December 17, 2017

Sustaining long-term change means working with your own resources

The development literature of the 1980s and 1990s gave considerable attention to participation in development – engaging local people, the “beneficiaries”, in decisions relating to their own development. This school of thought quickly drew criticism as the question was asked: what are they participating in? Of course, the answer was frequently that participation was little more than mobilising people in implementing an outside agenda, however well-meaning that may have been.
November 9, 2017

Minorities report – what are the global attitudes towards gender and sexual minority groups?

When we advocate human rights broadly, it is easy to rally support around them. Who doesn’t want to be a defender of freedom or protection? However, advocacy becomes a lot more challenging when we single out specific groups of people whose rights are under threat on a daily basis. We still periodically need to remind ourselves and others that ‘women’s rights are human rights’, for example. And not everybody who supports human rights in general is ready to stand by the rights of other gender-based groups, such as gender and sexual minorities, otherwise known as LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex) people.
September 28, 2017

Quantifying quality with participatory numbers

“How do you measure social change?” As a consultant, I am often asked this question when I evaluate programmes or campaigns that are meant to produce some sort of social progress in the global South. I guess the underlying dilemma is about whether we can quantify qualitative changes, such as better dialogue between aid donors and civil society organisations. Is there a way to measure quality with numbers?
July 29, 2017

What do emergency-affected people and field staff think of humanitarian aid?

It has already been a year since the adoption of the “Grand Bargain”, a global agreement made at the World Humanitarian Summit to save up to a billion US dollars over five years by reducing inefficiencies in how humanitarian aid is provided. How well are we doing? Are things actually changing where they are supposed to? Is humanitarian aid becoming more efficient and effective?
June 21, 2017

Domestic resource mobilisation, part II: perspectives from Vietnam

I continue to explore how developing countries go about increasing their tax revenues as a way to escape from poverty, reducing the need for aid and other forms of international co-operation. In jargon, we call these efforts domestic resource mobilisation. This time I have spoken with Huong Nguyen, Non-Executive Director of the Vietnam Initiative Social Enterprise (VNI), a leading Vietnamese think-tank based in the country’s capital, Hanoi...
May 18, 2017

Domestic resource mobilisation: a view from Turkana County, Kenya

Strengthening a developing country’s finances by increasing its tax revenues, rather than depending exclusively on aid, is widely seen as the way forward in the development community. Yet, few people actually know first-hand what it takes to generate support for increasing tax revenues in a developing country – particularly at community level...
April 25, 2017

Higher engagement, cleaner water

In the last few years there has been a lot of talk about ‘social accountability’, which is what happens when citizens directly engage in dialogue with public authorities to demand more rights or better services, and authorities respond with appropriate action. When managed effectively, social accountability brings concrete solutions to real issues even in the toughest contexts, such as some of today’s humanitarian crises...
March 7, 2017

International Women’s Day 2017: back to the workplace

This year’s International Women’s Day is about gender equality at work. A fitting theme to remember where and why we mark this day – it all started with a female garment workers’ strike in New York in 1908. More than a century later, working conditions for women have dramatically improved, yet they are still worse than for male colleagues...
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