Sometimes, don’t apply for a grant that might be a better fit for an organization led by and serving people of color. Be aware of how you may be perpetuating things like Trickle-Down Community Engagement (TDCE), where your org gets significant funds which you then trickle down a small amount to small grassroots organizations. Don’t be a gatekeeper. And don’t ask us to do stuff for free.
(Vu Le in Why more and more executive directors of color are leaving their positions, and what we need to do about it)

One individual was refused because they said ‘on the balance of probabilities we don’t believe you are a researcher’. This is deeply insulting.
“Across the board I think this adds up to evidence of institutional racism in the Home Office. It’s so arbitrary.  (Melissa Leach in ‘Prejudiced’ Home Office refusing visas to African researchers)

I would like to take this opportunity and zoom out a bit for some general reflections on MA programs and what they can and very often cannot deliver.

Tobias Denskus, der an der Universität von Malmö in Schweden Entwicklungs-Kommunikation unterrichtet. Denn transportiert würden stets die gleichen Stereotype.
„Bei Frauen sehr oft, die halten dann Kinder in den Armen und sprechen mit den Müttern, bei Männern hat man dann oft eher dieses Bild vom Fußballspielen auf dem staubigen Dorfplatz, und da ist die Kritik sicherlich am größten, zu sagen: Diese Art von Kommunikation, die kann man heutzutage auch anders gestalten. In eigentlich allen afrikanischen Ländern wächst die Kulturindustrie rasant; es gibt also auch eine somalische Hiphop-Truppe oder eine nigerianische Geschäftsfrau, die absolut fähig, authentisch und detailliert über Situationen vor Ort berichten können, ohne dass man eben da diese weiße Person aus dem globalen Norden einfliegen muss.“

“The UK has just committed to investing heavily in the Ebola outbreak in DRC [the Democratic Republic of the Congo]. Here at IDS we are leading a major collaborative research programme to look at efforts to avoid big pandemics.
“At our inception meeting in April all six of the Africa researchers were either refused a visa or it arrived too late. One individual was refused because they said ‘on the balance of probabilities we don’t believe you are a researcher’. This is deeply insulting.
“Across the board I think this adds up to evidence of institutional racism in the Home Office. It’s so arbitrary. Our colleagues here at Sussex and at other institutions now routinely meet in other countries, Dubai for example.”

An exhaustive 18-month inquiry by the Charity Commission has concluded that Oxfam was more interested in its reputation than dealing frankly and openly with the issue some of its workers engaged in “sex parties” with prostitutes on the Caribbean island in 2011.
While stopping short of accusing the charity of a cover-up, the commission says Oxfam did not investigate properly other reports of serious abuse or report openly to the charity commission, government departments or the Disasters Emergency Committee.
The commission has also warned Oxfam has not done enough to ensure the safeguarding of its army of charity workers and gave it 30 days to submit an action plan to show improvement.

I'm sorry to read this. But not surprised. In January I announced that I had mediated a settlement with Oxfam & we were going to work together to improve safe guarding at #Oxfam& in the sector instead of fighting over who was right or wrong 9 years ago. https://t.co/RuoJG0ME76

— Lesley Agams (@MzAgams) June 10, 2019

A few threaded thoughts on the UK Charity Commission's inquiry report on Oxfam's safeguarding scandal, released today. Should be required reading for everyone in the aid sector. https://t.co/wKOya3cB40

— Jeremy Konyndyk (@JeremyKonyndyk) June 11, 2019

Comic Relief is to send fewer celebrities abroad after criticism that stars like Stacey Dooley were going to Africa as "white saviours".
The charity's co-founder, screenwriter Richard Curtis, told MPs TV appeals "will be heading in the direction of not using" celebrities abroad.
He said they would be "very careful to give voices to people" who live there.
MP David Lammy, who had criticised the Dooley film, praised the plan to move away from "tired, harmful stereotypes".
Earlier this year, Comic Relief and Dooley - a documentary-maker and Strictly Come Dancing winner - were criticised after she travelled to Uganda to make an appeal film about the charity's work in the country.

"Do not get sucked into the marketing that this choice makes you a hero," Richey told AidEx, an organization that supports humanitarian workers, in an online interview in May.
"This goes to the core of the debate on what the whole development industry is about," says Savina Tessitore, who has worked at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. and gone on humanitarian missions to Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan and Thailand. "Whether it's changing the structural conditions of poverty and vulnerability or giving crumbs that fall off the table to the poor and hungry."
"Who can buy [$850] fanny packs?" Tessitore asks. "Very rich people who are such because so many more are very poor, some to the extent that they cannot survive without some form of foreign aid. It's downright obscene."
Others in the aid community share her perspective. "What is gained by co-opting your logo to clientele that, if able to afford a $800 hoodie, should frankly be doing a hell of a lot more [for charity]?" says Patrick McGrann, who has been employed by various aid organizations and U.N. agencies over a span of 15 years. He is currently working on a Ph.D. on humanitarian aid at the University of London. "[It's] a pretty lame way to broaden partnerships."

.@MalakaGharib's article made me think about communication-industrial complex that surrounds such projects & how many actors keep defending projects mainly because #globaldev system is underfunded; billionaires' taxes should pay for important WFP work, not sales of branded gear

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) June 10, 2019

“There’s nothing to do at night,” Natasha complains of her village, Nikolaevka, which is on the government-controlled side of the line but within firing range of the forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic.
Growing up, she had hoped to be a model. But she’s unemployed and has to raise her two children alone.
“There are no opportunities here,” she says. “In the night we sit quietly like mice in our houses. There’s nowhere to go.”
In the day, Natasha and other women gather in Nikolaevka’s community hall to chat. Even indoors, they’re wrapped up in coats, hand-knitted hats and scarves.
The village suffers from little heating because the fighting limits access to coal and firewood, inhabitants say, and gas lines that should provide heating are damaged by the shelling and badly driven military vehicles.

If a product requires a high level of digital literacy, it might be inaccessible to people who already lack access to education or health care; as a result, adopting it would exacerbate and entrench inequalities. To optimize the design, reach, and effectiveness of digital-health programs, user capabilities and technology requirements must be aligned. Welcoming innovation includes humility about the limits of technology and the pressing need to strengthen health systems to ensure that they serve all members of society. Then there is the question of who is designing and delivering health innovations – and who is accountable for them. In the past, innovation entailed collaborations between governments, donors, NGOs, and research organizations. In the digital age, new actors – such as mobile network operators and technology companies – have joined this process, each with its own language, agenda, and incentives. Without mediation, this can lead to distorted power dynamics, with some initiatives becoming “too big to fail” and governments struggling to exercise oversight.

EXCLUSIVE: Our investigation into Tamil Nadu's multi-billion dollar garment industry found that women are illegally being given unnamed drugs at work for period pains - and many say their health has suffered pic.twitter.com/qQVWqHqBkO

— Thomson Reuters Foundation News (@TRF_Stories) June 12, 2019

But the problem with this 21st-century "scholarly decolonial turn" is that it remains largely detached from the day-to-day dilemmas of people in formerly colonised spaces and places. Many academics mistakenly maintain that by screaming "decolonise X" or "decolonise Y" ad nauseam, they will miraculously metamorphose into progressive agents of change.

Yet it remains to be seen how beneficial AfCFTA will be to African nations and peoples, taking into account its limitations. Without a minimum of redistribution among African states, as well as heavy investments in industrial and transport infrastructure, purely trade integration attempts may only marginalize the least competitive African States and regions. More importantly, it remains to be seen how this free-trade area will serve to foster the Pan-African ambition of a continental bloc that will no longer have to import from the Global North.

Right in the middle of the entire continent 👀🤷🏾‍♀️ pic.twitter.com/aKWr66pdUR

— Zuleka (@ZulekaTweets) June 7, 2019

In a new paper, they used only open-source tools and data to show how quickly they could get a fake UN speech generator up and running. They used a readily available language model that had been trained on text from Wikipedia and fine-tuned it on all the speeches given by political leaders at the UN General Assembly from 1970 to 2015. Thirteen hours and $7.80 later (spent on cloud computing resources), their model was spitting out realistic speeches on a wide variety of sensitive and high-stakes topics from nuclear disarmament to refugees.

But Giridharadas is not so nuanced when he is alone on the page, when he seems to take a cruder, polemical line: the individuals may be honourable but the enterprise stinks; this is all about self preservation; what is needed is a much greater role for the state. He portrays MarketWorld as a monolith, showing no interest in teasing it apart to see if its various manifestations (social enterprises, impact investors, social impact bonds, management consultants) have different strengths and weaknesses. Nor does he ever discuss where the boundaries between state and market should lie. He seems torn between conspiracy theories (they are only doing this to save their skins) and a more nuanced understanding of ‘paradigm maintenance.’

You can be amazing allies to leaders of color, which will prevent us from leaving our positions. Get trained and regularly refreshed on implicit bias, white fragility, etc. Support your ED colleagues of color by sending potential grants and donors their way. Sometimes, don’t apply for a grant that might be a better fit for an organization led by and serving people of color. Be aware of how you may be perpetuating things like Trickle-Down Community Engagement (TDCE), where your org gets significant funds which you then trickle down a small amount to small grassroots organizations. Don’t be a gatekeeper. And don’t ask us to do stuff for free. Here are other suggestions for being a good partner.
This was the longest post ever, sorry y’all. Being an ED is a rewarding and magical job. And it is stressful AF. And being an ED of color is even more so. And thus many of us are leaving our jobs, and this is something the entire sector needs to worry about, especially funders, because the way we fund organizations and leaders of color directly affects how long they stay at their jobs, which affects how effective we are at addressing systemic injustice. This is a critical issue. We need to treat it as such.

Last week, men’s lifestyle magazine GQ published this photo of Silicon Valley executives including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Dropbox CEO Drew Houston from their pilgrimage to a small village in Italy to visit Brunello Cucinelli, a luxury designer famous for his $1,000 sweatpants.
But if you think something looks a little off in this photo, you’re right: A BuzzFeed News “investigation” reveals that two women CEOs, Lynn Jurich and Ruzwana Bashir, were photoshopped into what was originally a photo featuring 15 men.

“I want to send a clear message of concern: It is time to end the tradition in science of all-male speaking panels,” Dr. Collins wrote.
“Starting now,” he added, “when I consider speaking invitations, I will expect a level playing field, where scientists of all backgrounds are evaluated fairly for speaking opportunities. If that attention to inclusiveness is not evident in the agenda, I will decline to take part. I challenge other scientific leaders across the biomedical enterprise to do the same.”
His announcement was applauded by scientists who have long urged speaker diversity at conferences.

Just as Caro’s implicit theory of political power seems to belong to a mid-century world, the picture he paints of his own immersion in his work as simply a facet of his tenacious character also seems to belong to an earlier moment. Even if Caro feels that he had no choice but to keep researching and writing as though time were no consideration, the fact is that other people facilitated all of this — his publisher, his agent, his journalistic relationships.
Most of all, his work has been made possible by his wife Ina (a writer in her own right), who Caro describes as the “only” assistant he has ever trusted or tolerated. Her research contributions have been oft noted in profiles of her husband, but one anecdote that stands out here is the description of how she sold their Long Island home and moved them to the Bronx — without even telling her husband she was doing so, presumably to avoid causing him stress. And then there is the mention of how, once the rest of the money for The Power Broker came in, Ina commented that she was finally able to go back to the dry cleaner and the butcher. This was news to Caro, who apparently had not been thinking much about laundry or dinner (let alone the daily care of their young son).

At the community meeting the elder did a specific thing: in her affirmation of herself, she was also pointing out my preference as an outsider. Yes, I was invited. But I was invited by someone who was in a position of authority who made a decision to include me in the space with little or no input from others. When I arrived at this meeting, there was little at stake for me. I very much wanted the attendees to see the value in the project. I wanted people to want to talk to me. But at that point, I had not thought through how I might be disrupting a shared space, perhaps a sacred space, for those living in the same neighborhood—one in which anti-Black policing, continued disinvestment, and food apartheid were everyday realities—whose risks and rewards were the very reasons they gathered that evening. On the telephone the elder did another specific thing: she let it be known that just because the president invited me into that shared space didn’t mean that invitation extended to her private space. Her invitation to call her was an invitation to be checked: my authorized presence and stamp of approval stopped at her doorstep.

In other words, what I am asking is: why do those who could also opt out without penalty not do so? Certainly those in the middle of the rankings cannot leave in the same way that Oxbridge could. So what is the benefit to Oxbridge of staying? My suspicion is that the very culture of competitiveness might be what such institutions wish to preserve, even if that wish is subconscious.

There’s a real need for Arab women in our field. We’re based in a region where most countries have experienced wars, disasters, crises and upheavals, so there’s a need for more hands, especially in the form of Arab women,” she added. “We have empathy, we understand the culture and we speak the language. It makes a big difference.
(Rana Sidani Cassou, Why more women should take up humanitarian work in Middle East and North Africa)

We have a strong recommendation for a reparations fund.
(...) we would like to see this fund actually being focused on the individual survivors and helping them repair their lives. We know that when people are abused, their lives can be permanently damaged psychologically, physically. (Katherine Sierra on Reparations and rehabilitation – how Oxfam can build back better)

A reckless depiction of #voluntourism benefits highlighting experiences for volunteering w/o regard to ethics or long term effects of projects. It even promotes #orphanage voluntourism, which countless studies demonstrate is harmful to children. (Noelle Sullivan on Just married and just giving back: Charitable honeymoons are trending) 

Smith welcomed the fact that the report had been written but was critical of its content. “The report repeatedly states that it’s difficult to assign responsibility to individuals, which is ironically representative of the problem,” he said. “Failures in the UN rarely lead to accountability. Who else could be responsible for a systematic failure than the individuals involved?
“This report will be helpful if it can push the UN in a better direction, but it appears to have dodged the most difficult task of unearthing what specifically went wrong in Myanmar. There are no easy answers but some level of accountability is needed.”
The former assistant UN secretary general Charles Petrie, who in 2012 authored a report on similar UN failures in Sri Lanka during the endgame of the civil war, said he thought Rosenthal had “done a very good job” but that “ultimately he doesn’t say anything new”.
“It’s really a question of the system not having the determination and courage to implement the lessons that are so blatantly clear,” he said .

Sierra: We have not done a roadmap for how reparations would work. We just didn't have the resources to do a full design, but we have a strong recommendation for a reparations fund.
Unlike other funds, which are kind of community-based – working on girls’ education or job creation or the like – we would like to see this fund actually being focused on the individual survivors and helping them repair their lives. We know that when people are abused, their lives can be permanently damaged psychologically, physically.
(...)
It is easier to get agreement over a new policy in a new procedure and to put that in place and to say it's done. It's not done until it really reaches the furthest outpost of the organisation. And so testing for that, and putting the money behind it, making sure it actually gets to people that have to implement these new policies and procedures – with teeth – is going to be very important.
The second piece is the culture change, which we haven't talked too much about and that's hard to measure. It's really about changing the hearts and minds of individuals so that they see this is their business. This is not an add-on to their business. It's fundamentally part of the work that they do to protect people.

Looking back on her life as a humanitarian worker, Toukan said she would not only like to see more Arab women in the profession, but also more of them in decision-making roles.
(...)
Toukan’s views are echoed by Cassou, who said there is a desperate need for dedicated female humanitarian workers in the region.
(...)
Nevertheless, “there’s a real need for Arab women in our field. We’re based in a region where most countries have experienced wars, disasters, crises and upheavals, so there’s a need for more hands, especially in the form of Arab women,” she added. “We have empathy, we understand the culture and we speak the language. It makes a big difference.”

So how then did an American missionary without any medical qualification end up allegedly performing medical procedures and giving treatment to children even after her facility was ordered to shut down?

No one comes out of this looking good: tech firms, @AcaciaMining or the Responsible Minerals Initiative but fundamentally it shows an industry currently unable to curb its worst excesses https://t.co/KZuSrSCgIA

— Tomas Frederiksen (@MiningandCSR) June 18, 2019

It had the feel of a makeshift museum gift shop. Instead of buying coffee-table books and overpriced T-shirts, you could spend time flicking through the profiles of children in Africa, South America and Asia. Each child has had a rough life and a tragic story to tell.

“I danced with some elderly ladies and made their day,” he says. “We cried hard leaving them. They were nice, happy and expressed gratitude.”
At an orphanage, Andrew skateboarded with a little boy who was missing a leg.
“He didn’t want us to leave. It was neat to be attached to someone in that way.”

A reckless depiction of #voluntourism benefits highlighting experiences for volunteering w/o regard to ethics or long term effects of projects. It even promotes #orphanage voluntourism, which countless studies demonstrate is harmful to children. https://t.co/WKzsCfJqQI

— Dr. Noelle Sullivan, BA, MA, MA, PhD (@ncsullivan) June 20, 2019

Does humanitarian aid have a ‘white saviour’ problem? We discuss LIVE now on @AJEnglish and YouTube. Join the conversation.https://t.co/Fey4kGDPE0pic.twitter.com/ZeNKbjCgyo

— The Stream (@AJStream) June 19, 2019

Why does a financially independent institution full of progressive do-gooders, of people interested in change and talented enough to deliver on it, consistently and rather easily dismiss responding to climate crisis, either by reducing its own footprint or by paying attention to the harm playing out almost everywhere it worked? That (quasi-rambling) question is less rhetorical and more instructive than meets the eye.

When tragedy breaks out, it’s natural to turn to social media to find ways to help. But legitimate aid organizations—most of which don’t have the social-media prowess of top Instagram growth hackers—are no match for the thousands of Instagram scammers, meme-account administrators, and influencers who hop on trends and compete for attention on one of the world’s largest social networks.

The actual impacts of activists’ and citizens’ attempts to garner international attention using Twitter – when they shared horrific images of killings and destruction – did not get the results they hoped for. And these attempts to increase awareness did not appear to reduce the violence, at least during the time of our study.
However, there is growing international awareness with recent reports about human rights abuses and how the Cameroon crisis is one of the most neglected. Finally, while there were posts about peace, we did not see a strong peace building social movement.

Dan Fahey on the frustrations of trying to feed evidence & quality research into foreign engagements in Central Africa.#onestepforward#totd | Full interview: https://t.co/vwEHY0oeb0pic.twitter.com/LHyxCeb8Z8

— Ian D. Quick (@ian_d_quick) June 18, 2019

Like everyone else who understands the problem, including the EEOC, the HR workers I met at the conference reported that there is only one way to eradicate harassment from a workplace: by creating a climate and culture that starts at the very top of the company and establishes that harassment is not tolerated and will be punished severely. Middle managers can’t change the culture of a company; only the most senior people can do that. And expecting an HR worker—with a car loan, a mortgage, college tuition around the corner—to risk her job in a fight against management on behalf of an employee she barely knows is unrealistic.
(...)
HR is no match for sexual harassment. It pits male sexual aggression against a system of paperwork and broken promises, and women don’t trust it. For 30 years, we’ve invested responsibility in HR, and it hasn’t worked out. We have to find a better way.

We are calling for more serious scrutiny of the claims made in Suri and Jack’s study, and hope to prompt a more critical assessment of digital-financial inclusion strategies across the board, before it is too late. We worry that digital-financial inclusion through innovations in fin-tech have simply replaced microcredit in development strategies without addressing any of the fundamental issues that made microcredit such a developmental disaster for the global poor. We also fear that fin-tech has the potential to exacerbate the worst forms of extraction perpetrated by microcredit. Fin-tech’s obvious potential for doing good, such as when deployed by community-owned financial institutions that aim to serve the poor and not push them into un–repayable levels of debt, has been almost entirely overlooked in the investment community’s rush to get rich and to locate the next fin-tech ‘unicorn’.
Rather than being lauded as the new panacea for development and poverty reduction, digital-financial inclusion initiatives like M-Pesa should, therefore, be rigorously scrutinised. If this does not happen, we can look forward to two more decades of failed development policy with hugely negative outcomes for poor households around the world.

I found reading The Business of Changing the World rather disturbing – a bit like being taken hostage by a cult and submitted to polite but persistent brainwashing for several days (I’m a slow reader). The cult in question is what Anand Giridharadas calls ‘MarketWorld’ – an effusive, evangelical belief in the power of markets, data and new tech to solve almost any problem. It didn’t help that I read the two books back to back.

Moreover, we realized that this lack of accountability also creates a lost opportunity for the projects in question. Local views on researchers’ findings could add something to subsequent analyses. The communities in which we carry out research projects must be informed of our findings; they must be given a stake in the research results. Otherwise, what is the point of research? To make findings available only to elites? So that they in turn can use their knowledge and claim to be able to speak for the poor…?

“Sunstein continues to write as if nudges and cost-benefit analysis—the whole technocratic shebang—are cheeky new ideas worth giving a shot, and not the codified bedrock of an approach to government with a real and unflattering historical track record.”https://t.co/Vx5gthoPse

— Frank Pasquale (@FrankPasquale) June 20, 2019

But none of this means that mindfulness ought to be banned, or that anyone who finds it useful is deluded. Reducing suffering is a noble aim and it should be encouraged. But to do this effectively, teachers of mindfulness need to acknowledge that personal stress also has societal causes. By failing to address collective suffering, and systemic change that might remove it, they rob mindfulness of its real revolutionary potential, reducing it to something banal that keeps people focused on themselves.

This (real) video from GE on how to reset their "C" light bulbs is the most incredible how-to video you'll ever see.

They want to see how far they can push their customers before they snap. https://t.co/gbXOc543fy

— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) June 20, 2019

Scaling Impact introduces a new and practical approach to scaling the positive impacts of research and innova­tion. Inspired by leading scientific and entrepreneurial innovators from across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East, this book presents a syn­thesis of unrivalled diversity and grounded ingenuity. The result is a different perspective on how to achieve impact that matters, and an important challenge to the predomi­nant more-is-better paradigm of scaling.

