Links & Contents I Liked 209

Hi all,
As the world consumes on ‘Black Friday’ our link review is getting a bit artsy this week to provide food for thought and soul ;)!

We are looking at Radi-Aid nominations, online porn & sex education, photographing Nepal’s Maoist leader Prachanda, poetry in Uganda, research on Tinder Humanitarians and one of our ComDev lectures on writing about development differently; but there is also more ‘traditional’ news on cash transfer myths, UN’s cholera legacy, Safaricom’s business practices and humanitarian aid worker struggles.

Enjoy!

New from aidnography
VIDEO: Vote For The Best And Worst Charity Ads Of 2016

"It's a powerful, entertaining way to highlight the positives and negatives of development campaigning," says Tobias Denskus, a senior lecturer in communication for global development at Malmo University, Sweden, and the blogger behind Aidnography. He's been watching Radi-Aid's campaign since it launched in 2013. "Over time, we've seen a shift. It's become more difficult to find bad examples — aid groups don't want to be on the wrong side of viral sharing."

Me quoted on NPR's Goats & Soda on the Radi-Aid nominees and the power of communicating development through good and bad campaigning videos.

Development news
Fantastic #CashTransfers myths vs reality infographic. #socialprotection #Ev2Act @cashlearning @UNICEFSocPolicy @UNICEFData pic.twitter.com/yCLUvJw0Ng

— Development Pathways (@DevPathways) November 24, 2016



Top US government aid partner to pay $500k damages to African American job applicants

The Department of Labor also found that Chemonics violated rules about maintaining required records and conducting internal audits, which the company has now agreed to fix.
In addition to paying the settlement, Chemonics will hire eight of the applicants who previously did not get jobs.

Melody Schreiber for The Guardian. Finally a bit more on a story that should be much bigger given the size of the development industry in the US and how one of its biggest players blatantly violates core values of empowerment and development.

Nigeria’s brutal slum wrecking breaks principles of New Urban Agenda

Cities that are most likely to prosper are those that improve the ability, opportunity and dignity of people. The built environment is a complex social production, where the ideologies of order not only segregate urban space, along ethnic or class distinctions for example, but such spatial practices connect directly with emergent forms of political mobilisation. A group of stakeholders representing civil society groups, practitioners, academics and municipalities, recently highlighted seven key pathways to manage these emergent politics in an inclusive way.

Jaideep Gupte for IDS. Cities and urban growth will remain one of those hot topic items of our contemporary development agenda.

Ban Ki-moon's UN legacy clouded by cholera

"This is the moment of truth for the UN's leadership, but it's also a moment of truth for the UN's member states," said Lindstrom of IJDH, which filed claims with the UN on behalf of 5,000 cholera victims, as well as a class action lawsuit against the UN in the US federal court. "If they're not ultimately willing to step forward and invest in a just response, then the promise of a more accountable UN rings hollow."

Samuel Oakford for IRIN. How can the UN step up and lead the industry in accountable ways to step up when things go wrong?

Are You Guilty of Helping Safaricom Prey on Rural Women?

Some women in the study said they like Skiza Tunes, however the majority saw it as a hidden fee that consumed their airtime. That’s a normal complaint, but where is borders on a predatory business practice is the difficulty for people to unsubscribe, particularly rural women who many not have the device literacy, or digital literacy, to follow the abstruse instructions for unsubscribing.

Wayan Vota for ICTworks with a reminder that large corporations will never be saints...they want to make money-and Safaricom is not exception to cash in in the growing mobile phone and data market.

Lessons the BBC learned from innovating with African start-ups

having been aware of the “hack fatigue” African tech hubs often talk about (with Western companies organising them for PR purposes and not necessarily shipping products at the end), we were determined to get African pilots into a live BBC environment and show them to users.

Dmitry Shishkin describes key learnings from the BBC working with start-ups in Kenya and Nigeria-interesting from a 'development' as well as global media perspective...

Growing access to online porn is changing sex education in developing countries

As well as trying to compete among porn sites, those trying to reach young people with sex and relationship education also struggle against opaque censorship rules by social media providers and search engines and attempts to enforce obscenity laws by national governments. For example, an advert for the Love Matters education service in India with the question ‘Is sex painful the first time?’ was banned by Facebook.
Pauline Oosterhoff, Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, and author of the research, said: “How young people are learning about sex and relationships in developing countries is a growing and complex issue and one we must engage with, so that millions of young people can access information that is vital for their sexual and reproductive health.

Sophie Robinson for IDS highlights another area where mediatization, digitalization and traditional forms of development education are coming together, posing unique questions in the 21st century.

