People who do (Marie Stopes)
I’m in Tanzania accompanying my partner to the gathering of all the Marie Stopes Country Directors and honchos from headquarters. These people are seriously impressive. People like me write policy...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Our father’s kitchen
Every day, about a 120 children come to get lunch at Beza le Hiwot, a day-centre at near the Merkato in Addis Ababa. Their food is provided by Our Father’s Kitchen, set up a year ago by Yasser and...
View ArticleA jaundiced view of volunteers
Giving Back – The volunteers descend on Ghana I found a travel blog website and zoned in on Ghana and the stories of this year’s volunteer troups. The diaries and accounts read just like a book. A book...
View ArticleWorking with the government in Sierra Leone
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...
View ArticleClik here to view.
aidinfo blog launched
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 …
View ArticleClik here to view.
Riding a dead horse: Buzkashi wisdom
A friend in a donor agency (thanks CK!) passes on the following: The wisdom of Buzkashi riders, passed on from generation to generation in Afghanistan, says that ‘when you discover that you are riding...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What’s going on in Accra?
I’ve posted about the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness on our aidinfo blog.…
View ArticleWorld Food Day – Worry about incomes, not food production
Today is World Food Day. There are 967 million people living below the hunger line. In one of DFID’s splendid new blogs, Howard Taylor, Head of DFID Ethiopia , emphasizes the need for greater...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Thinking of starting an NGO?
Read this first (Allana Shaikh): Don’t do it. You’re not going to think of a solution no one else has, your approach is not as innovative as you think it is, and raising money is going to be...
View ArticleThe Daily Mail, to which donkeys are more important than Africans
So help me I’ve read some rubbish in the Daily Mail over the years – and I know it to be a potent brew of prejudice and lies. But this article must rank in the top-ten for stupidity. The headline – “A...
View ArticleDe-escalating the paperwork in development
Alanna Shaikk writes about the good and bad of working in international development. Here is a big part of the bad: … You’re a bureaucrat. An awful lot of every expat’s job involves paperwork. Most...
View ArticleBudget support and corruption
An enquiry has been demanded into the way some UK aid is given directly to the governments of some countries. According to the Daily Telegraph Figures from the Department for International Development...
View ArticlePaved with good intentions
In a very thought-provoking post, Alanna Shaikh lists four ways that an NGO can unintentionally do harm to the community it’s trying to serve. 1) You can waste the time and effort of a community by...
View ArticleWe are hiring (advert now fixed?)
If you read this blog you might have a passing interest in development and in technology. So you just might be interested (or know someone who would be interested) in joining our team. We are hiring a...
View ArticleWho should profit from charity?
Nicholas Kristof mused on Christmas Day in the New York Times on whether NGOs should pay high salaries. He seems to come down – though equivocally – on the side of saying that sometimes they should:...
View ArticleEthiopia’s new civil society law
The Ethiopian Government passed a new law on Tuesday that limits the activities of foreign-funded organisations. The law prevents organizations that receive more than 10% of their funding from abroad...
View ArticleAid to government, aid to NGOs – both working in different ways
The UK Department for International Development is to be commended for encouraging some of its staff to maintain a blog to explain to the public what they do. In Bangladesh, Adam Jackson has posted...
View ArticleCharging the poor for services
Tim Harford has an interesting article in this weekend’s Financial Times about private health and education in developing countries: Imagine that your daily earnings were less than the price of this...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Alchemy & Oxfam
I know it is a cliché, but if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Oxfam’s new campaign urges us to believe that they have designed a package of measures that would give $280 billion to...
View ArticleSupport TWACIB
I love this black humour about useless NGOs: It reminds me of a joke that we had in Malawi about the proliferation of useless (and often fraudulent) NGOs – we talked about the NGO TWACIB, which stood...
View Article
