I’m very excited to have made an inaugural post on the new aidinfo blog. This is the website for the work we are doing to increase the transparency of foreign aid. This RSS feed gives you an update of what is changing on the site – add it to your Read more…
Last weekend, we stayed in Gheralta Lodge, about 2 hours drive from Mekele in Tigray, Ethiopia, as our base for seeing some of the countryside and visiting the local rock churches. (See also here and here.) Gheralta is near Hawzien (or Hawzen), a small market town which is the site Read more…
Nancy Birdsall and Kate Vyborny at the Center for Global Development suggest six concrete steps for the Accra meeting on aid effectiveness: Untie all aid, including technical assistance, and publish information on which providers get contracts in practice. Tell recipients what donors are spending through a concrete set of standards Read more…
I’m impressed by the idea of the Welbodi Partnership, a charity supporting the Ministry of Health and Sanitation in Sierra Leone: The Welbodi Partnership was established to support the provision of paediatric care in Sierra Leone, where child health statistics are the worst in the world. The cool thing – Read more…
The Disease Control Priorities Project has a striking feature article about fistula and maternal mortality … across much of the less developed world, fistula is an ordinary hazard of childbirth for many women and a permanent blight on countless lives. In those countries, obstetric fistula overwhelming results from obstructed labor, Read more…
I’ve been puzzling for a while about why food prices are rising here in Ethiopia. Teff, the local grain, has trebled in price from about 400 Birr per quintal to about 1,200 Birr for the same amount. There is almost no global trade in teff, so it does not seem Read more…
Helmut Reisen points out that the global development finance system is dysfunctional: A prerequisite for effective ownership and efficient aid delivery, at the core of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, is to map the rising complexity of multilateral development finance, to help identify areas for consolidation, address fragmentation and Read more…
In a slightly whimsical account of Bill Clinton’s trip to Ethiopia in The Guardian, we find this: Awke Tiruneh and his wife Emaye Beyene are not the only couple who are faintly bemused. They are pleased with their two lightbulbs, one in the main room and a second in the Read more…
In Le Monde, David Martin has a rather intelligent piece about aid to Ethiopia: Major operators such as Difid, the British government arm, and USAid play a cat-and-mouse game with the government (GoE) because Meles is sensitive about external pressures in an environment in which domestic critics are almost silenced Read more…
We went recently to the village of Amber, about 6 hours north of Addis Ababa, to spend some time listening to people telling us about their attitudes to children, marriage, divorce, sex, abortion and contraceptions. (This is part of G’s work; I went along to listen and learn.) The most Read more…