs’ on their own and there is not a lot of porosity. We need protection advisors, lawyers, digital safety advisors, data protection officers, information management specialists, IT all around the table for this,” noted one discussant. Also, she said, though we do need principles and standards, it’s important that organizations adapt these so that they are their own principles and standards. “We need to adapt these boiler plate standards to our organizations. This has to happen based on our own organizational values. Not everyone is rights-based, not everyone is humanitarian.” So organizations need to take the time to review and adapt standards, policies and procedures to their own vision and mission and to their own situations, contexts and operations and to generate awareness and buy-in. In conclusion, she said, “if you are not being responsible with data, you are already violating your existing values and codes. Responsible Data is already in your values, it’s a question of living it.”

After losing his country's backing for @WorldBank president, Lebanese Finance Minister Ziad Hayek remains hopeful that another party will put forth his name before the nomination deadline. https://t.co/4U4ABPCpas

— Devex (@devex) March 5, 2019

The Jam suit, which was filed in 2015, is far from over. With the fundamental immunity issue resolved, it will return to a federal circuit court in Washington, D.C., this spring for further battles over the facts of the case, and it may not be decided for years. In the meantime, at least one other major suit against the IFC is now gaining steam in response to last week's decision, and more could follow as international financial organizations grapple with this new standard of accountability for the unintended consequences of their investments.
"This decision certainly opens the door for more lawsuits," says Mark Wu, an international trade law scholar at Harvard Law School who was not involved in the suit. "It may cause [international financial institutions] to be more cautious in the operations of the projects themselves."

A further consequence of this attempt to treat workers the same as other commodities is that the work entails significant unpaid ‘work-for-labour’. Time spent on work-related activities such as breaks, training, job searching, and applying and waiting for work goes unpaid, even though such activities are inevitable consequences of the manner in which these platforms organize labour. We conducted a survey with 656 workers in Africa and Asia, and they revealed that an average of 16 hours was spent every week browsing, applying for, and reading about jobs.
Moreover, as these workers lived in countries with little public provision of healthcare, the framing of workers as freelance contractors also meant that few workers could access adequate healthcare.
A further consequence of commodification was the high levels of unregulated global competition which could put downward pressure on pay. The experiences of a Nigerian worker, Joseph, exemplified this common situation. Joseph* made a living from digital marketing and advertising, and told us how: Immediately you see an offer being posted… you will see 50 proposals have been submitted.

Neoliberalism enabled poverty-reduction in Latin America!

- argues the great @bill_easterly, in response to @snaidunl, @rodrikdani, & @gabriel_zucmanhttps://t.co/Vj527OhnLd🤨

Others argue poverty fell w/ the commodity boom, minimum wages, & pro-poor 💰https://t.co/tSjalOEYuFpic.twitter.com/W9pqPVCLf3

— Alice Evans (@_alice_evans) March 6, 2019

First and foremost, governments and international organisations, such as UN agencies and the OECD, need a fundamental change in approach away from encouraging the use of digital technologies and innovation in support of economic growth to one focusing on their appropriate use by the poorest and most marginalised. The private sector will deliver on growth in its own interest; governments should, at least theoretically, support all of their citizens. Second, we need to understand that digital technologies in themselves have no power to effect change. Such an instrumental view of technology has been hugely damaging because it hides the interests underlying their design and production. Unless new technologies are created with marginalised people to serve their specific interests and empowerment, then inequalities will continue to grow. Finally, we all need to change our use of language to reflect such a radically different approach. Instead of calling the poorest and most marginalised the “last billion”, we should call them the “first billion” because they are the most important. We should stop propagating the myth of “bridging the digital divide” when that divide is becoming increasingly wide and impossible to “bridge”.

Local counterparts see this prejudice. It infuriates those local geniuses, logistical masterminds and selfless souls that they are bypassed by the international development sector, who chose instead to place a young and inexperienced European statistician as technical adviser to an agricultural community outreach programme, who may then joke with their friends about the ridiculousness of Sierra Leonean agricultural policy and implementation, be asked to advise senior agricultural officers and given the luxury of the Minister’s ear (only slightly hypothetical example…)
Never, however, will that young expat actually have to deliver what a Sierra Leonean has to deliver. Never will they have to manage the implementation of million-dollar (yet still under-funded) programmes within the family, community, work and social structures of those who earn $1 — $10 per day.
(...)
If you are someone lucky enough to be established in a wealthy country, and you find yourself bemoaning the inability of someone in a very poor country, consider what you would need to attempt whatever they are attempting. What could you do with $10 per person in Sierra Leone? Personally, I would struggle to provide a week’s dinner, let alone a whole public health system.

The U.N. and its sister organizations churn out innumerable important reports each year, and the world ignores them with impressively consistent equanimity. Last year a U.N. panel warned that we have a mere decade to avert catastrophic climate change. Governments everywhere failed to react. The U.N., one former senior official complained to me, is a “Cassandra figure” that can foretell the future, but whose prophecies nobody will believe.
There are many reasons for this, but one is that multilateral reports collapse under the weight of their own tedium. International officials are adept at packaging their views in sludgy, dull prose.

In fact, the pushback against voluntourism is spilling over into all humanitarian action, with many local NGOs in high-poverty countries asking large international NGOs why they aren’t being paid to teach their own children, build their own schools and water wells, etc., instead of bringing in foreigners to do so and why there are so many Westerners – most of them white – starting their own NGOs in developing countries.

Given this conflict with the community, the morning quickly became quite contentious. As usual, the women were stopped from collecting water, but this time they had a foreigner to advocate for them. At first, I was uncomfortable using my privilege to leverage a community into letting the women access the borehole, but this was the only option we had and the difference between having and not having water was far greater than my unease.
As someone who is living in the UK, it’s not often that I interact with human rights issues on such a deep and personal level. I was afraid I would not be able to handle the gravity of the injustices I witnessed. What I now realise, is that it was a privilege to be let in on something which causes such great pain and suffering.

"One of the best news photographers of his generation, Yannis was passionate, vital and intense both in his work and life," said U.S. general news editor Dina Kyriakidou Contini.
"His pictures are iconic, some works of art in their own right. But it was his empathy that made him a great photojournalist."
What underpinned everything Behrakis did in his professional life was a determination to show the world what was happening in conflict zones and countries in crisis.

In the 1970s and 80s Mogadishu's airwaves were filled with Somali funk, disco, soul and reggae. Musicians rocking afros and bell-bottom trousers would perform at the city's trendiest nightclubs during the height of the country's golden era of music. But it was short-lived: a brutal civil war began, musicians fled to all corners of the world and the vibrant music scene came to an end.

As public trust in old structures wanes, notions of partisanship, membership, affiliation and support need to be radically rearranged. While Gramsci thought personal leadership belonged to a pre-industrial past, and that the modern era would be dominated by bureaucracies, the social media age has heralded the return of personalised and charismatic leadership that is ideally suited to navigating a personality-obsessed digital culture.
Hyperleaders compensate for the crisis of membership organisations, providing their followers with a a supplementary form of collective identification. They offer channels to establish bonds that compensate for the failure of representatives to maintain links with the represented. Put simply, hyperleaders have become the intermediary between the people and their party.

The second question is much more complicated. Aside from the men and women that run these systems - who usually operate under a veil of commercial confidentiality - few people have seen them in the wild.
Very often, the people affected don't even know their life has been touched by an algorithm.
So, for the last two-and-a-half months, my producer Valerie Hamill and I have been criss-crossing the country, trying to find an answer.
As we went, we encountered one all-pervasive myth and one largely hidden truth.
First, the myth: predictive algorithms are like Minority Report.

Since she was hired 15 years ago, Mawani says she’s noticed many positive changes in the university but cautioned that many of them are only on the surface.
UBC has made recruiting more Indigenous students and faculty a priority, as per its enrolment reports and work in the Board of Governor’s Indigenous Engagement Committee. But where it falls behind is supporting those faculty once they arrive.Antwi addresses this phenomenon in a reflection entitled On Labor, Embodiment, and Debt in the Academy, where he describes the “energy” of faculty of colour being repurposed to make the university more diverse. In other words, professors are instrumentalized to do what the university has already promised to do.

Something I've been meaning to say about The Tragedy of the Commons. Bear with me for a small thread on why our embrace of Hardin is a stain on environmentalism. tldr: we’ve let a flawed metaphor by a racist ecologist define environmental thinking for a half century. 1/

— mattomildenberger (@mmildenberger) March 4, 2019

Setting a standard around good teaching, accepting what can and cannot be measured, and understanding the biases of students and faculties all give universities much to examine. And they need to do it now, before additional legal or even human rights challenges come down – Dr. Uttl says he would not be surprised to see a class-action lawsuit sometime in the near future. Adds Dr. Watson, “Given the complexity of what teaching is like and what learning is like, there ought to be a variety of data collected, a variety of evidence that’s presented that helps describe what the experience of being in a class is like.”

Hers contain a few books, a bottle of hot sauce and a yoga mat because she does sun salutations between classes. Now that I am no longer chasing tenure-track, I am letting myself feel the thrill of acquisition. I am slowly filling up my shelves with new books, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, RO Kwon’s The Incendiaries. They are different books, ones that have nothing to do with “the work.” They’re books that I read in bed and keep close to me until I am ready to let go. There will be no ritual of unpacking my library. I only carry one book at a time because the arthritis in my shoulders makes it difficult to transport more. I also don’t know how long I’ll get to stay in this place. Such is the nature of precariousness.

The 48-page graphic novel offers a snapshot of what life is like for one family in South Sudan. The crops have turned brown and brittle, the well has run dry, and they have gone four months without substantial food.

Against this backdrop, there are no incentives, indeed, there is no need, for any of Solomon Islands’ 50 fragmented national MPs to worry themselves about a mounting environmental catastrophe which government neglect and malfeasance has contributed to. Not one vote cast at April’s upcoming election will be made on the basis of what is transpiring in Rennell. The vast majority of voters simply have no interest in matters beyond the personal: the provision of corrugated iron roofing, given by a local MP, upon which a similarly gifted cheap solar panel can be affixed. And this too is completely rational given a historical failure of government service delivery and limited livelihood options. At a political level, no one will be held accountable for this disaster.
While oil haemorrhages, the vexed question of how to address the fundamental problems underlying Solomon Islands’ natural resource sector continues to be ignored. And there are zero political repercussions for this; just as there have been none for the national government for foregoing much needed revenue by scrapping all export duties on bauxite in late 2016, and for quietly pulling out of the global standard for governance in minerals, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, last year.

Last week, 13 rural communities in Guinea made public a complaint against the World Bank’s private lending arm over a loan to one of country’s largest bauxite miners, alleging its operations have destroyed ancestral farm lands and polluted vital water sources.
The complaint to the International Finance Corporation’s (IFC) Compliance Advisor Ombudsman is over a loan made to la Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée (CBG), co-owned by the Guinean government and multinationals Alcoa and Rio Tinto.

More than a million Ethiopians were forced from their homes by ethnic violence in 2018 – the highest number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) of any country last year. The worst of it took place in the south, where an estimated 800,000 mostly ethnic Gedeos fled the district of West Guji in Oromia, the country’s largest region.
(...)
Aid workers speak with alarm at the prospect of yet another round of premature returns, especially since it will coincide with the start of the national census in April (possibly triggering more violence). Involuntary returns and the “instrumentalisation” of humanitarian aid are, of course, breaches of humanitarian principles.

The global gag rule stifles the speech of doctors and other health care providers, preventing them from informing their patients of all the medical options available to them. This censorship worsens stigma, particularly for individuals living with HIV and AIDS, sex workers, members of the LGBTQ community and people with disabilities.
We must hold our leaders accountable to the human-rights framework that the US and 171 other parties have agreed upon. As state parties prepare for the UN Human Rights Committee meeting on March 25, when they will report on the implementation of the ICCPR, we urge them to insist on access to safe abortion as a right. The history of the US disregarding international human-rights standards should not be accepted as the status quo.

Don't you hate it when 2 dudes photobomb a serious meeting of a feminist foreign minister & a human rights law expert ;) ?!? https://t.co/vH30G5LQYN

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) March 14, 2019

Like you said, I sob like a baby in any movie. And I will cry as well, even after 30 years. But I just try and hope that it is not in a field setting. Our job is to help the people and therefore us being emotional in some instances might work, it might help them to feel that we’re empathetic, that we understand, but in other situations it might be the opposite—‘How is this woman going to help us if she’s crying? We do enough of it ourselves and we need somebody strong and determined.’ Of course we’re human, so as much as you want to have this emotion, sometimes you just have to deal with it and accept that it’s probably not the right emotion at that right time.

The problem is that although the espoused aspirations to do good of those acclaiming the Fourth Industrial Revolution may indeed be praiseworthy, they are starting at the wrong place. The interests of those shaping these technologies are not primarily in changing the basis of our society into a fairer and more equal way of living together, but rather they are in competing to ensure their dominance and wealth as far as possible into the future. The idea of a Fourth Industrial Revolution seeks to legitimise such behaviour at all levels from that of states such as the USA, to senior leaders and investors in technology companies, to young entrepreneurs eager to make their first million. Almost all are driven primarily by their interests in money bent on the accretion of money; some are beguiled by the prestige of potential status as a hero of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In some cultures such behaviour is indeed seen as being good, but in others there are greater goods. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is in large part a conspiracy to shape the world ever more closely in the imagination of a small, rich, male and powerful élite.

Abdalla of the Kenya Sex Workers Alliance said, “Sex workers are feminists, too. We belong in the feminist movement. My body, my business!”
(...)
An anonymous sex worker from Southeast Asia said, “Funders should have courage. Be willing to listen to us and support us in our struggle to have our rights respected and our voices heard.”

If you really want to make a difference, start by taking time for yourself right now because you can’t “change the world” if you’re not around long enough to make that happen. Also know that emails, projects, and other work will never stop or slow down enough for you to catch up. There will never be a perfect time to take time for you. If you’re doing worthwhile work, there will never be a shortage of challenges on your plate.
So, I hereby give you permission to stop trying to save the world. If you stop thinking you must go to work each day and save the world, you lift a tremendous burden off yourself and those around you.
Yes, go out and do good. Work hard. Make a difference. But also make time to be present for your family and friends. Have a hobby. Take care of yourself.

What, if anything, should be banned from online media? And who should review violent and explicit content, in order to decide if it’s okay for the public? Thousands of people around the world are working long, difficult hours as content moderators in support of sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. They are guided by complex and shifting guidelines, and their work can sometimes lead to psychological trauma. But the practice of content moderation also raises questions about censorship and free expression online.

Of course this applies more to older children and teenagers. But the pressure and desire to protect children from the horrors of the internet could inadvertently cause parents to engage with, or expose their children to, distressing content they would not have otherwise.
Digital hoaxes highlight the need for everyone to think more critically about online information. Often the hype can distract us from the real online issues affecting children and young people and the need for greater advice and support for suicide prevention in general.

Asked about her willingness to poke fun at these controversies and at her own public image, as she did during a recent SNL appearance, Paltrow beatifically responded, “Throughout this whole journey from the change of career and trying to build a company, I think it’s really important to always have a sense of humor about everything in life.”

The findings are a damning indictment of advocates for targeting effectiveness, with only one of the programmes reaching over half of the poorest 20 per cent of the households it is targeted at.

How development programmes choose to measure the empowerment of women and girls impacts whether an intervention ultimately contributes to or impedes their empowerment. In a new paper, KIT Royal Tropical Institute provides insight and guidance on the value of participatory approaches, those that ground the measurement of empowerment in the lives and perspectives of women and girls.

The guide outlines exercises and approaches to using participatory video in this context to open ears and minds and help other ordinary citizens, chiefs, business leaders and politicians move out of their filter bubbles and into the realities of those they rarely meet, let alone listen to. The lived experiences of the women and men affected by corruption and the impact on entire communities, cultures and ecosystems are all-too-often absent from the anti-corruption conversation. Overcoming the apathy of citizens towards the corruption that corrodes society and thwarts development – often tolerated as intractable or accepted as inevitable – requires people everywhere to be informed and empowered to take action. We hope this guidebook contributes in a very practical and tangible way to strengthening that important movement.

Affected people also feel slightly more optimistic about being able to live without aid in the future, and prospects of life in Afghanistan more broadly. Those who are sceptical about their ability to become self-reliant indicate a need for income-generating activities, shelter, increase in the quantity of aid and improved security.
Affected people still have mixed views on the relevance of available aid, with almost equal shares agreeing and disagreeing on whether aid is meeting their most pressing needs.
(...)
The views of humanitarian staff have become more sceptical on two accounts: they believe the support that national and local organisations receive is less sufficient and the collaboration between humanitarian and development actors less effective than in the previous survey round.

the book investigates the conditions under which countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia have adopted legislation against domestic violence, which remains widespread in many developing countries. The book demonstrates that women’s presence in formal politics and policy spaces does not fully explain the pace in adopting and implementing domestic violence law. Underlying drivers of change within broader domains of power also include the role of clientelistic politics and informal processes of bargaining, coalition-building, and persuasion; the discursive framing of gender-equitable ideas; and how transnational norms influence women’s political inclusion and gender-inclusive policy outcomes. The comparative approach across Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, Ghana, India, and Bangladesh demonstrates how advancing gender equality varies by political context and according to the interests surrounding a particular issue.

The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) has announced the creation of the Amartya Sen Chair in Inequality Studies, named in honour of the India-born economist, philosopher and Nobel laureate, who was Professor of Economics at LSE from 1971-82.
The holder of the Amartya Sen Chair in Inequality Studies will also serve as Director of the International Inequalities Institute (III), LSE’s flagship initiative focused on studying and challenging one of the most pressing issues of our time.

The results indicated a grim reality. Non-Africa based scholars represented between 73.2 and 100 per cent of cited authors in surveyed reading lists. Out of the 274 assigned readings for a Development Studies course at a leading British university, only one reading was from an author based at an African institution. Course conveners at African universities included their papers and those of their colleagues in their reading lists, raising the share of African-based authors to a maximum of 26.78 per cent at a top South African university. However, we have not noticed much of a pan-African citation pattern.

The Gender Gap Tracker uses advanced data analysis to cull and break down the numbers of men and women quoted in mainstream Canadian media. Co-developed by Informed Opinions, a non-profit advocacy organization, and researchers at Simon Fraser University, the tracker indicates men’s voices outnumber women’s in the media by a ratio of nearly three to one.
“That’s pretty pathetic,” says Informed Opinions founder and project lead Shari Graydon. “Democracy is essentially about being represented. If half of your potential audience is female but they never see themselves reflected on your program or in your paper, you’re missing critical insights.”

Between 2013 and 2017 Transformation published four articles by Alessandra Pigni on the relationship between personal and political change. A specialist in mindfulness training in humanitarian organisations, Pigni's path-breaking ideas are collected together in The Idealist’s Survival Kit. 75 Simple Ways to Avoid Burnout. As she puts it at the end of this article:
"I, for one, am interested, not just in exploring but in living in that space where critical thinking and reflective practice meet justice, and the capacity to love oneself and others. How? I don’t know. I just envisage this as the activism and humanitarianism of the 21st century, not just rallies or charity, but something new, where institutions don’t break people’s spirit, where personal wellbeing is not chased in isolation, and where ‘doing’ and ‘being’ are not mutually exclusive."

An innovation specialist at a large aid agency, speaking on condition of anonymity to allow for a frank assessment, confirmed the changing direction of humanitarian innovation.
It’s now “at a bit of a crossroads” and facing up to thornier issues, including scale, the specialist said, adding: “We need to stop fetishising technology.”
As innovation strategy matures, practitioners are facing up to some daunting challenges, the specialist said, listing: organisational culture, bureaucratic inertia, risk appetite, and legal and financial processes. The specialist also said the focus on technology had undervalued “backroom heroes” who come up with new ways of doing things in “prosaic spaces” like administration or human resources that may not even be recognised as “innovation”.

