- The Australian budget was handed down last week, with the aid budget receiving a slight increase, though only by definition. Stephen Howes analysed trends in the aid budget in great detail at the Devpolicy post-budget breakfast.
- In this great blog post, Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt uses the “Oxfam incident” as a hook to highlight the way development is “done” to those who have very little power to decide their own lives.
- Navigation by Judgment: Why and When Top Down Management of Foreign Aid Doesn’t Work (2018), a book by Dan Honig, was discussed at Harvard. Here is video of the event. The book compiles a database of evaluations from more than 14,000 projects from nine development agencies between 1973 and 2013.
- Chinese contractors are building Africa’s first fully electrified cross-border railway, between Ethiopia and Djibouti. Despite high expectations for the project in terms of development, it is already causing problems for the local population.
- David Beasley, Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), warns that many mothers and young children in North Korea are still relying on humanitarian assistance to meet their nutritional needs.
- Debbie Hillier, Oxfam’s Senior Humanitarian Policy Adviser, discusses the role and expectations of the insurance industry in the development sector.
- In this post, Carlos Rodríguez Castelán, social economist at the World Bank, discusses the benefits of the “Colombia Mayor”, a program introduced in 2004 that provides a modest unconditional cash benefit to older individuals living in poverty.
- Jeffrey Bloem, Khandker Wahedur Rahman, and Harshada Karnik, doctoral students in Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota, summarise the 2018 Midwest International Economic Development Conference (MIEDC).
- In this report, the OECD details how much DAC members give to civil society, and what the funds are spent on.
Aid links: top-down development, insurance expectation, more
Links and stories from the aid and development sector.
Railway bridge in Ethiopia (Photo: Tristam Sparks/Flickr)
Published 14 May 2018
Follow @AlexandreDayant