Duncan Green's Blog, page 12

Development Nutshell: Audio round-up (15m) of FP2P posts, w/b 2nd August

In praise of…. Logframes

Guest post from Graham Teskey My friend and colleague Lavinia Tyrell recently posted a note on LinkedIn, highlighting a recent WB Independent Evaluation Group report, which reflected on various methods of monitoring and evaluation currently used in development. In so doing, Lavinia referenced this diagram: As a fan of diagrams, as well as a long-time […]

How Filipinos have responded to Covid – some great new research on ‘Emergent Agency’

As part of writing a paper with the overall findings from our ‘Emergent Agency in a Time of Covid’ project, I’ve been catching up with some fascinating recent work from the Philippines, where Oxfam and the Philippine Sociological Society are publishing a fascinating series of case studies of civic responses to Covid. They include the […]

Inequality is the most powerful explanation for different Covid death rates – a summary of the evidence from The Economist

Powerful piece in this week’s Economist. I’ve added links to the various pieces of research it cites ‘Seventeen months into the COVID-19 pandemic, plenty of questions about the catastrophe remain unanswered. It is still unclear how SARS-COV-2 originated, for instance. Another puzzle is why some areas have had less destructive epidemics than others. Why has Florida had […]

Links I Liked

The RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institute) recorded a 2,000% increase in donations in a single day amid a surge in support over rescues of migrant boats. Criticism by Nigel Farage and others sparked an unprecedented flood of donations, including over £200,000 yesterday alone. Will Farage now offer to slag off other charities, for a suitable […]

Development Nutshell: audio round-up (16m) of FP2P posts, w/b 26th July

How does Innovation happen in Systems?

I approached Building Better Systems: A Green Paper on System Innovation, by Charles Leadbeater and Jennie Winhall, with a fair degree of initial scepticism – these kinds of papers tend to involve a lot of hand waving, and not many specifics. But I warmed to it as I read. First, some nice crunchy case studies […]

Why Oxfam is talking about race

Guest post by Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, Chief Executive, Oxfam GB In the past few weeks Oxfam’s work on anti-racism has attracted some criticism. Various commentators have characterised it as “woke posturing” or “anti-white.”   I think they have got it wrong. Let me explain why tackling racism is an integral part of Oxfam’s mission.   It is almost 80 years since […]

What’s blocking progress in fixing the Global Water Crisis?

I took part in a fun podcast recently on ‘water for development’. I was in the company of some people who actually know about the subject (Michael Wilson, Rosie Wheen, Melita Grant and Rachel Mason Nunn). I was playing my favourite role in this final wrap-up conversation of a series of discussions, that of informed […]

Development Nutshell: audio round-up (16m) of FP2P posts, w/b 19th July