My book 'Rebel Lives. Photographs from inside the Lord's Resistance Army #LRA' can now be ordered! https://t.co/a1b4zTTdSA Photographs from #LRA commanders; additional photographs by Georges Senga; Preface by Jonathan Littell and essay by @ahpetite. pic.twitter.com/zfmU5bMZOy

— Kristof Titeca (@KristofTiteca) June 17, 2019

A young woman too shy to look at the camera at Nova Canaã shelter in Boa Vista, Brazil. (UNHCR/Genesis Andreina Lemus Guacaran)

The Syrian government has rigged the system for provision of humanitarian aid, to ensure that the benefit to the state supersedes the needs of the population. In doing so, it has compromised each humanitarian organization or agency’s ability to program and re-oriented priorities towards obtaining greater access and resources, instead of serving beneficiaries impartially. Humanitarian organizations have very little leverage to negotiate up with the Syrian government. (Rigging the System-Government Policies Co-Opt Aid and Reconstruction Funding in Syria)

Our study shows that action on climate change demands shuttering vast sections of the military machine. There are few activities on Earth as environmentally catastrophic as waging war. Significant reductions to the Pentagon’s budget and shrinking its capacity to wage war would cause a huge drop in demand from the biggest consumer of liquid fuels in the world. It does no good tinkering around the edges of the war machine’s environmental impact. The money spent procuring and distributing fuel across the US empire could instead be spent as a peace dividend, helping to fund a Green New Deal in whatever form it might take. (US military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries) 

Polfus is part of a growing movement of scientists who don’t just “consult” with Indigenous communities — they immerse themselves in them, learn from them, share knowledge and return something to the community in the process. The Dene call this mode of thinking “łeghágots’enetę,” translated to “learning together.”
“It’s finding the questions that you have in common,” says Aerin Jacob, a conservation scientist with the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y). “Where’s the overlap between [questions] communities want to have answered and what is your expertise?” (Meet the scientists embracing traditional Indigenous knowledge)

Based on interviews with humanitarians, donors, experts, and beneficiaries, as well as a review of publicly available data on humanitarian and development assistance and reconstruction, the report concludes that the Syrian government has developed a policy and legal framework that allows it to co-opt humanitarian assistance and reconstruction funding to fund its atrocities, advance its own interests, punish those perceived as opponents, and benefit those loyal to it.

According to one report, a Ugandan official even says he personally witnessed Bach give a blood transfusion to a child sitting under a tree. That article, written by Nikki Gagnon, even contains a photograph of Bach inserting an intravenous line into an infant. Affidavits from the complaint reportedly contain testimony from a registered nurse affirming that Bach was observed performing a number of medical procedures. Former Serving His Children employee Semei Jolly told Al Jazeera that Bach would often cancel medication prescribed by local doctors and implement her own treatments. According to Jolly, when he raised the subject, Bach’s employees responded that “a boss is a boss.”

In this podcast, Alaso and Nielsen tell us why it is so important to recognize and question the power dynamics inherent in white saviorism. They share how the inequities they witnessed while living and working within the white community in Jinja led them to start No White Saviors. And they discuss the challenges and responsibilities of having a growing platform on the internet.
Despite critics accusing them of racism, they feel their partnership is positive. “Having someone who is a Black woman, and of African nationality, and then someone who is a white woman, who has very much been part of the problem, coming at it in a unified sense,” Nielsen says. Their message is “unapologetically ‘white people, you need to do better. We need to do better.’”

Here we are again; an image of a dead child spreading on social media. 2-yr-old Valeria & 25-yr-old father Oscar drowned together crossing the Rio Grande. I am mostly just tired & heartsick, but here are a few thoughts from my ongoing work on images of dead children in crises 1/

— Helen Berents (@hmberents) June 26, 2019

The journey to Brazil was challenging and now, living in temporary shelters in the northern state of Roraima, opportunities to take a breath from a demanding reality are scarce. But for five days in February, 21 young Venezuelans had a chance to put on their photographer hat, learn how to capture the stories of their community and share their dignity, resilience and hope with the world.
All participants of the photography workshop, organized by National Geographic in February with the support of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, were Venezuelan students living in shelters. Some had never held a photo camera in their hands; others, like Santiago Briceño, had always dreamed of becoming professional photographers.

“The biggest problem has been security. I think if we had the access we need, we could have finished dealing with it a long time ago,” says Socé’s colleague Michel Yao, in charge of the day-to-day WHO response.
“Every time there was an incident we would be prevented from working for three to four days. There would be demonstrations and anyone could be attacked. We became the target.”
(...)
“We have the vaccine and new ways of treating the disease,” says Dr Marie-Claire Kolie, a Guinean doctor in Butembo who worked on Ebola in her own country.
“The big difference is that this is occurring in a conflict zone and that is accentuating everything. We’ve seen the numbers of cases in the centres declining, and that’s good news, but we are still seeing deaths in the community and they are difficult to investigate. And there’s still no confidence in the community even now.

"It's shocking but not surprising," says Tarun Gopalakrishnan, a climate change expert at the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment. He says the crisis in Chennai is the result of "a toxic mix of bad governance and climate change."
Rains have become more erratic because of climate change. That, coupled with a delayed arrival of the seasonal monsoon, which usually comes in June, has all but dried up the city's water supply. Government data show that the storage level in the four lakes combined is less than one-hundredth of what it was at this time last year. A severe heat wave gripping most of India, including Chennai, has aggravated conditions.
What's happening in Chennai could easily happen anywhere across India, Gopalakrishnan says.

“However, Mozambique will be collecting only royalty payments at this stage and taxable revenue from companies is only expected in the 2030s, once the companies have recovered their initial expenditure.
“I think, unfortunately, that Mozambique’s gas story will be similar to Nigeria, Angola, DRC — there will be a lot of money coming in from its natural resources, but poor planning, poor governance, poor institutions and a massive amount of debt means that the average Mozambican will not see much improvement in their quality of life from the gas find,” Duthie said.

This @qzafrica article is riddled w/false assumptions about aid to #Liberia. Large portions of aid bankrolled foreign workers & admin, never reaching our shores; Remittances dwarfed ODA; Aid figures conceal more than reveal, stoking citizen-govt. tensions: https://t.co/ZkZViirGYE

— Robtel Neajai Pailey (@RobtelNeajai) June 25, 2019

Our study shows that action on climate change demands shuttering vast sections of the military machine. There are few activities on Earth as environmentally catastrophic as waging war. Significant reductions to the Pentagon’s budget and shrinking its capacity to wage war would cause a huge drop in demand from the biggest consumer of liquid fuels in the world.
It does no good tinkering around the edges of the war machine’s environmental impact. The money spent procuring and distributing fuel across the US empire could instead be spent as a peace dividend, helping to fund a Green New Deal in whatever form it might take. There are no shortage of policy priorities that could use a funding bump. Any of these options would be better than fuelling one of the largest military forces in history.

Polfus is part of a growing movement of scientists who don’t just “consult” with Indigenous communities — they immerse themselves in them, learn from them, share knowledge and return something to the community in the process. The Dene call this mode of thinking “łeghágots’enetę,” translated to “learning together.”
“It’s finding the questions that you have in common,” says Aerin Jacob, a conservation scientist with the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y). “Where’s the overlap between [questions] communities want to have answered and what is your expertise?”
That overlap can be a place of both great opportunity and great resistance. It’s the site of an ongoing clash of vibrant traditions, a stubborn establishment and curious minds.
(...)
Other benefits also arise when the community asserts control over how research is done in its territory. The Hakai Institute employs Heiltsuk members as field technicians. In Wuikinuxv First Nation, Adams has been trying to leverage the funding and privilege that comes with her affiliation with the University of Victoria to work with youth, running a camp in a hard-to-reach part of the territory.
Polfus has been doing the same in Tulít’a, spending time in schools and working with community members in an effort to expand local capacity.

Meth and cocaine are packed into boats in Latin America and the US and sailed to Australia and New Zealand to feed the countries' lucrative drug habits, leaving a trail of addiction and violence in the Pacific nations they pass through. The routes shown are an approximation based on the locations given in media coverage and police reports

Another big challenge was external interference in editorial decisions. The journalists and editors we spoke to said that this happened often. They gave examples of major advertisers, political leaders and media owners exerting pressure on them to skew articles in their favour or insisting on censorship.
The people we spoke to also said that the government, as the biggest advertiser, put pressure on media houses to give it positive coverage in exchange for advertising. As a result, independent investigative reporting suffered. There were also a lot of public relations exercises in the name of journalism.
Journalists also mentioned that reporters and editors would be biased towards people or organisations associated with their ethnic origin.

After all the efforts to protect ready make garment sector workers in Bangladesh, Cambodia etc from hazardous conditions, automation will take many of their jobs within the decade. https://t.co/m897BHVfZX

— Layna Mosley (@thwillow) June 22, 2019

“Some of the worst human rights abuses we can see can be facilitated by ID cards,” said Privacy International research officer, Tom Fisher, adding that biometric systems can make this situation even worse. “Do we need biometrics?” he asked delegates, as more and more services are accessed via biometric authentication. He stressed the importance of an ecosystem approach to ID which would mean those without the ID may still be able to access some services: “Can we remove the barriers that required the ID?”.

There needs to be some kind of international consensus and forum to address the many, and potentially violent, demands for self-determination across the world. The arbitrary drawing of borders by feckless and inept colonial officials in the Middle East, Africa and Asia has left behind an awful lot of unresolved self-determination crises. Kashmir, a source of conflict between two nuclear-armed countries, is not merely of local interest. We need some accepted criteria to assess the legitimacy of such demands, including for instance the protection of minorities, non-interference by outside powers and democratic endorsement (a requirement for non-violence might also help), and we need a place to talk about them sensibly. Not a court, as these disputes do not lend themselves to legal arbitration. They are political matters to be resolved by political means: negotiation, negotiation and more negotiation.

A Center for Public Integrity review of MSHA investigative reports, police files and court documents reveals that weak oversight has mixed with mistakes at mines to deadly effect, as the industry and its regulators bicker over proposed rules. Various types of heavy machinery have directly or indirectly been involved in nearly 500 deaths, dozens of them caused by blind spots, at underground and surface mines since 2000, according to MSHA data.
A recent analysis by the agency found that 23 deaths could have been avoided in surface mines alone between 2003 and 2018 if heavy machinery were equipped with safety measures such as backup cameras, proximity sensors or other collision-warning systems.

The minister will be here “any minute”.

Would have appreciated a more diverse set of panelists in your "#shootingwar" series of panels. Having local photographers who live & have grown up in active conflict zones would have added a great deal here because of their lived experiences. @TheGlobeEventshttps://t.co/hgcq3b8iJV

— Chirag Wakaskar (@chiragwakaskar) June 26, 2019

He thinks many people are very unreasonable, and makes sweeping claims about their irrationality and moral imbecility, but often doesn’t bother to listen to what they actually say. While insisting for page upon page on the necessity of rationality, he irrationally caricatures and mocks ideas he hasn’t tried to understand. Then, when the people who believe those ideas become upset, he sees this as further proof of their emotion-driven thinking, and becomes even more convinced that he is right. It is a pattern displayed by many of those who are critics of “social justice” and the political left. (For an entire book about this, see The Current Affairs Rules For Life: On Social Justice and Its Critics.) Pinker, however, takes it to an extreme: Nobody has ever tried to look more Reasonable while being so ignorant and condescending.

The #Pluriverse book has now been published!

It contains over 100 essays on transformative alternatives to dominant processes of globalized development.

Download the PDF for free here: https://t.co/qLn1cT4AU5

For buying it at a discounted rate, contact: info@authorsupfront.com pic.twitter.com/VsRBHXMBaQ

— Research & Degrowth (@R_Degrowth) June 25, 2019

There is stunningly well-conducted empirical analysis out in AER today on the effects of vapid, low-quality entertainment & biased news on cognitive ability, civic engagement, & support for populists politicians. The conclusion is that bad media harms people & politics. pic.twitter.com/416bBAJ1uR

— Jonathan T. Rothwell (@jtrothwell) June 26, 2019

Pluto’s output expanded enormously – almost four hundred titles had been published by the mid-eighties – and a number of important series generated, including Workers’ Handbooks, Marxism Series: Ideas in Action, the Big Red Diaries, The State of the World Atlases, the Militarism, State and Society series, Pluto Plays, Arguments for Socialism, Politics of Health, Pluto Crime and Liberation Classics. We published extensively in the areas of movement history, race politics, Ireland, popular culture, feminism and sexual politics. Anne Benewick was production manager from 1972 and managed the Atlas programme; and the editorial team was joined later by Pete Ayrton, Paul Crane and Neil Middleton.

At the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, some 200 Norman barons owned half of England. Thanks to the miracle of trickle-down economics, that elite has expanded over time - so that a mere eight centuries later, half of England lay in the hands of 4,000 aristocrats and members of the gentry. (...) But throughout all this (aristocratic decline from the 1920s to the 1970s), the landed aristocracy survived to a far greater extent than is commonly realised. From the 1970s onwards, they were joined by a newly minted plutocracy who today are keeping up the landowning traditions of a territorial elite (p.269).

Shrubsole’s book is not just an interesting case study of English history and contemporary conditions under the ‘neoliberal’ condition.
Questions about land ownership are playing an important role when we discuss sustainable development. After the initial excitement the debates on ‘land grabbing’ in the global South seem to have lost a little bit of momentum, but ownership of agricultural land, land for infrastructure developments or for a new middle class of home owners are not just discussion for the former imperial center…

The ⁦@nytimes⁩’ job ad for Nairobi bureau chief says a lot about the kinds of stories they want from Eastern Africa... pic.twitter.com/esEeOMI18l

— Ken Opalo (@kopalo) July 3, 2019

OK, I'm done. Officially done. 🤣🤣🤣🤣@aleyakassam@Laura_Ekumbo and @tweetmoraa you have made my day!

For @nytimes. Hopefully clownery will recognize clownery. pic.twitter.com/gkOxL3sIKj

— Christine Mungai (@chris_mungai) July 4, 2019

Gettleman is quite fond of Gettleman; that may not be that surprising given that he is writing his memoir, but it may also be indicative of similar Generation X narratives: His story is not a ‘rags to riches’ story, Gettleman essentially gets paid for creative work he loves and is good at and once his wife Courtenay has come to terms with the ‘emergency sex’ cheating they are starting a family and settle firmly into Nairobi. There is clearly a ‘I would do it again!’ notions about his experiences-and some parts of the European white academic male in me initial think ‘why not?!’.

The division between correspondents and fixers is not only a matter of title, compensation, and credit. It is also what determines who gets to tell the story. The role of journalism is to question the dominant authority and destabilize reductionist narratives. But too often, Western journalists are the sole authors of stories about non-Western subjects, and the inequitable relationships within journalism get reproduced in the published work. The result is a glut of predictable and monotonous news pieces about rape in India and war in El Salvador.
In 2013, Dixit was hired as a fixer by a German filmmaker for a documentary on women’s safety in India. The filmmaker expected Dixit to fetch her from the airport and drive her around. Dixit complied. But then the filmmaker demanded, “I want to interview a rape survivor who can speak English, for my camera.” Dixit felt she had to speak up. (Hearing this story, I was reminded of the 1978 memoir by Edward Behr, Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?) Many foreign journalists might not be so shameless. But there’s a word for the act of flying in to claim ownership of the stories of others: imperialism.

Most aid and development projects are subject to independent evaluations. But the article warned that funders maintain a high degree of confidentiality and control over the results.
In some instances, researchers who attempted to document negative findings had been subject to “personal and institutional pressure, intimidation and censorship”, the article said. The authors also warned of more subtle forms of bias, such as self-censorship on the part of academics and embellished findings.
(...)
Perverse incentives across the development sector encourage the use of “bad or fudged” data by agencies, it added. The article referred to previous warnings of a “success cartel” in global health, where pressure to achieve targets has led some governments and other development agencies to inflate their achievements.

2/ Combined, the results are a ‘gap analysis’ which can inform future research. Both studies were funded by @Charity_Futures, re its work establishing an Institute of Charity at Oxford University. But the findings can inform the agenda of any researchers in this terrain.

— Caroline Fiennes (@carolinefiennes) July 2, 2019

Caroline Fiennes, Director of Giving Evidence, said: “We were surprised by how uninterested charities and donors seemed to be in academic research. We were also stuck by the mismatch between the topics that they said they were interested in and the focus of the existing research. Clearly the voice of the intended beneficiary is not the sole determinant of a research agenda, but it is an important component. (...).The research also points to some activities that would be valuable beyond producing more research. One is helping charities and donors to find and use existing research –for example, about the effectiveness of various interventions, which they can use to design programmes. And another is training charities and donors about research methods e.g., for identifying impact, because there were several requests for research methods which in fact already exist.”

In your 2017 study, you note that Ecuador’s murder rates fell drastically after it legalized gangs — from 15.35 per 100,000 people in 2011 to 5 per 100,000 people in 2017. To what extent can you show that that was actually caused by gang legalization, as opposed to other factors?
David Brotherton
Statistically, you can only show correlation. And, actually, at first I thought maybe the crime rate was going down because the country had reformed the police. But we spent a year traveling around Ecuador and interviewing all the [gang] leaders. And when you hang out for a while, you see how differently they respond to conflicts now. For example, they [the Latin Kings] put on one of the biggest hip hop concerts ever, and they worked with other previously antagonistic gangs on the project.
(...)
It’s all about a progressive, rational policy for social control. There’s this idea known as “deviance amplification” — basically, when you want to stop a behavior, the worst thing you can do is prohibit it. Social inclusion is the most productive means of social control. You have to have a system where most of people’s engagement with the authorities is as positive as possible.
The state can’t just say, “This is the American dream, you can do it, so do it.” The state has to say, “I want you, and I’m going to help you in these concrete ways, and I’m going to win your trust.”

When hundreds of aid officials, NGO workers, and diplomats gather in Geneva, you can be sure of one thing: there’ll be publications and PDFs galore. We’ve gathered our top eight here

Algiers, Third World Capital, brings out the best in what I appreciate so much about alternative writings about the history of development: Through the eyes of a fascinating personality the reader is immersed in a historical puzzle that vividly and also entertainingly, outlines the complexities of transformation, of alternatives ideas, different ideals and insights into societies, countries and larger parts of the world in limbo.

In the end, 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!

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’. Heineken’s impact of local labour markets is smaller than what one might expect, its interest in accountability when it comes to the host countries is weak and ‘corporate social responsibility’ not more than an evolving buzzword.

This means that it has become easier to track refugees by benign actors, such as keenly interested academics, NGOs, and rescue coordinators, as well as more sinister actors including border security towards the interception of migrants. From mathematical formulas that neatly calculate the numbers of refugees any given European country should receive, to technical innovations that surveil mobility, there is no shortage of examples as to how sociotechnical imaginaries have shaped and determined refugee destinies. Dijstelbloem and Meijer point to digital technologies as a symbolic front, or a political strategy, through which governments can claim that they are proactive in their management of borders. My interest in these developments have been along two lines: first, how technological interventions, such as these, are seen as a way of bypassing the politics of migration and integration (meanwhile deferring power to but a few large tech corporations), and; secondly, how inequities and discrimination resulting from these interventions have been defined as technical questions.

Above all, successfully implementing technology requires more than socially-wise engineers. Technology workers' recent protests prove that it takes more than ethical judgement to implement ethical technologies. Workers across the industry sounded alarm bells over the last year as part of the #techwontbuildit movement. Tech workers have begun to protest unethical technologies by producing letters, petitions, work slowdowns, and even walkouts. Ethics guide our sense of right and wrong, but it does not empower democracy in the tech world. For this, students in computing-related fields need a sense of history and society that exceeds design or behavioral knowledge.
What we need is an approach that empowers citizens, civic organizations, and advocacy groups to take collective action. We will make progress when we collaborate with impacted communities to identify the issues that matter most and arrive at inclusive solutions. Community organizations already exist to combat the very real institutional and systemic injustices that plague vulnerable communities. We do not need to clarify the technology, we need to identify how technology might exacerbate those challenges.

From massive state-driven digital identity projects and YouTube censorship to Tinder and dating culture, from Twitter and primetime television to Facebook and political rumors, Global Digital Cultures focuses on enduring concerns of representation, identity, and power while grappling with algorithmic curation and data-driven processes of production, circulation, and consumption.

Gaining trust and access to sites of humanitarian practice is often challenging, yet imperative to understand the diversity and complexity of the humanitarian field. In the course of my research on domestic charitable practice in Saudi Arabia I encountered a broad range of different visions of community engagement, gathered under the umbrella of charity. Humanitarianism has offered a niche for my interlocutors in Jeddah and Riyadh, who sought to make a positive change. However, what constitutes “positive change” is a highly contested topic in today’s Saudi Arabia.

For the past two years, Thomas-Asante, co-president for democracy and education at Soas University of London student union, has attended meetings, panel discussions and focus groups, created mentoring schemes, organised events, listened to the problems experienced by BAME students and liaised between them and academic staff.
At first, she did so voluntarily, but it is now a paid role after she was advised by a BAME staff member not to work for free. While she loves doing the job and values the way the university involves students in addressing the attainment gap, she says it’s a lot of psychological pressure. “Just because it’s paid doesn’t mean it’s any less difficult. It’s an immense amount of work that you cannot do alone. It’s not enough always for universities to say the work is being done because students are doing it,” she says.
It is not only BAME students who bear the brunt of schemes to address inequality – academic staff from under-represented groups feel it too. Kalwant Bhopal, professor of education and social justice at the University of Birmingham, says that if there are issues around race and racial inequality “there seems to be an expectation that this should fall as a burden on BAME groups”.

Despite the fact that there are increasing attempts to “decolonise development”, much of academic debate is still concerned with questions of how to fix development, how to make approaches, projects and interventions more applicable, but seldom on questioning the complex web of who defines “development”, who practices development, with what means and to what ends. Most importantly, why do Western universalist idea(l)s of progress and growth continue to occupy the core of all deliberations? Without attempting to be conclusive, I want to highlight what I see as first careful steps towards approaching development studies with a decolonial lens, starting in the areas of research, teaching and collaboration.

It seems almost futile and pointing out bad examples of charity and development is not always the best way to communicate, but I anonymize the post as much as possible to avoid simply shaming a particular Women's Institute chapter.

