Published daily by the Lowy Institute

Aid links: calls for Australia first, the upside of dengue, more

Why refugees cutting down trees has led to strife in Uganda, plus more stories from the aid and development sector.

Photo: Mark Yokoyama/Flickr
Photo: Mark Yokoyama/Flickr
Published 20 Feb 2019   Follow @AlexandreDayant

  • Floods in north Queensland, a summer of bushfires around Australia, and one of the worst droughts in living memory have pushed some Australians to ask for a cut in spending on foreign aid and to help Australians “first and foremost”.
     
  • Morten Wendelbo discusses the reason behind Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s decision to block foreign aid from entering Venezuela at the very time of desperate need.
     
  • Samuel Okiror reports that in Uganda, massive deforestation by refugees from South Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo has sparked clashes with the local population.
     
  • David Evans tries to explain why (micro)economists don’t conduct cost-analysis in their impact evaluations.
     
  • Federico Costa and Albert Ko made an interesting discovery while studying health issues in a Brazilian favela. They found out that the population stricken by dengue was protected against the Zika virus.
     
  • In Addis Ababa, only 10% of residents are connected to the sewerage system. As a result, the local water supply and sewerage authority decided to build shared sanitation facilities. Seema Thomas extracts five takeaways from this successful project.
     
  • Seema Jayachandran, a professor of economics at Northwestern University, presents on gender inequality in India and what to do to solve it.
     
  • Another podcast: Alice Evans’ Four Questions with Harvard professor Gautam Rao who talks about how behavioural insights can help with development economics.
     
  • Here is a touching story about one Yemeni baby that made it against all odds.

     


You may also be interested in