- Bill and Melinda Gates have followed up their annual letter of a few weeks ago, in which they answer 10 tough questions from readers, by answering another set of readers’ questions. Bill Gates also participated in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” event.
- In an address to the Lowy Institute last week, Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand and Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters signalled a boost to his country’s aid program, which left unchecked would fall to 0.21% of Gross National Income by 2021.
- Esteve Sala writes about Andela, an innovative program in Africa that connects recent graduates with job opportunities in high-tech companies around the world.
- The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is inviting suggestions for how it could best align public disclosure with its guiding principles of “promoting transparency, enhancing accountability and protecting confidentiality”. John Hurley identifies three key actions the bank could take to improve its practices.
- 1 March was Global Waste Pickers Day. To mark this day honouring people who scrounge among rubbish to find something valuable, Amal Faltas from the World Bank wrote about Ibrahim, a waste picker from Palestine who started a textile and sewing business with his wife and brother as part of the Bank’s project to improve solid waste management. His business has grown into a big upholstery centre known for its Arabic designs.
- Interesting graphs by Justin Sandefur and Divyanshi Wadhwa explain how IMF and World Bank optimism regarding African economies in the 1990s contributed to the complicated debt situations these economies are facing today.
- A new bipartisan bill has been introduced to the US Congress to create a new aid agency which would combine the Overseas Private Investment Corporation with several private sector–oriented parts of the US Agency for International Development, as well as expand US development finance capabilities.
- This great podcast by Antony Funnell on ABC RN examines the rise of China as a new international donor, and how this is challenging principles of aid transparency. The Future Tense podcast has run three shows in a row looking at the future of the aid industry.
Aid and development links: waste pickers, African high tech, and US aid changes
Stories from across the web in the aid and development sector.
Scavenger birds pick a dump site in Dhaka (Photo: UN Photo)
Published 5 Mar 2018
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