Unfortunately, there’s some misinfo circulating on social media – while we know underwear helps in many ways, we would never claim it would prevent rape. For more info, please see https://t.co/t8tNDuQwkG. Hope that helps and thanks so much for your support. Fiona.

— SmallsforAll (@SmallsforAll) June 20, 2019

In Africa, some women are living in such poor conditions that they only have access to a single pair of knickers, or sometimes none at all.
Not only is this obviously unhygienic, but if women own underwear, they are considered more wealthy and likely to be ‘cared for’, which means they are likely to have a male relative in their life. In turn, this means they are perceived as ‘not alone’, and thus are seen as less vulnerable, and are less likely to be attacked or raped.
Smalls for all is a great charity which has been set up by Maria Macnamara, who after visiting and assisting vulnerable people in Africa, wanted to make a lasting difference to their lives.)

Here's another incredible #GiveAndMakeup drop off from our amazing customers. Just yesterday, we donated over 100 parcels to @RefugeCharity - thank you for helping us to make this happen! ❤️@CarolineHironspic.twitter.com/ZNsQcLbZ9o

— Escentual (@escentual) May 18, 2019

Give and Makeup was borne out of an idea for a blog post.
I was going to write a post about essentials…that led to an idea about what your absolute necessities would be…that led to an idea about ‘what if you had NOTHING’…and that led me to this page on the Refuge website.
(...)
My eyes locked on to ‘Medicines and Toiletries’ and I thought of the amount of product I had sitting in my cupboard and felt ashamed. I scrapped the blog post and Give and Makeup started that evening.

That picture gave us a lot of problems. We had to close the London address because we were being sent old bras. Just bras...(...) No-one is trying to be a ‘white saviour’. And that viral picture was a pain in my arse to be frank. (...) And unfortunately that picture meant that a manageable situation had to temporarily close, because it diverted people away from looking after the women/families.

Hi. I founded Give and Makeup. Easily traceable. You don’t so much ‘name and shame’ so much as underhandedly tweet about it and blog about it without asking me directly. I’m not sure what part of GAMU isn’t ‘fact-based’ for you, but I’ll continue to take my lead from ...

— Caroline Hirons (@CarolineHirons) July 10, 2019

Doing in-kind donations well requires a lot of effort-and they should definitely not be sent to 'Africa'!
But just to go back to the beginning: Do not send stuff to charities that are planning to distribute it in 'Africa' (or other parts of the world that are far away from Europe...). 

We have created beautiful work that has deeply questioned what it means to do good. We've had real impact with some of our stories, like getting an ICE policy changed that reunited over a thousand undocumented families. We've won four journalism awards, including a National Edward R. Murrow award for excellence in writing. Our stories have been part of philanthropic funding decisions. We've helped students think through how they can best make a difference in the world.
I'm also so deeply thankful for the audience we've built, of curious and globally-minded people who hail from all corners of the world. My heart and inbox have been overwhelmed with the messages I've been getting in response to announcing our closure on social media.

She says she agreed to help the children. And before long she came to feel that this was God's plan for her: turn the house into a center where malnourished children and their mothers could live while the youngsters recuperated — complete with free rations of the special foods they would need, the medicines doctors had prescribed and lessons for the mothers on nutrition ... and the Bible.
In early 2010 Bach posted a blog entry titled "Here we go!" Her nutrition center was up and running.

Church, we need to talk. Because while we'd like to think that this situation is a particularly terrible outlier, the truth is, many of us are raising young people to think in exactly this kind of mindset. 1/ https://t.co/1gjqOtMZUB

— Laura Seay (@texasinafrica) August 11, 2019

U.S. Missionary With No Medical Training Sued After Malnourished Ugandan Children Died At Her Center : Goats and Soda : NPR https://t.co/GqaChWbZ8Q

— TMS Ruge (@tmsruge) August 10, 2019

UNHCR spokesperson Cécile Pouilly told The New Humanitarian in an email that the probe, which began early last year, has now concluded and that the staff member in question has been on administrative leave without pay since 15 March.
“The case has been referred to the Division of Human Resources in accordance with the process for disciplinary action,” Pouilly noted. “We expect the disciplinary process to be finalised soon.”
Witnesses who gave testimony during the investigation told TNH this week that they believe UNHCR’s conclusion downplays the pervasiveness of corruption within the Khartoum office. All of the witnesses asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.
“[There is] not just one criminal. This type of crime does not work with one person,” said one refugee. “There is so much going on, from [the] reception to [the] senior protection officer.”

For Ershov and others, the donors’ reaction was a depressing reminder that rooting out corruption was a low priority.
“There are rich countries which are sending huge amounts of money to provide this support” for environmental programs, Pashyk said. “In the end, this money disappears like water in the sand.”

This project was bound to fail for the following reasons:
It would be extremely costly to run the project. This was actually going to cost more than all the other costs associated with free primary education currently offered by the government.
Lack of skilled personnel to run the program was a major hindrance. Most of the teachers were not very computer literate, and a one week training by the government would not make them experts, when the children they were supposed to teach could easily outdo them in using smartphones and tablets. The content was also not ready and it delayed the launch for a quite a long time
The priorities were wrong from the beginning. Schools lack teachers, classrooms, connection to the grid, and in some places, there are no schools! It is also common for children to drop out of school due to lack of books or even food.
Lack of requisite infrastructure. Only 10% of schools were connected to the grid, while 50% were far away from the national grid. Schools also lacked the facilities to safely store the devices, considering the many cases of school break-ins where books were being stolen.
Lack of support mechanism when technology failed. This left both teachers and learners stranded, and often having to wait for long to receive technical support.

And the irony of it all is that the SUVs are driving along roads that are in advanced stages of disrepair because the money has all gone for expensive cars.
Though the government has been slow to provide development and service delivery, vehicle-related expenses have grown six-fold since 2013. The federal government is the biggest spender: provincial governments accounted for just Rs20 million spent on cars in the past three years.

Recognising when we have gone beyond useful monitoring and it now significantly undermines the implementation;
Developing strategic, targeted monitoring and evaluation systems that focus on essential data needs. Guidance papers such as Ten reasons not to measure impact – and what to do instead can be helpful in thinking through when something is not needed or feasible;
Building structured opportunities for joint sense-making and learning in programmes, with room to make changes based on this analysis. While doing this, we should draw in insights from behavioural science to mitigate against the most common biases in decision-making (e.g. how to avoid ‘group think’, how people are influenced by their previous experiences and the effects of polarised political contexts);
Having honest (and yes, difficult) conversations with donors to see whether there’s room to scale back from excessive monitoring and oversight requirements and focus on what is really needed and useful. Let’s start by deleting ‘nice to have’ indicators and prioritise ‘must haves’ – keeping a few that donors need but otherwise concentrating on those needed to make programme improvements.

Privacy advocates are concerned there isn’t yet enough research to prove the efficacy or necessity of biometrics, worrying about keeping the details of vulnerable people safe.
Aid agencies argue the new technology can make sure aid gets where it is supposed to go, and could even make it easier to pick up assistance. After all, you don’t have to keep track of an ID card that entitles you to aid when an iris scan does the job.

The bill also provides for the collection wide variety of biometric data, including "fingerprint, hand geometry, earlobe geometry, retina and iris patterns, toe impression, voice waves, blood typing, photograph, or such other biological attributes of an individual obtained by way of biometrics." With the phrase "other biological attributes", the text technically leaves the door open for the collection of DNA data, contrary to the court's directive.
(...)
If this bill passes, then people like me will become undocumented in their own country, facing legal and civic death, and forced to exist at the margins. Eventually, our resistance might break and we may be compelled to register. But that will not be a choice at all - how does one choose between legal erasure or being commodified as data to be sold to the highest bidder?

The question of technologization and digitalization of the continent is a question of what kind of society we want to live in. African youth solving their own problems means deciding what we want to amplify and show the rest of the world. It also means not importing the latest state-of-the-art machine learning systems or any other AI tools without questioning what the underlying purpose is, who benefits, and who might be disadvantaged by the implementation of such tools.
Moreover, African youth leading the AI space means creating programs and databases that serve various local communities and not blindly importing Western AI systems founded upon individualistic and capitalist drives. It also means scrutinizing the systems we ourselves develop and setting ethical standards that serve specific purposes instead of accepting Western perspectives as the standard. In a continent where much of the narrative is hindered by negative images such as migration, drought, and poverty, using AI to solve our problems ourselves means using AI in a way we want, to understand who we are and how we want to be understood and perceived: a continent where community values triumph and nobody is left behind.

It’s also important not to overstate the significance of WhatsApp. Things look very different below the national level, for example, where campaign structures were less developed and a significant proportion of activity remained informal.
We found that while candidates for Governor and Member of Parliament did set up WhatsApp groups, they were much less organised. In many cases, candidates relied on existing networks and social influencers to get the message out.
Candidates were also keen to stress that while they used WhatsApp during their campaigns, they did not rely on it. Voters expect to see their leaders on the ground, and expected them to provide a range of services for the community. Advertising good deeds over WhatsApp could help a leader get credit, but only if they had fulfilled their responsibilities in the first place.
In other words, WhatsApp can amplify and complement a candidate’s ground campaign. But it cannot replace it.

Moreover, many of the big conservation NGOs some of which are colonial in origin have barely changed their key operating principles today.
(...)
While contemporary environmental projects and interventions are constituted by partly novel and more diverse purposes and interests than was the case during colonial times, the wholesale transplantation of tropes, laws, principles, strategies and practices must be recognised for what it is. This is not least to help locate more accurately the origins of many of the uniquely racist practices in environmental management but to also help render them familiar while at the same time signalling the tough struggle needed to break such long-standing and deeply-ingrained practices.

I’ve created a mental checklist to use when I think about partnerships, as a way of making sure that my salary doesn’t keep me from understanding essential facts:
Would I feel comfortable being honest with this donor? Have they displayed an openness to feedback, a desire to learn together, and an understanding of the language of sustainability? Is everyone being honest from day one about what we’re getting out of the partnership?
Does this program serve farmers, industry, or both? Have we consulted thoroughly with farmers to ensure that we’re meeting their real needs?
Could someone argue in good faith that the project is greenwashing? How would I respond to such an accusation?
How does this project shape the overall revenue mix of my work? Am I so reliant on any one donor, or even any one type of donor (public, corporate, foundation, or individual), that I would hesitate to do the right thing for farmers for fear of losing donors’ favor?
How did the donor set their priorities? What business need are they meeting in supporting sustainability work?
Do I think the donor has a fundamental respect for the role of sustainability NGOs and an understanding of why our work matters?

There’s nothing wrong with celebrating progress. Humanity has made some extraordinary gains in recent history that deserve our attention. But that’s not really what New Optimism is about. The movement’s core argument isn’t just that things have improved, but rather that the progress we’ve seen has been fuelled by the spread of capitalism around the world.
(...)
Over and over again, the question of inequality emerges as a sticking point for the New Optimists. To paper over this problem, many have tried to claim that global inequality is declining, and that poor countries are catching up with rich countries. Charts produced by Gapminder and Our World In Data give the impression that the gap has nearly closed over the past few decades, abolishing the old colonial divide between North and South. This is Pinker’s ‘Great Convergence’. ‘The poorer countries have caught up,’ Max Roser proclaims. And from Bill Gates: ‘The world is no longer separated between the West and the rest.’ This narrative works by relying on a very particular metric of inequality – one focused not on the actual income gap but rather on relative rates of change.

Cultural and situational differences in how we think about stress and burnout. The risk of designing policies around a small minority of aid workers coming from the global north.

What if these tools are combined with relationship, deliberation, reflection, fragility, acceptance, self-determination, openness, collaboration, courage, joy, and revolutionary love? What if we completely let go of “convincing” and using enthusiasm to attract people? What if we only share information within context and within a conversation? We aim always to align our grantmaking and fundraising with our values. What happens when we push communications to do so too, in even deeper ways? This requires a more profound conversation or dialogue than what can be shared in 280 characters, with market-driven tools.

Titus Kaphar, "Behind the Myth of Benevolence," 2014 pic.twitter.com/i7b3NeorKw

— Africa is a Country (@africasacountry) July 24, 2019

Despite being impressed, the dictator — like most people in 1985 — hadn’t fully grasped how life-changing the technology would be and he initially refused to grant Telecel an operating license. Gatt and Rwayitare knew they were onto a good thing, however, so they used their life savings to purchase an ailing U.S. mobile technology firm and obtained finance from Motorola to erect a small system in Kinshasa. All that remained was to buy a couple of hundred handsets — at $3,000 a pop — and give them to Mobutu and his inner circle.
“These 200 Zairean officials called each other and overseas over the next year without paying for a single call,” writes Sean Ndiho Obedih in a profile of Rwayitare. At the end of the trial period, and faced with the prospect of losing what had now become an essential cog in the state machinery, Mobutu agreed to give them their license … provided they could come up with legislation for the fledgling industry. Gatt and Rwayitare contracted the services of a Paris legal firm, which wrote the regulations from scratch.
Soon, everyone who was anyone in Zaire had a Telecel. The exorbitant cost of both handsets (Gatt and Rwayitare marked them up to $5,000) and calls (that $16 international rate was short-lived, but even local calls averaged $0.36 per minute) only made them more desirable among Zaire’s elite. Wrong “knew [she] was in the presence of greatness when [she] watched Zaire’s leading businessman juggle a row of Telecels on the coffee table in front of him.” (The batteries lasted only 60 minutes so he did have some excuse.)While Telecel was hugely successful — in the early days it made its owners an average of $800 per user per month — the company did encounter challenges.

Worse still, several recent conversations that I have had with African activists and creatives suggests that the over-occupation of space by “influencers” is starting to undermine people’s sense that their deep, engaged and un-self(ie)oriented work is “worth it.” As one person reflected “I used to think that if you just did the important work, it would be noticed.” Another commented how the community of women who taught them everything they know about brave activism don’t matter to the world anymore. Their working class realities are un-marketable in this new opulent culture of influence. Just last week, an older feminist shared with shock about how unsisterly she found the new wave of activist influencers—impatient, confident yet also self-absorbed, and it seems unable to handle the generosity required to build flesh and blood community. The once hallowed space of #afrifem online activism has become in some recent moments its own space of salty remarks and ungracious exchanges. The residues of those battles leave many feeling like a precious collective space for African feminists is slowly being undone.

On the course I argued that "Digital Development" is most useful when it is used as a collective term, inclusive of three things: Digital in Development, Digital for Development and Development in a Digital World. I also argued that #ict4d remains the best hashtag for all of the above. Let me explain why...

Thirdly, measures to mitigate these risks and threats, and ensure the safety and security of humanitarian and health workers and facilities, also inevitably impose costs, diverting resources that otherwise could be applied to the provision of essential services and assistance. Smaller aid organisations, with fewer resources and less capacity to cover these costs, are having to make difficult choices between safeguarding staff, facilities and equipment and providing humanitarian assistance. In addition, the appearance of substantial physical security measures can act to inflame negative narratives amongst local communities, creating a vicious circle of distrust and increased threat.In the long run, if unchecked, these trends inevitably can only pose the gravest threats to humanitarian relief—as a feasible activity and viable occupation.

(THREAD) After 6 years of painstaking work, one of the biggest & most important impact evaluations of "whether transparency & accountability" matter for development outcomes is out. And the results from @results4dev and @HarvardAsh are concise: "no" -> https://t.co/qOewVRcTHx

— Nathaniel Heller (@Integrilicious) July 17, 2019

The report highlights how many taxi drivers in the Algerian capital of Algiers hold graduate and even postgraduate degrees in the humanities and social sciences. In Douala in Cameroon, many commuter motorcycle riders, aptly known as ‘bensikineurs’, hold advanced degrees in engineering, mathematics and physical sciences. Such situations are also common in other major African cities.
“Yet, after their training, their skill sets do not appear to be in great demand in the labour market,” said Monga and his associates – Dr Abebe Shimeles and Dr Andinet Woldemichael, both lead economists at the African Development Bank.
In other circumstances, African graduates, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, are victims of frequent ethnic conflicts, corruption, nepotism and industries dependent on outdated technology with low returns and low productivity. “Such is the Nigerian experience where the rate of youth unemployment stands at 37%, which is among Africa’s highest,” says the report.

The issue is not only to do with the fact that he was not granted a visa – the difficulties for him to obtain this visa in the first place were prohibitively expensive and time consuming. The only place for Sierra Leone nationals to apply for a visa to Sweden are Nigeria and Morocco – and they have to apply in person. Benson had to travel more than 2,000 kilometres from Freetown to Lagos, and put his life on hold while waiting for a decision on his visa in a foreign country for almost two weeks. Admiringly, Benson managed to make the most of his trip by working on improving an unprotected well in the community where he was staying in Lagos.

Or should conference organizers initiate cultural shifts that are within reach, like emphasizing regional participation, while using venues with enhanced information and communication technology for remote collaboration?
But the real issues go deeper. Even assuming that technology breakthroughs for virtual meetings are around the corner, how does one balance the demands for an ethical approach to climate change with the reality that promotion and tenure can depend on part in number of invitations to speak at international conferences?
Additionally, any academic institute or organization that unilaterally aims to incorporate progressive environmental policies into its broader infrastructure risks being at a competitive disadvantage in the current academic environment, at least in the early stages.

You know the scene. First come the long introductions. Then five people give opening statements of steadily increasing length. After that is a “conversation” in which the panelists talk past one another, sticking to the same old points they have made dozens of times before. This is followed by a few incoherent rants from the angriest members of the audience (question mark optional). Finally, a polite round of applause, which is anticipated with the same resigned longing as the saving bell on the last day of school.
It doesn’t have to be like that. At their rare best, panels can actually be fun and informative.

Das Ausmaß schlechter Entwicklungshilfe könne nicht unterschätzt werden, glaubt auch Tobias Denskus, der an der Universität Malmö Entwicklungs-Kommunikation unterrichtet. Dass sich nach Jahrzehnten erfolgloser Hilfsrezepte aus dem Ausland Frust aufbaue, versteht er.

Primah Kwagala a Kampala-based lawyer who grew up in Jinja town now represents the women. “I knew the context so we moved as fast as we could. We are talking about illiterate women. If you are a white woman speaking English, wearing telescopes around the center and workers addressed her as “musawo” meaning doctor in the local language [Lusoga], they will assume you are one,” says Kwagala.
The lawyer says Bach’s misconduct went on for far too long partly due to the status of women and children at the receiving end of these medical experiments.
“She targeted women for whom a lot of violence is already normalized and many lack the language to describe the violations as they happen. They can’t write, they can’t read. They would never understand the health system. These are several layers of marginalization.”

The ‘gentleman’s agreement’, which has ensured that the IMF managing director has for 75 years been European and the World Bank president a US national, is undemocratic, illegitimate, and rooted in neo-colonial principles.
International institutions currently face a crisis of legitimacy, as faith in the multilateral system of global governance withers. If the IMF and World Bank want to present themselves as modern institutions capable of tackling today’s challenges, it is imperative that they become democratic and accountable to all of those they represent.

Two of the most prominent fintech apps are Tala and Branch. From their California headquarters, these firms export Silicon Valley’s curious nexus of technology, finance, and developmentalism. Small shops across the country are painted in Branch’s brand of blue, with slogans offering “loans for the way you live.” Quickly downloaded onto Kenya’s proliferating smartphones and utilizing the country’s ubiquitous mobile money transfer system, these apps mine people’s devices and social media accounts for signs of their creditworthiness. While their lending algorithms are closely guarded secrets, industry insiders suggest an ambitious effort to track everyday behavior and social relations. In line with the belief that “all data is credit data,” these firms seek to analyze everything from whether you call your family regularly, go to the same workplace every day, and have an extensive network of contacts. Tala’s CEO reported that “repayment of a loan is more likely by someone whose contacts are listed with both first and second names.”

Although the ICRC’s first bond had been complicated to set up and manage, he said, the organisation is pursuing other such bonds. One involves a city-wide sanitation project in a “biggish” city in Africa, he said, declining to give more specifics.
The bond concept may also widen the field of organisations that take part in relief or development projects: donors tend to contribute based on tenders, or Requests for Proposals (RFPs), de Borchgrave said. “The one who wins is the one who’s actually very good at giving an answer to an RFP, not necessarily the one who’s the best at delivering on the ground.”
Looking back now that the first impact bond in the humanitarian sector is well under way, was the experience worth it to the ICRC? “Absolutely,” Coderque said, noting that his organisation had not turned to the bond as a last resort for a difficult funding situation but had instead opted to use the bond as a tool for innovation: “We had a solution, an impact bond, and we were looking for a problem.

The second-to-last call I had, I was talking to the chief of one of the villages. One of the questions we ask is about sexual harassment because we want to be sure that recipients are being treated appropriately and respectfully. When I asked her, “Did anyone maybe show any inappropriate interest in you?” she laughed and said, “No, I’m old! But thank you so much for checking up on me.” Even though she thought the question was strange, it’s an important question we need to ask.

Crawley has committed Kiva to a bold strategy that extends far beyond its original mission and legacy as a crowdfunding platform for microfinance. The effort has required significant restructuring and staff turnover, as Kiva continues to figure out its new identity. “Last year was our low point around morale, mostly around employee concerns about culture and how they fit into the new world at Kiva,” says Pam Yanchik Connealy, Kiva’s CFO and COO since 2018. “But we have seen employees embrace the new strategy with a positive energy around their futures here at the organization.”
The question of Kiva’s new identity is far from settled, though. Should it see itself first and foremost as a technology venture? As a nonprofit trying to become a self-sustaining social business? As an impact investor? Is it really possible to have all of these identities on an equal footing? Only time will tell.

For about 15 years, every tech book was titled something like "The Internet Will Save Us Woo Woo Cognitive Surplus" and was, in every critical and useful sense, wrong. All these people are still employed churning out garbage. They're the Iraq war pundits of tech discourse.

