Aidnography

Hi all, It's getting a bit late this Friday afternoon-so without further delay follow this week's #globaldev review to Syria, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Chagos, Uganda, South Sudan, Kenya, the US & learn how work that George Clooney supports actually makes a difference! Enjoy! My quotes of the week Whenever I spoke to affected persons, they would ask me if my home was flooded, I would tell them about my grandmother and for a brief moment we would share a commonly felt loss. And it did make a difference. Knowledge of the language, local pop culture, colloquial phrases, and power dynamics helped me to judge situations much more easily. With relatively few professionals from my state working in the humanitarian sector before the floods, I found myself being a useful bridge in many situations, explaining the context as well as the true nature of the beast that INGOs are (Who is local?) Though this idea of working yourself to death is indeed both Western and white, as...

Hi all, Oxfam's bombshell announcement this week to lay of 1450 staff is only the latest concrete development around bigger questions around the future of (I)NGOs & civil society which are reflected in quite a few postings this week. And from the Ukraine to Papua New Guinea (with stop-overs in Kenya, Nepal, India, Bangladesh, US + UK) there is plenty of food for thought from around the globe as well! Enjoy! My quotes of the week In the scramble to piece together the scope and scale of the clearance operations against the Rohingya, the numerous groups who came to Cox’s Bazar neither coordinated in any meaningful sense, nor benefitted from each other’s knowledge. Unsurprisingly, this has led to significant duplication on one hand, and large gaps in the narrative of what happened in northern Rakhine state on the other. (Capturing a Crisis: What lessons can we learn from the “overdocumentation” of the Rohingya crisis?) To achieve their stated goals of abolishing poverty, cur...

Hi all, Wow...this has turned into one of the longest #globaldev reviews in a while-so I hope you have some extra time to explore great food for thought from India, Liberia, Ethiopia, Nepal, New Zealand, Hawaii, Afghanistan, Lesotho, Burundi, Iraq, Sudan &  Tonga! Enjoy! My quotes of the week Elders are the collective wealth of our community. They are also majority women, and majority impoverished. Women of older generations were systematically denied the opportunity to build a nest egg because they were forced into low-paid work, homemaking and dependency on their husbands. Older women cannot take care of themselves even if they wanted to. In a decade, one-third of Hawaii will be elderly people. There is no plan to care for them, other than to dump the work on their daughters. We need an eldercare infrastructure to care for every senior, not just the wealthy. (This state says it has a ‘feminist economic recovery plan.’ Here’s what that looks like). This is the task f...