NGOs have fired 91 people [that DFID knows of] for sexual exploitation and abuse offences over the last year says @PennyMordaunt giving the keynote speech #BondConf@bondngo@devex

— Sophie Edwards (@Sophie_Ed1984) March 18, 2019

We (two academics who have studied this issue critically and carried out extensive interviews with members of Lake Volta communities and a member of parliament whose constituents overwhelmingly live on and around the lake) deem it critical to set the record straight as this is a complex social issue which needs careful analysis rather than melodrama and sensationalism.
The allegations of child trafficking and child slavery, which are mostly made by Western-based or funded journalists and NGOs with the help of local affiliates, reflect a limited understanding of the lived realities on islands and communities along the lake. Fishing is one of the few guaranteed avenues of subsistence for islanders and residents of riverine communities along the Lake Volta, and children are rightly taught fishing skills by their parents.

"These empty red dresses hang in public spaces so people can encounter the absence and violence against indigenous women and girls," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation ahead of the museum's first symposium on the topic on Thursday.
More than four in five Native American women have experienced violence in their lifetime, according to the National Institute of Justice.
In 2016, the U.S. National Crime Information Center reported 5,712 cases of missing native women.
Similarly high rates are seen in Canada - where the REDress show originated - with a 2014 national report by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police estimating 1,181 indigenous women disappeared or were murdered since 1980.
The situation is a "silent crisis", U.S. Representative Deb Haaland, one of the first two Native American women elected to Congress, said last week during congressional testimony.

"Young people finish school and then are not able to find a job," he says. "So they start selling anything they can to make an income. They don't want to burden their parents."
Abubakar knows what that's like. He graduated from the University of Leeds in the U.K. in 2013 with an MBA but says he has not been able to find a white-collar job in his homeland.
So he decided to start his own company. In 2014, he launched Beta Business Forum, which helps small-business owners with marketing and sales. He's also earning money as a real estate agent and a farmer. And he plants cash crops like sorghum and corn.
"This hashtag actually opened my eyes. I had no idea that there were this many Nigerians hustling out there," he adds.

“Those are absolutely astonishing values,” says Fernando Martinez, director of the Asthma and Airway Disease Research Center at the University of Arizona. “We’re not talking here of asthma incidence; we’re talking about very severe, very negative conditions for life. Those are absolutely unacceptable levels that, in a country like the United States, would imply immediate measures to drastically decrease that level of pollution … because it’s a real, serious threat to health.”

Long-term stability means shifting the refugee-camp paradigm from humanitarian aid toward private industry. A California-based think tank called Refugee Cities is lobbying refugee-hosting governments to build development zones that could draw foreign investment. “If you create the legal space in which economic activity is allowed and people are given basic legal stability, you can unleash tremendous dynamism that ultimately creates prosperity,” founder Michael Castle Miller says. “Not just for people there—but throughout the country.”
Blueprints and budgets drafted by various humanitarian organizations show how economic development might come to Bidibidi: Wi-Fi zones, mini-electrical grids, large-scale production facilities. For now, business is small-scale, and private companies are only starting to think about how to tap Bidibidi’s idle labor force

“The roots of the power struggle over global goals lie in conflicting theories of economic and social change embraced by different development actors: national governments, civil society groups, multilateral agencies and the private sector. . . . Like a Trojan horse, each indicator conceals the theories of change and development that lie within, exerting their interpretive influence,” the authors wrote.
“While we all enjoy a good mystery, we are not detectives and cannot yet know the overall impact this power struggle over indicators is having now on the SDGs. However, this special ‘political thriller’ issue of Global Policy Journal reveals the dark underbelly of competing interests in the 2030 Agenda and their sometimes mysterious unintended consequences.”

“He poses her like an 80s glamour shot,” Northrup observes, “shoulder tilted towards the camera, forehead forward, nice light to illuminate the eyes, and direct eye contact – something that she would never ever do.”
(...)
This is false, Northrup says – the fear in her eyes is that of a student interrupted at school by a male stranger invading her space, her personal boundaries and her culture, without even having learned her name.

In her series, Woman go no’gree, Oyarzabal has done just this in a photographic exploration of gender, history, knowledge-making, stereotypes, and clichés of Africa. Using a mixture of archival colonial images mostly found in magazines, street photos taken with a digital camera, and studio photography found or made during her artist residence in Lagos in 2017, Oyarzabal employs a visual language that subverts and spellbinds in equal part, leading us into a silent realm of symbol and iconography.

Silicon Valley corporations are taking over the digital economy in the Global South, and nobody is paying attention.
In South Africa, Google and Facebook dominate the online advertising industry, and are considered an existential threat to local media.
(...)
Similar to the technical architecture of classic colonialism, digital colonialism is rooted in the design of the tech ecosystem for the purposes of profit and plunder. If the railways and maritime trade routes were the "open veins" of the Global South back then, today, digital infrastructure takes on the same role: Big Tech corporations use proprietary software, corporate clouds, and centralised Internet services to spy on users, process their data, and spit back manufactured services to subjects of their data fiefdoms.

But frankly, no matter how good your intentions, I just don't believe there's ANY way to market other people's struggles and trauma as an enriching travel experience that's not exploitative and problematic. 2/7

— Kate Cronin-Furman (@kcroninfurman) March 15, 2019

Now, the race is on for them, while competing with other pastors, to prove they can venture into the supernatural and seek solutions for people’s expectations. Seen from this angle, the contemporary miracle pastors are a product of the society. They are produced because society needs them to instantly perform the unusual, through accessing supernatural in ways that are humanly far-fetched. Arduous as this task may be, the miracle pastors take the challenge to alter or control the future. It is all about the future, the unknown, and the impossible. Whether they deliver the expected results is a matter of speculation but come to think of the significance of the bodily displays in deliverance and healing scenes as well as the positive (and sometimes, praising) testimonies about a powerful Man of God – a title indicating the pastor’s apparent proximity to God.

Had colonial rule genuinely been thrilling—pith helmets and elephant guns and gin-and-tonics out on the veranda—that would never have excused it. And yet, there is something acutely dispiriting about the idea that all the suffering inflicted by European imperialism was joyless even for the people whom it made masters of all they surveyed. Auerbach invokes Hannah Arendt several times, and he’s right to do so—the British Empire was mostly banal in its everyday governance, but that did not make imperialism less evil. It wasn’t glorious, and it wasn’t glamorous, and it didn’t bring any of the benefits of “civilization” to the places it conquered. As Auerbach writes, the empire brought “death, enslavement, imprisonment, famine, alienation from land and resources . . . poverty and instability almost everywhere the British ruled, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Even by its own metrics,” he concludes, “the British Empire was a failure.” It was an empire of men who shot elephants to avoid being laughed at—although that is a very cold comfort to its victims.

Challenges for #civictech when making theory real #TiCTeCpic.twitter.com/3FKVRInIBw

— Pablo Aragón (@elaragon) March 20, 2019

Hawi follows the story of Ement Legesse, a young Ethiopian woman living in America with her mother. In the opening scenes of the comic book, it becomes apparent that Ement desperately wants to visit Ethiopia on a guided tour but her mother is against the idea. According to her, Ement can barely speak their native Ahmaric language and fears for her safety given that numerous young girls have been abducted in Ethiopia. It's quite clear that Ement is frustrated by her mother's refusal to allow her to visit her home country. As the story progresses, the two eventually visit Ethiopia together (yay!) only for Ement's mother, however, to be abducted (oh no!). This is where the story really begins. Now we won't tell you how Ement obtains her dope superhero abilities but what we can tell you is what inspires them.

In the daytime, he would go to school when he was able. It was an elaborate process; a shower and a shave and a change of clothes left him so exhausted he had to do it hours in advance and take some time to rest before his commute to campus. But he would return energized. He had never stopped believing that his work, and his students, mattered. On days off, he had taken to alternating between cable news and a comedy reality TV show, Impractical Jokers. It was as much a joy to hear him shout angrily at the politicians and pundits on CNN as it was to hear him laugh at juvenile pranks.

This is crazy. Study shoes three people in a conference room over 2 hours can result in a Co2 level that can impair cognitive functioning. Ie. If you’re making decisions at the end of the meeting, you’re mentally less qualified to do so. pic.twitter.com/yGdufCWoVF

— Chris Young 🇨🇦 (@netmanchris) March 16, 2019

Recognizing that I would likely not contribute much to finding an agreed definition of situational awareness in a consensus-driven environment, I figured that putting together a list of information, tools and services may be a tangible output that could help most anyone no matter their definition of situational awareness.
So, mid last year, I collaborated with RJ Reid to see if we could build such a list. But, as you might expect, even searching for such items required that we put a framework and a definition of situational awareness in place in order to give us structured direction

The ICC has sought to enact a highly particular – rather than universal – brand of legalist, procedural justice. This approach is intolerant of alternative legal or non-legal responses to addressing mass crimes. Adherence to a model of ‘distant’ justice, ostensibly to maintain impartiality, has been counter-productive. Reliance on Western investigators with little or no experience in the areas where they operate, and investigations of very limited duration, are major shortcomings in the ICC’s modus operandi. Most trials have either collapsed or been abandoned due to poor-quality evidence.
In African societies affected by mass atrocity, ICC involvement has made justice and lasting peace less, rather than more, likely. This Counterpoint argues that major reform of the Court is urgently required if it is to serve the needs of African communities, including victims of mass crimes.

At the research level, stakeholders' inputs must be included from the planning stage of a study and projects should be designed with a view towards replicating and scaling up the findings. Early plans should also be made to disseminate findings to key audiences, including the general public, and respected thought leaders could be enlisted to help promote the policies. Checklists and other job support tools could be developed that can increase the use of research findings.
Academia also needs to evolve. For research to have a greater impact, the zeal for producing research must be matched by a desire to implement that research. To facilitate this, we must change the incentives, change the criteria for tenure. Implementation, impact, public engagement, and service should all be included to evaluate a scientist's professional advancement.

Nearly 100 female economists say a peer or a colleague has sexually assaulted them. Nearly 200 say they were the victim of an attempted assault. And hundreds say they were stalked or touched inappropriately, according to a far-reaching survey of the field.
The results, compiled by the American Economic Association, also reveal deep evidence of gender and racial discrimination within the field. Half of the women who responded to the survey said they had been treated unfairly because of their sex, compared with 3 percent of men. Nearly half of women said they had avoided speaking at a conference or a seminar to guard against possible harassment or “disrespectful treatment.” Seven in 10 women said they felt their colleagues’ work was taken more seriously than their own.

To conclude, open and honest dialogue about how researchers can be negatively affected by doing “difficult” research can provide reassurance to and reduce anxiety for other researchers, especially graduate students and those new to fieldwork, who are experiencing such reactions. It is also an important step towards decreasing the stigma associated with reaching out and seeking help – which based on personal experience and conversations I have had with others is something of a problem in academia. In the cut-throat environment that academia sometimes is, none of us wants to be perceived as whiny, fragile or difficult. But speaking openly about the challenges we face is important to identify those areas in which institutional and discipline-wide responses could be improved.

It's amazing how ISA is so tone deaf to key debates in #highered, Ontario politics, Canadian history, Visa regimes etc....oh wait, ISA is just booking the conference venue & collects fees & yet thousands of academics will attend without so much as blinking an eye... #ISA2019https://t.co/nvxSXF0tT0

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) March 20, 2019

When we tie professional advancement in the academy to participation in conferences and on committees that require extensive travel, we are too often asking for what is simply impossible to give, either in terms of their own time or of a spouse’s. This is an arrangement that disproportionately favors those without family commitments, which is much more likely to mean men. Just as there is a certain degree of myopia, if not outright hypocrisy, in our collective professional agitation for action on climate change, while maintaining our jet-set lifestyle, so too the continued reliance on conference and committee travel in the digital age discredits our claims to desiring greater gender equity.

Found the CV I used to apply for lectureship in 2009:
PhD + 3.5 postdoc yrs
6 journal + 11 conference papers + 1 book chapter
Lab teaching +MSc co-supervision experience
£2600 funding
6 beamtimes

Sadly this won't be enough in 2019 to land a lectureship!#academia#phdchat

— Moataz Attallah (@MoatazAttallah) March 17, 2019

My colleagues Lisa Ann Richey, David Simon, Ilan Kapoor & Stefano Ponte with a timely guest post as the International Studies Association’s (#ISA2019) annual meeting kicks off in Toronto.
The topic is once again the journal Third World Quarterly which is sponsoring the reception of ISA’s Global Development Section and the broader questions these discussions raise for higher education and academic publishing.
(...)
Two years on, the editor continues to own and operate the journal as before, even as this financial arrangement is concealed from readers, authors and peer reviewers. The risk of substandard scholarship being pushed through editorial processes for commercial reasons remains, while continued debates about the alleged academic threat posed by social justice concerns can serve as a smokescreen for more dangerous profit-seeking agendas.

Admittedly, few countries could adequately respond to a disaster of this magnitude—certainly not Mozambique, a country in the midst of a debt crisis, whose annual Gross Domestic Product barely tops US$12 billion. The debt crisis is the result of a combination of factors including an over reliance on the extractives sector, which has made the country vulnerable to fluctuating commodity prices; public borrowing for large-scale infrastructure projects; and extensive fiscal incentives to lure multinational corporations.
(...)
In an ironic twist, the International Monetary Fund and donors (who until then had tolerated—even promoted—a national bourgeoisie embedded in political patronage networks and allied to global capitalist interests), froze general budget and sector support. With little space to maneuver, the government imposed a series of austerity measures, including a civil service hiring freeze, and cuts to social sectors such as health, education, social welfare, sanitation and hygiene. As Idai, swept across Mozambique, it encountered a state weakened by an extractivist development model and captured by global capital.

"If you don't consider the risk of them chopping you to pieces to be too high, get out of your car and do your job. Vaccinate people. Negotiate in every way possible. Talk to the families. Talk to the priests. Talk to everyone."
It's a vicious circle. The greater the resistance, the more the teams must worry about their safety. But the greater the militarization of the operation, the greater the fear and resistance in the villages. Shako is not a fan of the escorts. But he also doesn't want to be responsible for the death of any of his people. "There's a war going on," he said.

In a series of letters to Blackstone and government officials in Czech Republic, Denmark, Ireland, Spain, Sweden and the US, Farha and Deva accused private equity and asset management firms like Blackstone and its subsidiaries of undertaking “aggressive evictions” to protect its rental income streams, shrinking the pool of affordable housing in some areas, and effectively pushing low and middle-income tenants from their homes.
Blackstone disputed the claims.

The review, which draws on 75 individual interviews with senior experts, concluded there are real-time problems in the design, delivery and management of large new programs, many of which are years behind schedule. A large proportion of new designs has been returned for more work by the new, and clearly value adding, Aid Governance Board. The department is turning increasingly to multilaterals and contractors but is then finding it lacks the capability to partner with them effectively.
Departmental reviews of facilities, economic partnerships and various organisational relationships, chart a decline in impact due to skills shortages. Consequently, bilateral and multilateral partners and institutional peers are telling Australia it is a less valuable partner. This is compounded by the frequent delegation of complex policy dialogue to relatively junior generalists. Access and influence are at risk. Australia’s ability to coordinate a major expansion of international activity in the Pacific, while keeping local leaders in the driver’s seat, is widely questioned, including by strong supporters of integration.

Counter-intuitively, an alternative is to sell the donated food and medicine at market prices to those who want to make their living by distributing and selling necessities to consumers. But how will those in need be able to buy the food if, by definition, they are in need? Here is where markets and modern technology come to the rescue.
The money collected by selling the food to the distributors can be transferred to those in need to enable them to buy it. If people have bank accounts and debit cards, as most Venezuelans do (courtesy of hyperinflation, which has wiped out the value of cash), then distributing money becomes a simple process of crediting the bank accounts of selected beneficiaries, which is unlikely to slow down the recovery because it can be done faster than distributing goods. The difficult part is to coordinate the arrival of the money in consumers’ accounts with the physical arrival of the additional goods on shelves: if it arrives too soon, inflation will ensue; if it arrives too late, the goods will not get to consumers in time. This mechanism has several distinct advantages over free distribution.

It’s about what we’re calling civil society. Whether before or after the revolution, the discourse is always on the formal or semi-formal organizations; as long as you had a name, a logo and at least two members, you were a civil society thing of some sort. The aspiration was always towards organization status, and many of those movements institutionalized, registering with the newly created Civil Society Commission and developing an administrative hierarchy. Part of this reason was the experience being gained over time, but the bigger and most compelling reasons was – drumroll please – international funding.
The international community, operating on the multiple acronym-formal bureaucracy-do-you-have-a-finance-officer definition of civil society, would only grant funding to CSOs who were a) officially registered with any government entity and b) had a bank account. In the face of these constraints, organizations and movements picked up the tricks relatively quickly, and many people saw the opportunity of making money by setting up organizations just to get funding.
BUT – and here comes the Whole Point of the Post – what about the non-official, ‘informal’ civil society?

He said colonialism had historically taken its toll on indigenous languages, with some communities actively prevented from speaking them.
“One of the enduring horrors of British colonialism is the conviction that one language – English – would be suitable for all interactions and activities. Colonisation resulted in the intergenerational transmission of language effectively breaking down. It’s far harder to relearn a language after you have stopped speaking it.”
He pointed to recent research that shows a correlation between indigenous language sustainability and decreased youth suicide within indigenous communities: “Speaking your indigenous language is not just learning French in school. It has public health implications.”

Sociologist Lasker, one of the few scholars studying the mission approach, found a strong preference among host country staff for programs that train local health providers. "One-off trips may help a few people for a lot of money but don't really have any long-term impact and may be harmful," she says.
She has a litany of concerns about traditional-style missions in addition to travel costs. There's often little follow-up care by trained personnel, she says. It might be that no supplies or medications are left after a group departs — and no one trained in post-surgical needs such as speech therapy for cleft palate patients or physical therapy for burn patients. The care sometimes focuses on medical conditions that are not the main priority of the community — a village might be more interested in dental care than heart surgery, for example, or vice versa. Time often runs out before everyone in line can be seen. People who develop problems between visits don't get any help. The foreign health care providers may not have access to needed equipment, and when missions include students — not just medical and dental students but undergrads as well — they might not be trained to do what they're doing.

In 2018, we interviewed 93 leaders from governments, multilateral agencies, foundations, multinational corporations, development NGOs, and private sector development contractors to assess their views on how global development is changing and how their own organizations are adapting. This research reveals a fragmented development ecosystem and an ever-expanding cast of players. It illuminates worries about how to stay relevant in a world that is heading in many different directions at once. During this upheaval, development leaders are innovating, harnessing technology in exciting ways, using data to drive decisionmaking, and empowering partners on the front lines. They are painfully aware that not all of their organizations are likely to accomplish their goals or continue to exist in their current form. Overall, the survey results paint a picture of a global development sector rife with experimentation and transition.

The viability of these anti-immigrationist policies and the ascendant power of the groups who peddle them, is sustained by the aggravated anxieties of Europeans wanting to preserve their perceived entitlements to neoliberal pursuits without many of the individuals who support that lifestyle through their exploited labor.
(...)
Many African nations, most of which are former European colonies, largely remain sources of extractable material and socio-political resources for European powers. Even in the case of countries like Israel and the US with anti-immigrant leaders who have faced pressure from rights groups, they can still impress their anti-immigrant base and activists by playing political football with human beings.

As Martin Scott, a senior lecturer in media and development at the University of East Anglia, put it: “there are parts of the world in which there are humanitarian crises that neither conform to news values nor do they conform to the interests of western governments, for the same reasons—because they’re geopolitically not vital to the interests of the country. Like Central African Republic… There is a lack of media coverage because that crisis isn’t relevant to the policy of the country that the media’s in in the first place.”
While media coverage might play a role in government thinking about how to respond to a crisis, there are more important factors at play—such as diplomacy, geopolitics, or even domestic politics. That said, the media can be instrumental in determining how a crisis is framed in the public eye—as a military problem, for example; or a humanitarian situation; or a climate change issue.