— Jacob (@SilvermanJacob) August 21, 2019

First of all, the research assistant loses any chance of involvement in decisions as to how the data ought to be analyzed, published, and disseminated. Nevertheless, on the ground, the research assistant remains the face of the research project – in the eyes of the local community, as well as in the eyes of political authorities and armed leaders who may be displeased with the resulting analysis. He may even risk finding himself subject to prosecution after the publication of the data they provided, and may have to contend with various expectations from one group or another. Secondly, the research assistant is rarely acknowledged in the publications that result from analyses of his/her data. Now, why should those who do the writing and analysis have a greater claim to authorship than those who negotiated the access to the field and gathered the actual data?

Women have inherited patriarchal, capitalist models of leadership. A focus on growing, expanding, or working towards an ambitious vision often trumps what is happening in the present moment. Relationships aren’t cultivated. Feedback is dismissed. This obsession with what is coming (over and above what is) leads white women to overlook challenges that need tending in the current moment. We justify this by imagining that the future vision will magically address the problems of the current reality. Ironically, dismissing present realities in favor of a vision of the future is a surefire way to undermine the future.
Antidotes: Grounding practices that build our capacity to regulate nervous system reactions that feed urgency and anxiety. Regular check ins with staff, boards, and volunteers and reflect on the following questions: Does the way we conduct this meeting reflect our values? Are my values (and our organizational values) reflected in the way I am behaving and the choices I am making in this moment and in this situation? Taking deep care to build relationships that center people’s present needs. Crafting culture-building goals that center on transforming existing organizational patterns of white supremacy culture. Articulating and developing accountability processes on benchmarks for gauging organizational transformation.

The focus needs to shift from academics ‘helping’ through engagement to communities, patients, social movements, local goverments driving the research agenda. Engagement alone perpetuates existing power relations. https://t.co/SaSzLGopJl

— Budd Hall (@buddhall) August 15, 2019

My life had turned into the nightmare of any single working mother topped by multi-day field trips, conferences, evening receptions, and workshops. If I saw my daughter, I was either too tired or mentally already occupied with the next application, collecting examples for competency-based interviews, written tests or searched for new open vacancies.
Each day when I got home, I had a toddler waiting for me, happy to receive mommy’s attention and energy, of which I felt I had so little to spare. Often nights included sleepless hours of caring for a sick child just to then get up and be ready for work. Like a machine, I just functioned based on other’s needs, neglecting my own.
I hit the point where I felt that none of my efforts led anywhere, yet, I was still trying whilst running on a low flame. I thought my ambitions were too high, that I had not realistically estimated my competencies and that this was the reason I could not land a position. I felt like an absolute failure confronted with numerous opportunities for others and none for me.

And this is happening in almost every social arena. Policing is just one of the most egregious, but it’s happening in terms of education, which youth to label “high-risk,” for example; in hospitals, in terms of predicting health outcomes; in terms of which people to give home loans to or not, because of defaulting in the past. And so our history is literally being encoded into the present and future.
And the real danger that I try to highlight in the book is that it’s happening under the cover of a kind of veneer of objectivity, in which we’re less likely to question it, because it’s not coming from a racist judge sitting in front of you, or a racist teacher who’s doing something. They’re turning to a screen that’s producing some results, that says, “You are high risk,” or “You are low risk,” you know, and then they’re acting on that.
And so I really want us to become attuned to this intermediary that is not, in fact, objective in the way that we are being socialized to believe it is.

Liberal feminism along with liberal antiracism and liberal LGBTQ movements and what has been called “green capitalism” were hegemonized — incorporated into — a hegemonic ruling bloc which in the United States took the form of what I call “progressive neoliberalism.”
These movements lent their charisma, their ideology, to give these horrible policies — financialization, the precarization of work, and the driving down of wages — the veneer of being pro-gay, pro-women, and so on. That definitely happened, and this is why it is so important that the new wave of feminism should break with that kind of feminism and chart a new path.
It’s always possible to be hegemonized and recuperated by more powerful forces whose ultimate aims are deeply at odds with one’s own. It is always important for emancipatory and left-wing movement to be wary of this.
Today, we are told that we really have only two options — either right-wing authoritarian populisms, which are racist and xenophobic, or else go back to our liberal protectors and progressive neoliberalism. But this is a false choice — we need to refuse both options.
This is a moment of huge crisis in which we have the chance to chart a different path, building a truly anti-systemic movement for the 99 percent in which feminism for the 99 percent is one current along with labor movements, environmentalism for the 99 percent, the fight for migrant rights for the 99 percent, and so on.

Truth is I’m privileged enough to afford to be brave. For those of you who love the Media Lab and want to see it sail through these rough waters, please take time to reach out to people who may not be able to be as visible in their next steps. Make sure they’re doing okay. Support them whether their decision is to leave or to stay. So many of my colleagues at the Media Lab right now are hurting, and they need your support and love too. Hope we can redirect some of that love folks are sharing with me to them too.

How to apply for a human rights job: a thread.

I am reviewing CVs, and I have some thoughts, which might be useful to someone.

1) Your application--CV, cover letter, etc--should be in the language the post was advertised in, even the post requires ability in multiple languages

— Heather Barr (@heatherbarr1) August 23, 2019

Our most conservative estimate suggests that for every 9.7 students enrolled there is one fewer teenage births. These findings are robust to a number of specifications and sensitivity tests. Our estimates imply that Brazil's secondary school expansion accounts for 34% of the substantial decline in teenage childbearing observed over the same period.

The gendering of care is all over the book, but the fight over whether the wildlife center was a zoo or a rehabilitation center especially highlighted how working with animals was shaped by gender, race (via the idea of “looking local”), and class. I did agree with the men who worked there, which was that rehabilitation required inhabiting a very vulnerable and dangerous space, but I also saw that doing so would mean that the local women doing this work were more vulnerable than their male colleagues, because of a specific orangutan’s alleged hatred of local women. I also agreed with the person who I call Cindy and her point that zoos were accessible to those unable to go jungle trekking. Part of my preliminary research entailed interning at a zoo, and I appreciate the role zoos can play in pedagogy, especially if captive animals’ needs are taken into account, for example when it comes to providing animals with hiding spaces that are unpopular among visitors.

Understand that this work will take as much as you have to give it. It will let you choose to work rather than spend time with your family. It will let you choose to deploy rather than to work on your relationships. It will let you spend your hard-earned pittance on therapy or medical bills not covered by insurance. You will not get a gold watch when you retire, and there will be no memorial for you when you die.

Get involved – on a regular basis – in some activity in your chosen home community. You’ll start to feel connection and commitment in a new way. You may also find that your experience in international development is actually relevant and useful. You may meet other people who have had made other big life transitions, not necessarily from international development, who you can really relate to. Or you may simply reap the benefits of knowing your neighbours, sharing and creating around you. Do not fear investing in a home.

Celebrity promotion of charities is ineffective at raising awareness, but can make the stars more popular with the public, new research says.

We have not yet connected the data revolution to a praxis revolution for development. The data revolution takes advantage of technical changes to deliver new volume, speed, and variety of data. The praxis revolution makes changes to development processes and structures in order to turn that data into development outcomes.

CBS is developing a new comedy series called UNprofessionals (...). No, that capitalized UN isn’t a typo, because the series will focus on a group of the least important people working at the United Nations.

Channel 4 has announced a series called The British Tribe Next Door, which is most definitely reverse anthropology and not dehumanising because – did you spot it? – the word “tribe” is used to apply to the British people. So it’s totally reverse, and actually not racist at all!
There are a few other clever twists in the series, too. The British participants, reality TV star Scarlett Moffatt and her family, are bringing their house – a replica of their actual County Durham, semi-detached house – to the Himba people in Namibia, so that they can show off their hair straighteners and microwave meals. It’s giving the Himba an opportunity to experience stereotypical, traditional English tribal culture. Reverse, reverse, reverse.

I’m weary about this story being framed as “privilege” & “saviorism.”

A white Christian evangelical missionary woman impersonated a doctor and, in the tradition of colonial violence, commanded an authority which allowed her access to vulnerable Ugandan children which she killed. https://t.co/eCX0pt3cv9

— inorganic african feminist (@ztsamudzi) August 25, 2019

Kenya is urging the UN to list al-Shabaab under the same sanctions as al-Qaida and Islamic State, but foreign donors say the move could stop aid reaching millions.
The proposed listing could take effect as soon as Thursday and could mean organisations that have any interaction with the extremists will face serious penalties.
“A measure like this will have the effect of criminalising humanitarian aid,” said Eric Schwartz, president of Refugees International. “Any measure that would impact the current provision of aid would have extremely serious and substantial implications.”
Al-Shabaab is already targeted under broader sanctions imposed by the UN on Somalia, which is heavily aid-dependent after three decades of conflict and economic ruin.
Currently UN agencies and humanitarian organisations are exempt from these sanctions, which enables them to deliver urgent aid without prosecution when they venture into territory controlled by al-Shabaab.

But what we found in Nigeria was something else entirely - how the very poorest have also now become major targets of those same criminal distribution networks, how a new generation of desperately poor consumers has been cleverly sold the idea that otherwise 'respectable' pain relief medicines are in some way a remedy for the day-to-day drudgery of lives without hope or opportunity. It doesn't take a genius to work out the thinking of those behind this trade; the value of each individual sale may be tiny, but make enough of them and the profits will really stack up.
Yet, despite the chaos unleashed by tramadol abuse, trying to ban the drug entirely is fraught with significant problems. In its legal form, tramadol can be a genuinely important prescription therapy for those in great physical pain. Numerous Nigerian doctors told us of this, in one instance inviting us to meet the children wracked by the agony caused by sickle cell anaemia – a genetic blood disorder that's widespread across Africa – whose lives would be intolerable without tramadol, one of the few affordable treatments available.

US firm Chemonics is the best-funded contractor on the list (it handles a large – and troubled – health supplies procurement contract). The government of Jordan is among the top 10, winning funding for state institutions and education. The World Food Programme received the largest amounts in the UN, while FHI 360, a North Carolina-based development organisation, was the largest NGO recipient in 2018.

In defense of the project, a Blackstone spokesperson noted that it had been approved by the International Finance Corporation, an affiliate of the World Bank, and that the IFC had determined that the project would, in fact, reduce carbon emissions. Blackstone also forwarded a statement that it credited to Hidrovias, which also emphasized the support of the IFC

“There’s a lot of hopelessness here,” says Lungu. “There’s nothing for young people to do. You can’t start a business, it’s too risky unless you can afford to pay bribes.” He struggled with alcoholism for over a decade. “Drinking gave me relief, short-term relief. It made me indifferent,” he says. But the country’s problem with drinking has only made conditions worse for Moldovans still here. Domestic violence, crime, child neglect, inability to work and drink-driving are just some of the major problems associated with alcohol abuse. A 2015 study found a partner’s drinking problem to be the strongest factor associated with spousal violence in Moldova and several other East European countries. A 2018 study of children living on Moldova’s streets by Terre De Hommes, an NGO supporting vulnerable children, found that a parent’s alcohol abuse is commonly linked to violence at home, child abuse and neglect.

MPOC has also approved funding news sites, researchers, op-eds and former politicians to speak up for palm oil and undermine the EU law, the documents show.
None of the groups or individuals identified in the proposals have been transparent about their funding and have often claimed to be independent voices.
At least three PR firms hired by the MPOC are running these campaigns, copies of their proposals seen by Reuters show. The MPOC approved all their proposals, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

“Manels” impoverish discussions and hurt women’s careers.⁦⁦ Thanks ⁦@vozexpertamx⁦@GenderAvenger⁩ for your efforts to change this!⁩

Why are so few women on think tanks’ foreign policy panels? Here’s the research. - The Washington Post https://t.co/oV9OM6Yzni

— Anna Raptis (@RaptisAk) August 23, 2019

Now, imagine this scenario. A couple of newly minted MPH graduates from an African university, say in Rwanda, land in Washington DC for a 2-week visit. They visit a few hospitals, speak to a few health care workers and policymakers, read a few reports, and write up a nice assessment of the US health system with several recommendations on how to fix the issues they saw. They submit their manuscript to the American Journal of Public Health. Can you imagine AJPH even sending it out for review? Even if the paper got published somewhere, would US health researchers take it seriously? (They should, I suppose. After all, the broken US health care system needs all the help it can get.)
Clearly, it’s an impossible scenario yet American MD, MPH, or MBA grads land in low-income countries to advise them on global health issues all the time.

This neglect of diversity also runs counter to good practice in understanding development challenges. It becomes difficult to search for the positive outliers and understand what makes them a success if our conceptual frameworks do not allow for diversity, difference, and outliers in the first place. We look forward to more explorations of diversity and heterogeneity within microfinance organizations so that the products they offer can be better delivered to the clients who need them despite the environmental challenges they face

7˚N 34˚E are the geographical coordinates for Gambela, a region in Ethiopia where over 200,000 displaced South Sudanese citizens now live after fleeing war, atrocities, drought, and famine in South Sudan. And it is where Manyang, from the age of three, survived for thirteen years. 734 Coffee is about building a brighter future for the displaced mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters of Sudan; it is harvested by growers right in the Gambela region, whom Manyang ensures are all refugees and after it is brought to the US, 80% of proceeds go right back to scholarships and education programs for refugees in South Sudan.

“UNHAS began its operations in 2004. Currently, South Sudan is UNHAS’s largest operation, followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo,” explained Sibrian.
UNHAS travels to some of the remotest locations around the world, transporting 32,000 passengers and more than 300 metric tons of cargo per month to over 323 regular destinations.

In Ethiopia, over a quarter of the population survives on less than two dollars a day. International organizations and foreign governments provide funds to address the rampant poverty in this country and others, but little data is available to assess the effectiveness of such programs. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on one nonprofit’s rigorous, research-driven approach to aid.

Saravia said she tends to use the same cloud patterns from the app, even though there are several other options with different patterns. "I just happened to like that one," she said.
She also said that photoshopping is something she's always been open about. She even claimed that she helped one of her followers edit an image with the same software.
"They were always aware about this because I never hide it," she said of her followers. "I always tell [them] the apps I use."She added, "Actually I'm the first one to tell the joke [that] the clouds are following me around the world."

How does #digitalisation influence the lives of urban #migrants? Our senior researcher @cmartinshields has, together with Sonia Camacho and Rodrigo Taborda @uandes and Constantin Ruhe @goetheuni, collected evidence from #Bogota. Read the discussion paper: https://t.co/emTSafuRhCpic.twitter.com/6kROhqbDuH

— DIE_GDI (@DIE_GDI) August 30, 2019

A recent article in Science Magazine (July 2019) described changes to Indonesian laws regulating the way that foreign scientists can do science in Indonesia. The laws are, in essence, a push back against “trickle down science“, in which scientist in Global North Institutions engage in colonial science. This is what happens when Global North researchers engage local institutions to provide service scientists and easy access to samples without any genuine consideration for their Global South collaborators.
(...)
The new Indonesian law is probably too heavy handed, but it is in the right direction. There is little doubt that there is a problem with #trickledownscience, and governments in the Global North, funders, and institutions need to push the nascent dialogue with the Global South about how appropriate, collaborative science can develop that addresses the needs of the Global South and not the whimsies of scientists in the Global North.

The real reflection should be on the fact that all of us are basically always asked to do, work, publish, teach and travel more-a discourse that has not really been changed since the bad old days of modernization theory…packing your bags and heading off to catch a flight to Nairobi, Kathmandu or Cape Town seems so much more tempting than going to the basement of your library to discover critical writings on the early days of ‘development’ or the manifestations of the ideas, ideals and practices that remind us of how mainstream ‘development’ has become and how tempting it is to add to the pile of (seemingly) self-critical discoveries that often border on hypocritical ‘told you so’ stories and ultimately only benefit ‘us’ and rarely anybody else.

For all of its supposed shallowness and anticipated fleeting popularity, this visible and achievable (and fun!) action has resulted in real dollars for the disease. But some academics question the effectiveness of celebrities’ promotion of charities and other critics cite “funding cannibalism” or “moral licensing.” In other words, if the amount people are willing to donate in finite, participation in the ice bucket challenge for ALS may mean that they will be less likely to donate elsewhere, resulting in a disproportionate loss for other deserving charities.

Ebola has only reinforced distrust in public authorities amongst the Liberians; distrust which goes back to a long history of Government corruption and ill performance. It is only understandable that relatives are unwilling to give up their loved ones to untrustworthy and incapable authorities especially when they fear that they will never see them again. When Government fails them, people have learnt to turn to their usual sources of solace and hope, namely the Church and the family, and who could hold that against them?

And without a higher purpose, what is a career as a reporter? It may count among the so-called “glamor jobs” sought after by recent graduates, but one careers website has listed newspaper reporting as the second worst job in America, based on factors such as stress, pay, and employment uncertainty; toiling as a janitor, dishwasher, or garbage collector all scored better. Even if you love the work, it’s hard not to get worn down by a job that sometimes requires you to risk life and limb for readers who wonder if maybe you suffer all the downsides and hazards just to support some hidden agenda.

Many people have multiple identities, one of which is some kind of association with Al Shabaab, sometimes voluntary, sometimes pragmatic, sometimes forced (p.5).

A whole industry has built around Al Shabaab. (…) The intense focus on Al Shabaab by journalists, academics and analysts has masked other forms of violence that continue to rip Somalia apart (pp.16-17).

In some ways, Al Shabaab is like water running down a hill, sometimes acting as a large, united force, at other times dividing into multiple rivulets, taking unpredictable paths and sometimes meeting dead ends. The fact that so many people have a loose association with the movement, flitting in and out of the group or performing certain duties on its behalf, makes it also impossible to define Al Shabaab (p.59).

Even if the group is eventually defeated as a fighting force, it will be an enormous challenge to win back the hearts and minds of the hundreds of thousands of children who have grown up knowing nothing other than Al Shabaab (pp.83-84).

Al Shabaab has taken hold in Somalia and endured because it has helped fill giant gaps in security, governance, justice, education and employment. In some areas of life it has offered the best choice available (p.233).

Mary Harper is the BBC Africa editor and has reported on Africa and its conflict zones for 25 years and her biggest achievement with this book is her nuanced, careful, critical and ultimately empathetic engagement with Somalia and her citizens. Her book is not about a ‘failed state’ that has been captured by a terrorist group, but about the fact that 'many people have multiple identities, one of which is some kind of association with Al Shabaab, sometimes voluntary, sometimes pragmatic, sometimes forced'.

We watch as the governments of small island states like our own, tied to multinational agreements, are forced to make decisions that are not in the best interests of the people they serve, while our electrical grid fails and we are made more dependent on fossil fuels rather than renewable energy. “Too expensive,” they say. “For whom?” we reply. “Is cost the only consideration?”
(...)
This is no longer unusual for Caribbean people. As I shared video footage with friends in Puerto Rico, they remarked, “I know the sound of that wind.” Is this what it means to be intimately connected by horror? Is there a new creolized language and aesthetic we have now become fluent in by default? We are island people. Where do you go? We live on slim margins.

“I had the gut feeling in the 1950s that the most important thing that was happening in the twentieth‑century world was the struggle to overcome the control by the Western world of the rest of the world. Today we call this a concern with North‑South relations, or with core‑periphery relations, or with Eurocentrism. It has to be said that, in the 1950s and indeed for a long time thereafter, my assessment of what was most important was not shared by most people, for whom what some called the Cold War between democracy and totalitarianism and others called the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (both of these terms being rather narrowly defined) was (and indeed for many, remains) the central defining issue of our time.

Immanuel Wallerstein, the founder of the World-System Theory approach, has left us. He began his work under the tutelage of C. Wright Mills, but - after dissertation work in West Africa - discovered the Third World. His first book, in 1961, was a study of African nationalism. pic.twitter.com/dYULFgMErZ

— Vijay Prashad (@vijayprashad) September 1, 2019

The comments clearly stunned some of his listeners. A woman in the front row began crying. Kate Darling, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab, shouted, “Nicholas, shut up!” Negroponte responded that he would not shut up and that he had founded the Lab, to which Darling said, “We’ve been cleaning up your messes for the past eight years.”
Zuckerman, who had spoken earlier in the meeting, also had a brief spat with Negroponte. Negroponte pressed on: in the fund-raising world, he said, these types of occurrences were not out of the ordinary, and they shouldn’t be reason enough to cut off business relationships. It wasn’t until Darling yelled “Shut up!” again that Negroponte mumbled “Good grief,” and sat down. Soon after, the meeting disbanded.

“There are two issues. First is the way members of the humanitarian community use pictures and videos of the people they claim they are trying to help. The way they dehumanise them or actively endanger them. It is very common.”
“You see the banner on Melissa Fleming’s feed, where children are gathered behind her, presumably those who have been ‘helped’.” It was a form of “white-saviourism” that “has been happening for decades and it still happening” he said.Fleming, who was chief communications officer at UNHCR until Friday, when she left to take up her new post, told the Guardian she had sent the tweet to raise awareness of how child refugees were unable to access education. She said she had “immediately acknowledged my mistake” and deleted the tweet, and said she was currently trying to locate the child’s family to apologise.

Dear World Bank, When you fund Dictators, don’t be surprised that you are funding Detention Camps https://t.co/sS9mbJ38Cm

— William Easterly (@bill_easterly) August 31, 2019

Engaging the same participants over and over again naturally impacts their interview expectations, a situation exacerbated by the high number of development interventions in Sierra Leone. Such interventions often mirror research practices and are experienced similarly by participants, though their purposes differ. It’s important to acknowledge the compound effect of these different factors, and researchers should consider the level of aggregate exposure when selecting cases and populations.
(...)
The commercialisation of conflict experiences in Sierra Leone highlights the need to recognise that knowledge production does not take place in isolation. Exposure has created expectations and has engendered an industry of research participation. At the same time, knowledge production generally remains extractive.

Military industry in the UK is made up of close to 2,500 companies, generates £33.5bn in turnover and employs 128,000 people, according to the government. Yet even from this high base, the government is currently seeking, in effect, to further militarise the British economy and society.
(...)
So Brexit is driving UK leaders' new military ambitions. Or perhaps providing an easy cover for their ambitions. Either way, the whole strategy raises concerns. Does this enhanced global military strategy have public support? It is hard to say because it has been so little debated. The public is surely even less likely to support future entanglement in wars in Asia than it does Britain's current wars in the Middle East. What is clearer is that Britain needs an industrial strategy that makes the economy less dependent on the military and arms exports and which articulates a transition towards creating new, civilian jobs for large numbers of people. But at the same time, Britain surely needs to move away from its imperial pretensions to police the world's oceans.

