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Benno Hansen - Video: Celebrities, agriculture and trade as seen by NGO worker THINK 3 - posts What are the roles of celebrities, organic agriculture and Fair Trade in eradicating poverty and hunger, securing universal education, environmental sustainability and the other Millennium Development Goals? Specifically, how does one NGO address these in its projects? Lean back and listen... Sent with Reeder  

LOMBORG: The Best Investments Project Syndicate - A World of Ideas - the highest quality opinion ... LOMBORG: The Best Investments In a world fraught with competing claims on human solidarity, we have a moral obligation to direct additional resources to where they can achieve the most good. Unfortunately, that is not how we allocate international aid now. Sent with Reeder  

Ethiopia: the challenge of making growth become transformative Development Horizons from Lawrence Haddad I just returned from Addis Ababa. It is a few years since I was last in Ethiopia. Addis has certainly changed. Construction everywhere, a growing middle class, and a sense of purpose and confidence that sustained economic growth can bring (the new 5 year Growth and Transformation Plan sets 11% as a minimum annual growth objective!). I did not have a chance to visit areas outside Addis, but colleagues who live in Ethiopia assure me that this growing prosperity is not confined to Addis, nor to urban areas. I gave a couple of talks while in Addis. The first, hosted by our partners the Ethiopian Development Research Institute ( EDRI ), and the World Food Programme, explored four questions: (a) how important will agricultural growth be for future economic growth in Ethiopia? (b) will Ethiopia be more like China than India in successfully converting growth into po...

Meh Aid Thoughts What has two thumbs and doesn't give a crap? Browsing the web today, I've come across two things that Friday-me is pretty unimpressed with, but lacks the time and patience to attack fully. The first is Larry Elliot in the Guardian's Poverty Matters blog, talking about the expectation that developing countries will grow much faster than developed countries in the foreseeable future: …there are also colossal longer-term risks. Growth rates of the sort envisaged for developing countries by the World Bank and PwC will put massive pressures on commodity prices and the environment. After two centuries of economic and political hegemony, rich countries may not take kindly to being challenged by China and India. And if, as looks highly probable, clashes over resources and currencies are a proxy for a deeper political struggle between the emerging east and the declining west, the world will need a robust and effective system of global go...

The best development blogs Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk Tell us which blogs should be highlighted in our Global development blogosphere Our Global Development blogosphere , collated for the launch of the Global development site in September 2010, offers a brilliant array of news and views from development blogs. We want to add a few more, and we want to offer you the opportunity to nominate any great blogs you read. Is there a great in-country blogger getting to the heart of a region or city from a personal perspective, adding colour to the mainstream version of events? Or clearly relaying the on-the-ground experience of a particular situation, people or group in a humanising way? Do any groups or individuals convey the progress and questions of a discipline or project brilliantly? Or analyse, deconstruct or create arguments that have shaped your views on development? If so, please let us know. Of course, we'll need to conta...

World hunger best cured by small-scale agriculture: report Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk A move from industrial farming towards local food projects is our healthiest, most sustainable choice, says Worldwatch Institute The key to alleviating world hunger, poverty and combating climate change may lie in fresh, small-scale approaches to agriculture, according to a report from the Worldwatch Institute . The US-based institute's annual State of the World report , published yesterday, calls for a move away from industrial agriculture and discusses small-scale initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa that work towards poverty and hunger relief in an environmentally sustainable way. The authors suggest that instead of producing more food to meet the world's growing population needs, a more effective way to address food security issues and climate change would be to encourage self-sufficiency and waste reduction, in wealthier and poorer ...

It takes more than a cow, but…girls still count Aid Watch By Amanda Glassman, Director of Global Health Policy at the Center for Global Development, and Miriam Temin, co-author of  Start With A Girl In her blog post on Aid Watch last week , Anna Carella took on the "Girl Effect," using some faulty logic and evidence oversights . Marketing may have over-simplified the message in the translation of research to advocacy in the campaign, but let's take the post point-by-point: [The campaign…] relies…on the view that women are innately more nurturing than men, and that women's natural strengths lie in the home as the "chore doer" and "caretaker." The point is that investment in women directly benefits their children and to a larger extent than if benefits were provided to men. For example, Ben Davis' paper The Lure of Tequila or Motherly Love: Does It Matter Whether Public Cash Transfers Are Given to Women or Men? .  There i...

Haiti earthquake charities blamed as scars fail to heal Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk The government's role and the international community's capacity to deliver aid effectively are being tested The 20 cholera patients lie in the rickety wooden beds of Port-au-Prince general hospital, their bodies writhing, twisting their bones and skin. Makeshift toilets in the form of buckets stand underneath their beds. Dr Vital Hervé shakes his head as he looks around his ward. "Here we have to manage however we can," he says. "We are relying on a tiny state budget and on aid agencies that do not seem to talk to each other. We get antibiotics from some, but sometimes we have to chip in just to get bleach. "It is still a problem of recovery, but it's entering a phase of being a problem of development, something I fear will never happen." Outside the ward, in the hospital's corridors, the debris from the...