The disaster grabbed global headlines and ushered in a torrent of foreign journalists to cover its impact. But as the weeks passed and international and national media moved on to other stories, local journalists like Yardin have stayed behind to cover a sole topic: Palu’s long recovery.
Yardin is the editor of Kabar Sulteng Bangkit, a donor-funded news outlet staffed entirely by local journalists whose own newspapers and TV stations shut down during the disaster.
Kabar Sulteng Bangkit, which means “news of reviving Central Sulawesi”, is a grassroots attempt to fill important post-disaster needs: communicating with survivors, and holding official aid and rebuilding efforts accountable.
“The mainstream media now tends to think the earthquake recovery efforts are over and that we’ve left the emergency period,” Yardin said. “But the recovery is long. It has to continually be given attention.”

My desired results of all this? I hope these officials, agencies and nonprofits will become more open to coming to League events and promoting our resources. I hope they will see the League as a resource. I hope more people in general will attend our events and see us an election and legislative resource. I hope more people will pay and join the League of Women Voters Oregon Washington County Unit. I hope we will see more diversity among people who attend our local events and who join the League.

But the US military is not only part of the story of Captain Marvel; as The Grayzone details below, the Pentagon was deeply involved in the production of the film itself.
The cast and directors of Captain Marvel worked closely with the United States military, relying on US military officers as consultants and advisers, employing dozens of active-duty US soldiers as extras. Several scenes were shot on a US military base. And since its release, the US Department of Defense has promoted the film relentlessly on its website and social media accounts.

Across Quebec this week, 35,000 students enrolled in social work, education, nursing, and psychology programs are striking in protest of the critical — but unpaid — labor they provide through their internship training programs. Social-work interns manage caseloads. Education interns write and deliver lesson plans. Nursing interns see patients and complete charting. Yet none are paid for this work.
They are students, the argument goes, and therefore they should pay, not be paid, for these experiences. Yet students in male-dominated fields — engineering, for example — aren’t subject to the same logic; internships in male-dominated fields in the province are paid. This is a strike, thus, for students, for workers, and for women’s work.

It’s not a knock against them. It shows there’s no accountability in our industry. People still show up for these manels, pay their fees, then nod and smile as they tweet away. We don’t stop clicking, or showing up.
Brianna isn’t the only person who sees a serious problem with manels. I know we all notice it. I know our eyes are tired from rolling them so hard. But when are we going to stand up and say enough is enough?
It’s not just the manels, though. It’s the expectation that when we (a collective we – women, people of color, queer people, etc) say yes, we’ll do it for free. Or that we’ll be the token.

The eight men on stage spoke about double-digit growth and higher investments in manufacturing, tourism and energy, while the audience, also a sea of dhaka topi and bald spots, applauded. https://t.co/BsmJBk76Am
— 🔥🔥🔥by @bbhrikuti
#NepalInvestmentSummit2019

— Anup Kaphle (@AnupKaphle) March 29, 2019

“In the U.S. people go in and out of poverty,” she says. “Most Americans enter poverty at some point in their lives. The idea to start fresh and not be always stigmatized by having to need public benefits at one point or falling below the poverty line is a great idea that actually seems to fit within our very individualistic culture.”
There are measures that individuals can take to protect their own data but the ecosystem of companies that collect, sell, and manipulate personal data has become so complex that it is becoming impossible even for experts to navigate it. “It’s increasingly not going to be reasonable to expect individual users to be accountable for the state of their privacy,” says Madden. “So I think we do need to look more towards responses that involve policy measures that instill some level of accountability for companies in the choices that they make.”

Managing Sexual Violence against Aid Workers aims to support aid agencies in preventing, being prepared for and responding to incidents of sexual violence against their staff. It is intended as a good practice guide to help strengthen existing processes and support organisations as they set up their own protocols.
This guide is aimed at anyone with a responsibility for staff care, safety and security, as well as anyone involved in processes aimed at preventing or responding to incidents of sexual violence against staff, such as security focal points, HR staff, project and programmes staff, and first responders to incidents of sexual violence within an aid organisation.

Women and girls also face sexual violence, including sexual exploitation and trafficking, in Italy. Less is known about the men and boys who undertake this journey. These knowledge gaps are of concern, given that an estimated 87.5 percent of refugees and migrants who have entered Italy via the central Mediterranean route since 2016 are men and boys, the latter of whom are largely unaccompanied. The Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) conducted a qualitative exploratory study to examine the nature and characteristics of sexual violence perpetrated against refugee and migrant men and boys traveling the central Mediterranean route to Italy.

The Women's Refugee Commission with a new study.

Confronting the Crisis in Independent Media: A Role for International Assistance


Nicholas Benequista for the Center for International Media Assistance with a brand new report!

Here be monsters? Innovations in evidence mapping

In another map – our first country evidence and gap map for Uganda launched in February this year – we have combined impact evaluations, process evaluations and formative evaluations. We found around 500 evaluations of development interventions published in Uganda since 2000, most of which are little read and less used. (...) By putting them in the public domain we hope to increase the use of the evidence they contain.

What is more interesting is the amount of ‘invisible work’ that I do to achieve this goal of 50% teaching – on the pie graph above it’s in purple (communication) and pink (administrative work, like filling in forms). Invisible work is a term coined by Anselm Strauss and Susan Leigh Star to describe forms of work that are not usually recognised AS work. It’s what my friend Ben Kraal calls “the work you do to do the work you do”. Teaching doesn’t just happen: teaching rooms must be booked, equipment needs to be working, tutors need briefings, guest lectures must be co-ordinated and administration systems negotiated so that marks can be sent to students. All this can be considered invisible work.

For more than a century, Heineken has shown an impressive amount of perseverance and tenacity in the most difficult of times. The rewards have often been rich. At the same time fraud and other controversial practices have played a significant role in that survival strategy (p.30).

‘It’s like Shell twenty years ago. They have not thought about the essence of human rights and only react when there are problems’ (p.189), a Dutch civil society activist remarked. In best international diplomacy speak a senior manager tells the author: ‘In order to further embed the policy we need more awareness internally, local analysis and an adequate planning of action (p.192).

The state wants beer, the army wants beer, the rebels want beer and the people want beer. What do you want us to do? Beer is what we produce (p.128-129).

If your investments end up perpetuating a regime that is authoritarian, immoral and irresponsible, should you not consider your position? I have never heard anyone in the beer industry complain about where their tax money goes. They pay millions and millions, but Congolese lives don’t improve as a result (p.175).

During a civil war, Heineken uses its collaboration with a group of criminal rebels to get rid of a large number of its workers and avoid paying the correct severance package. The beer brewer then proceeds to ignore their complaints for more than fifteen years but continues to highlight in public that it has no greater asset than its personnel (p.237).

Production was lower than usual, since many workers had been killed or fled, but still Heineken succeeded providing large parts of the country with freshly brewed beer (p.199).

In many countries, I found the same type of behaviour, from having ties with authoritarian regimes to violating advertising codes, from engineering mass redundancies to reduce taxation (p.218).

Heineken in Africa is an excellent book, one that underlines the importance of taking a long-term, historical perspective when assessing corporate engagement in Africa and highlighting the nuances of how multinational companies operate in what is all too often labelled as a ‘difficult’ environment. Van Beemen’s particularly strength lies in the fact that he not vilifying a company or making blanket claims about the ‘evils of capitalism’ and yet provides ample of food for thought for assessing the private sector’s role for ‘sustainable development’.

Humanitarian conditions in Haiti have significantly worsened over the past year, the U.N.’s Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Ursula Mueller warned in an address earlier this month.
Hunger levels are on the rise and more than half of Haiti’s population lives below the poverty line. Access to basic services is very limited and more than a quarter of Haitians lack clean water to drink. Some 2.6 million people are expected to be in need of humanitarian assistance in 2019, and more than 300,000 children are unable to get an education.

Governance of the health system remains a problem. The enthusiasm of development theorists and practitioners for improvements in governance embraced the introduction of corporatist managerial methods as a means to this end. Endless audits, flowcharts, grids, log frames, workshops and surveillance strategies later, this approach appears to have achieved little. Failures of leadership, breakdowns in communication, lack of transparency, and a host of other systemic problems have been identified, and managerial solutions prescribed to resolve them. But assumptions about the universal applicability of managerial systems not only ignore the practical difficulties for the health sector staff in PNG, but are also blind to their neo-liberal foundations.

I am ashamed that the UK allowed itself to be bullied into ignoring its long-term interest in an effective, legitimate rules based international system to nod through Trump’s nominee for the World Bank instead of insisting on an open, merit based process. https://t.co/wbKmFRE8cd

— Owen Barder (@owenbarder) April 6, 2019

Hmaidan was described by witnesses as a “predator” who bypassed usual hiring practices to surround himself with attractive women. He told investigators they had been referred to by others as his “harem”. These were qualified professionals who were excited and proud to work for the climate cause. He objectified, belittled and undermined them. Sample comments, which he denied making, include “you’re here to look good” and “you’re smart for a blonde”. One complainant accused him of inappropriately touching her and making repeated sexual overtures.
Working for Hmaidan was miserable, according to the testimony of his former employees. He was demanding and unrealistic, with an explosive response to disappointment. Several staff said they were chronically underpaid.
(...)
The board initially showed limited appetite for self-interrogation. Its instructions to the investigator focused on the complaints against Hmaidan. Walsh reported “systemic issues” at Can-I that were “as troubling and damaging to the organization” as the behaviour of its leader. But the reasons behind those failings, including the weak responses to the 2016 complaint and news of Borday’s death, went unexamined.
That is not to say the board was unaware of its past lapses. After the investigation concluded, it wrote to participants: “The board deeply regrets not undertaking more detailed investigations and more determined corrective action in response to earlier warning signs.”

Conservative estimates in research to be published later this year show that South African newsrooms have shrunk by about half in the past decade. In 2007 there were about 10 000 journalists. Now there are about 5 000.
South Africa fits very much with the developed world global pattern of job losses in the traditional media sector. The losses are mainly in the senior category of journalists (40-60 year olds). In other words, those who are experienced.
The age-old practice of having journalists who are specialists – they write about specific fields such as science and education, also known as beat reporters – have all but disappeared. Other layers that have been removed from newsrooms included those responsible for editing articles and fact checking for accuracy. This explains the spike in mistakes in newspapers as well as online publications.

The rise in child poverty, alongside the deepening housing crisis, is no coincidence. This trend comes as a result of a powerful paradigm shift, in which housing, more than a place to live with dignity, became a financial asset. This has distorted the functioning of land and property markets, as well as generating an increase in homelessness and an imbalance between housing costs, incomes and quality of living.

They complain that health workers are usually not available to serve them – blaming authorities for putting the entire population, in the district, in a danger.
The population claim that their health center, one of the few available facilities, is near to out of service. They argue that taking a patient to the facility is as good as leaving them wherever they are.
The center’s authorities are aware of the problem of absenteeism of staff, but there is little they can do. “Every morning, humanitarian agencies transport staff from the health center to the (refugee) settlements, leaving the health facility with no one to attend to the multitude of patients who come to the hospital on a daily basis,” John Lutara, the Chairperson of Palabek Ogili Health Unit Management Unit, said.
At his capacity, John can only watch. He cannot discipline anyone. This makes him so sad, he says. John thinks majority of his staff got better paying jobs within the humanitarian organizations operating in the region, leaving the facility barely empty.

People like to use this term "African women" to convey a narrative of a woman who doesn't care enough about herself. But they don't actually mean every woman in Africa. Blair's not talking about other white women who look like her, who happen to live in Africa or who grew up there. She's talking about black African girls.

Terrible #globaldev journalism: "How Gigi Hadid Used Social Media to Raise Awareness for Refugee" edition https://t.co/jEOP42k47u

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) April 3, 2019

• Such marketing plays on societal expectations about what a woman will or should put up with. The MTN advert is one of many in which a woman is reduced to an object, with little voice or agency. Even when she’s accosted, she has to smile back. While it is intended to be humorous, it’s not funny for those who face street harassment and intrusion on a routine basis.

The legacy Future Africa is working towards is building a truly Pan-African research hub. Being able to say, years from now, that the center was instrumental in training a Kenyan Ph.D. student or a postdoctoral fellow who has gone home to launch a life-changing project in Nairobi, is an ambition worth chasing, Slippers says. “By providing quality research environment in Africa that connects to the global network, we don’t have to go to Sweden, Sweden can come here.”

Here is an amazing #UnitedNations story that I am ashamed I never knew. This week, @GermanyUN opened the curtains of the #SecurityCouncil chamber overlooking the East River. @SCProcedure explains why these are almost always kept closed. It involves #CheGuevara& a #bazooka! [1/6]

— Richard Gowan (@RichardGowan1) April 4, 2019

These activities occur within a health system already under strain. Electricity shortages, stock ruptures of medical supplies, severe over-crowding, vast infrastructural damage and unemployment are all the policy-inflicted force multipliers of the Israeli occupation. These conditions make the bullet wounds far more dangerous.
For the abandoned people of Gaza, there is no such thing as an ‘international community’ that will address this crisis. There are a collection of political interests, with the most powerful of them entirely backing the occupation. Bilateral aid is channelled at an unprecedented level to Israel, while being entirely cut off from the humanitarian mechanisms needed to deal with the consequences of never ending occupation and siege.
What health professionals can do is to defy these policies by continuing to save lives and alleviate suffering. In the case of Gaza, that means salvaging the limbs that are being targeted with the intention to debilitate.

Support awareness and compliance with new regulations and legislation that can protect privacy. Don’t use “innovation” as an excuse for putting historically marginalized individuals and groups at risk or for allowing our societies to advance in ways that only benefit the wealthiest. Question the current pathway of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and where it may take us.

The SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) potentially offer an inclusive, integrated approach to development, centred on social justice, for all of humanity. But how are they being implemented in practice? Too often a piece-meal, sectoral approach is adopted, rooted in modernist assumptions of linear transition and control.

How might a foundation take on its grantees without stomping on freedom of the press? What rights did funders have to object? What did nonprofit news organizations owe their funders? Was it a good idea to have nonprofit journalism that relied on donations?
The questions raised are difficult and remain largely unaddressed in the nonprofit news sector other than in broad guidelines for funders and nonprofit newsrooms developed by the American Press Institute and a standard reference to a so-called firewall – editorial decisions should not be influenced by financial considerations – by the Institute for Nonprofit News.

But the problem with platforms is not merely a matter of algorithms, whether its tainted historical data reinscribing a history of prejudice, or opaque structures allowing for masked discrimination. Discrimination plays more overtly into the atmosphere of distrust platforms foment and rely on. If the presence of cameras in Airbnbs, etc., implies a mutual distrust among parties to a quasi-social transaction in one sense, it may also unite them against the unannounced but often presumed targets of surveillance in a racist society: racialized others used to rationalize systems of tracking and control. As Simone Browne documents in Dark Matters, many surveillance techniques were developed as part of maintaining slavery and retain that legacy in their implementation.
Cameras in Airbnbs indicate a desire not merely to protect property but an implied willingness to sort people into those who are confident that they “have nothing to hide” (i.e. have not been subjected to direct scrutiny on the basis of some prejudice) and those who have reason to fear being subject to prejudicial suspicion.

Why solely focusing on the bias or accuracy of facial recognition misses the big picture, in 17 words:

“The surveillance state acts more like a sledgehammer — sweeping, indiscriminate; as much about intimidation as about monitoring.” https://t.co/dRvnr6bZNB

— Matt Cagle (@Matt_Cagle) April 5, 2019

The conclusions of this article suggest that the utilization of WhatsApp has impacted the relationship between journalists and sources both on a personal and professional level. New perceptions of intimacy and trust, camaraderie and obtainability, and temporality are observed among the journalists who use this application. These observations carry important professional and ethical implications for journalists navigating today’s media ecology, and show how technological and socioprofessional aspects are tightly interwoven.

Excited to share research with you that I have been working on since grad school 😳

Question: what happened to the sons of slaveholders who lost wealth (sometimes tremendous fortunes) after the Civil War? Did sons rebound & join elite, or did wealth loss transmit to next gen?

— Leah Boustan (@leah_boustan) April 1, 2019

This is the inaugural issue of the student journal on the deepening of transformation, decolonisation, and the Africanisation of higher education.

Updates illuminate, amongst others,
new EU structures dealing with the Common Security and Defence Policy;
significant changes in the management structures of the Department of Peace Operations of the United Nations;
good practice instructions on tackling safety concerns, including cyber;
concepts of migration, gender and sexual exploitation and abuse;
the role of policing in peace operations.

Many refugees who cannot pay bribes said their personal cases, including detailed interviews and fraught histories establishing a need for resettlement, were stolen by others who can afford to skip the queue to a new life. Some report going to the UNHCR after years of interviews and other procedural checks, only to be told they had already resettled, leading them to conclude someone else had gone abroad using their identity.

Former UNHCR and U.N. investigators, as well as others with experience of U.N. processes, also argue that diplomatic immunity allows U.N. staff to exploit refugees without fear of punishment. "There has been a bit of movement but it's moving the deck chairs on the Titanic. You'll never get accountability with them policing themselves," said Edward Flaherty, a Geneva-based lawyer who's worked on U.N.-related cases for two decades.
"The U.N. fiddles around the edges, they issue new policies, [but] the immunity and impunity remains. The lack of accountability remains. … It's amazing that [corruption] is still being revealed, because the U.N. crushes whistleblowers."

Like other refugees interviewed for this series, the sexual violence survivors in Nakivale reported the corruption they came up against to the UNHCR, but said they only suffered more afterward. The UNHCR's Inspector General's Office lacks the independence, local knowledge and desire to properly investigate, according to former and current UNHCR staff and two former U.N. investigators. Dozens of refugees across five countries, interviewed as part of this investigation, say the IGO has tended to clear allegedly corrupt officials rather than supporting refugees who are victims of them.

The UN promised a referendum on self-determination for the Sahrawis as part of the 1991 agreement, but the terms of that vote have never been agreed. The Algeria-backed Polisario Front demands the option for full independence, but Morocco is only willing to consider autonomy under its flag.
Anna Theofilopoulou, who was part of the UN’s negotiating team from 1994 - 2006, says she is “doubtful” the referendum will ever happen.
“For reasons outside Polisario's control, for the most part, it has not managed to [deliver a referendum],” she says. “But it remains engaged in the UN process while having to contend with mounting frustration in the camps, especially among the young people.”

The donation of Tsingtao beer brand was delivered to residents of Tiaty by a Chinese Company, Ghuanshan International Mining Company Limited, on Friday.
Baringo is one of the areas most affected by the ongoing drought triggered by delayed long rains.
Dr Ombacho said food donations must meet the accepted standards to avoid poisoning desperate people.
"While we welcome people of goodwill to support, it must be proper food fit for human consumption," he said.

But the government has made little headway in enforcing laws that require prescriptions for buying antibiotics, nor has it done much to stem the flow of bootleg drugs that spill across the nation’s 400-mile border with Somalia.

Market March has been effective at reducing market harassment in markets, says Jekein Lato-Unah, head of projects and human rights and advocacy at Stand to End Rape Initiative, a nonprofit organization that focuses on creating awareness on violence against women and girls and who's not involved with the Market March movement.
"I visited the market sometime in January this year and what used to be five to ten men verbally harassing me was reduced to just one man raining curses on me because I told him off. We don't expect change immediately but it's good to know a lot of them digested Market March messages," Lato-Unah says.

Future deals like this present an opportunity to change the model followed in Sicomines and by most Sino-African trade relations. This has, to date, essentially involved China supplying value-added manufactured goods and high-skilled workers. In exchange, African countries have agreed to export mainly primary-based resource products. And African workers are hired for unskilled, low-cost tasks.

A heavy metal fan base has been developing in Botswana for years now, and a surprising number of women from across the generations are identifying with the genre as they rebel against a society structured along patriarchal lines.

Two of the most frequent questions that we receive daily from users of the ReliefWeb jobs section are "Where can I send a job application?" and "How can I help or collaborate with you?" Many of these messages come from university graduates seeking to make positive contributions to the world and looking for an entry point.