It is impossible in this paranoid-making era to watch Cold Case and not be made to feel uneasy by the secrets it unlocks and the human aptitude for evil that it exposes. Its questions about the ways in which corporate interests—such as the Belgian mining company Union Minière du Haut Katanga, which backed Tshombe’s breakaway move—can undermine good intentions (in this case, Dag Hammarskjöld’s integrity and vision of a more egalitarian distribution of wealth in Africa), could not be more timely. Although the film starts out by positioning itself as a deliberately meta-inquiry, replete with self-mocking gestures, it ends by being a deeply serious and deeply unsettling portrait of a world run by exploiters, whose avarice and self-interest is served at the expense of the vulnerable and the dispossessed.

Growing up alongside international volunteers has impacted me hugely. When I look into the bigger picture of what is going on with them I can see how their actions have a lengthy history and are related to human psychology. That volunteers feel the need to give things to people they don’t know on the other side of the world must be a response to a kind of emptiness in their own life. They live a life with every material wish fulfilled, and yet no amount of cars, luxury resorts, or material possessions can satisfy them. Giving charity and doing voluntourism are self-gratifying ways of filling this void that they feel – and are a whole lot easier than doing the work to find the root cause of what is wrong in their own lives.
There is a saying in Hindi: “Who will make their hands dirty by doing the cleaning in their own house?” It basically means that the best way to avoid dealing with your own problems is to get yourself involved in someone else’s problems. I think it is the perfect metaphor for what is going on with those volunteers.

Just like, working as a Humanitarian doesn’t make you a good person. I endorse this message. https://t.co/AkoFmg9DvC

— अजय (@RuralHuman) September 1, 2019

Thus, rather than simply wondering if Africa’s narrative has changed, perhaps the real questions should be: how are narratives on and about Africa changing? Could there be a room for Africans to claim their ownership? And how to best do that? The task is not to replace one single story with another. Rather, as Peter da Costa eloquently argues: “There is a need to push the boundaries, to find new ways to communicate about [developments], to represent Africa in all its complexity and contradiction…” Only then will we have in-depth and informed analyses; and only then will we offer balanced perspectives about the complex dynamics unfolding in Africa. The real challenge, in a nutshell, is to provide balanced and substantiated perspectives, rather than catchy titles with hollow contents.

Essentially, the baksheesh system in India has been systematizing corruption, class conflicts, socio-economic divisions and poor workplace performance from the colonial to the postcolonial times. Looking deeper into the system of tipping unfurls the different ways through which India continues to be infected with the toxins of colonization.

I noticed African Architecture isn’t really showcased compared to Asian, European, Middle Eastern and Indian.

So here is a thread of African Architectural styles.

Starting with Nubian pic.twitter.com/3uEhg6uYCQ

— Igbo Excellence (@1ncognito___) August 31, 2019

That certainly resonates with my experience. It is commonplace to hear artistic directors of the largest, most influential companies freely opine publicly that women cannot be choreographers, for the most risible, blatantly illogical reasons, including “Women don’t want to choreograph, they just want to have babies and dance” (told to me at a company fundraiser) or this gem from a recent gala, reported by a woman well known for her advocacy for women in finance: “Women cannot choreograph because they are used to being lifted on stage, so they cannot see what’s going on behind them.” Nope, not making it up. Alexei Ratmansky, who as the in-house choreographer for American Ballet Theatre has immense influence, stated on Facebook in 2017 that there is no equality in ballet, and he is fine with that, it is simply part of the tradition and the way things are.

"For the first time, the #nonprofit world’s workforce is larger than the workforce of the manufacturing industry" (yet with NO corresponding political power) https://t.co/iiK6ulyLMA via @Philanthropy

— robert egger (@robertegger) September 4, 2019

As the open data movement enters a new phase in its evolution, shifting to target real-world problems and embed open data thinking into other existing or emerging communities of practice, big questions still remain. How will open data initiatives respond to new concerns about privacy, inclusion, and artificial intelligence? And what can we learn from the last decade in order to deliver impact where it is most needed? The State of Open Data brings together over 65 authors from around the world to address these questions and to take stock of the real progress made to date across sectors and around the world, uncovering the issues that will shape the future of open data in the years to come.

@DartCenter network member @johealey_ is launching her book "Trauma Reporting - A Journalist’s Guide to Covering Sensitive Stories" with the support of @louistheroux@LucyWilliamson@itsjina@dartian1 and especially her contributors. Get your copy now! **Voucher for journalists** pic.twitter.com/ED5twelawU

— Dart Center (@DartCenter) September 5, 2019

We do not argue that the numbers provided by the UN are too high, or too low: we also do not know. In our research we noticed that to determine if somebody is an IDP according to the UN definition one needs to engage in conversations with the potential IDP in terms of the origin of the move, their needs or issues. The methodology that the UN has used, notably asking key informants, such as neighborhood leaders, instead of potential IDPs themselves, isn’t accurate enough according to us.

Although I was born and raised in Uganda, it has not been my home for 25 years. this means that I don’t always understand the ways in which the country has changed/evolved and this has implications for the work that I do

Private orphanages have mushroomed across Nepal in the absence of a state-run welfare system, their growth fuelled by corruption and the prospect of attracting donations from foreigners, activists say.
Robinson, whose name has been changed, and others fear some of these unregulated orphanages are neglecting and possibly abusing children in their care.

Tristan Biehn examines the new imperial ideologies present in narratives manufactured by the websites of youth-centred volunteer abroad organizations. These narratives serve to instil neoliberal, capitalist understandings of the issues of global inequality and poverty in prospective volunteers, resulting in the depoliticization and decontextualization of such issues. Biehn finds that ideas of “change” and “good” are ubiquitous and yet are left undefined, that claims of “helping” and “immersion” are questionable, and that the utility of international student volunteering lies not in the benevolent donation of unskilled western youth labour to underprivileged communities, but in the production of ideal neoliberal subjects.

We are tolerated when it fits the agenda, we are obstructed when it doesn't. I know that we are not fixing the root cause of what's going on in Libya, but if we were not in the Libya [detention] centres, and if we weren’t able to tell what is going on and then share the stories of people we care for, it would be off the radar: nobody would talk about it. It’s to humanise crisis.
Portraying people fleeing for their life in Central America as invaders of America as if we were in Star Wars, that's indecent. We have to tell the story of a mother and father and a child who were looking for a better future. Full stop. And I think we have a key role.
We never realised the blessing of our financial Independence as much as today, because people come to us and tell us, ‘if MSF doesn't say it, nobody's going to say it’.

The Guardian understands from IOM sources and further communications it has seen that the agency is avoiding direct references to climate change in documents for projects funded by other US government entities such as USAid.
IOM receives about a quarter of its total budget of $2bn (£1.6bn) from the US, $18m of which is provided by PRM.
There is no indication that messaging on projects funded by other donors will be censored, or that there will be any operational impact on existing programmes.
However, a source in the humanitarian community in the US who had recently left IOM, told the Guardian he was “very concerned … that IOM is acquiescing to this kind of pressure”.

"Climate change is real in Somaliland"

The self-declared republic of 4 million people in the Horn of Africa is one of the most vulnerable places to #climatechange and is struggling to adapt for the future

Catch our special film on Tuesday 10th September l #Climate#UNGA74pic.twitter.com/4D38zVlkxz

— Thomson Reuters Foundation News (@TRF_Stories) September 6, 2019

Even though this case involved the data of people using a training module, rather than aid recipients, Siobhan Green, a tech consultant working with aid agencies on data management and governance, told Devex that the reputational damage to humanitarian organizations from data incidents could be significant.
“We are finding that individuals — especially those already vulnerable — are making decisions about what personal data they want to share based on their beliefs about how that data will be used, shared or protected. In extreme cases, we see people self-censoring or refusing services out of a sense of self-protection. Will this risk result in fewer people using our services? What is the impact of that behavior on our ability to serve these audiences?” she asked.

Rwanda has signed a deal with the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and the African Union (AU) to host hundreds of African migrants currently being held in Libya, in an exemplary humanitarian and selfless Ubuntu act.

It is not a question of seeing a golden age of the 1980s to contrast with the period since 2000. While there have been important changes, there are also repeated patterns. This is why the much-hailed 2017 ‘coup’ was doomed to failure, and perhaps no surprise that the Mnangagwa regime has seen much continuity, notably in violent repression of opposition forces. This is of course why a democratic transition, with a strong constitutional base, remains so critical; to shed once and for all this violent history.
In assessing Mugabe’s complex legacy, the positive legacies of massively improved education and health services for all in the 1980s and land redistribution to smallholders, especially post-2000, have to balanced against the persistent use of violence, gross economic mismanagement and the failure to develop a democratic state. As opposition politician, Tendai Biti, noted on his death, Mugabe was a ‘coalition of controversies’.

I started traveling throughout the country to visit and train every new gender focal point and talk to colleagues in the field about Minusca’s mandate on the protection of civilians. During the visits, I always requested meetings with the local leadership and representatives of the civilian and police components [of Minusca]. The focal points attended the meetings with me. This also improved the communication within units. In many places, civilians and military did not used to talk. It was especially fruitful to exchange information with heads of offices, human rights, civil affairs, women protection advisers, child protection advisers, UNPOL [UN Police] and military observers.

Foreign policy can never truly be feminist as long as it is grounded in an understanding of global justice that reproduces, rather than challenges, dominant gender and racial hierarchies. A feminist and post-colonial foreign policy would actively disrupt the binaries – ‘civilized-barbaric’; ‘saviour-victim’; ‘masculine-feminine’ – on which traditional notions of international ethics are based. From a post-colonial feminist perspective, responding morally to global challenges requires a deep reflexivity on the part of powerful states regarding their own historical and contemporary roles in the situations they condemn.

We should also address the motivations for volunteering. Having a volunteer experience on a resume shouldn't be an automatic bonus when applying to a professional school but rather something to explore, starting with the question: What exactly did you do?
The ultimate goal should be to ensure that these well-intended volunteer efforts responsibly achieve positive, objective change while making it impossible at best, or uncool and unpalatable at least, for any volunteer (regardless of skill level) to haphazardly conduct tubal ligations or hand out random antibiotics.

Our analysis of these relative caloric prices yielded a striking result. As countries develop, their food systems get better at providing healthier foods cheaply, but they also get better at providing unhealthier foods cheaply. This means that in less developed countries poor people also live in poor food systems. Nutrient-dense foods like eggs, milk, fruits and vegetables can be very expensive in these countries. That makes it harder to diversify away from nutrient-sparse staple foods like rice, corn and bread. The problem in more developed countries is rather different. Unhealthy calories have simply become a very affordable option.

Beyond simple timestamping applications and the five use cases outlined in more detail in our study, we see the merits of distributed ledgers in the implementation of a variety of checks and balances for good governance and, at multilateral level, for mutual accountability between states with regard to transactions enforcing international agreements

“Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO) deeply regrets its participation in the Dior campaign. We believed that we had an opportunity to reshape long-standing and damaging representations of Native peoples on an international scale. That did not bear out as we had hoped and intended, especially in Dior's media and public relations campaign, in which we did not consult or have prior knowledge. AIO takes responsibility for our actions and has much to learn from this unfortunate set of events. AIO will work with allies to address this situation through the practice of our core values of relationships, responsibility, reciprocity and redistribution, AIO will continue to bring a consciousness to the non-Native public about the reality of Indigenous peoples today.”

Academics, activists, politicians, journalists, youth, and all others who fail to question the currently dominant system, simply open the door to more reincarnations of the ghost of “development”. Short-term measures conceived from the halls of power only entrench the North-South status quo, patriarchy, coloniality, and the destructive instrumental separation of Humanity and Nature. Well intentioned but superficial solutions will not address the global crisis unless endowed with a post-capitalist, post-development horizon and strong sense of cultural reflexivity.
An adequate political strategy will go to the roots, questioning core assumptions of the "development" discourse, such as growth, the rhetoric of progress, instrumental rationality, so-called free markets, universalism, anthropocentrism, sexism, and so forth.

How thankful I am to have played this small part in such a vast, moving, interdependent global picture. I’ll continue to do my part, because you welcomed me, taught me, healed me, and gave me a glimpse of the potential in the multitude that will be with me all of my days.
I am forever changed by you. I am forever called by you.
And as I leave you, you whisper, “May you continue to know your voice, power, force, and direction…”

“Austerity is the idea that the 2008 financial crash was caused by Wolverhampton having too many libraries.” - outstanding from Alexei Sayle on @BBCRadio4 just now.

— James Anderson 🏛 (@tufnelljimmy) September 12, 2019

Sam Smethers, the chief executive of women’s rights campaigners the Fawcett Society, said: “The problem with Siri, Alexa and all of these AI tools is that they have been designed by men with a male default in mind. I hate to break it to Siri and its creators: if ‘it’ believes in equality it is a feminist. This won’t change until they recruit significantly more women into the development and design of these technologies.”

And yet, while it’s easy to attack the rotten apples such as Ito or Negroponte, a more radical transformative agenda should ask for more: close the Media Lab, disband the Ted Talks, refuse the money of tech billionaires, boycott agents like Brockman. Without such drastic changes, the powerful bullshit-industrial complex that is the “third culture” will continue unharmed, giving cover to the next Epstein.

I've read this and I have thoughts. Please read what @Lessig wrote and then my thread -- not the other way.

Thanks. https://t.co/O6scBkxcE2

— Siva Vaidhyanathan🗽🤘🏽 (@sivavaid) September 8, 2019

My biggest fear for development economics as a discipline is that we’re becoming a charity advisory service for billionaire philanthropy and our questions are increasingly framed as such. That said... this is nothing to sneeze at. https://t.co/EWZWDEMXpF

— Justin Sandefur (@JustinSandefur) September 11, 2019

Thinking back to when she was in the depths of depression while also dealing with her newfound fame with Little Mix, she says: “It was such a weird feeling to be living your dream but hating it at the same time.”
This led her to try to hide her unhappiness.
“I didn’t want to annoy anyone or be seen as a diva,” she explains. “That’s how I thought it would be perceived if I was getting upset. So I thought, 'OK, I'm just gonna ignore this'. It was the worst thing I could have done.
The trolls only got more vicious if she showed any signs of being upset, she says. "It was like the more people knew it affected me the more they wanted to do it."

Vale the Humanitarian Principles: New principles for a new environment
The Centre for Humanitarian Leadership with an interesting first paper.



Managing Misinformation in a Humanitarian Context
Internews with a new report and toolkit around humanitarian (mis)information.

Academia
Honest Academic Job Postings

The Department of Political Science and Public Policy invites applications for a full-time tenure-track position. Preference given to candidates who can publish enough to get tenure but not so much that they will outshine their mediocre senior colleagues.

The need for a critical reappraisal of the relationship between knowledge, power and institutions is not an exclusively South African preoccupation. In South Africa, the term “decolonisation” is one way in which concerns about “deracialisation” are expressed. The imperative to “deracialise” is also valid for Europe, for the United States, for Brazil and for other parts of the world. The emergence of new varieties of racism in Europe and elsewhere, the reassertion of global white supremacy, of populism and retro-nationalism, the weaponisation of difference and identity are not only symptoms of a deep distrust of the world. They are also fostered by transnational forces capable of making that same world inhospitable, uninhabitable and unbreathable for many of us.

But remember that teaching “grit” won’t end global income inequality. Neither, for that matter, will an extremely innovative kind of yogurt or a well-planned, clean-water birthday campaign. Global income inequality could end, but its elimination won’t happen through the bolstering of in-place, profit-minded organizations with half an eye (or more) on their own bottom lines. It will come through the close examination of the real causes, effects and perpetrators of all forms of oppression.

There are promising developments: the Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities initiative is looking at outreach efforts; the Humanitarian Innovation Fund is testing novel approaches; the Digital Humanitarian Network is bringing together newer, tech-focused organisations; and the Start Network of UK NGOs is experimenting with new ways of working. In 2016, the UN-organised World Humanitarian Summit offers an opportunity to set a new course for the community, bringing together many of these threads. This is not a techno-utopian view of the future in which the internet sweeps away all the injustices of the world. The web could lead to a dead end of corporate monocultures, but part of our struggle against that must be the continual renewal of these grassroots connections.

The aid industry (…) is fast becoming a global industry in which startups and social entrepreneurs challenge the power and influence of foreign aid agencies in Washington, London and Brussels.

Now the individual in need, not the project, is becoming the main unit of activity.

Rewarding what works is unleashing creative new approaches to solving the world’s biggest problems

Delivering results for the world’s poorest people now entails a new way of understanding poverty, hunger, disease, lack of education, and other social ills

The Gateses want an aid industry that works. (…) But to achieve their goals, they need everyone from UNICEF to the World Bank to do their jobs, to have the funding they need and be able to recruit the best talent, to be data driven and results oriented (p.33).

Small, nimble companies and NGOs are taking advantage of this shift (of many potential funders), building global brands even when their operational scale is a fraction of that of some of the traditional players (p.49).

Simprints is part of a growing movement to professionalize delivery of health, education, agriculture, energy and other services, treating the poor not as nameless and helpless, but as identifiable consumers. (p.77)

The more it produces, the bigger it gets, the more good it does (p.93).

This virtuous cycle – activists calling our bad behaviour, consumers pushing up the norms of good corporate behaviour, and good corporate citizens realizing that behaving well is actually better for business-is what will ultimately lead corporations toward a kind of shared-value business (p.109).

Combine these devices (wearable devices and gadgets that plug into a smartphone) with machine learning and data analytics, and the potential for a massive disruption in the way healthcare is provided and paid for is not just possible but likely (p.157).

Finishing the book felt a bit similar of going home after a dinner talk: You had an entertaining evening, probably in the company of interesting people, and you feel somehow smarter and somewhat motivated, but once you wake up the next morning you realize how complicated, political and less well-intentioned the world really is.
The business of changing the world is not nuanced and critical enough to receive my full endorsement. It reflects the state of a discussion around business and development that claims to ‘disrupt’, but essentially only introduces philanthrocapitalism and digital solutionism into an aid ecosystem that faces much bigger and more complex challenges that any business approach is willing to deliver without questioning the path of how we ended up in a state of climate emergency in the first place…

A student-led group at Harvard's JFK School under the direction of former Defense Secretary Ash Carter will be meeting to discuss how to ensure new technology serves the "public good." An interesting example of how elite policy thought is being incubated post-techlash. pic.twitter.com/gwfUPRxVIK

— Ben Tarnoff (@bentarnoff) September 16, 2019

Wie zahlreiche andere Entwicklungsexperten ist Denskus überzeugt, dass diese Art von vermeintlicher «Entwicklungshilfe» oft mehr schadet als nützt. Man müsse die Frage, was junge, unqualifizierte Freiwillige in einem fremden Land innert weniger Wochen zur nachhaltigen Entwicklung beitragen können, ehrlich beantworten: «In den meisten Fällen sehr wenig.»

By the end of the next decade, the current contribution of between $3.5bn and $12bn (£2.8bn to £9.6bn) a year from funders would need to rise to at least $20bn a year, to keep pace with a predicted surge in the number of people afflicted by disasters such as storms, floods, droughts and other extreme weather events. The estimates were made in a report from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), entitled The Cost of Doing Nothing, presented to the UN on Thursday evening.

Everyone who lived on the hardest-hit islands of Grand Bahama and Abaco – about 76,000 people – is affected. Housing, infrastructure, and basic services have either been destroyed, damaged, or disrupted.
As much as 90 percent of Abaco has been damaged. The mostly-Haitian shantytowns of The Mudd and Pigeon Peas were flattened. Many of the estimated 5,000 Haitians on Abaco had been living and working in the Bahamas for years, many of them undocumented.
Here’s a stock-take of response operations so far.

Dear @mtlgazette,

You may be wondering why this tweet has garnered so many comments – by far the most of any of your paper’s posts over the last 24 hours. So I wanted to offer my perspective as an emergency management professional and someone with a keen interest in this field. https://t.co/NngMqylh2i

— Sarah Delisle (@EMxSarah) September 14, 2019

In the meantime, the UN’s reputation further deteriorates, potentially undermining its work elsewhere as well as the reform of the country team system. No official, diplomat, or government representative has been held accountable for a responsibility that is shared collectively. More than one million Rohingya refugees continue to live in horrid conditions in Bangladeshi refugee camps.

Having tirelessly investigated all leads, the Tanzanian investigator has uncovered an array of new witnesses, sensitive archives, information about previously unknown Western mercenaries, the presence of rogue aircraft in Katangese and Rhodesian skies and a plot by French elite officers to assassinate UN leaders in the Congo.Yet despite these findings, the Othman investigation has repeatedly hit a wall. Several UN member states have consistently expressed an extreme reluctance, if not outright refusal, to declassify still-secret material.
Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, South Africa and the United States may well be wary of revealing the details of events from the colonial era, however ancient they may be. Even Hammarskjold’s own country, Sweden, has refused to declassify some documents related to the Ndola tragedy, invoking “national security” considerations.
As Richard Goldstone, a former South African chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, has noted: political embarrassment can be a powerful leverage.

Short-term work contracts and slow professional advancement opportunities are among the reasons some junior staffers are looking beyond the U.N., according to several current and former U.N. employees.
(...)
Nam said he has spoken with transgender employees who come from countries with regressive LGBTI policies and idealized working for the U.N. The reality is not quite as they imagined it: “A lot of them find themselves disappointed. Maybe a bit less so now, because we are pushing for greater awareness of these issues,” he said.
For one former U.N. staffer, a slow and unclear career path factored into the decision to join the private sector.

Activists, Bono says, don’t normally become investors, but he’s interested in supporting what works. He downplays his role as a board member (“I don’t think they need me to represent them,” he says. “I might be trouble at the Christmas party”). But the startup says that the musician’s influence will help them convince governments to adopt the technology more quickly.

We built a social media industry on a financial model where people are the product, their data exploited.

We built a payments and fintech industry on the financial model where people are the product, their data exploited.

