Digital Archive....

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...