A few lines from me about the gender pay gap in #aid organisations. This reflects a wider problem with inequality and imbalance of power in the sector that we must all challenge: Marie Stopes has worst gender pay gap among UK aid groups — again https://t.co/NuhnodalrH

— Gemma Houldey (@AidSoulSearch) April 8, 2019

It’s that time of year again when the media remind us that the conflict in Syria began on March 15, 2011, but we both know that wars seldom start or stop with such precision. We also know that this date has another meaning for your family: it’s the day your youngest brother was born. It’s amazing how fast these eight years have flown by, and how slowly. How much pain they have brought your family, and also some joy.

As a tangible example of this compression and globalization of the challenge of shaping new technologies for good, consider ‘digital identity’. Over several recent and ongoing projects, it’s become clear to us that the challenges states face in granting digital identities to the one billion people who lack a digital identity are intertwined with (indeed, possibly at cross-purposes with) of the challenges of preventing surveillance, tracking, and erosion of privacy that concern many of us in the Global North. In a sense, there are a billion people who are seen too little by the emerging digital infrastructure, and at least a billion who now feel they are seen too much. Good policymaking and good innovation will keep the tension between these issues in mind. One can’t be solved without the other.

Beyond the raw numbers, our posts travel far and wide on forwards from one friend to another, creating awareness and excitement well beyond our actual subscribers.
For example, multiple research requests are leading to new findings and your provocative posts calling for real change in the industry create new collaborations and new initiatives.
In addition, ICTworks posts helped create the MERL Tech and ICTforAg conferences, and contributed to USAID Digital Development Forums in Ghana, Zambia, India, and Central America.

A new map of nearly all of Africa shows exactly where the continent’s 1.3 billion people live, down to the meter, which could help everyone from local governments to aid organizations. The map joins others like it from Facebook created by running satellite imagery through a machine learning model.

There are so many protection issues for civilians implicit in this @facebook mapping project I would like some answers about including... 1) https://t.co/uchsHB3ULj

— Nathaniel Raymond (@nattyray11) April 10, 2019

Dozens of UK business owners are using artificial intelligence to scrutinise staff behaviour minute-to-minute by harvesting data on who emails whom and when, who accesses and edits files and who meets whom and when.
The actions of 130,000 people in the UK and abroad are being monitored in real time by the Isaak system, which ranks staff members’ attributes.

A new journal is born: Journal of Humanitarian Affairs! I am very happy to have been invited to write the closing op-ed. Share generousy, comment similarly. Open access.🙏🏾🙏🏾 @MeeraSabaratnam my piece shouts out to your immensely important work. 🤲🏾 https://t.co/WNWCKL5KP9

— Olivia U. Rutazibwa (@o_rutazibwa) April 6, 2019

This paper summarises the processes by which children become vulnerable to sexual exploitation and related harms within or facilitated by orphanages. It concludes by canvassing the international, regional and domestic initiatives that respond to these risks, as well as strategies designed to prevent the sexual exploitation of children living in orphanages.

Humanitarian response that is locally owned and led is becoming the new norm for humanitarian assistance in the Asia-Pacific region. National governments are increasingly setting their own localisation agendas and requiring international actors to reconsider traditional humanitarian roles.The Sulawesi response takes us closer to understanding the new norm and provides lessons for how humanitarian actors need to adapt.

New #UKaid review - @DFID_UK’s partnerships with civil society organisations - finds delays & uncertainty in funding UK government programmes delivered by #CSOs hampered the results of UK aid work

Find out more: https://t.co/7q6DsMkowopic.twitter.com/FuzNRUvlyo

— ICAI (@icai_uk) April 10, 2019

In a country where mental health was still considered an emerging field before the war, Syrians are working to address and manage the mental health and psychological effects of war. Despite this disastrous situation, there appears to have been significant progress in the field of mental health during the crisis.

A judge in Nevada has fined the world’s biggest publisher of fake science journals more than $50 million, quoting evidence from this newspaper that helped demonstrate the publisher’s deceptive practices.

I do think that sociocultural anthropology is qualified to help the world in thinking through Eurocentric, misogynistic, and capitalist views of the world; to bring attention to how power operates, its various scales and institutional similarities and differences; and to help bring a comparative perspective to the diverse ways that humans and nonhumans have (in the past and present) continued to coexist and resist. Primarily, we do that through our methodology of long-term participant-observation and through the ways we put the pieces of our research together, in conversations between people and social theories, slowly and carefully over time. We do not hurry to make sweeping comparisons or to create far-reaching theories that strip others of their complexity. This precision is our strength, even as we make the supposedly strange familiar and show how the familiar can sometimes be strange.

Despite the fact that neither students’ grades nor self-study hours are affected by the instructor’s gender, we find that women receive systematically lower teaching evaluations than their male colleagues. This bias is driven by male students’ evaluations, is larger for mathematical courses, and particularly pronounced for junior women. The gender bias in teaching evaluations we document may have direct as well as indirect effects on the career progression of women by affecting junior women’s confidence and through the reallocation of instructor resources away from research and toward teaching.

Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder visits #Ethiopia - but it's not his fault alone that stereotypical #globaldev images shape the communication of his visit - a thread 1/n https://t.co/ccBcvLNQwB

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) April 18, 2019

Adjacent to the food distribution point is Kawere primary school, where Brian and his two friends are playing on the football pitch. The three boys are visibly malnourished. Their families can only afford a single meal.
A local educational officer says school children often collapse from hunger.
The World Food Programme (WFP) is now giving cash assistance to villagers. They expect most Zimbabweans to require food aid until 2020.
“The most important livelihood opportunity is agriculture, but with the current situation it means there is nothing until next year. So there a strong possibility that we will need to support families until March next year,” says the WFP’s country coordinator, Eddie Rowe. The current food crisis in Zimbabwe has been exacerbated by the reliance on a single staple crop, maize, which is not suited to drought or warmer temperatures.

She went on to explain what she sees as the core issue of development stories: an inauthentic understanding of storytelling. She illustrated how stories are often collected as “raw material” from the developing world and then shipped to the United Kingdom and other Western headquarters to be processed for Western donors and institutions. “We were the story factory. We were shaping the narrative to suit our own objectives,” she confessed, recalling her own challenges with storytelling while she was the executive director at a major philanthropic foundation.
(...)
Msimang offered some solutions that start with asking ourselves questions. She asks us to consider how stories are made and who we think the stories are intended to influence. With that, she says we might find some uncomfortable truths. For some organizations, it might mean restructuring key messaging or new storytellers altogether.
“Investing in storytellers and deemphasizing the key messages of your organizations [and] your storylines means complicating the narrative,” she said.

I deliberately use the word ‘victims’ because while we debate which terms are synonym of empowerment, the daily realities of these women, men, and children affected by this 10-year long conflict are about survival. There is nothing empowering about a family of 5 living in a makeshift shelter made up of plastic and bed sheets whose size is less than 5 square meters. There is nothing empowering about having to choose whether to eat in the morning or at night because there is only one meal day. There is nothing empowering about sending children to beg to buy something to eat. There is nothing empowering about living in a space where there is not a single toilet and that you have to walk several meters in the pitch-dark night to defecate or urinate in the open.

It was a quandary that Mr. Harrison, who has forged close ties with the Silicon Valley elite over the years, had been mulling for some time. Now he is doing something about it. Under a new program, start-up founders will be able to share their wealth not just with impoverished families in the developing world but also with a rather more comfortable demographic — Charity: water employees.
Here’s how it works: Entrepreneurs who own sizable stakes in private companies can donate some of their equity to Charity: water. When their company goes public or is sold, some of the proceeds will be paid out as bonuses to Mr. Harrison’s staff.

A model aid agency tweet.
No logos.
No expatriate staff.
No fundraising appeal.
No celebrities.
And wonderful dignity. https://t.co/bSMj009FRA

— Jeff Crisp (@JFCrisp) April 13, 2019

Confidential documents obtained by the AP show UNAIDS is grappling with previously unreported allegations that Brostrom and her former supervisor may have taken part in “fraudulent practices and misuse of travel funds.”
The ongoing turmoil is a damaging distraction for an agency at the center of multibillion-dollar, taxpayer-funded U.N. efforts to end the global AIDS epidemic by 2030. The virus affects more than 37 million people worldwide and kills more than 900,000 people every year.
“The U.S. highly values transparency and due diligence and in this context, supports the timely completion of all investigations,” said the U.S. spokesperson, who added that the government remains “committed” to a strong U.N. AIDS agency. The U.S. stopped short of saying whether any funding would be withheld.

Yes, there was arsenic in Bangladesh’s wells, and it may have posed a health threat. But in areas where people were encouraged to switch away from the wells, child mortality jumped by a horrifying 45 percent — and adult mortality increased too. It turns out that the alternatives to the wells, for most people in Bangladesh, were all worse — surface water contaminated with waterborne diseases, or extended storage of water in the home, which is also a major disease risk.
Is that worse than well water laced with low levels of arsenic? The paper reviews the complex, often contradictory literature around the effects of chronic low-level arsenic exposure and finds that it does increase your risk of cancer in old age. The authors conclude that risks seem to accumulate with more exposure, but the effects are still small next to the effects of unclean drinking water.
That means that, in encouraging people to switch away from the wells, development agencies swapped out a fairly limited risk for a much larger risk — and people died as a result.
“We worry about scary things like arsenic,” Rachel Glennerster, chief economist at the UK’s Department for International Development and one of the researchers who wrote the paper, told me. “But some of the everyday costs of things that seem not so scary, like diarrhea, are actually huge.”

But I am becoming increasingly concerned that AI will, in fact, block the traditional growth path by replacing low-wage jobs with robots.

“It is difficult to access these international organisations,” says Scotou general secretary, Ahmed Hassan. “They are based inside Mogadishu airport, which is heavily guarded; there is nothing much we can do to advocate for the rights of local workers. Somali staff members, especially casual workers who report to the base every day, are not even allowed to use their mobile phones at work for security reasons, which means they cannot call their family members even in an emergency. This is unacceptable.”
(...)
“There is always an international staff assigned to supervise Somali nationals regardless of their capacity, position, experience or level of education,” she says. “They assume that we are not competent enough to execute our duties and the fact that we are Somalis we are bound to make mistakes therefore, there is always that white or non-Somali looking after you, watching and correcting your mistakes.”

At the top of our demands is equal pay for equal work – which means consultants should be remunerated at a living level, and receive equivalent benefits and support to those working for a Swiss employer. All organizations should provide comprehensive and accessible information to current and future consultants about their fiscal and administrative obligations. We also believe that the CCB can provide effective input into collective efforts to ensure fee rates and benefits are more transparent and consistent across Geneva, and that institutions like UNOG, the cantonal authorities and Swiss Permanent Mission can do more to help. There is still scope for organizations to help consultants who have to bear high, potentially ruinous, retrospective obligations.

To address this, we decided to aim for complete salary transparency across all projects and all locations. ‘Salary’ and ‘transparency’ are two words you don’t often see together. This was unfamiliar territory - and definitely scary. For some, it conjured up thoughts of: Will I be forced to reveal my salary publicly? What if I’m paid too much? Too little? Will I be given a raise? Could my salary decrease? After talking with organizations who had implemented some form of salary standards (thanks, colleagues at Ushahidi) and reading about others, it became clear that there were many forms of transparency. Some organizations were transparent internally (among staff) while others went public (e.g. Buffer). Some published a raw number without explanation due to legal requirements (e.g. government employers like the State of New York) while others published a formula (again, Buffer). For HOT, we felt like the best solution was one that emphasized transparency and equity during the process, rather than being overly focused on the end result without any explanation of how it was determined. Our management team felt we needed a solution which accomplished the following

One thing is clear: Social media is changing how people communicate during emergencies. Instant communication and real time data helps humanitarian organizations and survivors to respond and recover faster and more safely. At the same time, misinformation and disinformation can increase insecurity for vulnerable communities. Institutional disaster responders need to learn how to proactively deal with these challenges, while media and information literacy programs in disaster prone countries can play an important role in helping journalists, community leaders and survivors access vital information and identify misinformation. Better informed communities can make more informed decisions about their future. In the aftermath of an emergency, that can be the difference between life and death, between recovery and deterioration.

One of the recurring criticisms of large-scale philanthropists is that they aren’t interested in any redress of the economic systems that create inequality. But in order to rectify inequalities, doesn’t a radical rethinking need to happen? Bill and I are both on the record saying that we believe in more progressive taxes. We believe in an estate tax. We don’t believe in enormous inherited wealth

The hyper-focus on “solutions” is also a way to avoid acknowledging systemic injustice. It happens often when we talk about uncomfortable things like racism and white privilege, or sexism and male privilege, or colonization and wealth. Going directly to solutions makes us feel productive while allowing us to avoid feelings of guilt, shame, and helplessness that often accompany these conversations. But these impulsive solutions are often ineffective because they are not grounded deeply in courageous acknowledgement of the root causes of problems.
Solutions Privilege helps maintain the status quo and keeps systemic injustice in place. In order to address injustice, those who benefit most from it have to be able to see it, understand our roles in perpetuating it, accept that it’s our responsibility to address it, spend enough time to really grasp it, examine our conscious and unconscious biases that might prevent us from registering certain solutions to it, accept that solutions to entrenched problems are complex, and trust that the people most affected by injustice would have the most effective solutions and support them to implement these solutions.

The mixed medium book (part narrative and part graphic novel) is based on real life events. It uses eyewitness accounts to reconstruct the 1994 Rwandan genocide in which 850,000 people were massacred in one hundred days. It follows the main protagonist through repeated attempts to hold to account a UN colleague accused of being intimately implicated in that atrocity. And in doing so, it takes the readers through an account of the major international crises - from Sudan to the Congo, from Gaza to Myanmar - of the past 30 years.

In many countries there appears to be a considerable number of well-educated taxi drivers of foreign origin. Their number seems to have increased over the past 25 years. This observation, of course, leads to the question, why are they driving taxis and why don’t they have jobs corresponding to their level of education?
(...)
Although these rankings are often subject to critical questioning, at the end of the day they are taken seriously, leading to the perception that there is a global market for education. As argued above, this idea is up for debate since the majority of higher education is national, or even local, with graduates going into national, or even local, labour markets.
The implication appears to be that leaders of academic institutions – maybe with the exception of those 200 so-called world-class universities – should care much more about their home markets than about global markets and they should reflect much more about their internationalisation strategies.
This is particularly the case in countries with nationals who speak a language of restricted global use. That has led to increased academic teaching in English in such countries, a change that is open to questioning. For there is no evidence that teachers communicate better in a language that is not their mother tongue. Neither is there any evidence that students understand things better in a foreign language.

me, sobbing: "I haven't worked all week."
partner, gently: "you've facilitated two events, given feedback on three chapters, met with five students, and written eight recommendation letters."
me: "AS MY UNFINISHED BOOK EXPLAINS, ONLY IT HAS VALUE UNDER CAPITALISM"

— Lauren Stokes (@laurenstokes) April 11, 2019

When I tweeted out the piece, a fellow academic responded: “This sounds….familiar: ‘CorePower churns out thousands more “certified” teachers than the company offers to employ.’”
She’s referring to the overproduction of PhDs: too many people coming through grad school, and too few sustainable academic jobs. And as anyone in any field understands, when there’s way more qualified applicants than jobs, the existing jobs can demand more of applicants (more qualifications, less money) while applicants lower their own expectations (for compensation, for benefits, for job security, for course load and service, for location). So why don’t academic departments just decrease the number of PhD students they accept? Because those students have become an integral cog in the contemporary university.

Aksel seemed to thrive in an environment of broad mandate, vague strategy, and little perceptible internal regulation. He seemed to be always working, always rushing out of the office to this or that important meeting, or frantically trying to finish one more email before barely making it to the airport to catch a flight to Erbil or Istanbul. Ray couldn’t remember the last time he’d had more than a 15-minute conversation of substance with his direct supervisor (p.16).

As Larry found himself pulled into the murky world of cross-border humanitarian operations, little did he know that the truth of what actually happened with grant US-008-58673-0062 would spiral through the cramped offices of the Ronald Reagan Building, smoky pubs in Sweifiah, and the dusty planes of As Sweidah.

Ahead in the light of a sinking afternoon sun Ranim could see the border fence, the guard towers, the light blue banner with “UNHCR” on it with big white letters. And beyond that, the clean open desert of Jordan. Ranim turned once more to look back at Noor. “Come on, hyati. We’re almost there!” (p.90).

I am basically repeating my previous praise for J’s writing. Cross-border is an entertaining read during your next ‘airport purgatory’, a thoughtful reflection on contemporary challenges in humanitarianism that students (and researchers!) should discuss and the continuation of friend’s literary journey that I have been fortunate to accompany from my academic sideline!

Katie Meyler, the CEO and founder of More Than Me, has resigned six months after a ProPublica investigation revealed her charity missed opportunities to prevent the rapes of girls in its care by a senior staff member, Macintosh Johnson, with whom Meyler once had an intimate relationship.
Meyler, who founded the charity in 2009 to save vulnerable girls from sexual exploitation, had been on a leave of absence pending the results of three separate inquiries by the charity and the Liberian government into ProPublica’s report, which outlined that Meyler and charity officials gave Johnson significant power over vulnerable students, were not transparent about the extent of his abuse and failed to make sure that all of his potential victims were tested after it came to light that he had AIDS when he died.
The findings of these inquiries have yet to be made public, but Meyler announced her departure Friday evening on Facebook:

Multiple government and military sources in Khartoum have confirmed to CNN that Bashir's government received the proposals and began to act on them, before Bashir was deposed in a coup earlier this month. One official of the former regime said Russian advisers monitored the protests and began devising a plan to counter them with what he called "minimal but acceptable loss of life."
While the documents do not come from official Russian agencies, they were essentially a blueprint for protecting the Kremlin's interests in Sudan and keeping Bashir in power.

A #Peabody goes to #BBCAfricaEye in collaboration @Amnesty International, @Bellingcat network & independent analysts @Twitter for "Anatomy of a Killing," for innovative reporting to source a viral video of an atrocity, bringing the perpetrators to justice. https://t.co/g3hPME05qQpic.twitter.com/jHFJTlLMoq

— Peabody Awards (@PeabodyAwards) April 23, 2019

Poorer nations have suffered harsher effects in part because they’re concentrated in already hotter parts of the world, like Africa, South Asia, and Central America. In such places, a tick up in temperatures can quickly cut labor productivity and agricultural yields while increasing levels of violence, crime, suicides, illness, and mortality. These effects have been identified in many studies, including earlier work by Burke (see “Hot and violent”). In addition, the same countries often don’t have the money to invest in tools, infrastructure, and programs to address these dangers.

Yet, when it comes to actually doing something to meet those goals, many companies have thrown up their hands. Almost half of the companies surveyed, or 44%, had no plan in place for how to reach water-savings goals.

Many allegations involve financial improprieties, management inaction or sexual assault — or sometimes all the infractions wrapped in a single case.
One UN official who wanted to remain nameless called the problems “endemic” and getting worse.
When the underlying factor of a controversial political appointment kicks in, usually for a prestigious and career-building job demanded by a UN member government or regional group, capable international civil servants suffer. They talk of being forced to work under the imposed and often unqualified overlord who may have neither experience in the field nor respect for UN rules.

An immersive poverty experience is coming to Birmingham this month allowing both adults and children to experience the sights, sounds and smells of a developing country.

The comments say it all: "The height of poverty porn". While the UK is in all sorts of austerity-related trouble, some org wants to bring a terrible #globaldev idea to Birmingham https://t.co/W6mxIFoOGH

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) April 22, 2019

Unfortunately, the Special Report offers no organising framework for readers to make sense of the mechanisms in the management, regulation, financing, or delivery of the various services or arrangements it presents. It offers little in the way of assessing potential causes from effects or confounding variables (I can’t believe I’m saying this — I’m not an economist!). It sidesteps issues of equity explicit in SDG4 by suggesting governments have a somewhat necessary (but potentially inefficient) concern to cater for the public good, while also citing, in parts, that private schooling may be inequitable.
All this left me perplexed.