Let's not do that for identity.https://t.co/hf5Ybmkmds

— Tom Fisher (@TomSamaki) September 18, 2019

The transnational nature of the digital revolution has the potential to break down Africa’s arbitrary borders, which were haphazardly drawn during the colonial era, as well as the potential to diffuse power away from state governments to citizens. But it also makes it harder for those who misuse the technology to be held to account.

At this point, Dothe began to despair. This was the spiral of revenge that he had been so worried about. Determined to prevent further violence, he decided to approach the police to see whether they could intervene. The police referred him to the national prosecutor. The national prosecutor said he could not open a case without a lawyer — and a lawyer cost almost as much as a brand new motorcycle. It was money that Dothe simply didn’t have.
Dothe’s friends did not understand why he was bothering. “We can get you a new motorcycle this afternoon,” they said. “We just take one from the people who took yours from you. That’s how things work around here.”
Dothe refused. What is the point of having rules if nobody follows them, he wondered.
Giving up on official channels, Dothe asked the presidents of the two moto-taxi associations to meet. They were both sympathetic, and agreed to the meeting, but they warned that the issue was beginning to cause tensions in the Christian and Muslim communities. People were getting angry, and were threatening to take matters into their own hands. This was exactly the kind of issue that had led to flare-ups of violence in the past.
Dothe said he understood. He didn’t want any violence, he just wanted to his motorcycle back.

Don’t enforce reforms when there’s no capacity to implement. You need best fit – reform programmes that are grounded in the local context, understand it. That means answers must come from local coalitions, and outsiders’ role is to help create the spaces for those conversations to happen, and support the systems to collect the data needed to make good decisions.
Who are the drivers of quality reforms? It is often a middle class thing, but in a lot of these countries, the middle class has exited into private education. So we need to help create the idea that learning matters. That is coming – you’re now getting second generations of going-to-school parents, who are pushing for quality. There are some policy champions emerging, eg in Cambodia. But there’s a lot of work to be done.

“As the world continues to experience our art and interact with its creators, the future of African music appears bright,” says Joey Akan, a Nigerian music journalist. “Only time will tell how big the movement will grow and perhaps, someday, take over the global stage.”
As it stands, the takeover will be hard-won. Those unfamiliar with the process of applying for a visa may believe, naively, that being a model citizen guarantees entry to other countries. However, experience proves that is not the case. Timileyin A, a representative of 3 Kings Media Group, responsible for Burna Boy’s show in Toronto, knows preparedness and timing are essential.
“We plan ahead of time and send in all paperwork to get a working visa early,” he says. Even when an artist is granted a visa early—Burna Boy, according to Timileyin, had his work visa sorted out as soon as February for his August show—they can't predict what hurdles they’ll face at the point of entry.

In other words, not only were the French giving back what they had stolen more than a century earlier, they intended to help fund a building that would display what was Benin’s in the first place. This museum’s development is still in progress, but it’s not the only institution being built in West Africa for the intention of housing once-looted treasures. This week, a spokesperson for the in-demand art star architect David Adjaye told Artnet that Adjaye had been tapped for a feasibility study for the new Benin Royal Museum in Benin City, Nigeria, which would potentially hold artifacts stolen from the historic kingdom, such as the Benin bronzes.

.@AlexMartinsDev on the fetish for formal qualifications, and biased perceptions of "expertise", in the development sector:#totd | Full interview: https://t.co/xy3JJlQ6zopic.twitter.com/jEFPBPcyqx

— Ian D. Quick (@ian_d_quick) September 17, 2019

There's a more fundamental problem with humor that makes it bad for fundraising -- even if your donors somehow get the joke. The psychological foundation of most humor is a sense of superiority -- sometimes gentle, sometimes cruel, but always there. You're laughing at something or someone. You're pulling something over on them. This sense of superiority is about as far from the emotion that leads to charity as you can get.
When you use humor in your fundraising, you pollute the atmosphere. You make empathy and kindness difficult. Being funny while fundraising is like belting out punk rock while soothing a baby to sleep. You could be good at both. But not at the same time.

Many of us are aghast to learn that a pedophile had this much influence in tech, science, and academia, but so many more people face the personal and professional harm of exclusion, the emotional burden of never-ending subtle misogyny, the exhaustion from dodging daggers, and the nagging feeling that you’re going crazy as you try to get through each day. Let’s change the norms. Please help me.

UKCDR commissioned a team from the School of Education & Social Work and the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex led by Dr David Orr to conduct an independent evidence review to characterise the nature of specific safeguarding issues and challenges that may arise in the international development research context, identify existing guidance and review its implementation.
Today, UKCDR has published the outputs of this work including a set of draft principles and best practice guidance.

Asian Transformations sets the stage by discussing the contribution of Gunnar Myrdal to the debate on development then and now and providing a long-term historical perspective on Asia in the world. It then uses cross-country thematic studies on governments, economic openness, agricultural transformation, industrialization, macroeconomics, poverty and inequality, education and health, employment and unemployment, institutions, and nationalisms to analyse processes of change while recognizing the diversity in paths and outcomes. Specific country studies on China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam, and sub-region studies on East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia, further highlight turning points in economic performance and demonstrate factors underlying success or failure.

Nobody said the work and life of a communication for development researcher would be easy!
Therefore, I conducted painful field research by transcribing a 1:40 minute video recording of Victoria Beckham's appointment press conference as a new UNAIDS International Goodwill Ambassador.

Let me underline, italicise, put in bold, that this is not supposed to be a criticism of Emma Watson. I admire her intelligence, her bravery, and her thoughtfulness. I do not blame her for talking about the experiences she knows. While she did not go quite as far as to say that her experiences belong to a highly elite, privileged class of people (the same class to which I myself probably belong), she did admit: "I don't know if I am qualified to be here. All I know is that I care about this problem. And I want to make it better."
What I do criticise, then, is that the United Nations chose to use a white, western, heterosexual, upper-class woman to speak for a group of united nations. Why should the mouthpiece of an international campaign be such a foreign, distant figure to so many girls and women?

A remarkable number of the politicians voters despised for their tricks learnt their politics at Oxford: David Cameron, William Hague, Theresa May, Jeremy Hunt, Ed Davey, Danny Alexander. Matthew Hancock, Ed Miliband, David Miliband, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper, Angela Eagle, Maria Eagle, Rachel Reeves and Stuart Wood. There are more PPE graduates in the Commons than Old Etonians (35 to 20). Remember I am not talking about Oxbridge-educated politicians, who make up 50 per cent of ministers and 28 per cent of MPs, but the graduates of just one Oxford course.

And what nobody else did, media-wise: PassBlue journalist Laura E. Kirkpatrick tackles how many women stood out at this year’s UNGA (spoiler alert: not many) and notes that some men actually championed gender issues in their speeches moreso than women.

Almost 1,000 children in rural Guatemala gained sponsors this month from a megachurch in southern Indiana.
But in this case, it was the indigenous children in need who pondered photos of smiling faces and chose one they felt a connection with. And it was the adult donors in the United States who nervously waited, wondering who would pick them.
The role reversal, which World Vision is calling “Chosen,” is the first significant change to the Christian humanitarian organization’s bread-and-butter method of engaging Christians with the world’s needs and equipping children to live healthier and safer lives.

MPs have criticised a “dramatic increase” in aid spending in ministries outside the Department for International Development, because they have not put in place adequate measures to assess value for money.
A report, by the House of Commons public accounts committee, questioned the doubling of the Newton Fund, managed by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, to £735m, despite the department’s “weak understanding” of how funds were spent, where and with what results.

One leading multilateral agency has committed to banning all-white interview panels for every role within the organisation in order to reduce the potential for bias in recruitment and selection. If managers cannot put together a suitably diverse interview panel internally, they have committed to bringing in outside experts to sit on these panels. Bravo.

Brazilian mainstream media is failing when it comes to covering this story - putting white journalists in the spotlight when the vast majority of the favelas' residents are of African descent, and often using dehumanising terminology.
The danger for journalists reporting from inside the favelas is real - as highlighted by the brutal murder of Globo's journalist Tim Lopez back in 2002 - but violence plays a disproportionate part in their coverage, leaving aside other, more positive stories.
"That's why Papo Reto and Mare Vive are fundamental,'' says Renata Souza. "Because they have a direct link with everyday lives, they listen to the residents, they give visibility and amplify those voices. To have alternative communication tools like Mare Vive and Papo Reto speaking out against the logic of war and the dehumanisation of black bodies in the favelas is fundamental."

Frustrated frontline responders told TNH about additional paperwork and meetings. They complained about confused project definitions and scope, leadership issues, and, perhaps most crucially, limited government buy-in hindering genuine cooperation and aid delivery.
For Fie Lauritzen, senior humanitarian policy advisor at the Danish NGO Dan Church Aid, greater alignment between humanitarian and development response is welcome, but there has not been enough engagement with local organisations.
“We are seeing closer working between the donors and the UN on developing priorities and approaches, but we’re not seeing that extended to the local, national, and even international NGOs, or community organisations and civil society groups,” she told TNH. “That’s a big gap. Where are the local actors in the nexus? At the moment, they’re not included, and that is a big omission. We need to do more to engage them if it is going to be a success.”

My most exciting/inspirational result of 8 years of progress?: The recognition that we now have a brilliant generation of scholars that are going to keep talking about politics. A remarkable set of authors from the Global South, Ghana, Bangladesh, India, Uganda. They will keep on talking about how politics and how it shapes development. That’s my favourite takeaway from all of this.

When we say that civic space is shrinking, this usually refers to legislative measures, human rights violations, and other oppressive practices to curb the space for civil society. But what we see today in many places, including India, is a change in atmosphere. People seeking social justice find themselves increasingly operating in restricted spaces, where populist speech demonises reformers, and legitimises opinions that were until recently unsayable in public. As someone said: ‘Hate is in the air, in many ways and against many‘. Hate of all kinds of ‘others’ extends to hate for people who promote inclusion.

How are we in the humanitarian sector preparing people at all levels of the system to engage with these systems, design them ethically, reduce harm, and make them more transparent? How are we working to build capacities at the local level to understand and use ADS? How are we figuring out ways to ensure that the populations who will be affected by ADS are aware of what is happening? How are we ensuring recourse and redress in the case of bad decisions or bias? What jobs might be created (rather than eliminated) with the introduction of more ADS?

While the international economics of personal data may follow some of the same general dynamics as oil production, data is fundamentally different from oil because it does a double duty – providing not just monetary value to businesses, but also surveillance opportunities for governments. Some civil society activists I’ve met as part of my research in India and Indonesia told me they were sceptical of their own governments’ narratives about data colonialism, worrying instead about the increased access to sensitive personal information that localisation gives to governments.

@Bomu: #DigitalID takes us back to colonial times. Everybody is being transformed to data. Lower income countries depend on high income countries for technology. We are importing their principles. Forgetting our past. #HudumaNamba case.

— Mercy Sumbi (@MercyMutemi) September 23, 2019

Yet against this backdrop, limited empirical evidence so far links cashlessness to the pursuit of financially inclusive policies in developing nations.
(...)
The street sellers we spoke to are frequently visited by representatives of digital wallet companies providing information on their products: yet such systems, rather than building on the long-standing ecosystems of street vending, are designed in rupture with these, effectively dismantling their transactional architecture.

In choosing to entirely ignore one of her most glaring failures—as a self-proclaimed activist and diplomat—Ambassador Power missed a crucial opportunity to set the record straight on her horrific actions and inactions as ambassador. In the eyes of this Yemeni-American, Ambassador Power remains neither educated nor an idealist.

Wallerstein’s intellectual presence was like a juggernaut, breaking down unbreakable walls. But sometimes, brute intellectual force and theoretical élan took the place of rigorous systematic formulation. Critique has showed that his work seemed to rest on some uneasy functionalisms. Perhaps more importantly, his devastating dismissal of national development as a phantasm, a fantasy of inclusion in a system which by its nature excluded, may have brought its own blinders.He may, by leaning on Kondratieff cycles rather than class power, have underestimated the degree to which post-1973 saw a global counter-revolution.

Welcome to the latest edition of Africa Update! We've got the Nigerian space program, trans-African highways, online therapy in Kenya, why the Sahara is bad for infant mortality, and more.

While many in the journalism industry, and many of the industry’s main benefactors, are currently preoccupied with the nonprofit newsroom model, a lot of the people that I’ve talked to who are outside the echo chamber don’t even understand — or, dare I say, don’t care — about the difference.
(...)
Let’s focus first on building journalism products that surprise and delight customers. Products that deliver real value. Products that meet real market needs.
Let’s recognize that if the industry just keeps investing in the same models that we’re already familiar with, and the same people we’re already familiar with, we’ll likely end up with the same news ecosystem that we have today — troubled and sorely lacking in diversity of perspectives.

The UN should promote greater coordination among the UN agencies active in the media sector, following on the successes from the UN Action Plan for the Safety of Journalists. UNESCO and UNDP, in particular, have untapped synergies in this field.
In post-conflict states, the UN’s mandate should explicitly include support for public access to information and the protection of journalists and independent media in those countries

Congratulations to @NatashaMsonza for the great launch of the Digital Security Trainer's Guide at #FIFAfrica19! Find it at https://t.co/Y85VqKWFnmpic.twitter.com/QOKY6HuCkm

— Safe Sisters (@safe_sisters) September 25, 2019

For example, if social mores limit women’s ability to interact with men, then programs that enable home-based work or enable women to more easily network with other women could be especially useful. By creating more equality in the labor market,this approach might, in turn, erode the restrictive norms, creating a virtuous cycle.Another promising approach is to try to directly change individuals’ and community’s beliefs and attitudes that privilege men in the workplace. While this type of attitude change intervention is often used by non-governmental organizations, there is an important opportunity for governments in developing countries to expand their use of this strategy.Many governments want to promote gender equality, whether as an end in itself or as a way to increase economic prosperity by putting women’s talents to better use. Media campaigns and school-based programs like the one studied by Dhar et al. (2018b) could be a valuable complement to more standard governmental strategies such as using the legal system to promote equality. Governments are in a powerful position to inculcate individuals and communities with a commitment to equality of opportunities, both in the labor market and overall

Are cash grants just a jump start?

New brief—in Uganda, people who got cash grants earned more after 4 years, but after 9 years, those who didn’t were earning just as muchhttps://t.co/PFwhRr41Qcpic.twitter.com/Ul4dmudzTl

— IPA (@poverty_action) September 23, 2019

New analysis of data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada shows that three in four African students (75%) who applied for study permits in Canada between January and May this year were rejected. The rate is much higher than the global rejection rate of 39%.

We do not have clean hands, but we suggest these measures because people urgently need to reduce consumption. Scientists face significant pressures to travel - a culture change is needed. Individuals can petition conference organizers, administrators and others in the community for an environmentally friendly scientific culture. Conferences are often organized and are always attended by researchers, so we do have the power to apply pressure and change organizations. Travel should not be an essential element of academic success; instead, evidence of sustainable travel should be valued in a researcher’s career.

Why are senior consultants ‘hiding’?
There are some more obvious reasons why senior consultants are often not very visible in public debates:
They tend to be very busy: they have carved out their niche and are on the go to the next assignment in ‘their’ country, region or area of expertise
They tend to be older and may not have been socialized in the digital culture of sharing, being online and maintaining a digital presence or even a brand
They actually have something to lose if public critique leads to fewer assignments for a favorite organization or they are perceived as ‘difficult’ (many freelance senior consultants have quasi-employment status with some of the largest bi- and multilateral organizations)
They know development is a job; after decades of work, every profession, job or calling has been met with plenty of reality checks; even if you are not cynical or burned-out it is difficult to have similar discussion regularly or get excited when the latest ‘participatory bottom-up community design project’ turns out to be just like any other project with a budget, log-frame and quarterly reports
They do not really like the academic reflection business and prefer to get an assignment ‘done’ rather than reflecting on an industry that may not be responsive to critique anyway (see previous point)

Avoid promoting quick fixes: What that does is provoke disillusionment down the road. We need to discourage young people particularly from thinking complex problems can be solved with a rush of energy and cool new tools. We need to be communicating that many tough challenges will require stamina and sustained effort and commitment.

Gone is the pernickety Ibu, head of the household, living in her own tropical Downton Abbey. Now I actively smell the sheets on the bed and think they can last another week without being changed. I purchase "easy-iron" clothing or even "no-iron" if I can find them. Electric appliances are my constant companions. I have even given the dishwasher a name (Doris Smeg).
As I consider what's for dinner tonight (we are working my way through our suitcase supply of Indofood Nasi Goreng paste), I pause to consider Life After Help.

The UN General Assembly’s high-level week of debate has ended, and so too the hectic pace of international initiatives and summitry. Here’s a selection of reports that came out before and during UNGA that are worth your reading time if you’re following the humanitarian agenda.

With arable land scarce, an overreliance on unhealthy food imports has impoverished diets across the SIDS. In communities historically raised on fish and a variety of fruit, a newly-induced preference for meat – often of poor quality – is devastating public health. Fatty, highly processed and sugary foods have become the norm. Seven of the world’s most obese countries are Pacific island nations.
Nutritional failings reflect wider governance and development challenges. My own arid country keeps shrivelling as sandy beaches are excavated. Such are the tourist industry’s needs that they can only be met through massive imports. This leads to chronic trade deficits, while local agriculture struggles.

There is no sign of reflection on the flaws of the "European model of development" and its colonial legacy as such.
It does not matter whether the label is, "development" or "partnership", if the core features remain the same: the belief in endless economic growth, the rhetoric of progress according to the European standard setting, and a destructive anthropocentric worldview.

All this means we really don’t know if more people are displaced today than at any point in the past. So: such claims are usually incorrect.
They’re also highly misleading, because the absolute figures are less important than the relative figures.
Relative to the total global population, today’s figures are not exceptional.
(...)
This is why it’s misleading to stress that there are “record” or “unprecedented” numbers of displaced people, especially when the key issue is not the scale of population displacement, it’s the political will to resolve it.

The truth is that women and children have been pushed to one side in global health policy making since 2016. There are no champions for women and children among Heads of State. Health is no longer prioritised by UNICEF’s leadership. And even WHO has stepped back from the front lines of programmatic advocacy. It is a pitiful state, revealing the cruel weaknesses of global health where issues are chosen and dropped with brutal expediency. And those who suffer these cruelties, women and children and young people living in poverty under regimes that care too little or not at all, remain invisible and forgotten

🔺 HAPPENING NOW 🔺#CGDTalks: How May We Help You? A Conversation on Consent in Global Development w/ @PopWorksAfrica, #BlackWomenInDev, @AngelaBruceRaeb@StephKimou@ErinGarYun, Nana Apenem Dagadu, @modonnell1231.

💻 Watch it LIVE: https://t.co/y9rXxnnCBmpic.twitter.com/JMet1Z8Evh

— Center for Global Development (@CGDev) October 3, 2019

240 civil society organizations and 40 international networks have called on the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General to end the recently signed UN’s Strategic Partnership Agreement with the World Economic Forum (WEF). The call, made in an open letter, condemned the agreement for ‘delegitimiz[ing] the United Nations and weaken(ing) the role of states in global decision-making.
Signed in June, the agreement promises to “accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” by deepening institutional coordination and collaboration between the UN and the WEF. Furthermore, the agreement grants transnational corporations preferential and deferential access to the UN System at the expense of States and public interest actors.
This “preferential access,” would undermine the mandate of the UN as well as its independence, impartiality, and effectiveness when holding businesses to account. “This agreement between the UN and WEF formalises a disturbing corporate capture of the UN. It moves the world dangerously towards a privatized and undemocratic global governance” said Gonzalo Berrón of Transnational Institute in presenting the letter.

Winners and Runners-Up of the 2019 Award Competition for Evaluation for Transformational Change announced.

Stakeholders’ within Kenya’s fragmented identification ecosystem view identity systems as tools for development and control. Some champion identification to better provide government services and expand the digital economy; others to monopolise opportunities and address security threats. These sometimes stand in tension.
Ongoing exclusions prevent some marginalised ethnic groups from accessing identity systems that are vital for participating in political and economic life. Women and girls also face unique challenges to accessing identity systems, including application processes that do not account for their needs and exploitative officials.

But as the use of cutoffs spread across Africa, many more users will resort to virtual private networks to circumvent censorship says Berhan Taye, who leads a global campaign to stop internet shutdowns at Access Now. Legal challenges against government-ordered shutdowns have been increasing too, with cases, some successful, filed in nations including Uganda, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, and DR Congo.
Ultimately, Berhan says, “the nuclear option of shutting down the internet is not going to be sustainable.”

“The terms of the document we signed with the Sana’a-based authorities last week specify that neither side should provide details,” says a WFP spokesperson. The organization would not comment on whether it had shared biometric data with the Houthis.
But this opacity is what makes both privacy experts and aid beneficiaries feel uneasy.
“We need to be able to trust the humanitarian sector, and, importantly, the humanitarian sector is dependent on our trust for its resources and its license to operate,” says McDonald. “That trust starts with being explicit about the compromises and partnerships that frame their data-sharing relationships.”

"Indeed, the challenge for humanitarians is how to handle divergent and culture-clashing views of what’s relevant in a way that addresses power, fosters communication and enhances appropriateness, rather than imposes expertise." So well summarized. #alnap32

— Tom Arcaro (@tarcaro) September 27, 2019

Yet there is a persistent expectation from individuals, families, communities and governments that women’s care work is an endlessly elastic safety net that will meet increased needs in situations of conflict and austerity. In fact, this highlights the role of such labour in sustaining society and preventing further conflict. However, policymakers tend to overlook it, as well as women’s role in sustaining peace. But when states don’t support women, they set the conditions for further conflict, depleting households and leaving whole families and young people vulnerable to recruitment by militias, warring groups and violent extremists.

SPRING research thus spoke to what I see as the core tenant of the doing development differently agenda: working in partnership with local people to identify and better understand problems and potential solutions in order to enable greater local ownership, and ultimately more impactful and sustainable development. In fact, I would argue that SPRING’s success was largely shaped by using qualitative research to do development differently.

