On World Food Day let us remember Sen’s insight that hunger is not a problem of food production but of poverty. The fact that most poor people work in agriculture suggests that a good way to escape poverty is to get out of agriculture. So the best way to reduce hunger and help people out of poverty may be to focus not on improving agriculture, but rather on helping people who want to leave agriculture into more rewarding work.
Walking home today after having lunch in a nearby cafe, I was asked for money by a middle aged man suffering from podoconiosis, sometimes called Mossy Foot. I bet you are thinking: podo-what? Podoconiosis is a disease of people who work barefoot, particularly on red clay soil in the neighborhood Read more…
Pharmaceutical companies do not have many fans among development workers. This is a shame, because the development of effective pharmaceuticals has been one of the most transformative new technologies of the last century, increasing life expectancy and the quality of life in industrialised countries and developing countries. One reason that Read more…
The British Government is testing the idea of Social Impact Bonds. Social Finance, the organisation which developed the idea, describes them like this: A Social Impact Bond is a contract with the public sector in which it commits to pay for improved social outcomes. On the back of this contract, investment is Read more…
I’ve now seen the same annoying elementary (but quite common) mistake twice in two days, and I’d like to knock it on the head before it gets repeated. According to a blog post yesterday by Malaka Gharib at ONE, Daniel Yohannes, the CEO of the U.S. government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation, believes Read more…
Here are some photos taken as we travelled around Ethiopia last week. [slickr-flickr tag=”ae2010″ type=”galleria” delay=”3″]
Last week’s UN meetings in New York prompted a flurry of papers, speeches, documents, announcements and articles about development in general, and the Millennium Development Goals in particular. There seem to be three emerging development narratives which are not obviously completely compatible. I’ll summarize them here, and in a later Read more…
Social media I can think of a couple of organisations which have embraced social media exactly like this: New aidinfo website In work-related geek news, my team has a brilliant new website: http://www.aidinfo.org. (I can call it brilliant without immodesty because I had almost no part in it.) The internet Read more…
This week I attended the inauguration a new Marie Stopes family planning clinic in Woldia in northern Ethiopia. Together with yesterdays announcement by the UN of a new “Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health”, Every Woman, Every Child, this has led me to reflect on the importance of family planning and maternal health in Ethiopia and in other developing countries. There is huge unmet need for family planning here in Ethiopia which, if met in full, could both directly improve the lives of many families in Ethiopia, and result in a substantial increase in incomes per head. A decade of sustained access to modern contraception could have increase incomes per head in Ethiopia by roughly the same amount as the whole of today’s international aid to Ethiopia. The new UN strategy, Every Woman Every Child, isn’t really a strategy, but it is a welcome restatement of the importance of the health of women and children. It is shocking that it is almost completely silent on abortion. (Here in Ethiopia, unsafe abortion is responsible for a third of maternal deaths.)
A story of characteristic Ethiopian honesty, from Dessie.