Tyler Cowen on Jeff Sachs’s Millennium Village project In my view Sach’s [sic] work is admirable and will do much to improve the lives of a small percentage of Africans. But I do not think it is scalable. First, I believe the candidate villages are cherry-picked for possible improvement. Armed Read more…
In a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Barack Obama has promised to double aid by 2012 if he is elected President: For the last twenty years, U.S. foreign aid funding has done little more than keep pace with inflation. Doubling our foreign assistance spending by 2012 will Read more…
G and I both ran the London Marathon yesterday, on a beautiful warm day. G had a good run – starting at a sensible pace, running even splits, and finishing in 3:28:01. I ran like an idiot – going off way too fast at the start, and (inevitably) hobbling home Read more…
Not according to Blake Lambert and Wendy Glauser who write about Canadian NGOs: Part of the reason NGOs have difficulty meeting their overall goals is that they often end up measuring day-to-day results rather than long-term progress. As Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan journalist and political economist who’s currently on fellowship Read more…
The Government has consistently refused to set up a statutory inquiry into the way that many thousands of haemophiliacs were put at risk by the supply of contaminated blood products. (The new inquiry by Lord Archer of Sandwell is an independent inquiry, not a government inquiry, and has no powers Read more…
The head of evaluation at the World Bank writing in the Guardian blog about the effectiveness of aid: For donors, this means going beyond the push for free-standing projects and the tracking of individual project successes, to supporting better coordination and linkages. For developing countries, it means being in the Read more…
I don’t normally read the stream of vitriol that Paul Staines (calling himself Guido Fawkes) spews forth. It seems to me an imitation in the form of a blog of everything that is fetid about the mainstream press – all gossip and personality, with no substance or detail. I’m happy Read more…
The Economist highlights the importance of improving the way aid is given: Because the aid they receive is such a capricious, volatile commodity, governments dare not make full use of it. They could hire legions of extra teachers, clinicians and civil servants, but only if they are prepared to fire Read more…
According to Murray Waas: Employees of the World Bank have been “expressing concern, dismay, and outrage” regarding favoritism shown by the bank and the Bush administration towards the one-time girlfriend of World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, according to an internal memo circulated within the bank by the World Bank Group Read more…
So asks Simon Maxwell at ODI. His conclusion is that DFID is pretty good. In our own work on aid architecture, we asked developing country aid practitioners from 27 countries to rank donors and comment on their strengths and weaknesses. DFID outranked other bilateral and multilateral donors. DFID scored especially Read more…