The city still has far too many slums and squatter settlements, it lacks a functioning public transportation system, proper traffic management, efficient waste disposal, sanitation, adequate potable water supply and routine road maintenance.
Lagos also suffers because of problems that afflict the country. There isn’t regular electricity supply, and there are high rates of poverty and unemployment. And, as elsewhere in the country, many residents don’t comply with laws on building, traffic and sanitation.

An inspiring African mother who has to be validated by a white celebrity saviour. Why is UNHCR doing this? https://t.co/1cWzmqjUWX

— Jeff Crisp (@JFCrisp) September 28, 2019

First, I realised that in my desire to help and rescue others, I had mistaken charity for justice, and pity for solidarity.Unintentionally, as the rescuer, I had boxed everyone else into corresponding categories
(...)
Second, I realised that my carefully polished identity of helper and saviour of others in need was a way of avoiding my own need, my own suffering.
And paradoxically, when I managed to acknowledge and accept the parts of me that were needy and selfish, something magical happened: I was suddenly so much freer to explore what it means to be selfless and of true service to others. With a newfound lightness: because my deeds of service to others are no longer required to cover up the lie that I am never selfish.

"I think some of the most devastating critique is not around substance in terms of what the companies do, it's around a motive," he said. "So, either we don't care because we just care about making money because we're a business. Or we don't care about certain issues because we're biased to not care about them."
You know, I feel he has a point. That's exactly what many people think, principally because it's been shown, time and again, to be astoundingly true.
From the earliest stages of Facebook, when the company showed a complete disregard for users' privacy, it was evident that power, money and the copying and destruction of all competition was all.
It's only recently, when Facebook was implicated in perhaps helping alter the fate of democracy in several countries, that Zuckerberg suddenly experienced peculiar conversion therapy.
When you've been fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission, it may not be much money to you, but the perception is that you're a considerable fraud.

Google contractors “sent teams to Atlanta explicitly to target homeless people and those with dark skin, often without saying they were working for Google, and without letting on that they were actually recording people’s faces.” https://t.co/uJ6VC6pC6s

— daniel harvey (@dancharvey) October 3, 2019

However, in the midst of a 21st century, de‐colonial scholarly pivot, ‘opening up development’ fundamentally demands turning the colonial, ‘white gaze’ on its head. In particular, contemporary social media movements challenging white supremacy such as #BlackLivesMatter have gained prominence while non‐white development actors such as China have emerged as enticing alternatives. These phenomena have pried open development with both positive and negative results, intended and unintended consequences. This article seeks to put Critical Development Studies into fluid conversation with Critical Race Studies in an examination of how scholars, policy makers and practitioners have simultaneously succeeded and failed in subverting the ‘white gaze’ of development.

This issue of Crisis Magazine brings together a range of expert perspectives that reveal the deeper dynamics behind Syrian migration. With this issue, we aim to encourage a more coherent political narrative from the Left that replaces the limiting frame of “the migrant crisis.”

Data and politics are now inseparable: data is not only shaping our social relations, preferences and life chances but our very democracies. Expert international contributors consider political questions about data and the ways it provokes subjects to govern themselves by making rights claims. Concerned with the things (infrastructures of servers, devices, and cables) and language (code, programming, and algorithms) that make up cyberspace, this book demonstrates that without understanding these conditions of possibility it is impossible to intervene in or to shape data politics.

There is a need to make behavioural models more practical and attractive to those who are supposed to use them in real life, filling this operational gap. And in doing so, help reduce the frequent resorting to ‘’go-to’’ default interventions, such as trying to solve any behavioural issue with a communication campaign, regardless of what may explain the practice of the behaviour. In this document, we try to make the explanation of complex phenomena more accessible, and systematically link every conceptual element to an approach that can influence it.

This guidance note offers comprehensive background information and resources, along with guidelines and guidance for the UN system, in supporting Member States in their efforts to prevent and counter violent extremism and terrorism (P/CVE)—with a primary focus on preventing violent extremism (PVE). It proposes a model for gender mainstreaming across PVE efforts that is human rights–compliant.

By the time notification of an outbreak has been received, it is generally too late to establish the networks required to support the collection of good quality social scientific data. Networks like WASSERN embed social scientists at the national level, linked up with their colleagues in universities, NGOs, health ministries and national public health agencies, so that they can be called on to offer insights for all disease outbreaks, including more common ones like cholera, measles and malaria, as well as rarer diseases like Ebola or Rift Valley Fever. A robust localisation agenda can only help to facilitate improved global health security and creative ways of responding to the increasing complexity of the humanitarian/development nexus.

Along with these questionable intentions, there are a whole set of rules that govern the conversation, which I have come to call the “Diversity and Inclusion Racket.” Below, I present just 50 of them. They are not the rules as I would write them. They are the hellscape I’ve learned to live in.

In the end, we teachers, researchers, educators and citizens will have to live with a growing demographic of people who will be demanding their full charity investment experience-either abroad and/or in connection with online activities…it means that traditional charities have to change from the printed newspaper to a New York Times online to Buzzfeed model of charity or the attention, clicks and dollars will go elsewhere-potentially traveling with a new generation of entrepreneurs who want to experience quick impact during a short sabbatical…

A revised approach to sex within the international development community would make the link between sexual pleasure and power dynamics, choice, health, and rights. It would account for the realities of people’s holistic (and sometimes pleasurable) sexual lives, and further, move beyond the gender binary of women and men. We must acknowledge that our sexual selves, experiences and choices do not exist in a vacuum and are linked to issues of class, race, norms, caste, sexual and gender identity and expression, and other forms of privilege and exclusion.

Executives of Portland-based Mercy Corps knew co-founder Ellsworth Culver had been credibly accused by his daughter of serial sexual abuse but allowed him to continue at the renowned international relief agency in a top role for more than a decade.

The $471-million-a-year charity twice rebuffed Culver’s daughter, Tania Culver Humphrey — 25 years ago when she first detailed her allegations to Mercy Corps officials and then again last year when she asked them to reexamine how they handled the initial review.

A BBC investigation has uncovered a secret world of sexual exploitation of children and young women by religious figures.
Clerics are grooming vulnerable girls in Iraq and offering them for sex, using a controversial religious practice known as “pleasure marriage”.

Board members’ resentment against the board’s UN participant representatives, who represent 85,000 active UN staff members and include the whistleblowers who raised awareness about problems in the fund’s secretariat under the ex-chief executive, Sergio Arvizù, drives board dynamics.
Additional tensions come from smaller UN specialized agencies on the board who fear reforms, particularly those in which they could lose their voting weights if adjustments are made to the board’s composition, based on relative numbers of members and size of contributions.
When the board tried to block the whistleblowers from taking their seats as elected members of the body, the UN Appeals Tribunal found in their favor and pronounced the board’s actions “unlawful” and “egregious.”

The survey of more than 8,000 WFP staffers, which was commissioned by the agency’s executive director, David Beasley, did not identify the names of the food agency’s leaders responsible for misconduct. But its findings portrayed work-life at the U.N.’s premier food agency as demoralizing, with some staffers characterizing their bosses as “repressive, authoritarian,” and self-dealing.

We are still living in an incomplete recovery and a fragile situation that could easily dip into economic, social and political crisis. This is made worse by the growing right-wing backlash fuelled by decades of structural adjustment and austerity. This backlash threatens to throw away the good with the bad, destroying the entire apparatus of international cooperation.
We should act to rescue the multilateral system from the policy capture that has prevailed since the 1980s. The progress on tackling rising inequality at the IMF must be accelerated as part of a broader set of reforms that reclaim its purpose in the name of a new social contract. Instead of the destructive role played in the last decades, the IMF can help build a global economy based on shared prosperity and a just transition to a zero-poverty, zero-carbon future.
Doing so will require challenging both the right-wing opponents of internationalism and those who have mismanaged the multilateral financial system into its current state of disrepair.

The company pushed out content on Facebook with paid ads targeting users in the US, UK and Europe.
"The risk of a campaign like this, in a place with so little access to truly independent media, is it skews the perceptions and understanding of the international community in a way that doesn't reflect reality," says ASPI cyber researcher Elise Thomas.
"That appears to be the goal, one which someone is willing to spend hundreds of dollars and many months to achieve."

Similarly, “Community Pass,” a digital platform Mastercard is developing, brings many different entities under one proverbial roof to serve individuals. By signing in with a universal ID, people can access multiple services through one platform. A smallholder farmer has at her fingertips the ability to check in to her health care clinic and the health providers can match her information to vaccine records. She can connect her produce to more buyers or pay her children’s school fees remotely. Bringing additional services in one system dramatically lowers the marginal costs of the individual services and interventions.

Here we go again. Altohelix is a foreign drone company based 12,220km from Nairobi. Why not hire Kenyan drone pilots instead? They are local, live in Nairobi, speak Swahili & have professional training. Why not give Kenyan drone pilots the opportunity to support their Red Cross? pic.twitter.com/fwRoqFXN4O

— Patrick Meier (@PatrickMeier) October 5, 2019

The co-operative movement suggested four steps to address the crisis: decreasing the debt stock through a moratorium on loan payments or debt write off; an interest rate cap to end the exponential increase in debt; alternative avenues for affordable rural credit including through the co-operatives; and policies to increase income streams through collective production as opposed to self-employment.

At this same time, up to 300 people a day were arriving at Carcelen's doorstep, triple the amount from six months ago when the daily average was 100 people. While she gave everyone meals, she was only able to give beds to about 150 people a night, prioritising families with children, she said.
"Where are they expected to go?" said Carcelen, criticising the new visa restrictions, "they don't have wings, they can't just hover around in the sky."

Often I was asked, after a particularly awful story, how I was taking care of myself. I would brush off the questions with a joke but I struggled with crippling anxiety and burnout. Perhaps depression as well – I don’t know because I never bothered to go to a therapist or to get diagnosed. Partly, I didn’t see it as a major problem. I was high-functioning and this came with the territory of the work I did. What kind of journalist complains about his mental health when people are dying from sieges and barrel bombs, when paramedics are killed doing their duty, when children are suffocating to death by poison gas, and people risk their lives in choppy Mediterranean waters to escape certain death and totalitarian states?
But I realised I needed help when the stories stopped coming to me.
The biggest culture shock I had when we moved to Canada was the fact that the last eight years there had been relatively normal for citizens, compared to the lives of those in the Middle East. The mundanity of the problems I now faced from day to day struck me as almost frivolous, a betrayal even, of the people whose stories I had helped tell.

I don’t suppose you have Ben & Jerry’s here, do you? Oh, well. Allison met her Harvey when she was a teenager. The melting Arctic attracted a mining company to her town, the mining company brought in a bunch of workers—mostly men—and that became a breeding ground for Harveys. Because what else is there to do up there but to prey on young women and sell them to your friends? By the time Allison migrated to Alaska, her Harvey had made enough money off of her to buy a fancy sports car.

Many Syrians protested against the screening of “The Cord” but there was no response from the management of MAFF, nor explanation why they had the audacity to accept this Assad propaganda to its programme in the first place. When I asked one of the responsible board members to answer the Syrians, there was a silence. No answer. According to award-winning Syrian filmmaker Ziad Kalthoum it is an absolute disgrace if festivals screen Assad-supported films: “It is very shameful to see Arab film festivals in Europe celebrating and receiving films that glorify the killer and shine his image of war crimes in which thousands of people died, tortured and killed thousands in their prisons. To allow this, makes these festivals involved in the crime. The most sad and painful thing is the silence of Arab directors from Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia and other Arab countries on the behavior of these festivals. Instead they give a warm clap and they are waiting to walk on the red carpet as a cheap trade in the social media machine. To be a film director, you are a messenger in the time of the revolution, to transfer the reality and concerns of society in all its details and its truth. Not to be a slave of the commercial industry and its spotlights.”
At the same time, the MAFF Board decided to pull a Virtual Reality experience “Escape from Sweden”, supported by Malmö Stad, Boost Hbg and Film i Skåne, after myself, as director of the film, and our crew, had voiced our critique on the programming of another Assad-propaganda film.

After extensive scoping in the field and consultation with agronomists, we conducted a phone survey that asked 131 female farmers about their kitchen gardens – what crops they grew, when they planted their crops, etc. Using the findings from the field, a base of knowledge, and the survey results, a team of agronomists developed a kitchen garden information package specifically tailored to women farmers’ needs and local agricultural practices. PAD will begin calling 15,000 women to provide this information on a weekly basis. We are hoping that women will find this content relevant to their needs and will thus answer the PAD weekly calls and listen to them at a higher rate than they have in the past.
One of the most innovative aspects of the PAD service is that in addition to the outbound calls that users receive, users can also call the PAD team: the record any question that they may have about agriculture, and a team of agronomists will research the answer and get back to them within two days. This feature empowers women to have a direct information source they can access—one that does not require literacy or a smartphone. The goal is for women to feel self-reliant and that they do not need to rely on their spouse or others for information or to consult when making a decision.

“This is a generation [of African writers] that isn’t just writing about colonialism and postcolonialism, or just looking at African governance and its failures,” says Ms. Gappah. “We write history. We write romance. We write science fiction. In this generation we have gained the freedom to write about the things that American and European authors write about, which is to say anything we choose.”

I'm constantly on the move and always feel like I'm visiting wherever I stay, as all the places where I work are several kilometers away from the office. I do not have a support system and I'm unable to create one with my constant movement. But I get to travel around the country anyway.
When I get deeply moved by things or stressed and just need to rest, it comes off more as a sign of someone who is used to living in luxury. I should be fine with just a little discomfort especially since I'm African anyway.

“TNCs have added 5.7 billion miles of driving annually in the Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC metro areas.” In the San Francisco Bay Area, many of the Lyft and Uber drivers live in poorer regions and drive long distances in order to chauffer the more affluent around in increasingly car-clogged metropolises. The dystopia that is Silicon Valley, as it annexes more and more of the Bay Area, shows that the tech overlords have little interest in a better world, as opposed to a more profitable one for themselves.

I asked him if he has any concerns about Amazon’s rapid expansion into national security. “We seem to be racing toward a new configuration of government and industry without having fully thought through all of the implications. And some of those implications may not be entirely foreseeable,” he wrote in an email. “But any time you establish a new concentration of power and influence, you also need to create some countervailing structure that will have the authority and the ability to perform effective oversight. Up to now, that oversight structure doesn’t seem to [be] getting the attention it deserves.”

Haley is on her way to getting the thing she wants, the thing all of her friends want. To be a very online young person in 2019 is to share the same goal: have the kind of social media following wherein performing your life online becomes a paying job. Haley and her friends, and their friends, and their friends, want to be stars in the constellation of professionally watchable influencers who rack up millions of views and considerable livelihoods by simply hanging out on their couch. They don’t want a boring day job, because who does? Why would you choose to eat sad desk salads when you could meet screaming fans and get paid by brands just for being yourself?

Haley has gotten a small taste of this, and like everybody else who has, she wants more.

I remain suspicious about the seductiveness of overly celebratory narratives of open access publishing that do not address the real costs of academic publishing or gloss over the labour involved. The Politics of Language Contact in the Himalaya is still steeped in the privileged resources of Western academia, and the orientalist cover by the great Victorian artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, Edward Lear—these days known mostly for his literary nonsense poetry and especially for his memorable limericks—at first appears to reinscribe that privilege. Our choice of Lear’s painting for the cover art to this volume was in fact intended rather to disrupt his authority and create space for communities in and from the Himalayan region to engage with colonial representations of their homeland.

Today’s global access crisis is a symptom of broader, connected trends, including the massive increase in humanitarian needs, a collective failure to find political solutions to end armed conflicts, and the rapid erosion of norms governing armed conflict and humanitarian action. In this complex geopolitical environment, complying with the regulatory and legal burden imposed by donors and the actual security risks fall on humanitarian actors at the frontlines of humanitarian response. Meanwhile, the humanitarian agencies they represent struggle to deal with increased costs and the reputational, legal, and security risks that access delays and denial impose.

OUP has granted free access to a selection of ten highly cited articles from recent years. These articles are just a sample of the impressive body of research from African Affairs.

Decolonising the curriculum FAQs // a thread to keep me sane. Lots of answers via @ProfMadhuK who just have an amazing seminar on this subject at UEA. Please add!
Q: why is the focus on race
A: bc it’s the most pressing issue of inequality facing Higher Education.

— Sophie Robinson (@sophiepoetry) October 4, 2019

Sorrowing over the treatment of migrants, Achille Mbembe calls for Africa to adopt a pro-migration stance, phase out colonial borders and become ‘a vast space of circulation’.

Just thought of sharing my poster which invited a lot of enthusiasm and reflections at Humboldt Forum pic.twitter.com/zjkfKa8cRQ

— Sayan Dey (@sayandey89) October 6, 2019

At the same time, and related to the previous themes, is an increased focus on mental and physical well-being. Even is the development industry is essentially global, new challenges are likely to emerge when ‘local’ staff experiences stress, ‘regional’ aid workers return to their own challenging environment or ‘international’ staff experience stress because of lower salaries or fewer perks such as R&R and home vacations are cut back.

So once again, tons of learning at PopTech and above all, great people and connections. I hope I can make it back sooner than in another 5 years!
*and this will all probably sound incredibly naive when I read it in 2019…

International adoption is built upon a foundation of lies and cultural misunderstandings. Better regulation would help, but the power is concentrated in the hands of a powerful adoption agency lobby and adoptive parents, who have legal rights adoptees lack. Adoptive parents’ desires become instantly more important that the child or the child’s homeland, culture, and first family. Adoptees’ histories are erased when their birth certificates are changed to reflect only the names of their adoptive parents – and those parents can change adoptees’ names against the children’s wishes. Adoptee voices are rarely heard in policy discussions and, when they are, they are often dismissed as “angry” or “ungrateful”.

This is a short entry from the forthcoming/evolving Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Security Studies.
The entry outlines four areas for social media and peacebuilding that roughly follow a historical trajectory: from initial “add Internet and stir” extensions of traditional peacebuilding approaches into the digital realm and the enthusiasm of social media “revolutions” and from a backlash from various powerful regimes and actors to a future where issues such as online privacy, data ownership, and the decolonization of tools have become new arenas for conflict prevention, building peace, and contributing to positive social change.

Notably, Esther is the second woman and the youngest person to have ever won this prize. In her interview right after winning, she said: "Showing that it is possible for a woman to succeed and be recognised for success I hope is going to inspire many, many other women to continue working and many other men to give them the respect that they deserve like every single human being". We hope these words and her actions will continue to inspire generations of development practitioners, particularly women and minorities, for years to come.

In earlier econ culture, certain great men held special wisdom that was inaccessible to others without their help.

Esther and Abhijit (+ plenty of others) not only pulled back this curtain but also showed everyone ways to start figuring out what we CAN know (however narrowly).

— Nick Hagerty (@hagertynw) October 14, 2019

While the laureates’ approach to poverty research and policy may seem harmless, if not laudable, there are many reasons for concern. Both heterodox and mainstream economists as well as other social scientists have long provided thorough critique of the turn towards RCTs in economics, on philosophical, epistemological, political and methodological grounds. The concerns with the approach can be roughly grouped into questions of focus, theory, and methodology.

But these behavioural interventions can be too small and overly simplistic, disempowering and paternalistic, and stray into victim-blaming. The behaviourist paradigm interprets low incomes and precarious lives as a function of individual misbehaviours and cognitive biases, rather than a product of larger structural injustices of the economic and political system. Yet poverty traps are not just a function of individual cognitive insufficiencies: rich people make mistakes too – more often with other people’s money – but for them the consequences are far smaller. As fifteen leading development economists said in an open letter last year, RCTs and behaviourist approaches are practically designed to miss the bigger picture.

The second contradiction is more widely understood: despite the gushing headlines in the Western press, there is simply no evidence that policy based on randomized trials is better than alternatives. Countries that are now developed did not need foreign researchers running experiments on local poor people to grow their economies. There is ample historical evidence that growth, development and dramatic reductions in poverty can be achieved without randomised trials. Randomistas claim that their methods are the holy grail of development yet they have not presented any serious arguments to show why theirs is the appropriate response. Instead, the case that such methods are crucial for policy is largely taken for granted by them because they think they are doing “science.” But while they are certainly imitating what researchers in various scientific disciplines do, the claim that the results are as reliable and useful for economic and social questions is unsupported.

By the end, more than 75 people, some with tears running down their cheeks, formed a semi-circle around Humphrey.
They repeated that they believe her and that she has the support of Mercy Corps employees worldwide. Many thanked her for speaking publicly about her experience.
“Thank you for standing here with me,” said Humphrey, looking at the impromptu crowd.

Similarly, in early 2015, Zinmin Thu’s colleague forwarded the same letter to a staffer at the UN Development Programme (UNDP) office in Myanmar, which began funding COM on behalf of another agency – the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) – that year. But the staffer who received the report did not forward it to the Office of Audit and Investigation in New York, and it was not logged as a formal complaint. COM continued to receive funding from UNDP until 2017, when it was discontinued for unrelated reasons.
A UNDP spokesperson told VICE that the agency “didn’t receive any complaints regarding allegations in the concerned organization through the designated channels available at the time.”

The results on WFP’s leadership, WTW said, “closely align” with the UNICEF findings. Levels of reported sexual harassment at WFP were consistent, if not better, than surveys of other UN agencies and in other industries, the report stated.
In one result more specific to WFP, the external review found that the extensive use of short-term contracts contributed to abusive behaviour by discouraging whistleblowers and giving managers arbitrary influence.
About half of respondents were working under consultant or service contracts or agreements, which are subject to renewal and do not carry the job security or benefits of full UN employment.
Beasley’s email to staff said the organisation would “strengthen key HR processes” and establish a “true meritocracy”.
The report questioned the competency of the senior WFP management, pointing out that the top levels are staffed by people who came up through the ranks as “technical experts”. “Leadership,” the review added, “requires a completely different skill set than operational delivery”.

Despite the denials, Primah Kwagala, the executive director of Women’s Pro-bono Initiative, the Ugandan organisation representing the women, said she was anxious to see Bach in court in Uganda, primarily to underline the message that organisations such as SHC cannot come to the country and operate without proper checks and balances.
“I want Renee to know that she did something wrong and she needs to be held accountable,” said Kwagala. “It is for people to know that if they do what Renee has done, including Ugandans, they will have to pay.”