Billions of dollars’ worth of gold is being smuggled out of Africa every year through the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East – a gateway to markets in Europe, the United States and beyond – a Reuters analysis has found.
(...)
Much of the gold was not recorded in the exports of African states. Five trade economists interviewed by Reuters said this indicates large amounts of gold are leaving Africa with no taxes being paid to the states that produce them.

The active role of local NGOs in flood response also exposed language issues in coordination. Many coordination meetings are still in English in Lebanon, in a country where English is not an official language – which is somehow puzzling. My own reading of this is that Lebanese local NGOs are too polite to ask – and that expats have, somehow selfishly, normalized the situation, perhaps not realizing that local NGOs vote with their feet and just stop coming to meetings when not feeling welcome. Realizing this, we have now in the Bekaa a bilingual interpreter in all interagency meetings, so that everybody can express themselves in the language they feel more comfortable with.
The language gap also runs inside the local NGO community. Big Beiruti NGOs, as well as Lebanese NGOs set up by the educated Syrian diaspora, manage themselves very well in English. This is, however, not the case for long-established, smaller local NGOs in the Bekaa. This does not mean that they have less effective transnational connections – just that in many cases, they are not necessarily with the Western world.

TribesForGOOD aims to provide a more sustainable solution to volunteering by pairing participants with social enterprises, enabling skills development and first-hand experience in the philanthropic and impact-driven arena. The concept of ‘Volungearing’ was birthed in 2018 to distinguish a new, sustainable type of volunteering experience.

“Now, like never before, it is so important to have strong female lead characters who are emotionally connected to their world and who can choose to change their world,” she said. “So to me, selecting an all-female writing team was a natural fit, because who better to create and connect to those characters than females themselves.”

The process of deciding what to ask for, and gathering supporting evidence, is hugely labour-intensive for indigenous communities and even national governments, so a torrent of claims is unlikely. Calls for restitution are nevertheless part of a modern museum’s workload. “We absolutely acknowledge where our collections are from,” says Dugdale. “And if you do that, you have to be open to having some different conversations. But it’s not going to be the case that suddenly all museums are going to be denuded of everything. That’s just not realistic.”

International reporters today are frustrated that they can’t get Americans to care about the rest of the world. Part of the reason may be that coverage of places like Haiti or East Africa is either shallow or relentlessly negative, often portraying people as passive victims. Solutions stories restore agency to the people we cover because they often show people solving their own problems. Solutions stories tend to be surprising and counterintuitive. And they are by no means some fluffy alternative to hard-hitting reporting. To the contrary, they seek to replace a type of lackluster international reporting that paints any half-baked idea as a magic cure to poverty or disease. Solutions journalism leads us to critical questions about the status quo: why, for instance, do international charities continue to spend so much money on disaster relief when scientific evidence suggests it’s far more cost-effective to save or improve lives through preventative interventions such as distributing anti-malarial mosquito nets–or even just handing out cash?
A few years ago, Ryan Lenora Brown reported for the Christian Science Monitor how unconditional cash transfers were not only giving low-income Africans in Lesotho control over their own lives, but were proving more effective than other types of aid. In true solutions journalism fashion, she also examined cash transfers’ limitations– namely, that most research on cash transfers has focused on short-term benefits. And she painted a picture of where cash transfers were heading: toward government companion programs that might make cash transfers a viable long-term solution to several facets of poverty.
(...)
Solutions journalism demands that we take a critical look at what’s truly working, and why. A new super-medicine? Let’s explain how scientists discovered it and why they think it might work where others have not. A new push to hand out computer tablets to African students? Is there any evidence to suggest that traditional paper textbooks don’t work just as well?

THREAD: The retail apocalypse in full swing: Gymboree closes 800 stores, Shopko 105, Payless 2300, Charlotte Russe 400.

What’s behind it? Some blame Amazon or changing taste, but the real culprit is private equity. We’ll explain how PE makes money as these businesses fail. 1/12

— Eileen Appelbaum (@EileenAppelbaum) April 19, 2019

I did tell them that they had facilitated multiple crimes in the EU referendum. That as things stood, I didn’t think it was possible to have free and fair elections ever again. That liberal democracy was broken. And they had broke it.
It was only later that I began to realise quite what TED had done: how, in this setting, with this crowd, it had committed the equivalent of inviting the fox into the henhouse. And I was the fox. Or as one attendee put it: “You came into their temple,” he said. “And shat on their altar.”
I did. Not least, I discovered, because I named them. Because nobody had told me not to. And so I called them out, in a room that included their peers, mentors, employees, friends and investors.

In the context of alienation and poverty, their desire to share their lives is gripping, even overpowering. The anchors call for an audience, as if in dialogue. This prompts the question: if the anchors are demanding attention, does live streaming augment our engagement as spectators? Reducing the relation of subject and object in the film to anchor/audience, without the camera’s mediation, the ethical issues that are raised concern the possibility of an active spectator. At the same time, the mass consumerism that often surfaces in the film as a contrast to the anchors’ economic struggles suggests a digitally heightened form of behavioral commerce.

Amazing graph.

What happens when adolescent girls in Malawi stop receiving cash transfers?

Nine months later... marriage & fertility rates spike upward, erasing the previous treatment effect.https://t.co/Q2WCktysXj via @BerkOzler12pic.twitter.com/DunjbnzGCr

— Justin Sandefur (@JustinSandefur) April 22, 2019

Core funding is vital as it enables us to maintain our independence – ShareAction takes no money from the corporate sector or the investment industry in order that we can continue to challenge the system and influence the policies that govern it. Independence means we can work alongside our funders to contribute together towards strategic goals. Core funding also enables us to think longer-term and be responsive to opportunities for increasing our impact in a rapidly changing context

Imagine your house is gone. And yet the TV is still standing.
That's one of the scenes that photojournalist Tommy Trenchard documented as he visited parts of Mozambique hit by Cyclone Kenneth on Thursday.

If there is anything Congolese and international analysts agree on, it is that most attacks are not the work of armed groups, but of local networks involving politicians, local leaders and other powerbrokers. The suggestion that armed groups funded by conflict minerals are involved in the killings of Ebola responders is not only mistaken, it is also dangerous. This framing of the problem could inadvertently ramp up a heavy-handed militarization of the Ebola response. Given the violence that has punctuated the region’s recent history, increased militarization is likely to heighten people’s fears and deepen the divide between people in eastern Congo and those working to stop them from getting Ebola.
Linking Ebola to conflict minerals distracts from the real challenges in eastern Congo. The international Ebola response should be based on an accurate analysis of the perceptions and interests that are driving negative reactions to Ebola interventions. This includes developing an understanding of the complicated ways in which local power struggles intersect and overlap with national political dynamics and regional geopolitics. Reaching that understanding requires careful efforts from journalists, scholars, and humanitarians.

But while great strides have been made since the West Africa epidemic in learning how to trace contacts and vaccinate infected people, and in how to treat patients better and more humanely, like ALIMA does, winning the information war has proved far harder in North Kivu.
In addition to Facebook, groups have ballooned on platforms such as WhatsApp and other chat rooms, distrusting the Ebola response – and worse – urging people who think they might have the disease to stay away from treatment centres.
“These communities have never seen this kind of mass mobilisation before,” concluded Segoni. “And they’re wondering why now?”

These might look like normal metal detectors, but they’re “data doors,” covertly gathering the identifying info of your phones, including IMEI no. & MAC addresses. New @hrw report is packed full of new discoveries on Xinjiang’s mass surveillance systems: https://t.co/DiQLNaPp83pic.twitter.com/jp0bQq5SiE

— Maya Wang 王松莲 (@wang_maya) May 1, 2019

While Shell and Eni claimed their deal was only with the Nigerian Government, the money was in fact destined for former Oil Minister and convicted money launderer Dan Etete, who, according to prosecutors, used the cash to pay massive bribes to people including former Nigerian President, Goodluck Jonathan.
That’s right – Shell and Eni used Nigeria’s share of oil to fund an alleged bribery scheme, which saw money flow from the companies to shady individuals, instead of the Nigerian state and ultimately the Nigerian people.

As part of the project, the World Bank has developed a contentious new land indicator. Initiated as a pilot program in 38 countries in 2017, the indicator is expected to be expanded to 80 countries this year. The purpose of the indicator is to get countries to transform customary land tenure arrangements into formal titles, so as to render land a “transferrable asset” and therefore make it easier for corporations to acquire it from small-scale farmers.

On 10 April 2019, the UK Supreme Court held unanimously (...) that Vedanta Resources, a UK company, arguably owes a duty of care to villagers living in the vicinity of its Zambian subsidiary, Konkola Copper Mines Plc (KCM). Ruling on a procedural appeal, by upholding the jurisdiction of the UK courts, this landmark judgment allows the claimants, 1826 Zambian villagers, to pursue their case against both the parent and subsidiary companies in the UK. The core legal question, whether a parent company can be held accountable under civil law for human rights violations and environmental harm caused by its foreign subsidiary, is central to the ability of many victims of corporate human rights violations worldwide to access justice.

Dampening study from on youth employment in Ethiopia. Industry unpopular, many exit without alternatives. Self-employ preferred, with positive outcomes in the short-run. BUT these dissipate over time EVEN with a $300 grant to kick-start businesses. https://t.co/slhMcV72s6

— Nicola Banks (@NicolabanksNM) April 30, 2019

Sudan has had three military leaders in the last week. However the political upheaval ends, the backdrop to this crisis includes multiple conflicts, displacement, and an economic crunch affecting the living standards of millions – humanitarian issues that won’t be resolved soon

In addition to taking into consideration the ethical, intellectual property, environmental, sustainability, ownership, and consent aspects mentioned above and being guided by the Digital Principles, it was suggested that donors make sure they do their homework and conduct thorough due diligence on potential partners and grantees. “The vetting process needs to be heightened with blockchain because of all the hype around it. Companies come and go. They are here one day and disappear the next.” There was deep suspicion in the room because of the many blockchain outfits that are hyped up and do not actually have the staff to truly do blockchain for humanitarian purposes and use this angle just to get investments.

Strategic communications is essential to help UNHCR meet its operational objectives – whether it is to influence decision-makers in opening their borders or whether it is to build empathy when large numbers of people are seeking refuge and need help. Communications is also key when we try to mobilize action, like donations to UNHCR or volunteering, even to take refugees into one’s home. These are small actions, but they can make a world of difference for individual refugees.

We live in an extremely unequal world. But we also live in a world where it’s easy to bury the truth by manipulating the scale on your charts or failing to use the appropriate measurements. Do not believe the defenders of capitalism when they talk about how “rising tides are lifting all boats.” The question is: How much are they lifting your boat, versus how much are they lifting my boat? “Oh, well, your boat and my boat are both being lifted by 20 percent…” None of that bullshit, thank you very much. Be honest: Capitalism is delivering windfalls to the rich and crumbs to the poor. Yes, “extreme” poverty is declining, thank God. It should be! But most people still have nearly nothing, and some people have everything they could ever dream of 1000 times over.

While national independence was easier for postcolonial powers to circumvent, the class struggle remained their nightmare, and any African leader who put it on his agenda was immediately taken out — from Patrice Lumumba to Thomas Sankara. Even apartheid’s end in South Africa was stipulated on the fatal compromise whereby gold and diamond mines were not nationalised (as Mandela’s African National Congress had demanded) as a concession to the white ruling class that owned them. The failure to achieve social justice resulted in a deeply polarised country where, aside from a small black bourgeoisie, class and racial divisions still run deep into South African society. It is precisely in this regard that Rodney’s analysis remains as relevant as it was when first published — a call to arms in the class struggle for racial equality.

There was pride from council staff around how they had ensured venues were physically accessible, had provided transport for rural or isolated citizens, and had seen more than the ‘usual suspects’ participate in bidding, and voting, for PB projects. Yet there were clear tensions around these conceptualisations of access and the perception of PB being an accessible process. People may feel excluded by PB due to historical conflicts and disagreements with public institutions or other community members, or if there is a perceived lack of support for people with certain communication abilities or cognitive impairments, or if the times for marketplace events and voting make it impossible to attend. Furthermore, some people clearly still see PB, and the types of projects that are funded, as ‘not for them’; perceptions that are reinforced when they see groups associated with well-resourced institutions or national charities succeed to the detriment of smaller or more marginalized groups.

“We cannot know at this stage what exactly it will find but it is reasonable to assume that, like many large British institutions during the colonial era, the university will have benefited directly or indirectly from, and contributed to, the practices of the time.
“The benefits may have been financial or through other gifts. But the panel is just as interested in the way scholars at the university helped shape public and political opinion, supporting, reinforcing and sometimes contesting racial attitudes which are repugnant in the 21st century.”

Homelessness is caused by people who have $30 million to study the causes of homelessness. https://t.co/U7QTuGnJne

— Micah A. (@LetMicahDown) May 2, 2019

Workplace software companies seem to think that more time on their platforms — and less time switching to others’ — is a solution. They accomplish this by integrating other common workplace tools like Office or Google Drive within their platforms.
Information workers switch windows on average 373 times per day or around every 40 seconds while completing their tasks, according to a Microsoft study.
The idea is that if you’re able to do more of your tasks under one roof, you’ll waste less time clicking in and out of different programs. But if the platforms themselves are riddled with distractions, these efforts are moot.
To be more useful, workplace software will have to get much better at getting us the info we need — surfacing conversations on the same topic that may have happened months ago or helping you find the appropriate channels for your specific needs, for example — without us having to find it.
(...)
“We don’t have a technology problem, we have a boundary problem,” Peck said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s email or a text message, we really suck at boundaries and suck even more at communicating them.”
We have to figure out what those boundaries are, define them, and stick to them.
“My strategy is personal accountability: taking personal responsibility of my own job performance and looking at my personal effectiveness,” Foroux told Recode. “I’m constantly asking if my actions contribute to my overall goals at my job. Talking to coworkers an hour a day on Slack is not bringing me closer to my goals.”

I do not think of the blog (or of myself, for that matter) as strictly academic. I often return to Laura Shepherd's beautiful essay on what it means to identify as an academic and a feminist--and a feminist academic--how those identities co-exist alongside others. I also reflect on the politics of knowledge production in academia and the ways in which our writing sometimes obscures the lives of the people we write about. There is often a silent process of translation in producing academic writing, whereby in order to make people's lives 'theoretically legible', we obscure their humanity, their humor, their emotions, their own language for how they experience the world. Like some of the scholars and writers I admire, from bell hooks to Cynthia Enloe, and from Sara Ahmed to Valeria Luiselli, I am committed to resisting that translation, where possible, both in my academic writing and in other publications.

I recently negotiated with a funding agency (NSF) regarding the ethics of data sharing in qualitative fieldwork in conflict areas. I wrote a memo in case my experience can be helpful for other researchers. My thanks to all who guided me in this process. https://t.co/DvPtMsk0Xn

— Roxani Krystalli (@rkrystalli) April 30, 2019

New study just published on the gender pay gap in academia: https://t.co/9il3zPc99I

Our big takeaways: the pay gap is real (it *worsens* as women advance through their careers) & it’s more than a pipeline problem (so time isn’t going to fix it!) pic.twitter.com/2ylDG0mXuP

— Emma Dreher (@EmmaDreher_) April 29, 2019

At the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the division of the World Bank Group that invests in the private sectors of emerging markets, we have an active portfolio of about US$1 billion in private education. Jobs-oriented higher education is a top priority for us. Some loyalty-and-rewards-type alliance could be quite relevant in this context.
We are already taking steps to support this broader agenda, notably with the launch last year of the IFC Employability Tool, an advisory service recently launched in Ghana and South Africa to help educational institutions in emerging markets improve their employability practices.

We hope one day to be able to pay our interns, but at the moment we aren’t in a financial position where we can fulfill our mission in terms of the hiring decisions we make in order to fulfill our mission. Sometimes, interns are able to find scholarship funds for summer opportunities through their college. Sometimes, they are not. Sometimes, a volcano explodes and kills thousands of people. Who can really explain these things?
Do you have a name like Daphne or Alistair? Then follow our application link at the bottom of the page. If you have a name like Brandi or Troy, please don’t.

The problem was of course that Ellen simply could not process Achieng without imposing a narrative on her. The notion of Achieng learning English in a cyber café and the idea of her parents selling everything for her to go to school — these are apocryphal stories, the kind of tropes that make Africans legible to white people. These tales adorn us like garments. Without them, we are worse than naked; we are invisible and indescribable. Achieng’s socio-economic equivalent in America would never have captured Ellen’s attention. Achieng – bright, bubbly middle-class kid – found herself being cast as a plucky impoverished heroine who had overcome great odds to make it to America. Meanwhile check out her Instagram and its clear that Achieng is living her best life. She’s no elite kid but she’s certainly not the villager Ellen assumed her to be.

Ajayi explains that fashion photographers have very little power to change the status quo because clients usually insist on using lighter-skinned women to market their products. And the images created by the advertising industry in Nigeria often do not represent the audience they are trying to communicate with. “There hasn’t been any real change. I think light-skinned people are still preferred,” he says. “There is an idea that they photograph better. Sometimes people believe clothes pop better on lighter skin.” This thinking even extends to children’s products, with mostly light-skinned babies dominating diaper adverts.
(...)
Recent shifts in how we see beauty such as the body positivity and natural hair movements as well as dark-skinned, Oscar-winning Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o becoming ambassador for French luxury cosmetics house Lancôme, are contributing to our gradual redefining of beauty. My hope is that one day in the near future, no woman in Nigeria will feel she has to lighten her skin to feel beautiful or improve her odds of success in life.

What is happening on the campus of one of India’s oldest universities in the western edge of Uttar Pradesh is representative of a wider movement being led by young women who are dragging society by the scruff and asking questions about a series of “that’s how it is done" rules. From the University of Delhi and Banaras Hindu University to Panjab University, something is afoot. Women have always resisted patriarchal attempts to view the university as a safe transit point between the father and the husband. But the voices of resistance are growing louder and more public. Pinjra tod (break the locks) is more of a norm than a fringe. On the campus lawns in Aligarh, references to iconic former students like feminist Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai are common. But what does it mean to be a feminist in Aligarh today, at a moment when religion and student life have become inextricably linked to national politics?

I had been mentally prepared for the challenges of accessing the right people. Often asking community leaders to choose interviewees results in a selection of people who are connected with the leader and aligned to his political party. I had also understood the problems that leaders faced if community members thought they were selecting many wealthy people to speak to researchers.
What I hadn’t thought enough about was that once we had accessed people who had escaped poverty, they would work hard to downplay their wealth.
It’s a blind spot that many development researchers have. Our belief that we are asking these questions for our interviewees’ own good makes us think that interviewees will also understand why providing accurate data is important. Our belief in the possibility of getting accurate answers to the questions we ask makes us blind to the incentives for interviewees to give inaccurate responses.
If I wasn’t willing to tell Zahra how much money I have in my different bank accounts, why would a person in eastern Niger be willing to tell me about her sources of income and wealth? Even if we convinced community leaders to open themselves up to criticism for selecting richer people for our team to interview, why would those interviewees reveal details about their financial situation to a complete stranger?

Organizations do not understand participation as bottom-up: even when the Terms of Reference talk about high levels of participation, they often have been elaborated “in-house” (= without participation)
(...)
Ultimately, given the aid-vicious-circle and hardship they face, beneficiaries are busy and often engage into the process solely with the hope of getting extra aid, that is, the more they engage, give their time, the more they expect that will revert into new projects supporting them or their area.

If the UNHCR refused to help with repatriation, the government may still close the camp. This would force refugees into other camps and they could still be denied the right to work in urban centres.
Nonetheless, the UNHCR must consider the impact of its assistance on government policy. If the government’s goal in closing the camp is to encourage repatriation, and only the UNHCR can help with repatriation, then perhaps it should not help.
If it does not help with repatriation, the UNHCR can continue to use its budget to provide aid to refugees in Kenya. And if the government still closes the camp, despite the UNHCR refusing to help with repatriation, it still has the option of re-instituting repatriation in the future.

