I’ve been gratified by the number of people who have contacted me (by email, twitter and on facebook) to say how much they liked one of the slides in my recent presentation on aid effectiveness. The slide borrows a format from Wired Magazine – it shows what I think is Read more…
Most of the people who read this blog are interested in development rather than computers. Many of you live in developing countries, where the internet can be slow and expensive, and computer support can be difficult. So I thought it might be useful to give you some non-technical suggestions for how to manage if you live somewhere where the computer facilities are rather basic.
In this first post in a series, I’ll look at the basic set up.
An international organisation working on development, which shall remain nameless, has asked some of its staff each to suggest three “megatrends” which they think will shape the context for its work most powerfully over the next five years. They’ve also been asked to give a subjective guess – on a scale of 1 to 5 – of how significant these trends will be, and how likely they are.
What are your answers? Mine are below.
Why the Paris agenda won’t deliver aid effectiveness: my presentation at the Ethiopia Donors Assistance Group meeting yesterday. Also my first experiment with publishing a narrated presentation.
There is a growing trend towards publication of data, rather than or as well as information and analysis. Aid agencies need to move in this direction; and they need to do so in a way that enables the data to be analysed from the perspective of a user – such as a citizen in a developing country. To make this task tractable requires some cooperation among donors to standardize the way the data are published.
Ravi Kanbur has written an interesting paper (pdf) about how he feels as someone who makes a good living from analysing and writing about poverty. Here is an extract, but it is worth reading the whole, thoughtful piece: What is striking about the class of poverty professionals (of whom I Read more…
Bill Easterly writes about how much he loves his iPad. This is ironic for the man who sees the world divided between searchers and planners, and who complains about the grip of planners. The iPad is a testament to control-freakery by one man on a grand scale. Steve Jobs Read more…
Reflections on the loss to Parliament of retiring and defeated MPs and especially the loss of Dr Evan Harris, who has stood up for science, secularism and freedom of speech.
Esther Duflo explains in a TED talk how we can bring aid evaluation from the “middle ages” to the 21st century. It is extraordinary how much resistance there is within development agencies to rigorous evaluation of development interventions.
Since there will be a lot of politics on our TV screens in the next 48 hours, I should like to take this opportunity to issue some timely pedantic reminders: England, not the House of Commons, is the “Mother of Parliaments“ “Big Ben” is a bell which is found in Read more…