As my regular post-2015 update from the invaluable Rachel Quint at the Hewlett foundation reminded me today, there have been (at least) six separate proposals...
Claire Melamed
Claire Melamed is Head of the Growth, Poverty and Inequality Programme at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI). The programme does research and policy analysis on how economic growth can be more effective in reducing poverty and inequality. She has worked for the UN in Mozambique, taught at SOAS and the Open University, and worked for ten years in NGOs including ActionAid and Christian Aid.
Decline of Europe, World Cup edition
This chart shows the percentage of European teams getting through to the last 16 in World Cup tournaments since 1986 (before which there was a last 12, in...
Environmentally friendly oil rigs? Well yes, Norway, but….
We are big fans of Norway here at GD. And look - in a bid to make oil production more environmentally friendly, the Norwegian parliament is hoping to force...
Could foreign aid actually help UK flood defences?
Thankfully the Daily Mail's mean-spirited campaign to get the government to cut aid to pay for the UK's flood response was swiftly dismissed by the PM in his...
The bicycle theory of social change
Something odd is happening on the streets of London. Cyclists are obeying the law in droves. On my daily cycle from home to work, it’s rare now to see anyone...
Angus Deaton and the foreign aid debate
Angus Deaton is in town, promoting his new book, The Great Escape. I am a huge fan, so off I went to a breakfast discussion at the (super-plush!) Legatum...
Evidence, policy and badgers
Fascinating discussion on how evidence from a randomised trial should be used in policy making, on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 this morning. Summed up...
Where are the women? Gender imbalance in MY World mobile phone voting
This is a joint post with Frances Simpson Allen, of the UN Millennium Campaign The million...
Being wrong, wrong wrong about migration: David Goodhart in the Guardian
Migration is a notoriously divisive issue. Maybe David Goodhart, writing in the Guardian last week, should be commended for trying to say something new on the...
President Obama wants to eradicate extreme poverty
This was the development bit in President Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday night: We also know that progress in the most impoverished parts of...
What do people want a post-2015 agenda to do for them?
Here, my post-2015 friends, is the very beginnings of an answer. The 'MY World' survey, available through the internet, by mobile phone, and in the...
Book Review: ‘The Ringtone and the Drum’
At the risk of coming over all ‘Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like’, it’s hard to know how to talk about being a rich and privileged white person in a poor African...
Lots of lovely numbers
A New Year present for data geeks. In case any of you are bored with twitter and facebook as ways of wasting your time, have a look at this. 'Worldometers'...
Did the world just get simpler?
Among our many neuroses, we right on development types like to agonise about what words to use to describe countries. Low, middle and high income? Bit...
Thoughts from the post-2015 High-Level panel meeting in London
Just in case anyone missed it (but how...), last week was the second meeting of the UN Secretary General's High Level Panel on the Post-2015 agenda. This is...
And they’re off….
The focus of the post-2015 world today is New York where the High-Level Panel appointed by the UN Secretary-General to provide him with advice on the...
Procrastination…
I have something very urgent to do, but instead I have found this, which kind of proves the point in a satisfyingly circular way. From Aaron Ausland's blog,...
Post-2015: Possible solutions to the MDG/SDG puzzle
I was doing some thinking on possible ways that the post-2015 MDG/SDG scenarios might play out after the launch of the SDG process at Rio+20 last week. I've...
Post-2015: What role for business?
There’s a consensus that any post-2015 global development framework should have more to say about the role of the private sector than the MDGs have done. But what does that actually mean in practice? This new report from the Overseas Development Institute explores some options for how the private sector might be represented in and contribute to a new set of global goals for development.
Don’t blame the economists
What is it about economists that make people so cross? Some of my best friends are economists and they are perfectly nice, reasonable people - some of them...
More from Global Dashboard
Let’s make climate a culture war!
If the politics of climate change end up polarised, is that so bad? No – it’s disastrous. Or so I’ve long thought. Look at the US – where climate is even more polarised than abortion. Result: decades of flip flopping. Ambition under Clinton; reversal...
Big Elephants and Small Islands: getting beyond the New Aid Orthodoxy
Official development assistance (ODA) – or aid – is a small but conspicuous pillar of the international order, and its frailties are being exposed by COVID as surely as those of the other foundations of this order. The assumptions underpinning aid and its management...
Uncertainty and Humanitarian Action: What Donald Rumsfeld can teach us
Since its onset, one striking feature of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has been the narrative power of its novelty. This global narrative depicts COVID-19 pushing humanity towards a ‘historical divide’ of BC and AC (before and after COVID-19), where unknown,...