The oxymoron “humanitarian war” is sometimes used ironically, at other times derisively, and still at others earnestly. In his recent book, excerpted in the April issue of Harper’s Magazine, Rony Brauman, former president of Doctors Without Borders, explores criteria deemed essential to justify violence. “While claiming to protect populations,” Brauman writes, “the United Nations is rehabilitating war—when in fact it was created to prevent it. And in granting itself the right to declare war and to call it ‘just,’ the U.N. is acting as both referee and player, and legalizing the conflation of judges and parties to a conflict.”

The sector cannot afford to ignore such avoidable cases of moral compromise, but on a more fundamental level, can it afford a more ethically strict fundraising code? Purity would come at a high cost. I think that most of us accept that the principles of humanitarian fundraising must exclude the worst offenses and embrace considerable compromise in order for our programs and for our salaries to exist. Regardless, this needs much more deliberation and visibility within agencies. Are we happy with our choices? Are we concerned that times are changing?

My latest - and it's a biggie - is an inside look at how the 2014 Ebola response was built.

A big, and under-appreciated, lesson of that response: many/most of our outbreak control tactics don't scale well. 1/ https://t.co/dsDhOZiUBT

— Jeremy Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) May 9, 2019

While some seem to be angry about the use of African wax print, a greater number of people are expressing anger at the fact that fashion trends always have to be made by Western fashion houses before they are globally recognized.

The show represents part of an emerging conversation about whether treating cultural appropriation as “a bad habit to be trained out of us”, as writer Connie Wang recently put it, is the right approach. In an article for the New York Times, Wang wrote that she has “come to see appropriation as a form of communication. Sometimes what people are trying to say is trivial, hurtful and condescending – a bindi to proclaim that they’re “exotic” for instance, or cornrows to say they’re “cool”. But other times, what is being said is difficult and important.”
If the fairytale of a woke fashion giant sounds a little too good to be true, that is probably because it is. The global capitalist system, of which LVMH, the luxury brand that controls Dior, is part, remains as deeply inequitable as ever, even while promoting positive cultural exchange and social conscience on the Dior catwalk. Little of the symposium-style messaging of Dior’s “project” will trickle down to the shop floors where its bags, perfumes and lipsticks are sold.

"Fewer people are giving to charity, in what researchers say is a worrying trend at a time when trust in charities appears to be falling."-a short thread 1/nhttps://t.co/nj3zXOM2eM

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) May 7, 2019

Global Forest Watch (GFW) used updated remote sensing and satellite data from the University of Maryland and estimates that there was a 60% increase in Ghana’s primary rainforest loss in 2018 compared to 2017, the highest in the world. The second highest was neighboring Côte d’Ivoire with a 28% increase. Together, these two countries produce nearly 60% of the world’s cocoa.
However, the Democratic Republic of Congo lost the largest size of tropical primary rainforest in Africa and collectively, the world lost 3.6 million hectares of primary rainforest last year—an area the size of Belgium in 2018 alone.

Their study concluded that most links between life satisfaction and social media use were "trivial", accounting for less than 1% of a teenager's wellbeing - and that the effect of social media was "not a one-way street".

Social media data "likely confounded by ... tweaks to underlying algorithms ... [that] cannot be documented or controlled for in ... attempts to replicate the work." Uncomfortable realities for communication researchers outlined in our new @theNASEM report https://t.co/wJCL6kTkYRpic.twitter.com/YiyyMwnPuU

— Dietram A. Scheufele (@scheufele) May 7, 2019

Delta has been notoriously anti-union for years, Lance Compa, a lecturer and labor expert at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, told The Washington Post. Compa said he wasn’t surprised the company had targeted union dues as part of its recent campaign.
“Somebody took that off the shelf,” he said. “The question of union dues has always been something employers hammer away at.”

By focusing on local opposition to company practices, Ciafone said she wanted to write a different kind of history from what is common. Histories of corporations or of global capitalism often focus only on executive decision-making, or make companies seem all-powerful, or give a sense of “a train that’s left the station and is just bearing down through history,” with opposition useless, she said.
Instead, Ciafone said she wanted to show how the Coca-Cola Company, as it exists today, “isn’t solely of its own design” due to the various movements and forces that have challenged it around the world. Though that opposition can often seem powerless in the face of a massive corporation, that’s not always the case, she said.

If you are interested in ethical representations of developing country contexts, and issues related to gender, inequality, resilience, poverty, vulnerabilities, disasters and identities then the novella will resonate. Readers can use their wider understanding of these theories and concepts they have learnt in class or elsewhere, to unpack the stories images, dialogue, and narratives in 'After Maria'.

De Souza shows how neoliberal stigma plays out in practice through a comparative case analysis of two food pantries in Duluth, Minnesota. Doing so, she documents the seldom-acknowledged voices, experiences, and realities of people living with hunger. She describes the failure of public institutions to protect citizens from poverty and hunger; the white privilege of pantry volunteers caught between neoliberal narratives and social justice concerns; the evangelical conviction that food assistance should be “a hand up, not a handout”; the culture of suspicion in food pantry spaces; and the constraints on food choice. It is only by rejecting the neoliberal narrative and giving voice to the hungry rather than the privileged, de Souza argues, that food pantries can become agents of food justice.

This year’s GRID focuses on urban internal displacement and presents new evidence on the humanitarian and development challenges presented by displacement to, between and within towns and cities.

"This report features 13 case studies that together highlight the range and impact of UNDP’s engagement with the media for the purpose of achieving development outcomes. These examples vary widely in scope and aim: from an election media monitoring initiative in Georgia to an initiative promoting local empowerment through community radio in remote areas of Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR); from engagement with media for peacebuilding in Lebanon to Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs) awareness campaigns implemented in partnership with the private sector in Brazil.

This collection interrogates the representation of humanitarian crisis and catastrophe, and the refraction of humanitarian intervention and action, from the mid-twentieth century to the present, across a diverse range of media forms: traditional and contemporary screen media (film, television and online video) as well as newspapers, memoirs, music festivals and social media platforms (such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr). The book thus explores the historical, cultural and political contexts that have shaped the mediation of humanitarian relationships since the middle of the twentieth century.

Decolonization is not a synonym of diversity/inclusion (see Gabriel 2018; Tuck and Yang 2012). Cultivating a decolonial space is a process that begins with privileging silenced voices to interrogate how unjust structures have been (re)produced by and within them. We have to do better every time and every day. Just because we did better one time, that doesn’t mean we accomplished it. We just have to do better all the time. And that involves decolonial policies, curriculum, syllabi, mentorship, communications, everyday operations of our departments and professional organizations, and our everyday practices. Equitable anthropology graduate training is not only the necessary praxis of anthropology’s fundamental principle of promoting diversity and equity within anthropological institutions, but it is also the future of anthropology to rectify its colonial history through decolonial methodology and theorization, and contribute to justice and equity in the larger society.

I can tell you that those who occupy these prestigious influential positions keep missing three key things in their analysis of inequality – namely the importance of power, of prejudice and of the elitist political system. Could it be because they’ve always had power, never experienced prejudice and have friends working in politics?

“Nobody [in the aid world] wants to be part of a Daily Mail story,” said Tobias Denskus, who teaches development communications at Sweden’s Malmo University. The mass-market UK newspaper and website has a “well-established discourse that any type of aid is basically a waste of taxpayers’ money”, he added.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, riven internally by disputes over its mission and future direction, may be in trouble. Faced with questions about its basic competence from board members and outside investigators, accusations have been gathering about unsatisfactory statistical work and laxity in meeting UN standards and regulations for spending reports by its leadership.

Oxfam International dismissed 79 people because of safeguarding concerns in the year to March 2019, it has revealed.
The charity’s latest progress report, published today, said it had received 294 safeguarding reports across its global operation, including 23 cases of sexual abuse and 74 cases of sexual harassment.
There were also 25 accusations of exploitation, including paying for sex, and 98 cases involving other forms of misconduct, such as bullying.
The figures were collated from 19 affiliate organisations employing about 10,000 staff worldwide.

Mohna Ansari, a member of Nepal's National Human Rights Commission in Kathmandu, says myriad reasons prevent the law from having much effect. For one, a woman who reports a family member might be kicked out of the family with no way to support herself on her own. It's also tricky to prove someone was forced to sleep in a menstrual shed when many women do so out of societal pressure and their own fear of the consequences.
(...)
Aishwarya Kunwar, 24, is finishing up a prenatal session with a health care worker. At nine months pregnant, she doesn't have to worry about periods right now, but she and other women have pretended that they'd received hormonal birth control injections and told their in-laws that as a result, they would not menstruate.

In my experience of being that person in the room always having to tell the economists they are forgetting important social factors, I can tell you that those who occupy these prestigious influential positions keep missing three key things in their analysis of inequality – namely the importance of power, of prejudice and of the elitist political system. Could it be because they’ve always had power, never experienced prejudice and have friends working in politics? Even on the left we have white economists from privileged backgrounds who think racism is simply a consequence of economic inequality, rather than understand that a grossly unequal system can only be built and justified through racial, class, gender and other forms of prejudice.

The wealth of parents and that of their children is highly correlated, but little is known about the different roles genetic and environmental factors play in this. This column compares outcomes for adopted children in Sweden and those of their adoptive and biological parents and finds there is a substantial role for environment in the transmission of wealth and a much smaller role for pre-birth factors. And while human capital linkages between parents and children appear to have stronger biological than environmental roots, earnings and income are, if anything, more environmental.

At the same time, Mauya and other civil-society activists say the assault on civic space has been sustained and vigorous—a result of both top-down decrees and legislation written by the CCM-dominated Parliament. Magufuli’s government has banned the live broadcast of debates in Parliament and enacted regulations imposing hefty fees on bloggers. It has also actively enforced a 2015 “cyber crimes” law, signed by his predecessor, Jakaya Kikwete, that was intended to combat the spread of false information but also designates jail time for “insulting” the president and has been used as part of a wider campaign against dissent. And it has severely restricted opposition rallies, despite the fact that they are allowed by law

The tiny nation of Timor-Leste hopes to become the world's first "plastic neutral" country, with a deal to create a new chemical recycling plant to be signed on Friday.The ground-breaking Catalytic Hydrothermal Reactor (or Cat-HTR) plant, which will cost about $57.7 million to build if and when funding is secured, breaks down plastic waste into tiny pieces and allows it to be used again to create new plastics, hard waxes or fuels

The number of new recruits who abandon the selection procedure has nearly doubled in recent years, he told parliament in Rome this week.
Young people were increasingly finding it difficult to “deal with authority and to adapt to a rigorous and disciplined regime,” the general told the parliamentary defence commission.

INGO-based researchers themselves face some real challenges. Unlike their equivalents in universities there is no recognised career path and often little recognition of their skills. Your name may not even appear on the reports you contribute to and your work, even when enjoying high circulation and influence, is rather patronisingly referred to as grey literature. It is rarely cited by academics and your employer is unlikely to support you to get it published in peer-reviewed journals. However, things are beginning to change as larger organisations invest in research capacity and support staff to pursue research careers. More and more development master’s and PhD graduates are choosing a career in NGOs where they feel they can make a difference to the use of evidence.

In the humanitarian sector, there is no standard definition of what constitutes a critical incident related to data management, and incidents such as the above often go unreported given there are no established protocols for managing them. This can lead to recurring preventable errors, missed learning opportunities, and failure to protect vulnerable populations and the humanitarians working to serve them.

The third period, under Bill Armstrong as executive director (from 1982 to 2002), was a period of growth at a time when Australian government-NGO relations were very strong. Armstrong also brought a marked shift from the 1970s by adopting a more activist approach on human rights and social justice. There was a lot of work in support of the anti-apartheid movement in Southern Africa. When Cambodia was isolated in the 1980s, OSB took a lead in having a government-funded NGO office there. Most significantly, in Timor-Leste OSB provided UN volunteers to administer the independence ballot, and also supported the team working with Xanana Gusmao before and after his release from prison in Indonesia.

The relationship between black domestic workers and white families over generations has inevitably led to patterns of decorum and behaviour, which convey much of the historically grown entanglement between black and white. Oral history interviews and research by sociologists such as Jacklyn Cock and Shireen Ally stress the fact that black people are often saddened, angered and disgusted by the restrictions and discrimination that result from racism and limited work opportunities. A complicated image of entanglement is held in the collective South African memory, and during the past couple of years research has shown that white people often construct their memories of apart­heid around domestic workers, realising that the “learning” of white dominance hinged on their contact with black women in the home.

We want to inspire and inform more respectful, reciprocal and genuine relationships between “local” and “external” researchers in disaster studies. This Manifesto calls for rethinking our research agendas, our methods and our allocation of resources.
We recognise that, while every researcher in our globalised system struggles with complicity and contradiction, the manifesto reflects principles that we as a collective aspire to. It is not by any means a claim of having achieved these objectives in our past work.

But even when such footage is used well, or interestingly, it can still contribute to an overall sense that the technique has become something of a cliché. Writing in Film Comment magazine last year, the critic and curator Eric Hynes argued that watching drone imagery was “like watching everybody play with the same new toy.” He added that “if your film’s currency is intimacy, is access, is humanity, why are you floating above everyone’s heads?”

Chinese phone cradle for boosting your phone's daily step count. Some insurance companies in China allow people who consistently reach a certain daily step count to get discounted health insurance premiums. pic.twitter.com/pJFBSYqdlb

— Matthew Brennan (@mbrennanchina) May 14, 2019

Systems like credit scoring or criminal records create profiles that stay with individuals, regardless of whether they’ve changed as people. These systems restrict people’s ability to demonstrate how they’ve changed, and to move past their earlier selves. Once categorised with a certain label, that label sticks, no matter how much a person’s identity or behaviour changes.
Worst of all, participation in these systems is not optional, yet they purport to make life easier. But easier for whom? Researchers from the study conclude that the systems they looked into were ‘for the sole benefit of the data collector,’ rather than for the community members themselves.
(...)
In many ways, digital data is a simplification of reality, a ‘stone representation’ of a complex life. Taking this one step further: perhaps digitisation, or digital data, isn’t always the answer. Narrative histories tell us far more than a digitised family tree ever could. The feelings that are communicated during a great oral story can never be reduced to machine-readable data. The results of a heritage DNA test cannot reflect the life experience and history of a person — and even those results are the consequence of scientists’ preconceptions about gender and race, combined with the data they had available to learn from, codified into a digital system.

Things I have learned about the general public whilst working at the library:

1. A huge number of people under 20 can't read face clocks, having grown up with only digital one.
2. Many people don't know how to spell "library." It's in our email address. This causes problems

— 21st Century Gorgon 🐍 (@grumpwitch) May 15, 2019

This encyclopedia offers an overview of some of the key actors in the gender and mining field, ranging from indigenous women’s organisations to some of the world’s largest mining companies. There’s a short entry for each actor, providing key facts about the organisation or initiative and briefly covering their work and how it relates to gender issues. The encyclopedia is divided by theme, including artisanal mining, transparency and accountability, and participation in the workforce.

The article is definitely worth reading, but, I can't believe the amnesia of #globaldev! This is straight out of the Community-driven Development playbook. (1/2) https://t.co/lP5FlUUGJY

— Søren Jarnvig (@sjarnvig) May 15, 2019

The results show that apprenticeships shift youth out of wage work and into self-employment. However, the loss of wage income is not offset by increases in self-employment profits in the short run. In addition, the study uses the randomized match between apprentices and training providers to examine the causal effect of characteristics of trainers on outcomes for apprentices. Participants who trained with the most experienced trainers or the most profitable ones had higher earnings. These increases more than offset the program's negative treatment effect on earnings. This suggests that training programs can be made more effective through better recruitment of trainers.

she was completely naked, except for some jewelry fitting for a gala event. Across her chest she had written “RES,” the acronym used by the society, and across her stomach “PECT.”
That day, the message to her peers was a demand for respect for women and their place in economics. This was not the beginning, nor would it be the end, of Bateman using her body to help deliver a message.
“Women and women’s bodies are the elephant in the room in the economics profession,” says Bateman, an economist and lecturer at the University of Cambridge. “This is what’s being ignored.”
There are vast consequences for this omission, she says. One of the most fundamental questions in economics is: Why are some countries rich and others poor? Years have been dedicated to understanding this mystery of relative prosperity. In her new book, The Sex Factor: How Women Made the West Rich (Polity), Bateman revisits economic history through feminist eyes. In the book, which is a short, accessible, and thought-provoking work, Bateman asserts that the missing piece to the growth puzzle lies in understanding the role women, their bodies, and freedoms played in creating prosperity.

What happened when public universities in 🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦 started publicizing faculty salaries?

The salary gap between men and women declined by 30% as a direct result. #SocSciResearchhttps://t.co/uKP4eAgvYppic.twitter.com/2INP01bPWC

— John B. Holbein (@JohnHolbein1) May 13, 2019

The art educator says her experience creating and presenting her thesis project was overwhelmingly positive – save for a few disrespectful tweets like “So next, all we’ll have to do is a kindergarten hand paint and they’ll grant us a master’s degree?” While meant to be cruel, the comment illuminates a relevant point: it is precisely the question of scholars and young people alike conducting scholarly inquiry through drawing that concerns Ms. Parker’s research and goals. She believes that people, especially young people, should have the option to be educated through embodied inquiry, should be equipped with a critical mode of visual literacy, and should feel encouraged to learn in this way. Ms. Parker’s work and its warm reception at SFU attests not only to the value of the work, but the remarkable potential of drawing scholarship.

Until recently, in much of American life, and American writing, the default setting of human being was white and/or male. Today so much writing shatters this default, complicates the point of view. And “Upheaval” reminds us why that matters (Anand Giridharadas).

(M)any Western universities have strict protocols and insurance guidelines about how to assess and avoid risks when the research is conducted internationally, i.e., what type of vehicle to travel in and where not to go. Conversely, research assistants and collaborators based in those regions are rarely protected by the insurance policies. Depending on the context, researchers there are often exposed to varying degrees of risk when conducting the research. The very networks they have and leverage for these projects can be challenging to navigate when resource-rich Western researchers are in the picture (Yolande Bouka).

While overall spending on travel has fallen at WHO, abuses continue. External WHO auditors analyzed 116 randomly selected travel claims that were flagged as “emergency” requests and therefore exempt from stricter U.N. travel controls. They found proof that in more than half the claims, the travel was instead for regular duties like attending workshops or speaking engagements.
“We see therefore a culture of non-compliance by staff involved in emergency operations,” the report authors said. “Raising a (travel request) as emergency, even if it is not compliant with the criteria for emergency travel, shows a breakdown in controls and results (in a) waste of resources.”
WHO’s auditors said when some staffers flew business class even though they didn’t meet the U.N. criteria to do so, they failed to submit paperwork justifying the exception.
“Based on the difference in ticket costs for business class and economy class, savings could have been realized by the organization,” the report said, citing more than 500 travel requests last year that may have broken the rules.

I agree on the compliance aspect, but flying/traveling is a complicated, political one-size-sometimes-doesnt-fit-all issue - a bit like everything else in #globaldev ;)!https://t.co/Xk8pSZDc2ehttps://t.co/le1GafAKE5

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) May 20, 2019

Uganda Broadcasting Corporations in conjunction with the Uganda Museum launched an exhibition that is showcasing unpublished pictures from the Amin regime.
Many of these had been recorded films and photo negatives that had been archived at UBC for nearly 40 years.
During his regime, Amin is said to have had one of the most advanced media industries on the continent, he had seen the national broadcaster move from black and white to colour and boosted Radio Uganda.
Because of that relationship Amin tried to build with the media, keeping photographers around him, much of the exhibition that is aptly titled “The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin” is from the media’s point of view.
The showcase is a collection of photos describing different stages of the regime such as the expulsion of Asians, the economic war,

With food not getting to the right people but instead used to buy support, feed fighters or sold for funds, CNN asked the UN's Grande if she was worried that the aid programs could actually be prolonging Yemen's devastating war.
"Certainly, humanitarians are not political. We're here to keep people alive," she replied, notably not saying no.
"The responsibility for ending the conflict is in the hands of the people who are driving that conflict," Grande said. "It is the responsibility of the humanitarians to say to the people who are responsible for the war, these are the consequences of your actions, this is the impact of the decision to take up arms and to bring this country to war."