The @WorldBank’s 2020 World Development Report is out, and its focus is on integrating with global value chains.#WDR 1/5https://t.co/NiVZJPArEl

— Seth Schindler (@seth_schindler) October 16, 2019

"I can report that there's no one starving, no one dying of thirst, no one walking around naked," Campbell said during a visit to Marsh Harbour.
The minister says people are surviving due to "an incredible outpouring of love and support" from people around the world. "Food and water is coming in. Those that are in need are being served. But there's a sense of urgency to get people into their homes or some form of housing that is airtight and watertight."
In the short term that housing may be in a tent city or mobile homes, he says, or some other temporary solution while homes are rebuilt.
On both Abaco and Grand Bahama, shantytowns were turned to fields of rubble. Concrete commercial buildings were flattened. Seaside restaurants where tourists used to drink Goombay Smash cocktails and Sands beer were flung inland. Nearly every building in Marsh Harbour was damaged or destroyed. Some disappeared entirely. Dorian left Abaco and parts of Grand Bahama with no electricity, no running water, no banks, no grocery stores or gas stations.

In post-earthquake Haiti, there were all manner of things the US could have spent its money on. It could have spent that money to revitalise Haiti’s agricultural sector. In a country where only one in four people have access to basic sanitation facilities, the US could have invested in building things such as flush toilets, sewers and sewage treatment plants. In a country where 59% of the population lives on less than $2.41 per day, the US could have simply given Haitians the money. Studies have shown that such “unconditional cash transfers” can be a more effective way to increase income and access to education and housing than many types of traditional “project-based” aid. But policies like cash transfers would have undermined the approach to aid in which rich countries simply prescribe “solutions” for poor ones, rather than allowing people to take their futures into their own hands.
Little about the US’s foreign policy toward Haiti has changed since the 2010 earthquake. The US continues to send the country surplus crops through the Food for Peace programme to this day. Hillary Clinton stepped down as US secretary of state in 2013, but her successors have championed the same sort of private-sector-focused development. USAid continues to spend money to boost Haiti’s textile industry, and the US government continues to advertise Haiti as a business opportunity for US investors.

Lindsay Jaacks, a global nutrition researcher at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health who was not involved with the UNICEF report, says the rise of childhood obesity in developing countries is an ominous sign for those countries' health-care systems. Those countries may soon face a costly burden of Type 2 diabetes, arthritis, cardiovascular conditions and other obesity-related conditions, she says.

throughout my travels I was struck by how many compromises (in my view) were being made for sustainability, be it the through taming of wildlife, prioritization of economic development at the expense of local customs, or many other examples.
(...)
Ecotourism is undoubtedly a more responsible and sustainable option that many other tourism choices. But, let us not overly romanticize positive impacts of such travel, nor grow complacent over the trade-offs, compromises, and potentially negative impacts that it may have.

Dayak landowners of Sarawak will take no pleasure but experience little surprise in hearing how the people of Papua New Guinea (PNG) have related their ill-treatment by the logging and oil palm plantation conglomerates based in East Malaysia. These are companies who first robbed Sarawakians of their landrights before extending operations into virtually all the remaining timber reserves on the planet.
East Malaysia’s timber tycoons are a destructive force in the Congo, Amazon, Indonesia, The Solomon Islands, Tasmania, New Zealand, Siberia, PNG and beyond. Their practices rate amongst the worst in the world in terms of trashing the environment and the rights of indigenous people.
Now, as profits from the earlier palm oil boom have slumped, Sarawak Report has learned first-hand how these same Malaysian companies have been simply telling local workers in PNG that their jobs are finished and to find their way home, without compensation or support. All we spoke to were being paid illegally low salaries in the first place.

It seems that the most common issue was the lack of any kind of systematic set of policies on fixers' protection. Though individual journalists and documentarians do often care about this a lot, the organizations they work for usually don't have any concrete rules on offering fixers insurance, safety equipment, hazardous environment training, or emotional counseling. This matters more for fixers working in dangerous areas, but even in "safe" areas, there are a number of stressors that fixers endure. News organizations need to address this more systematically.

And as it is increasingly becoming recognised, people do get declined: people who are on the frontlines of global health and who best know ground realities; the very people who are needed to keep global health a valid enterprise. There is an inverse principle: those most able to fly to Geneva, New York and London to participate in premier global health events, are at times the least needed people there. The costs in terms of blocking the sharing and learning that are at the heart of effective research and policy have been listed by many.
So visas are, in effect, a tax applied to middle class LMIC applicants on behalf of wealthy governments. But the patterns are not uniform as shown by the spidergrams below contrasting the Welcoming Country Index with the Henley Passport Index, i.e. how many countries does a nation allow in without visas, or with visas on arrival or electronic visas vs. how many countries can a citizen travel to without prior visas. In general, many LMIC countries are much more welcoming of others while often being very limited in terms of where their citizens can travel freely, with the opposite often applies in Europe and other high income countries. But there are exceptions, and some LMIC countries are not especially welcoming to other nations and are also not welcome everywhere.

While I appreciate the reference to “small” charities and not all charities, we – and by this I mean photographers, storytellers, videographers – are creating an unsustainable situation by working for free. In fact, we’ve set up the expectation that our work holds no monetary value and that we’re ok not getting paid for our photography if we think we are doing good with our pictures.
Here’s the thing, nonprofits are businesses, albeit, businesses that have to show zero profit at the end of the year. They generally pay the people who work for them for their time and services. Beyond that, I’d be willing to bet that most nonprofit organizations care about the ethical treatment of people. Guess what? Photographers are people. And most of the time we’re people who don’t have the luxury of not making an income. So why is it OK not to pay photographers?

The Guardian investigations illuminate the shared features of these new systems, whether in developing or developed countries, east or west. The most glaring similarity is that all this is happening at lightning speed, with hi-tech approaches sweeping through social services, work and pensions, disability and health, often with minimal public debate or accountability.
Within that revolution, the human element of the welfare state is being diluted. Instead of talking to a caseworker who personally assesses your needs, you now are channeled online where predictive analytics will assign you a future risk score and an algorithm decide your fate.
In the new world, inequality and discrimination can be entrenched. What happens if you are one of the five million adults in the UK without regular access to the internet and with little or no computer literacy? What if the algorithm merely bakes in existing distortions of race and class, making the gulf between rich and poor, white and black, college-educated and manual worker, even more pronounced?

The viewership metrics were inflated by 150 to 900%. Whole companies shifted their strategy to video. Companies going bankrupt, people losing jobs, FB gets away with 0.18% of annual income ($40M / $22B), a slap on the wrist. https://t.co/6Gdw2eRY7a

— Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) October 13, 2019

Research with and about vulnerable populations, including refugees and migrants, raises several methodological concerns. Due to their experiences, potential respondents might mistrust the motives and independence of researchers and how the information they share might be used. The necessity felt to keep a low profile leads to challenges for researchers to access relevant population groups and difficulties in establishing trust to share information. This article gives examples from across the globe, including Jordan, Turkey and Kenya, on how quantitative researchers try to access these populations and what approaches are used to establish trust, including the involvement of local ‘gatekeepers’, non-governmental organizations, community leaders, and the employment of refugee enumerators. Furthermore, conducting quantitative panel surveys with refugee populations that feature a high rate of mobility comes with another set of challenges for researchers. These challenges often evolve around finding the right balance between personal data collection and the protection of personal data. This article illustrates these challenges with examples of panel surveys conducted in Jordan and Turkey

Plenaries where world-renowned speakers seem astonished when told they have only 5 minutes left, having spent large parts of the previous 25 introducing the topic, saying nice things about their fellow researchers etc etc. They then abruptly change gear and whizz through the substance of their talk in a series of ‘I’d like to talk about X, but I don’t have time’.

Girls can take part in all of Adjunct Barbie’s™ academic adventures. Pack her bags as she jet-sets off to Glassboro, New Jersey, Prescott, Arizona, or even Augusta, Georgia, for job interviews that never quite pan out. Leaf through The Chronicle of Higher Education and guess which positions have already been promised to internal candidates. Help her review the honor code with Plagiarism Daisy™. Then after a long day, she’s ready to kick back in the studio apartment she shares with her ex-boyfriend, Freelance Ken™. They’re staying out of each other’s way until the lease runs out! Or maybe she just drives around for a while, thinking about her life choices.

You write about the bad job many celebrities do (e.g. Victoria Beckham), happy to receive a bit of traffic, some Likes and sharing, but deep down you and I know that this is not going to change celebrities’ behavior.
Some have started to educate themselves, but at the end of the day for every thoughtful intervention there are going to be five or so stereotyped pre-Christmas fundraisers, ill-prepared field trips to Africa and that nagging feeling that once, just once, the celebrity, PR person, friend, NGO etc. would have spent an hour to think it through, read up on basic stuff and ask one of the many, many experts some simple questions: ‘Is this a good idea? Should I be doing this?’

I entered Peru with arrogant attitudes about what I could bring to the table as an outsider without any special skill set. Over several months, I learned that Peruvians are some of the hardest working people I know. I realized that I will never understand the intricacies of a country and a culture as well as someone who grew up there. I learned how hard it is for NGOs in developing countries to do good work when they remain subject to the whims of donor politics. I learned that I can’t save anyone, but that I can humble myself, listen, roll up my sleeves, and get to work alongside these leaders. In other words, I learned to cast off the white savior complex I didn’t even know I was wearing.

We might complain about being invited to meetings, but on some level we actually love it. Being invited means that you're valued; it means that your participation counts, even if you aren't being productive. But this hurts us as individuals—professional objectives aside, being over-scheduled takes a toll on a personal level. On an organizational level, we can take steps to reduce the spectators in meetings and enable the participants to complete the deliverables they're tasked with by making sure they have clear paths to decision-making. Meetings are not going away, but they don't have to be painful.

“Despite the best of intentions, the sad truth is that visiting and volunteering in orphanages drives an industry that separates children from their families and puts them at risk of neglect and abuse,” she said.
“Institutionalism is one of the worst things you can do to children in the world. It has huge effects on their normal development, it renders children vulnerable to abuse and trafficking, and it massively impacts their life chances. And these dire statistics apply even to what we would see as well-run orphanages … The effect on children is universally poor.”

According to the internal documents, the IFRC initially bid a much lower overhead rate than its two rivals. Letters from the Commission dated 15 February to the three bidders asked for clarification, including on the justification for the indirect support costs, which were listed as follows – IFRC: €8.7 million; World Bank: €21.9 million; World Food Programme: €33 million.

Spoiler alert: It won't.https://t.co/jsLu4n3A4wpic.twitter.com/6LVNft4ocU

— Tobias Denskus (@aidnography) October 22, 2019

1. First, the report challenges assumptions around irregular migration from Africa to Europe. It finds that getting a job was not the only motivation to move, that not all irregular migrants were ‘poor’ in Africa, nor had lower education levels.
58 per cent were either employed or in school at the time of their departure, with the majority of those working earning competitive wages at home. They are of the ‘springboard generation’ – beneficiaries of two decades of remarkable development progress in Africa. Still, some 50 per cent of those working said they were not earning enough.
2. Second, that barriers to opportunity, or ‘choice-lessness’, were critical factors informing the calculation of the 1,970 people surveyed. That in spite of development progress at home, 77 percent felt that their voice was unheard or that their country’s political system provided no opportunity through which to exert influence on government.
3. Third, despite the danger and risks of the fraught journey from Africa to Europe, only 2 per cent of all those people surveyed said that greater awareness of the risks would have caused them to stay at home. In fact, 41 percent of respondents said ‘nothing’ would have changed their decision to migrate to Europe.

Yet, making access to even the most basic safety dependent on immobility or return is a double-edged sword: while it saves lives in the most immediate sense, it also suggests that Africans should be grateful to just stay alive, and are only—theoretically—entitled to anything beyond that on their own continent. It seeks to confine Africans in Africa, urging them to accept their fate and, as a young Nigerian returnee wearily acquiesces, “stay in our country and feed on what we have.” Critically, using the language of protection also omits that evacuation has meanings other than the restoration of safety. To evacuate also means to empty out. To expel. After all, before the dream of “getting out of Libya,” there was another dream, now entirely eclipsed: to go to a place of one’s own choosing. This omission reinforces and naturalizes the idea that national communities best stay separate if they want to be safe and prosper.

I love activism. Taped to the inside of the World Bank bathroom stalls at #WBGMeetings: #fossilfreewbgpic.twitter.com/Xr60dUvwHX

— Kate Midden (@katemidden) October 18, 2019

Measures by DfID and Bond aimed at providing better reporting and complaints mechanisms have focused too much on theory at the expense of ensuring changes in practice, the committee said. The MPs called for “an end to voluntary self-regulation” of aid agencies, which they said “allows failures on sexual exploitation and abuse to slip through the cracks”.

Progress reports from those that made commitments at 18 October 2018 Safeguarding Summit in London.

She also asked students to be thankful they live in the United States and said while the world of politics is very divisive, she got a glimpse of "evil" through her job as ambassador.
"I've been in Venezuela and seen people starving, killing zoo animals to survive," she said. "I've seen pictures of children killed by chemical weapons attacks in Syria, children ripped from their mothers’ arms in the Democratic of Congo. When you’ve seen those images, that’s evil. What we need to remember is to be grateful because on our worst day we are blessed to be in America.”

I doubt I am the first to say this and I will not be the last, but: what? On paper, you would be right to think that this does not sound like a good idea. In practice, it is also very much not a good idea. The vague intention is: the Moffatts – dad Mark, who is boring; mum Betty, who is boring; the teen sister Ava-Grace is mostly mute – move in with the semi-nomadic Himba tribe in Namibia, and they stay in an exact replica of their home (frustratingly glossed over are the logistics of building an exact replica of Scarlett Moffatt’s house in the middle of the Namib desert. I would rather watch an hour of someone explaining how they erected an untethered terrace with electricity and running water in such a setting than, say, the dire five-minute segment where Mark Moffatt goes metal detecting and finds a whistle). The Himba – who are pitched somewhere between props for the Moffatts to bounce off and actual, rounded people with their own thoughts and feelings and to-camera segments – patiently explain to the Moffatts how much they prize their livestock’s health, shy away from excessive possessions and dress traditionally; the Moffatts nod and point to a plug socket and say: “That box, very spiky!”

We have some words for @ScarlettMoffatt and @Channel4News about #thebritishtribenextdoor .... this is going to be a WHOLE thread, so hold your fragile white feelings until the end. pic.twitter.com/h0xtXPa0bj

— No White Saviors (@nowhitesaviors) October 24, 2019

All these additional steps – having the time to listen, to think and to explore – require budgeting. Is there a donor out there, public or private, that is willing to fund these intangible, but ultimately more effective, efforts on a regular basis? If not, let’s discuss why. I am ready to bet that donors find it hard to ‘sell’ these intangible efforts to their constituents (e.g. taxpayers), which takes us back to the importance of communicating what we do more effectively.
Four years from now, I hope there will be many more blogs amplifying voices from the Global South. The most important lesson I have learned so far is to walk the talk and start doing things differently, even if it just means writing one post at a time in plain English – and in other languages too.

A deep split that exists within Ethiopia’s ruling coalition — the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (the EPRDF) -was made evident over the last few weeks when a Facebook row broke out between two major political party members who disagreed on the historical accounts of Ethiopia as a modern state.
The row revealed how party members within the EPRDF use social media — through posts and memes — to manipulate public opinion and spread misinformation and incendiary content.

GiveDirectly is scrappy — and always will be. Staying scrappy is a prerequisite to efficiency. But there have certainly been times where we were scrappy at the expense of team efficiency. We think GiveDirectly’s CFO (and one of GiveDirectly’s very first employees) summed it up best in describing our very first office in Kenya.Over the last 10 years, we’ve developed a more sophisticated understanding of where to stay lean, and what investments are worth the return.

That day, driving back from the airport, in a city somewhat controlled by revolutionaries and the people, remains one of the most surreal experiences of my life. The red, green and black tricolor of the revolution was everywhere. Open trucks, packed with young men in fatigues, drapped in flags, drove through the streets. People were dancing in the street. A man desperately wanted us to accept his offer of rose water, a traditional offering for guests. Children watched the impromptu celebration in awe. Variations on these scenes were everywhere.
My words can’t fully describe my feelings and memories of that day; nor can my photos, quickly snapped through the window as we drove through joyous crowds. It was like a yoke had been lifted from them, and for them, in moment, anything was possible. A future, free and bright.
After about an hour or so we made it back to the compound, safe, sound and drained. Over dinner, the death of Gaddafi, the future of Libya and its people, was all we talked about. Even though we knew the road forward would be rocky, optimism ruled over pessimism that night.

Surviving kidnapping by criminals. Taking on police killings after her husband was murdered. Fighting sexual harassment at work. Beth Mukami – from the Dandora slum in Nairobi, Kenya – has seen it all. Today she’s a human rights defender, a feminist, activist and a “voice of the voiceless”. She and others started the Dandora Community Justice Centre which is on the front-line of the fight against inequality.

This belief that others are not “ready” for things, that they are too fragile to handle stuff. I’m going to call it Gatekeeper Fragility, aka Meta-Fragility, a sense of emotional discomfort caused by thinking of others’ potential experiencing of emotional discomfort, which leads to prevention of uncomfortable conversations and gatekeeping of progress. Here are other examples of this. While it applies to anything, for instance an ED afraid that their team can’t handle the truth about financial troubles, or a grantwriter afraid to give feedback to funders about their crappy grant practices, I’m going to focus on issues of equity

This editorial is based on my experiences as a journal editor, and also an academic who has been a local researcher and a foreign researcher. It is also based on a constructed ‘ideal’ of how things might have been without global health research partnerships, and when (circa late 19th to mid-20th century) many of the countries that are now high-income countries experienced significant improvements in health outcomes and equity, that is, an ‘ideal’ of local people writing about local issues for a local audience. I deploy this ‘ideal’ not as a prescription, but only as a heuristic device. And by applying this sense of ‘ideal’, I wrestle, rhetorically, with three questions that come to mind and give me pause, whenever I consider solutions to imbalances in authorship, especially those solutions that are based on mandates and strictures. The questions are: (1) What if the foreign gaze is necessary? (2) What if the foreign gaze is inconsequential? (3) What if the foreign gaze is corrupting?

Climate-related change in Somalia has reduced livelihood options and caused migration. It has also left significant parts of the population in a vulnerable condition. These climate-related security risks contribute to grievances and increase inequality and fragility, which in turn pose challenges to the implementation of UNSOM’s mandate. The impacts of climate change have hindered UNSOM in its work to provide peace and security in Somalia and in its efforts to establish functioning governance and judicial systems.

International Migration: Trends, Determinants, and Policy Effects. After 9 years since starting the DEMIG project, I am very happy and proud with the OPEN ACCESS publication of the final summary paper! @ERC_Research@IntMigInstitute@UvA_AISSRhttps://t.co/kEFi4teN7Apic.twitter.com/X0builwGXA

— Hein de Haas هاين (@heindehaas) October 23, 2019

Looking at examples from Colombia, Guatemala, India, Myanmar and Pakistan, the cases presented offer rough contours of the issues and their conceptual underpinnings that might be relevant for understanding and conceptualising empowerment and accountability processes in such settings. Taken collectively, this set of cases show that progress is possible in the conflict/post-conflict context despite the unfavourable terrain, but the paths that social action takes is heavily constrained by local understandings of empowerment and accountability, the configuration of pro‑accountability stakeholders, the history of the conflict and its effects on various groups, and how narratives are mobilised to serve political change. Moreover, any progress, we note, is transitory

Throughout the PhD I draw upon the omnipresence of whiteness within the town and the Black mixed-race family as fundamental to the racialisation and racism narrated in the research. I discuss how negotiations of racism and racialisations that family members have endured have either remained silent, been purposefully muted or have been understood without – or even through dismissals of – recognitions of ‘race’. I’ve been interested in how families have collectively and individually made sense of the whiteness of their hometown, but also how this whiteness manifest as a subtle structure and ideological force within their own families. It is through this discussion where I break down the possibility that racial literacy is not a universal tendency for parents who have brought up Black mixed-race children within a predominantly white place. Finally, I explore how the specifics of mixedness can at times allow for whiteness -both structurally and demographically – to become partially habitable for Black mixed-race families. Though I outline that this habitability was not a universal experience for all participants, I contest that the lives and narrated experiences from various family members suggest that there have been times when their proximities to whiteness – or a lighter skinned privilege – has allowed the participants to have more space to negotiate structural inequalities individually and collectively as a family.

Thus, capitalism in its ever-transforming material and ideational forms is perpetuating a myth of White virility that is best left to history. If the cover image of this book is to be taken seriously, the ‘Man with anxiety peeking through blinds’ resembles a puppet trapped inside a Matryoska style mummy, opening one layer, to peer out into the world. Gabay succeeds in tracing in a grounded, documented, justified way, the fluidity of White power as both structural and agentive: taking the classic sociological understandings and turning the gaze back on international relations of Africa. It is absolutely worth the peek out into the world of Whiteness.

One thing that really irks me: researchers/research projects that have colonies or former colonies as their main focus, come to these countries, use its resources then organise conferences in the West and don't plan to come back to talk about their results in the country studied

— Anaïs Duong-Pedica (@anaisdpedica) October 22, 2019

But at the same time the award was an eye-opener in terms of how the charity-industrial complex communicates with the rest of the world and how little critical C4D approaches often seem to matter in the mainstream.

I came across the PlayPump story in Ken Stern’s With Charity For All, but I could have plucked one from any of the dozen or so “development doesn’t work” best-sellers to come out in the last ten years. In The Idealist—a kind of “where are they now?” for the ideas laid out in Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Poverty—Nina Munk discovers African villages made squalid by the hopes and checkbooks of Western do-gooders. Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee’s Poor Economics finds dozens of “common sense” development projects—food aid, crop insurance, microfinance—either don’t help poor people or may even make them poorer.

How Matters has collected a great repository of links surrounding the Band Aid 30 debate-bookmark it for future references!