Digital Archive....

Malawi's democracy dips into recession – By Keith Somerville African Arguments Share President Bingu wa Mutharika is displaying signs of increasing authoritarianism in Malawi. Between independence in 1964 and the referendum to end the one party state in 1993, Malawi was almost a stereotype of an African autocracy with a geriatric Life President, a violent youth movement which beat or killed his opponents and no real freedom of expression.  But from the multiparty elections in 1994 until last year it seemed, despite one or two potholes on the path of progress, that Malawi was moving steadily down the road to greater democracy and accountability. Events of the weekend of 17 and 18 March show increasing intolerance of critics and a willingness to use the police and dubious legal means to silence them. The election in May 2004 of Bingu wa Mutharika, a former World Bank official who had served at the United Nations Economic Commission of Africa and as Secret...

Watchdog raises questions over impact Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk The DfID funded scheme has succeeded in energising people to consider girls' needs but should focus on making a difference The extremely slick Girl Effect campaign is no stranger to criticism. Supported by the Nike Foundation, a philanthropic wing of the multinational sports group, the social-media savvy, slogan-heavy campaign urges world leaders to pay closer attention to adolescent girls, as an "untapped resource" for development. Invest in a girl, the initiative suggests, and "she will do the rest," pulling herself, her family, her community, and her country out of poverty. Over the past few years, critics have slammed the campaign for playing up to stereotypes of women and girls as natural caregivers, sidelining questions of structural inequality and power imbalance, and focusing on what girls can do for development, rather than w...

I Finally Visited a Millennium Village: Some Reflections Global Development: Views from the Center By Nancy Birdsall - I finally visited a Millennium Village, the Koraro Cluster, in the northern Tigray region of Ethiopia (estimated regional population is 4.5 million people). The cluster is located in the Hawzien district (population 117,954) and is made up of 11 villages:  Koraro plus 10 neighboring villages (68,000 people total). I'd been invited by John MacArthur who [...] Sent with Reeder  (verzonden vanaf tablet)

This is Nancy (12), victim of the incurable 'nodding disease' in northern Uganda Home - Africa Journalist With this blog post, I want to draw attention to an unexplainable, incurable illness that has claimed the lives of at least 170 children and has affected at least 3.000 more in northern Uganda. It is called 'nodding disease', after the nodding of the head shown by its victims. Their brain is affected, just like their body growth and ability to speak. Even if they survive, they risk remaining handicaped for the rest of their lives. I met Nancy, the girl in the picture, after northern Uganda took centre stage in the world news in early March following the release of the controversial video 'Kony 2012' by American ngo Invisible Children. 'Kony 2012' advocates for a solution to the suffering caused by Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). The LRA was active in northern Uganda for  many years. People in the reg...

Being Smarter About Safe Water Innovations for Poverty Action Blog Jeremy Hand This blog was originally posted on the Impatient Optimists blog of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for World Water Day. Recently, UNICEF/WHO Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation (JMP) announced the exciting news that we have achieved one of the targets of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to reduce by half the number of people who don't have sustainable access to safe drinking-water. But the 2012 JMP report added the important caveat that "it is likely that the number of people using safe water supplies has been over-estimated."  Indeed, providing safe water to more than 780 million people worldwide remains quite a challenge, and innovative, low-cost approaches are needed. Perhaps a smartphone is not the first tool we would seize on when assembling a safe water toolkit, ...

Shrinking Your Plastic Footprint SSIR Articles Shoppers in the market for a tube of lipstick may soon be able to narrow their selection by comparing not just color and price, but also how much plastic various manufacturers use. A cosmetics maker from the United Kingdom is the first business to agree to measure its "plastic footprint," using tools developed by the Plastic Disclosure Project (PDP). "If you don't measure something, you can't manage it," explains Doug Woodring, founder of the international project that launched at the 2011 Clinton Global Initiative. As a first step toward plastic reduction, PDP encourages companies to calculate their baseline footprint by tallying their use of plastics for manufacturing, packaging, and shipping. "We're not saying that anyone has a good or bad number," Woodring says. "Let's say your number this year is 100. Then next year, you get rid of some packaging and it ...