An ex-Credit Suisse banker has become the first person to plead guilty in #Mozambique's $2 billion tuna-bond scandal. https://t.co/9P0xaCn1F8

— Paul Wallace (@PaulWallace123) May 21, 2019

It is time for the humanitarian sector to let go of some of the fundamental – but outdated – assumptions, structures and behaviours that prevent it from adapting to meet the needs of people in crises.
This is a proposal for radical change to create a humanitarian system that is fit to respond to the challenges of both today and tomorrow. It calls for:
letting go of power and control;
letting go of perverse incentives; and
letting go of divisions to embrace differences
(...)
UN agencies and large INGOs should reorient their activities away from direct implementation, taking on a more enabling role. Such a shift would support national and local organisations to undertake crisis response roles on their own. This requires channelling funds to and rewarding staff for collaborating with local organisations.
The Inter-Agency Standing Committee, the humanitarian system’s high-level coordination body, should enlarge its membership to include non-traditional organisations and decentralise leadership and strategic-level decision-making to those closer to crises.

Perhaps we should think of what movements that advocate extreme violence offer their members as manhood-on-the-cheap. The groups preaching ethnic, racial, or religious war offer the role of self-sacrificial protector of their community through violence. The content of the group’s ideology is largely irrelevant to the members. It is the masculine role that is appealing, not the ideology. Most young men that join these movements do not do so based on a rational embrace of the group’s doctrines. Rather, they join merely to be manly warriors. This frees violent movements from the expectation that their agenda be driven by reasonable evidence or accurate historical understanding or sensible moral values. As long as they provide manhood to their members, they can largely stand for whatever they want.
What this means is that combating the appeal of extreme violence will require confronting the nature of masculinity. We need to collectively reassess how we raise boys. We need to provide more space for boys to find their identities affirmed in ways other than through self-sacrificial military labor. And for those men already enculturated into warrior masculinity, we need to find opportunities for them to have their masculinity affirmed in constructive ways.

The BBC just asked me what Binyavanga's legacy would be. I wish I could have said this more articulately - to me his most important legacy isn't even the writing per se. It's that he made room - he published us, invited us into the platforms, shouted down the walls of Jericho.

— Nanjala Nyabola (@Nanjala1) May 22, 2019

The show revolves around the lives of four modern urban women based in Dakar. First there is Marème, the unapologetic mistress of Cheikh. Cheikh is married to Lalla—another key character. She’s his devoted wife but is in the dark about his other life. Then there is the reclusive Racky, with a managerial position in the male-dominated construction industry. Lastly there is Dialika a successful professional who is married to Birame, an abusive, narcissistic alcoholic. Other strong female characters include Mamy, a go-getter career woman who still struggles to get over being made fun of as a child for her weight and Dior, a single independent-minded woman.

Originally inspired by the life of Cornelia Rau, the story intertwines complex personal stories to reveal a system struggling with the the contradictions of immigration and border protection.
Rau, a German-Australian woman and former air hostess, attracted attention in 2005 after she escaped a controversial sect known as Kenja, only to be held at the Baxter detention centre in South Australia as a suspected illegal immigrant.
Blanchett said that while the story was focused on Australia, it explored global themes: “The desire for personal freedom, the need for social stability, an escalating lack of faith in the political process and the deeply unsettling impact this has on individual lives.”

This week, I’ve focused the resources on reclaiming representation, tackling a very sticky blindspot that covers the ways in which we choose to communicate, and which knowledge(s) is/are privileged in this process.

With support from Oxfam Intermón and other allies, they launched the digital action on Twitter. It lasted barely a few hours, yet generated significant engagement and reach. The strategy proved to be successful, because just a short while later, political representatives from Barcelona Municipality, Barcelona Diputación, and Cataluña Autonomous government contacted L’associació asking to discuss and respond to the allegations raised on social media.
After a few days, a proposal was approved to oblige Barcelona’s City Hall to report and prove that it was not financing fundamentalist groups. In the Catalonian Parliament, a question was publicly addressed to the Social Affairs Counselor, asking for explanations. And thirdly, the Barcelona Diputació approved a resolution committing not to finance these kind of groups.
The digital advocacy action was successful in putting the issue on the political agenda, and opening a door for policy change in defense of human rights.

Dates, stats, facts. Things that you now know. What I would most like to share with you though is the experience of children EVERYWHERE, so many pregnant women, and babies and young people. They swarm out of the schools and work in the markets and hang about on the streets, the Mall in Dili is heaving with them at the mobile phone shops. And in the village this weekend a huddle of 10 very small boys traipsed us through the bush to a waterfall where they promptly stripped naked and swam with us in the pool at its base. One offered to carry a bag, another held my hand over the roughest bits. We asked how old they were…10, 12, 14. Not one of them was as big as our 5-year-old grandson. Genetics yes, malnutrition, definitely.

Individual and collective wellbeing in the aid sector nevertheless remains my passion, after having spent over four years studying stress among aid workers in Kenya, and having worked in many organisations where lack of attention to staff care has had negative implications for my health and the health of my colleagues. So although I’m in the transition phase of finishing my Phd, waking each day with some inertia and indeed some emotion as I let go of this last chapter of my life, I also know there is much work to be done in challenging organisational cultures and practices that not only damage staff but the very humanitarian ethos and caring aspirations of the aid sector. I am thus striking a delicate balance between resting, enjoying a life that goes beyond the mental angst and solitude of academia, and of connecting my ideas and values with meaningful action.

A remaining problem with “Upheaval” is one that cannot be fact-checked away, but, happily, is already being fixed across the world of letters. Until recently, in much of American life, and American writing, the default setting of human being was white and/or male. Today so much writing shatters this default, complicates the point of view. And “Upheaval” reminds us why that matters.
When Diamond describes “highly egalitarian social values” as an ethos that has “remained unchanged” in Australia, despite having written a chapter about the country’s history of legalized racism, he is using a definition of egalitarian that applies only to white people. When he says, “Social status in Japan depends more on education than on heredity and family connection,” he is ignoring what it means to be born a woman. “Of course, my list of U.S. problems isn’t exhaustive,” he admits. “Problems that I don’t discuss include race relations and the role of women.” You know, the problems affecting the vast majority of Americans.

The recent review of Jared Diamond’s book is spot-on. I have expressed similar frustrations over how only particular sorts of people are granted the opportunity to publish fact-free pieces without any pushback from their publishers to adhere to basic academic rigour. pic.twitter.com/sMHLqhhrxB

— Nathan Oseroff-Spicer (@nathanoseroff) May 20, 2019

This present momentism appears, at least on the surface, as a therapeutic solvent for all our problems, making our present situation more bearable. But this bearability of the status quo amounts to a permanent retreat to the psychic bomb shelter of now, a kind of bury-your-head in the sand mindfulness which acts as a sanitized palliative for neoliberal subjects who have lost hope for alternatives to capitalism.
(...)
The faux mindfulness revolution provides a way of endlessly coping with the problems of capitalism by taking refuge in the fragility of the present moment; the new chronic leaves us mindfully maintaining the status quo. This is a cruel optimism that encourages settling for a resigned political passivity. Mindfulness then becomes a way of managing, naturalizing and enduring toxic systems, rather than turning personal change towards a critical questioning of the historical, cultural, and political conditions that are responsible for social suffering.

"We empower 23andMe customers to learn about themselves and their ancestry through their unique genetic code,” said 23andMe CEO and cofounder Anne Wojcicki. “Working with Airbnb, a leader who is reimagining travel, provides an exciting opportunity for our customers to connect with their heritage through deeply personal cultural and travel experiences."

In so doing, I have discovered enormous differences in cultural practices on Facebook, and have been particularly struck by how blatant the use of sexual innuendo and imagery can often be. I’m afraid that this is one of the main reasons why I choose not to add people to the Group.

Institutionally, I think again the challenges that conflict studies faces are not very different from other fields, and I do think there is a long way to go. I think women are leading the way on some of the most interesting trends in conflict scholarship: on in-depth fieldwork, mixed methods, ethical considerations, big questions, and rich and analytically clear theories. But do I see women earning awards, grants, invited talks and promotions at rates that reflect these contributions? I don’t know. I think it’s hard to account for the gender gap at the top of our profession without taking sexism into account. Another problem is a gender gap in citations, which has been documented by IR scholars. I recently read an article that of 40 citations, 2 were women – on a topic where there is fantastic, cutting edge work by junior women scholars. That’s why I believe that practices in journals to encourage or require authors to check the gender balance on their citations is important.

Doing research in conflict-affected settings can be dangerous. Consequently, many Western universities have strict protocols and insurance guidelines about how to assess and avoid risks when the research is conducted internationally, i.e., what type of vehicle to travel in and where not to go. Conversely, research assistants and collaborators based in those regions are rarely protected by the insurance policies. Depending on the context, researchers there are often exposed to varying degrees of risk when conducting the research. The very networks they have and leverage for these projects can be challenging to navigate when resource-rich Western researchers are in the picture.
When issues of gender, race or citizenship make traveling or conducting specific types of research in some regions, accompanied by a Western researcher, more dangerous, so-called local researchers may be sent to the field alone. Or after preliminary fieldwork is done and Western researchers return to their teaching obligations, local researchers may be tasked with gathering the remainder of data on their own. When these researchers are excluded from the development of research and security protocols it can lead to failures to accurately assess risks. Unfortunately, the precarity of many researchers in the Global South often leads them not to push back when faced with requests they believe can be dangerous. Instead, they navigate risks as best they can, making use of their social capital and personal resources.

Drink if students compare you to a pop culture figure who has a vaguely similar ethnicity.
If your department or college emailed you to discuss your evaluations, which were “below departmental average,” call out sick and head to the liquor store for a re-stock. Because at Lake Woebegone University, everyone should teach above average.
Drink if students recommended a study guide. By “study guide,” they mean “the exact questions you will ask on the exam.”

In the eyes of Rony Brauman of MSF, wars are always triggered in the name of morality. Today’s ‘humanitarian’ interventions are little more than new crusades – and their justifications are based on lies.
(…)
Without being militantly non-interventionist, Brauman is extremely suspicious of the thirst for war displayed by many of today’s world leaders, the consequences of which are devastating (jacket cover).

In France we mocked the gullibility of the American and their press, much of which-and especially the most prestigious publications-actively parroted all of the White House’s lies. Yet with the exception pf some in the media, there was the same headlong rush to war in France in 2011 (p.46).

Dumdum bullets, prohibited (in 1868) owning to their ‘excessive cruelty’, were nonetheless permitted for big-game hunting and colonial wars. That distinction was theorized by Gustave Moynier, co-founder and president of the Red Cross, who wrote that its founding principles were the product of evangelical morality and civilization. As a result, this progress was ‘inaccessible to savage tribes that…follow their brutal instincts without a second thought, while civilized nations …seek to humanise it’ (pp.94-95).

Yesterday’s interlocutor becomes today’s enemy of mankind, blackmail is presented as negotiation, an alleged massacre becomes a genocide in progress, and a worn-out lie a defence of humanity’s values (p.109).

There are no ‘just wars’, there are only false prophets. And I worry about how easily their stories, rewritten for the purpose at hand, become History (p.110).

The process of receiving, studying and responding to an RFP doesn’t do much to further a relationship. I get a general email, read a general document and write a response. There’s no space built in to that process for us to get to know one another.
Instead, you are left making assumptions about me, and I about you – based on a single RFP. (Mary Cahalane)

“The reason we have the triple threats of disconnection of people from society, mistrust of institutions, and the rising tide of populism is because we have structurally underinvested in [civil society],”(...) “We have let the local community pillar break down and wither.” (Andy Haldane, Chief Economist Bank of England)

Brauman revisits those ‘forgotten’ interventions from a unique perspective of a French intellectual, critical humanitarian involved with MSF and journalist who is not satisfied with the dominant discourse and convenient explanations. His perspective helps to include a European perspective in these US-driven interventions with an important reminder that the military-industrial complex, foreign policy establishment and international law system are truly global constructs that can align rather well if their is a consensus about a ‘humanitarian’ emergency.

What we need in refugee and displacement camps is women-centered design. That is, approaches that account for women’s stated needs and bodily integrity.
Such an approach would involve consulting women and girls. For instance, asking them about the availability of toilets and washing facilities and whether they would prefer pads or tampons, reusable or disposable products. We know, for example, that meaningfully including women and young women in the design of responses to MHM in humanitarian crises is one of the most surefire ways to improve health and safety conditions. But a participatory approach that centers women and girls’ immediate needs is relatively uncommon across emergency, humanitarian, and refugee contexts.
The humanitarian sector should invest in consultative processes that center women and girls’ needs and perspectives around MHM and, in turn, use these insights to design projects that prioritize the creation of safe, functional spaces and the provision of appropriate products.

He is clear that civil society – neglected politically and financially – is not currently in a fit state to fulfil this role. “The reason we have the triple threats of disconnection of people from society, mistrust of institutions, and the rising tide of populism is because we have structurally underinvested in [civil society],” he says, citing former Indian central banker Raghuram Rajan’s book The Third Pillar. “We have let the local community pillar break down and wither.” One way to renew it would be to make it more visible and prominent, he says. It is not taken seriously like the private sector, or even the public sector, because we don’t measure it.

In the review one staff member described Amnesty as having "a toxic culture of secrecy and mistrust".
Amnesty said the senior leadership team accepted responsibility and all seven had offered to resign.
Five of the seven senior leaders, based mainly in London and Geneva, are now believed to have left or are in the process of leaving the organisation.

A former logistics officer for Irish NGO GOAL was detained last year in Ukraine and is now facing US extradition on charges of corruption and witness tampering related to US-funded aid projects in Syria, The New Humanitarian has learned from court documents.

With the rapid cultural, linguistic and geographic shifts in the Sherpa community the Kancha Sherpa documentary depicts, it is likely more and more of us will go digging for our history and sense of identity in the ever-growing detritus of mountaineering media. Thankfully, this film offers something more than just working and dying on the mountain as an example of what being Sherpa means. Instead, it contains an inheritance of quiet, philosophical reflections on long lives fully lived, delivered in the rumbling, murmuring cadence of spoken Sherpa and accompanied by subtitles for those of us who need them.

Featuring politicians, civil servants, academics and activists, the list both recognises high-profile icons and shines a light on the unsung heroes whose work is indispensable to creating a fairer world for everyone.

Women waiting to deploy felt confident that the training equipped them for all protection of civilian tasks they would be assigned. But women who’d returned from dangerous peace operations felt the pre-deployment training didn’t adequately equip them. They found it especially challenging to handle complex cases where women and girls had experienced sexual violence related to conflict, were extremely traumatised, or required urgent assistance. These challenges were exacerbated by the difficulty of communicating with local woman through an interpreter – a skill that had to be learnt on the job in difficult circumstances. A 27-year-old liaison officer, who was critical of the military training’s emphasis on processes and procedures, suggested that “more information on the psychological impact violence has on survivors” was required. She said encountering gender-based violence in camps for internally displaced people (IDP) “was not easy” and the training hadn’t prepared her for sustained engagement with survivors.

Her concern is that the girls in her study said they lack what they perceive as princess characteristics – beauty, desirability and Americanness.
"Beauty in itself isn't inherently good or bad, but it's been assigned this importance culturally as what makes someone who is female valuable. At the very least, we hope a girl doesn't feel excluded from having value," Hains says.
Of course, Disney is not solely responsible for white and Western notions of beauty: Both Fiji and India were colonized for many decades, ingraining the concept of whiteness-as-beauty before Disney products ever reached their shores. But Uppal's findings show that Disney may bolster these notions, Hains says.
"It's another data point that reinforces these stereotypes and harmful beliefs about who's good enough and who can be considered beautiful."

Even if cameras are the most straightforward way to improve teacher attendance, they are in our view the wrong one. This is because a teacher who shows up because they are being observed may add value over an absent teacher, but is not likely to do all the other (unmonitorable) things needed to produce high levels of student learning and growth. And teachers that are likely to produce high levels of student learning and growth are likely to be repelled by a system that focuses on accounting-based accountability and top-down control and observation.
The road to a high-functioning education system not only addresses teacher attendance but also what happens when teaches do show up. Education systems steeped in accounting-based accountability will sometimes be better than the status quo, but won’t be able to deliver the education all children deserve. A misplaced focus on accounting-based accountability moves us away from, not towards, our broader goals. Systems transformation in education and far beyond depends on our ability to differentiate account-ability from accounting ability.

But there’s no indication that the findings triggered actions that helped refugees. And critics argue that open-ended analyses, such as the refugee challenge, play fast and loose with sensitive information for the sake of exploring big data — rather than doing good for the people in the studies. “Is there no way around understanding how isolated refugees are besides using an invasive technique to track people through mobile technology?” asks Alexandrine Pirlot de Corbion, a programme leader at Privacy International in London, a charity that advocates for the right to privacy. Another way to find out whether refugees are isolated would be to ask them questions, which allows them to decide what to share, she adds.

How are aid agencies trying to reach audiences through viral social media campaigns? @lindseyblumell presents new research from @glendacooper on mummy bloggers who went to Bangladesh to on behalf of @savechildrenuk 1/ pic.twitter.com/Paug6TkEiF

— Humanitarian News (@HNResearchNet) May 24, 2019

The content analysis found that the majority of tweets (55.7%) from Nigerian NGOs could be classified as “one-way communication”. These were primarily tweets that shared information with the audience. Only 39.8% of tweets could be considered “highly interactive”. Although most tweets were one sided, this proportion of ‘interactive tweets’ is actually higher than the authors were expecting. Specifically, these levels were higher than researchers have found in similar analyses of NGOs in the US.
(...)
This finding provides some reason for optimism in relation to the likelihood that social media usage by groups within Nigeria might contribute to a more vibrant civil society. However, as the authors note, only a very small portion of Nigerian NGOs in their sample utilized social media at all. As such, there is still significant room for growth, information dissemination and engagement online.

The process of receiving, studying and responding to an RFP doesn’t do much to further a relationship. I get a general email, read a general document and write a response. There’s no space built in to that process for us to get to know one another.
Instead, you are left making assumptions about me, and I about you – based on a single RFP.
I am happy to talk with you. I might even be able to give you free advice during that conversation that solves some of your problems. While talking, I can get a better sense of your staff, your mission and how you work. As we get to know one another, we’ll know whether a client-consultant relationship makes sense.

relief workers do not usually benefit from being in a well-trained, tightly knit unit with a clear command structure. In addition, training and briefing, particularly with regard to psychological issues, is generally inadequate. This is particularly pertinent for those organisations which deploy a high proportion of first assignment volunteers. Third, aid workers are often called upon to perform duties outside their realm of professional competency and experience. Finally, there is the pressure when the drive to ensure the visibility of their own organisation may over-ride questions of the appropriateness or quality of interventions.
(...)
Concurrently the humanitarian sector is becoming larger and more professional, and we are seeing a new type of professional: the career relief worker. These environments, however, are not ordinary work places; they expose individuals and organisations to new dilemmas and new challenges. Staff turnover is high and burnout is common. Perhaps the crucial element in the achievement of the humanitarian goal today is the development of a stable and experienced workforce whose energies are effectively harnessed through more enlightened organisational policies.

Fearful, ashamed and lonely, he embarked on a years-long, arduous journey to overcome the debilitating symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Rising to the position of UN Assistant Secretary-General, he is now committed in helping others to fight the stigma of mental health problems.

Media research is *overwhelmingly* dominated by the global north. @silviowaisbord analaysis of ICA journals shows that 99% of first authors come from just 16 countries. The rest of the world (170+ countries!) accounts for 1%. It’s not ok & it’s time to change #Ica19@icahdqpic.twitter.com/TWAibd4qbC

— Mel Bunce (@meljbunce) May 27, 2019

Siri’s ‘female’ obsequiousness – and the servility expressed by so many other digital assistants projected as young women – provides a powerful illustration of gender biases coded into technology products, pervasive in the technology sector and apparent in digital skills education.This publication seeks to expose some of these biases and put forward ideas to begin closing a digital skills gender gap that is, in most parts of the world, wide and growing.
(...)
The publication explains the role gender-responsive education can play to help reset gendered views of technology and ensure equality for women and girls.

