In the latest Development Drums podcast, Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman talk about their book Enough: Why The World’s Poorest Starve In An Age of Plenty. I found it interesting that these two Wall Street Journal journalists lay the blame so comprehensively at the policies and behaviour of industrialised-country governments. Read more…
What are good ways to get feedback from the intended benefiaries of an aid programme? Can we use text messaging and other technologies to crowdsource monitoring? Over at Virtual Economics, Matt is interested in good examples to learn from.
An extraordinary thing happened yesterday: an aid project (1 million t shirts for Africa) was subjected to impromptu crowd-sourced appraisal on twitter and the blogs. Is this the beginning of a new, post-bureaucratic way of doing project appraisal?
Gapminder Desktop has been released and it is free. Now you can do the same kind of graphs that Hans Rosling does in his amazing TED talks (see here and here). I’ve been playing with it this morning and I find it captivating. Perhaps that just shows that I’m a Read more…
A post which argues: (a) Donors cannot, in practice, create incentives for developing countries through the promise of aid. That is why aid conditionality does not work. (b) It is absurd to measure the success of aid by the policy change it brings about. We should measure aid’s success by the services which are provided. And (c) Cash on Delivery does not depend on the assumption that developing countries need incentives to provide key services. There are good reasons for testing the idea even if you do not believe that incentives are needed or would work.
Apparently Bill Gates now acknowledges that you fight diseases by strengthening health systems.
We have been told that the three largest parties in the UK are committed to retaining DFID as a separate government department, with its own Cabinet Minister, and with a budget that rises to meet the UK’s commitment to increase aid to 0.7% of GDP. If we want to help to accelerate development, then some of the time we will need to put the UK’s broad, long-term interest in building a safer, more equal and prosperous world ahead of the UK’s narrower and short-term commercial or political interests. The most important international development question for the UK election should be: which of the political parties is willing to do that?
The development policy debate focuses too much on aid. Aid policies may help to improve the living conditions of people in developing countries, but it is development policies that will result in lasting transformation. If we are serious about promoting long-term change, we should talk less about aid, and more about the other rich-world policies and behaviours that affect developing countries.
The World Bank is today launching a new website, data.worldbank.org, from which you can get a huge range of statistics and indicators about development. In the past you had to pay to use World Development Indicators, or buy a CD-ROM. From today you can find, download, manipulate, use, and re-use Read more…
You may have heard talk about randomized evaluation as a way to understand the impact of development programmes. In the first of a new series of the Development Drums podcast, Rachel Glennerster, the Executive Director of the Poverty Action Lab at MIT, explains what we can learn from randomization. She Read more…