Where We Are Headed Ken's Commentary Charity Navigator is America's largest and most influential charity rater. We serve over 3.3 million unique visitors and impact approximately $10 billion of charitable donations each year. This makes Charity Navigator far and away the largest and most utilized charity rating service that exists anywhere. Up until recently, our rating system was solely focused on a financial analysis of charity's performance. However, we are now revamping the rating system methodology (the new system is called CN 2.0 ) from a one to a three dimensional rating system. We recently expanded our rating criteria from our traditional one dimension - financial health , to a second dimension - accountability & transparency . We are now testing a third dimension - results . The results dimension will count for the largest portion of the total rating score once it goes live. There are two significant features to this enhancement of our r...

Harm van Oudenhoven: Gesubsidieerde investeringen richten schade aan Vice Versa - vakblad over ontwikkelingssamenwerking De rol van het bedrijfsleven is een nieuw speerpunt van het Nederlands ontwikkelingsbeleid. Maar volgens Harm van Oudenhoven, die een chocoladefabriek in Nicaragua heeft en die winnaar was van de eerste BID-challenge voor het beste businessplan om via economische bedrijvigheid de armoede te bestrijden, zijn er een hoop vraagtekens te plaatsen bij dit nieuwe speerpunt. Hebben ontwikkelingsorganisaties überhaupt wel expertise op dit terrein en hoe integer zijn multinationals eigenlijk? Van Oudenhoven laat zien hoe het nu in de praktijk misgaat en hoe het naar zijn mening wél zou moeten. Het staat nogal in het nieuws: het ondersteunen van bedrijven die willen investeren in ontwikkelingslanden om zo de armoede de wereld uit te helpen. Er wordt veel gesproken over investeren in eerlijke handel, samenwerking tussen de publieke sector en bedrijven,...

Sudan referendum: what to watch Texas in Africa After decades of war, a five-year transition/peace process that at several points seemed destined for failure, and a year-long push, tomorrow, Southern Sudanese will at long last vote in a referendum on whether to secede from the North. The outcome of the referendum is a foregone conclusion; there's no question that the vast majority of Southern Sudanese will vote to go. The only surprise will be if the option to split garners less than 95% of the vote. While John Prendergast, George Clooney, and other advocates who don't speak a word of Arabic have been raising fears about violence for months (and are now embarking on silly plans to take satellite images of areas in which they believe genocide is likely , despite the fact that you can't actually see that level of detail in satellite imagery), the likelihood that a genocide or war will break out immediately seems to me to be slim to none. As Stephen ...

Wrong About China Aid Thoughts When I was in Ethiopia, one thing that struck me immediately was how big and visible the Chinese presence there is these days. While my travels were mainly restricted to the north of the country, virtually every road I came across that was under construction (and there were a lot of these) had Chinese staff overseeing the work. There were entire camps for workers in the road building trade, proudly flying a much larger Chinese flag alongside the Ethiopian one. China scares a lot of people in development. Over the last two or three years, increasing attention has turned to the role of 'new' or 'non-traditional' donors. These labels are generally applied by what we would think of as the establishment donors: the US, UK, Scandinavian countries and the major multilaterals. They consider the 'non-traditionals' to be those donors who come from outside their cabal of policy voice: South Korea, India, China and Br...

M-PESA: The Economist looks at the nuts and bolts Innovations for Poverty Action Blog This week, The Economist turns its attention to the secret of M-PESA's mobile money success. As David Roodman, FAI's Jonathan Morduch and others recently observed on a Gates-Foundation sponsored visit to Kenya, when it comes to mobile banking, an awful lot of on-the-ground physical activity goes into enabling the technology side of mobile banking. For all its promise as a "cashless" solution, The Economist highlights the fact that there's still an awful lot of money that has to be moved around to keep the system going. *See our "before and after" series on a recent Gates Foundation-sponsored visit to Kenya to observe the development of mobile banking at M-PESA. Sent with Reeder  

Democratisation and its discontents Baobab IN the run-up to a referendum in South Sudan which is very likely to create Africa's 54th state, our sister company, the Economist Intelligence Unit, has published a report examining the trend towards democratisation on the continent since 2000—an apt subject for review, with a slew of elections due over the next couple of years, and with current events in Côte d'Ivoire demonstrating how far some countries have to go before the wheels of the polling process turn smoothly. As the report's introduction puts it: Every year the electoral calendar in Sub-Saharan Africa becomes more crowded, and every year most posts, from the presidency to seats in the National Assembly and town mayorships, are competed for rather than seized or bestowed. The number of elections held annually in recent years has increased; since 2000 between 15 and 20 elections have been held each year. African democracy appears to have flouri...