By regarding youth as experts in their lives the team understood how some young people embrace uncertainty to find hope. Their certainty is persistent poverty and insecurity. Some from environmentally fragile earthquake affected and drought prone rural areas face increasingly severe difficulties in subsistence farming or finding local paid employment to help provide for their families. Others, especially rural girls, want to escape expectations of early marriage. Many want to break with family expectations and social norms in their communities and move to uncertain situations and seek new social bonds to gain a sense of belonging. Many young people have been migrating to urban centres and when they still find poverty, insecurity, lack of social status or respect, they migrate internationally to seek different futures.

So happy to get a ‘top faculty paper’ prize #ICA19#ica_jsd with my bff co-authors @martinscott2010@newsprof1 for ’Foundation funding and the boundaries of journalism’. It’s now published open access in @journstudies& you can read it here https://t.co/ZHm8TjvcUP… pic.twitter.com/IpAILQQbR4

— Mel Bunce (@meljbunce) May 26, 2019

The average increase in referrals to counselling services, whether self-referred or otherwise, was 77% but, in many universities, rates of increase between 2009 and 2016 were much higher:
University of Warwick- 316%
University of Kent - 292%
Brunel University - 177%
Newcastle University - 126%
University of Bristol - 88%
University of Portsmouth - 74%
University of Edinburgh - 72%
And the rates of growth were steeper between 2013 and 2016, when the new fees regime, with its higher expectations from students paying up to £9,000 a year for courses, came into force.
Dr Morrish said so many in-house counselling and occupational health services had been overwhelmed that many of these programmes had since been outsourced to the NHS or private practitioners.

Universities to 👱🏻‍♂️👩🏼: you’re experts bcs you’ve written the same thing for years on the Global South

Universities to 🧔🏿🧔🏽👩🏿👩🏾: your work is too local, personal & doesn’t engage with (Western) main lit

Also universities to 👩🏾🧔🏽🧔🏿👩🏿: pls teach us how to “decolonise” 🙄😒🤨

— Laura Loyola (@wawisloyola) May 29, 2019

Drawing from Sylvia Wynter’s call for rethinking our category of “human”, Melissa Johnson’s ethnography Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize (Rutgers University Press, 2018) demonstrates how entangled people are with the other-than-human that surrounds them. Mud, water, trees, animals and people form assemblages and shape particular identities. These relationships were also intrinsic to social and political contingencies. Johnson notes the historical legacies of slavery and the search for mahogany in the 19th century and the emergence of ecotourism in the 20th century as part of the process of becoming Creole.

Frontex is turning into an information hub, (...) Its new powers on data processing and sharing can have a major impact on the rights of persons, beyond the protection of personal data. (Biometrics: The new frontier of EU migration policy in Niger)

Are big people – the ‘heroes’ as they have been called, of ‘epic narratives’ – flattered and misled by the deference with which they are treated, and by the way their misbehaviours are tolerated because they are adulated as gurus? Do their charisma, ego, power and personal dominance combine to inflict on them awesome learning disabilities? Can this be researched and documented, and can future generations be warned of these dangers? (Personal reflections on the Green Revolutions narrative and myths)

Study on academic air travel shows
1) flying & polluting is related to increased salary, not to increased productivity
2) senior scholars fly & pollute significantly more than junior scholars
3) male scholars fly & pollute significantly more than female scholars (Saskia Bonjour, Tweet)

“The problems of wellbeing and the financial crisis are symptoms of a leadership that continuously made decisions that it could not afford, in terms of budget, workload and responsibility of care.”
The cuts, which will be finalised in September, come during a change of direction at the organisation that has led some staff to express concern that in-depth research on key issues such as the death penalty, torture and the arms trade could be compromised.
Kumi Naidoo, Amnesty’s recently appointed secretary general and a former head of Greenpeace International, will make the climate crisis and economic rights a central focus of the organisation’s work.
One insider told the Guardian of concerns that vital areas of Amnesty’s work such as research, law and policy may be disproportionately affected by the cuts.

The Commission is shifting to “informal arrangements [that] keep readmission deals largely out of sight” – serving to ease the domestic pressure on governments who cooperate on returns, according to European law researcher, Jonathan Slagter.
The new Frontex regulation provides a much broader mandate for border surveillance, returns, and cooperation with third countries.
It contains provisions to “significantly step up the effective and sustainable return of irregular migrants”. Among the mechanisms is the “operation and maintenance of a platform for the exchange of data”, as a tool to reinforce the return system “in cooperation with the authorities of the relevant third countries”. That includes access to MIDAS and PISCES.
(...)
“Given the extent of data sharing, the regulation does not put in place the necessary human rights safeguards and could be perceived as giving a green light for a blanket sharing with the third country of all information that may be considered relevant for returns,” she told TNH.
“Frontex is turning into an information hub,” Gkliati added. “Its new powers on data processing and sharing can have a major impact on the rights of persons, beyond the protection of personal data.”

A final question raised about Digital ID systems was who should be implementing and managing them: UN agencies? Governments? Private Sector? Start-ups? At the moment the ecosystem includes all sorts of actors and feels a bit “Wild Wild West” due to insufficient control and regulation. At the same time, there are fears (as noted above) about a “one system to rule them all approach.” “So,” asked one person, “what should we be doing then? Should UN agencies be building in-house expertise? Should we be partnering better with the private sector? We debate this all the time internally and we can never agree.” Questions also remain about what happens with the biometric and other data that failed start-ups or discontinued digital ID systems hold? And is it a good idea to support government-controlled ID systems in countries with corrupt or failed governments, or those who will use these systems to persecute or exercise undue control over their populations?
As one person asked, “Why are we doing this? Why are we even creating these digital ID systems?”

This neglect can be a result of a lack of geopolitical interest. Or the people affected may seem too far away and too difficult to identify with. Neglect can also be a result of competing political priorities and a lack of willingness to compromise, creating a protracted crisis and growing donor fatigue.
Our goal, in issuing this list, is to focus on the plight of people whose suffering rarely makes international headlines. People whom politicians have forgotten or disregarded. People who currently do not receive the support and protection they deserve and need.

“What’s needed is a clear-headed assessment of why these displacement crises receive so little coverage. Partly, it’s a reflection of the broken business models of most international journalism – which means news outlets often struggle to provide consistent coverage of real public value,” he argued.
But it is also a reflection of the political priorities of powerful countries – which news outlets often reflect, Dr Scott added.
These reports, he pointed out, also draw attention to what’s not working, in general, within international journalism.
“But there are news outlets which do, regularly, report on crises like these – such as Devex, News Deeply, The New Humanitarian and Inter Press Service (IPS),” he noted.
“It is important to highlight their work – so that audiences know there is coverage of these crises out there,” he declared.

1/ Had a great time at the #JournalismFundersForum this week: a summit for foundations, journalists and researchers to meet & develop best practice for media funding. Two days of frank conversations. A few take homes.... pic.twitter.com/LCaHbpNRjY

— Mel Bunce (@meljbunce) June 6, 2019

Hi @RoryStewartUK, just finished reading 'Can intervention work?' - great read, very thought-provoking. Wondering how you are, in concrete terms, reforming the "corporate culture" and spreading "mountain rescue" within @DFID_UK now that you are in charge. Thanks for your time pic.twitter.com/rCmLAGYfEp

— Jacobo Quintanilla (@jqg) June 6, 2019

Of the 15 hottest places in the world on Sunday-Monday, eight were in India and the others in neighbouring Pakistan, according to weather monitoring website El Dorado.
The intense heat could be another manifestation of an extreme weather event, say experts from the Indian research organisation Centre for Science and Environment. Scientists worldwide have long warned that rising global temperatures from climate change will intensify heatwaves.

A lot of the fishermen are seeing weather patterns change, and thus have to change their fishing practices. There has been salination of the soil and as a result, a lot of farmers are not only [dealing with] lack of rains, but they’re also struggling because their soil and their wells — which are important water sources — are salty. Little changes like rain coming too early or too late, or it being a day short, means the difference between being able to sustain yourself or not.

Lagos is home to 22 million people and counting, more than double New York and London's tally.
The city's population grows by 77 people every hour as Nigerians from less industrialised regions seek jobs. And as the city grows, so too does demand for housing.
In a country where the minimum wage is about $80 a month and where graduates earn an average of 80,000 naira ($222) a month, renting in Lagos is an expensive exercise.
Odili got lucky. Her employer offered her a housing loan and she was ready to move in with a friend.

Philanthropy has evolved from the time-worn model of traditional giving to now include supporting social enterprise, impact investment, and direct giving, resulting in better outcomes for communities. The concept of individuals giving back while travelling must also evolve. Individuals must be equipped with the knowledge and critical thinking skills they need to make informed decisions about their capacity, ability, and best means to help. Volunteer placement organizations and companies must ensure their partnerships are independently assessed and evaluated, and that impact is measured and reported. Increased transparency around partnerships, financial reports, and impact reporting is also required.
There are many ways to give back—and we need to recognize that volunteering when travelling is not always the best way. Sometimes it is simply better to travel, pay for carbon offsets, stay in eco-friendly accommodation, support ethical local businesses, and make a contribution to an organization that is working to address development issues in an ethical and sustainable way. Unless you have specific, relevant, specialist skills, in most cases development work should be left to the professionals.

This can be a confusing dispute to follow, not least because of the political stakes. Edin, Shaefer, and Meyer are all highly respected researchers, but Edin and Shaefer make no secret of being left of center and supporting a more generous safety net, while Meyer is affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute and receives funding from the Charles Koch Institute. I think Meyer does extremely good, careful work, but there’s obviously a reason that the Charles Koch Institute wants to fund this line of research, and by the same token there’s a reason supporters of a bigger safety net would be drawn to research suggesting that extreme poverty is widespread. There’s a broader political debate outside the narrower methodological debate.
The two major debates on which this evidence weighs are, in brief: (a) did welfare reform increase extreme poverty and (b) how bad is deep poverty in America?
The Meyer paper shows pretty definitively that welfare reform did not increase extreme poverty as defined as “the share of households with children consuming less than $2 per person per day.” That phenomenon appears to be extraordinarily rare in the United States, thankfully.

Let’s talk about ‘evidence of outcomes’. I’m going to be blunt. I have never, in nearly two decades of fundraising been asked for the raw data or evidence that the claims we are making are true (for example, around employment). I could honestly have made the whole thing up – and I sometimes wonder whether other organisations do.
Why do you ask us to mark our own homework? Where is the sense in every separate organisation in each sector having their own evaluation processes? It renders meaningful comparison impossible.
While we’re on the topic of evaluation, are your staff well enough versed in the reality of operations to recognise how organisations can hand pick ‘beneficiaries’ and how that can skew outcomes data?
(...)
With those of you that relish your power, I play humble, careful not to upset the rules of patronage by exposing myself as an upstart. With those of you steeped in (usually) white and (almost invariably) upper middle class guilt about both your personal and professional privilege, I play along. I nod when you ask rhetorical questions such as “How can I possibly know what it’s like to be them?” My hidden truth however is somewhat more combative – you can know. You can enquire deeper into your own experience of being human, face your wounds and fears, your childhood trauma (however comparatively benign they may seem compared to the ‘Adverse Childhood Experiences’ (ACE) criteria). You can look at how you construct the world, how you hold yourself back and get in your own way and realise just how hard it is to change habits of body and mind that do not serve you. To get an experience of what it’s like to try and intervene in a complex system, you can start trying to shift the way your family, friendship group or own organisation operates.

Are big people – the ‘heroes’ as they have been called, of ‘epic narratives’ – flattered and misled by the deference with which they are treated, and by the way their misbehaviours are tolerated because they are adulated as gurus? Do their charisma, ego, power and personal dominance combine to inflict on them awesome learning disabilities? Can this be researched and documented, and can future generations be warned of these dangers? Can personal critical reflexivity be part of the self-correcting compass of those with personal and professional power?

Days later the Chief Nurse, Mr Sousa, told me that they were more than 300 on his counts. Mr Sousa, had a list of those cases he thought needed my immediate attention. I had to decide who to take to the theatre and who to leave waiting, perhaps to die. Those were agonising decisions, made with little diagnostic support and no colleagues to share the burden. The anxious eyes of the severely wounded, as they were looking at that undefined line between life and death, their faces showing shock and fear under the hospital dim lights, have been with me all these years to haunt me. I think I’ll never forget and always remember them, feeling at the same time intense emotions. The harrowing experiences of that time left me with indelible marks and haunting, sometimes intrusive, images and thoughts.
All these years, I wanted to go back to Chokwe to find closure. I strongly felt that I needed to see the places and the surviving staff who had worked with me. My recent getting into photography, gave me the necessary will, motivation and perhaps the therapeutic tool to embark in such a project, to frame and reframe deeply rooted and unresolved emotional aspects.

McDonald received his first diplomatic posting to Berlin in 1946 and eventually held positions throughout Western Europe and the Middle East. In 1974, McDonald was appointed deputy director general of the U.N.’s International Labor Organization, where he managed the ILO’s Secretariat of 3,200 staff.
After his time at the U.N., McDonald was appointed an ambassador on four occasions—twice by President Carter and twice by President Reagan—to lead multilateral diplomatic efforts around the world. He then joined the State Department’s Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs as the coordinator for Multilateral Affairs.
He retired from the Foreign Service in 1987 after 40 years and subsequently became a professor of law at George Washington University.

You’re a woman, a single mom, and at 42 you’re young for an executive director at time when the average CEO age is 58 and women make up less than 1 in 5 of Canadian CEOs. How do you hope to help promote women’s leadership and increase diversity in the environmental movement?
This is going to sound pretty corny, but one thing I’ve learned is that by being yourself, you allow other people to be themselves. Part of encouraging different kinds of people to take on leadership roles is showing that leadership doesn’t take one form. It doesn’t have one personality. It doesn’t have one background or education.
I’m soft spoken and I don’t love being the centre of attention. I’m more collaborative than controlling. I tell bad jokes. I love teen TV. I’m not the traditional picture of senior leadership. And that’s not just my own preconceptions talking! Coming up in this movement, I was told many times (most often by men in senior roles) that I would need to become someone else to succeed: louder, more forceful, more self-important. But I didn’t have it in me to change in that way. I didn’t want to. And I’m glad, because with the support and mentorship of some incredible, unconventional leaders I’ve been able to cultivate a style of leadership that’s open, empowering, and true to who I am as a person. And in the end, those qualities that some saw as liabilities turned out to be some of my greatest strengths.

A Mexican-born yoga teacher from Canada is being lambasted for photos posted to Instagram that show her executing yoga poses in sacred sites in Thailand.
(...)
Levin told HuffPost Canada via email that when she visited these sacred spots, she would always ask for permission to shoot her poses and said she often recruited the assistance of onsite staff to help her with her photos.
“While in Thailand, a tour company contacted me asking me to collaborate on photos of sites ― they would show me around the city in exchange for a few pictures on my feed in different main temples,” Levin said from Thailand.

Truth: "in practice, ‘the robots are coming for our jobs’ usually means...‘a CEO wants to cut his operating budget by 15 percent and was just pitched enterprise software that promises to do the work currently done by thirty employees in accounts payable.’"https://t.co/vxYXUelNNz

— Meredith Whittaker (@mer__edith) June 1, 2019

While technology companies often frame personalization through AI as an inevitable result of market trends that will surely benefit society, the meditation app users I have interviewed express deep skepticism about AI’s ability to facilitate a meditation practice. Using aggregated data to help individuals on their path to personal growth assumes that a person’s deepest problem is a lack of relevant information. This assumption has been the subject of STS critiques of the technology industry for decades (Winner 1984), yet it continues to undergird popular discourse and drive technological design and innovation. Contrary to this informatic model of learning espoused by many members of the technology industry, app users and meditators I have encountered throughout my fieldwork have articulated a different basis for a meaningful teacher-student relationship—one that is characterized by forms of presence and care that a digital assistant might not be able to provide. By listening to someone they can relate to, seeing and hearing a calm, centered person, and feeling that this person cares about them, they are able to persist in the otherwise arduous, confusing practice of meditation.

'we did a lot of research specifically into a group of female militia fighters called the #ypj.' didn't you discover their struggle is anti-capitalist? did you ask yourself how they'd feel about being used for your hyper commercial war shit? https://t.co/hjBdlSOaqo

— Frederike Geerdink (@fgeerdink) June 2, 2019

Could it be that Soviet authoritarianism feels so eerily perfect when spoke in an English accent because British people spend their lives in bureaucracies that, in some very abstract level, resemble those of the Soviet Union? Britain in 2019, with its decaying infrastructure networks, its stalling growth, its creeping environmental dread, its dysfunctional political caste and its maddening bureaucratic networks, orientated towards symbols of achievement rather than achievement itself, does not feel as remote from 1980s Soviet Ukraine as it maybe once did.

Study on academic air travel shows
1) flying&polluting is related to increased salary, not to increased productivity
2) senior scholars fly&pollute significantly more than junior scholars
3) male scholars fly&pollute significantly more than female scholarshttps://t.co/4yLEnOawWi

— Saskia Bonjour (@SaskiaBonjour) June 3, 2019

I am sitting in my office at 7pm crying. I am surrounded by piles of marking I need to moderate tonight. I have worked solidly for the last 10 days, often 12 hour days. I am utterly overwhelmed + exhausted. This is the life of a British academic ... #academiclife

— prof jenny pickerill (@JennyPickerill) June 5, 2019

The motivation for Pili came from a combination of that frustration, mixed with how we can do it in a co-produced way, and also audience. We write academic texts, we talk about these issues in policy forums, and I try to get my work out there as much as possible, but nothing really changes. The more I visit these communities in Tanzania – and I have been since 2005 – I do see change, but the stories of being a left one, of it not just being about the drugs but everything around it e.g. the health system, all of this keeps coming out, so I thought let’s change the medium and the method, and keep the message. You don’t want to keep doing the same thing. Coming back to one of your first questions about influence and exciting things in the discipline, you go to conferences such as ISA and BISA and you sit on feminist panels about making women visible and issues that need more attention, but we don’t ever change our methods of how we do that. We talk about how important these issues are, and we have exciting pieces of research, but I was getting frustrated that nobody was actually doing anything about this, so that’s why we tried something different. This isn’t to criticise people who work in these forms or do really great research, I’m very clear to say that I don’t think all academics should become filmmakers, but for me I couldn’t keep going to these meetings again and again without anything changing.

Maybe African Studies people should start organizing their conferences in, I don't know, somewhere like, Africa? Much easier to get visas there I hear. Also you can buy your dashikis and Kampala materials for those hideous African Studies professor shirts from source. Win win.

— The Writer Formerly Known As Elnathan (@elnathan_john) June 6, 2019

Graduation Cap and Gown Cat Costume from ohmymeow.com

I personally have absolutely no doubts that diverse PhD cohorts are great for academia, but our desire to be surrounded by field experiences and interesting people always risks to turn into an almost colonial approach at a time when higher education is already going through major soul searching.
So talk to us-but prepared for ‘Reviewer 2’ feedback ;)!

Working for the UN vs. eradicating poverty. While there is nothing wrong with a wish to pursue a career with the UN, I am a bit skeptical as to whether it would really fulfill your development ambitions. And with your background in banking, the World Bank or IMF could even be better options for a career in international organizations. Right now, the UN system is more competitive than ever and every job advertisement will receive hundreds of responses from qualified candidates.

A PhD is a great learning experience-but mainly for you. There’s nothing wrong with this, but if advocacy work is your passion or you want to work in collaboration with others plus see the impact of your work then doing a PhD may not be your first choice, because it gets very lonely and the ‘impact’ of your work is almost impossible to measure. Because the PhD is so difficult to fit into a box, especially if you are accustomed to the 'capacity building' discourse, it requires second and third thoughts.