In Iraq and Syria, humanitarian aid workers struggle within a strained system

“Humanitarian aid work operates within a system that is built on inequality – we won’t see large-scale change happen in the lives of people, in terms of long term development, until we start to challenge the structures and systems that result in this inequity in the first place. And the heart of those institutions is within North America and Europe – until we recognize how dependent we are on the oppression and marginalization of others for our own betterment and benefit … humanitarian aid work is just another cog in this bullshit machinery.”

Tom Arcaro for The Conversation with more insights from his survey and book project that I reviewed on the blog before.

Shadowing Prachanda

Some of Shrestha’s photographs are rare images from the conflict never published before. Dahal trusted Shrestha not to let any of the photographs fall into the hands of the security forces. For many years of the conflict, no one knew what Prachanda looked like and there were even rumours that he was a fictitious character.
“I used to hide the conflict pictures at my relatives’ houses in Kathmandu so that nobody could find them,” recalls Shrestha.
Shrestha himself was jailed in 2002 for being a Maoist and more than 1,500 of his pictures from the conflict were confiscated by the Army and he never got them back.

Shreejana Shrestha for the Nepali Times. If you have an interest in Nepali and conflict history it's definitely worth checking out some of the unique pictures of Maoist leader 'Prachanda'.

Young writers are leading a poetry revolution in Uganda

Poetry has evolved and it is no longer just poetry on the page. Performance poetry is really popular now and it has helped increase poetry publications. It even looks as though performance poets are more relevant in our society now than page poets. This is forcing poets to become performers. A good example is Harriet Anena, the author of A Nation in Labour.

Gloria Mwaniga for The Nation on contemporary poetry and new forms of performances in Uganda.

LP Culture and Development
We enjoyed a lively presentation and discussion with author Lara Pawson in our ComDev 'Glocal Classroom' about her memoir 'This is the place to be', how alternative forms of writing 'happen' and can be performed in different environments and why this is not a book about Angola...

Our digital lives
PostGrowth: Founding an organization remotely via Skype chat

Other people we connected via blogs. But it was all electronic connections. No one had met with each other. We had our first meeting planned on Skype, a video meeting. Of course within the first few seconds, the video crashed. All of a sudden we go over to typed format – the instant messaging form.
For the last six years we never deviated from that. All of our meetings other than every second month where we have a personal check-in, which is visual. Every other meeting that we hold is all just typed.
(...)
Donnie: We had to chat. What’s amazing about chat – the reasons which we learned later on – is that it’s extremely participatory, extremely efficient, and extremely supportive of all the people in the team. The way that happens is as follows, in Skype for example when you write a message and you’re watching someone else write a message, you’ll see the little pencil moving.

Christian Kreutz interviews Donnie Maclurcan about running a virtual organization.

Hot off the digital press
“Tinder Humanitarians”: The Moral Panic Around Representations of Old Relationships in New Media

Through the posting of a new photograph every day, the “Humanitarians of Tinder” Tumblr blog and Facebook page have generated a public discussion on the politics of representing suffering strangers in attempts to enhance the appeal of western image producers. This article will investigate the phenomenon of the Humanitarians of Tinder in order to understand its representations of North–South relations from the photographs themselves and from the debates held around them in new media and old. Critical development studies, media studies and sociology will provide an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to understand the moral panic that these Tinder humanitarians have created through posting private photographs of humanitarian performances to increase their personal desirability.

Latest article by my great colleague Lisa Richey in Javnost-The Public. The article is not open access, but the first 50 visitors will have full access-and you can contact Lisa directly and I'm sure she will be happy to share a pre-print version of the article with you!

How do you deliver aid in the world's most challenging contexts?

The Secure Access in Volatile Environments (SAVE) programme explores how to deliver humanitarian aid in some of the most challenging conflict environments. Based on three years of field work in four countries – Afghanistan, South Central Somalia, South Sudan and Syria – it is the first major effort to answer some of the aid world’s most critical questions about how much aid is getting to war zones and how much that aid is helping.

I haven't have time to explore the website yet, but definitely worth returning to an interesting source of data and analysis.

Academia
Academic labour markets in Europe vary widely in openness and job security

This example is telling of the wide differences in the organisation of academic labour markets in Europe, notably between countries where access to jobs and promotion is mostly closed to outsiders and draws primarily on seniority (Italy, Spain), and those that are open to foreign academics and where promotion is more based on performance (the Netherlands, the UK).
In a recent article, I outline the main differences in the organisation of academic labour markets in Europe with an emphasis on two dimensions: the extent to which they are open to outsiders, and the job security they provide for recent PhD graduates. I differentiate between four types of academic job markets:
open markets with high security (e.g. the UK, Netherlands, Scandinavia)
closed markets with (potential) high security (e.g. France, Spain, Italy)
open markets with low security (e.g. Switzerland)
closed markets with low security (e.g. Germany).

Alexandre Afonso for LSE's EUROPP summarizes his research on European academic labor markets.