The UK Department for International Development has started a group blog. This is great news for those of us who believe that it has a good story to tell.
DfID has a very good reputation abroad, but hardly anybody in the UK knows anything about it, or appreciates how much DfID contributes to positive perceptions of [...]
The BBC sub-editor picked an angle, with the headline Prudence pays off in Ethiopia and the teaser:
With the financial turmoil affecting many of the world’s economies, Elizabeth Blunt in Addis Ababa considers how Ethiopia and other parts of Africa may escape the worst of the credit crisis.
But that headline does not seem to be consistent [...]
Growth Commission Blog
We are launching the Commission on Growth and Development BLOG (The Growth Blog) today, while unprecedented changes in the financial markets are underway. These changes have the potential to reconfigure financial systems and manner not seen since the 1930s.
I found the Growth Commission Report strangely disappointing. Let’s hope the blog is better.
I’ve written about last week’s Accra meeting on the aidinfo blog and discussed it with Simon Maxwell in this week’s Development Drums.
The inauguaral edition of my new development news podcast, Development Drums, is now online.
Simon Maxwell, Director of ODI, joined me for a discussion of this week’s Accra Agenda for Action, the UN MDG Gap Report, and the latest poverty statistics from the World Bank
To listen to the podcast, you can use this link:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/DevelopmentDrums
I’m aiming [...]
I’ve posted about the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness on our aidinfo blog.
The ever-excellent Chris Dillow asks:
2. The National Gallery of Scotland wants the tax-payer to buy some paintings from the Duke of Sutherland. Why don’t we apply Nice-style cost-benefit analysis here? Would £100m spent on art really produce £100m worth of increases in quality-adjusted life years (by improving the quality of life, not length of course)? [...]
A friend in a donor agency (thanks CK!) passes on the following:
The wisdom of Buzkashi riders, passed on from generation to generation in Afghanistan, says that ‘when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount’. However, in the UN and NGO community a range of far more advanced [...]
The World Bank published new estimates of the number of people in poverty yesterday. They are very important and they’ve been universally misreported.
The estimates show:
the developing world is poorer than we thought; there are 1.4 billion people living in poverty (about one quarter of the developing world), not 985 million as we previously thought
nonetheless, progress [...]
Paul Collier savages Prince Charles for advocating medieval peasant farming, and points out that it is not a solution for hunger in Africa.
The GM ban has three adverse effects. It has retarded productivity in European agriculture; grain production could be increased by about 15% were the ban lifted. More subtly, because Europe is out of [...]