Africa is rising - is poverty falling? Africa Can... - End Poverty Several people, from The Economist to this blog , have been highlighting Africa's accelerated GDP growth of about 5 percent a year for the decade before the 2008-9 global economic crisis, and the two years since the crisis. But has this growth served to reduce poverty? The latest globally consistent estimate of poverty rates has an answer: Yes.  Using the measure of people living on $1.25 a day or less, the World Bank's poverty measurement team, led by my colleague Martin Ravallion, estimates that the percentage of poor Africans fell from 58 percent in 1999 to 47.5 percent in 2008.  This rate of decline of about one percentage point a year is a welcome change from the previous decade when growth was much slower and the poverty rate increased.    In the past, even when the poverty rate fell, we typically found that the absolute number of poor people rose because of rapid populatio...

The Invisible Christians of #Kony2012 AFRICA IS A COUNTRY In the last few days every journalist (or outraged blogger) covering #Kony2012 has been so busy reporting on what the bloggers have been saying and putting together salad after salad of African (and therefore authentic, true etc) opinion, that they have utterly failed to actually do any journalism. That's right: reporting. Finding out what this thing is actually about. So far as I can tell there hasn't been much of this. As a result the conversation has either taken the form of handwringing over What Is To Be Done in Northern Uganda (we all think we know more about this than six-year-old Gavin and so we can all speak with great confidence on such matters) or else gawping blankly at the colossal, though suspiciously self-pronounced, power of social media. A big part of the story that is being missed is that Invisible Children and their project are firmly rooted in evangelical Christianity. ...

Kony: What's to be done? – Alex de Waal African Arguments Share Military solutions have never been the sole answer to stopping the LRA. As a critic of the KONY2012 campaign, I have been asked the eminently practical question, "so what would you do about Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army?" Let me take this opportunity to respond. There have been a number of proposals for peace in northern Uganda and the resolution of the LRA problem. As a framework, let me use a nine point comprehensive approach proposed by the International Crisis Group in January 2006. [1] Three points are military, six non-military. Let me give a scorecard for each one. Apprehending the Indictees . Crisis Group called for capturing Joseph Kony and the other LRA commanders wanted by the International Criminal Court. Clearly, six years on, this has not been achieved, despite at least two major multinational operations (2006 and 2008) and other military efforts. ...

Don't Judge a Book By Its Cover David Roodman's Microfinance Open Book Blog By David Roodman - The author sent me a draft for comment. You can see from the cover why the publisher was interested. I'll withhold final judgment on the text until I've seen the final version. The draft concerned me—as with Milford Bateman's book, at least as much for the manner of argument as the conclusions. The title doesn't quite make sense. What would a microfinance heretic confess? That he'd fabricated his heresy? The idea is more like: Heretical Confessions of a Microfinance Insider. Here's the blurb : Part memoir, part financial detective story, and part exposé, this is the account of a microfinance insider who joined the industry in the early 2000s with a newly minted MBA and the intention to do good in the world. But over the course of eight years, he became increasingly disillusioned and alarmed. Eventually he decided to do something ...

Food or Cash? Development Horizons from Lawrence Haddad Is it better to give food or cash in anti-poverty programmes? It is a very old question with no simple answer. The context is everything. Is the food appropriate to cultural and nutritional needs? Is the food delivered efficiently? Will the food undermine the local economy? If cash (or vouchers for a cash-based alternative), is there anything in the markets to buy and if there is will the injection of demand simply raise prices leading to the traders being the major beneficiaries? Will cash empower men and disempower women? Will cash lead to more conflict? Which is the more politically palatable from the donor perspective? This issue most recently came up in an interesting exchange between Charles Kenny of CGD and Bill O'Keefe of Catholic Relief Services in Foreign Policy . O'Keefe responded to an article by Kenny entitled "Haiti Doesn't Need Your Old T Shirt" which makes...

The Next Development Goals: Never About Us Without Us Development Horizons from Lawrence Haddad Together with the excellent Hege Hertzberg from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Norway, I kicked off the OECD DAC's new Development Debates series, chaired by Jon Lomoy, Director of the Development Cooperation Directorate. My presentation (with the standard over the top title) can be found here . I argued that while the 2015 expiration date of the MDGs was stimulating a lot of new thinking about what next, new donor action was harder to find. I went through some of the new thinking needed: being more discerning about growth (not any old kind, thank you); focusing on poor people rather than poor countries (a la Sumner); some of the thinking behind new metrics of human development (the Multidimensional Poverty Index, can wellbeing really be quantified?); rethinking the location of problems and solutions (the poor countries do not have a monopoly on problems, ...

Do you know better than the experts? Innovations for Poverty Action Blog Leah Stern   At Academy Award parties on Sunday across the country, people filled out sample ballots to guess the Oscar winners before they were announced. Now we're doing the same thing. We've got a new challenge for all you blog readers out there: predict the results of our studies . IPA recently conducted two studies about whether consulting services and/or cash infusions could help small businesses generate more profit or other positive measures of business success. One study was in Ghana with tailors and seamstresses with only one employee, if any; the other was in Mexico with businesses in a variety of sectors, with an average of 14 employees. The studies tested questions about what – if anything – makes a difference for these firms: is it gaining management skills, gaining the ability to use these skills, or simp...

Impact and Scale-Up: An Interview with Annie Duflo and Dean Karlan, Part 2 Innovations for Poverty Action Blog Leah Stern Last month, Annie Duflo assumed the executive directorship of IPA, replacing Dean Karlan, who will stay on as President. Annie has been with IPA for over three years serving as Vice President and Director of Research. With this shift in leadership, we wanted to sit down with Annie and Dean to hear directly from them about the new organizational structure and what lies ahead as IPA looks toward its tenth anniversary. This excerpt from the larger interview focuses on the origins of IPA and the organization’s scale-up efforts. We posted Annie and Dean’s comments on their goals for the next year in an earlier post . ----- Interviewer: The origin story about IPA is that Dean joined like-minded researchers with a vision of applying rigorous research methods to really figure ou...

Navigating the New Social Economy PHILANTHROPY 2173 Toolkit I'm thrilled to announce that Blueprint 2012 is now a customizable toolkit for use by foundations, nonprofits, or any group seeking to improve their community. Navigating the New Social Economy: Making Sense of Philanthropy's Future presents practical information on the implications of three key issues for our sector - the new social economy, the impact of Citizens United on the social sector, and the potential of big data as a public good. You get the content you need on these three issues as well as the materials to lead strategy discussions about your work in this context. The Council of Michigan Foundations made this possible - and their staff and members (independent, corporate, and community foundations) have vetted and beta-tested the tools. The toolkit includes a customizable slide presentation that you can fit to your setting (board meetings, staff retreat, commun...

A Decade of Outcome-Oriented Philanthropy SSIR Articles Outcome-oriented philanthropy is at least a century old, but the past 10 or so years have seen an upsurge in both its intensity and its extent. It has been the subject of many articles, talks, and conferences, and has given rise to new organizations dedicated to facilitating its practice. An increasing, albeit still small, number of foundations seem to have adopted an outcome orientation. "Outcome-oriented" is synonymous with "result-oriented," "strategic," and "effective." It refers to philanthropy where donors seek to achieve clearly defined goals; where they and their grantees pursue evidence-based strategies for achieving those goals; and where both parties monitor progress toward outcomes and assess their success in achieving them in order to make appropriate course corrections. This approach can take different forms. A classic example from many decades ago...