Aidnography

Hi all, From Argentina to Zimbabwe & from Bangladesh to the Philippines this week's review also covers stories from India, Myanmar, Germany, UK and the US. Stay safe & well and enjoy your reading! My quotes of the week The system has not collapsed. The “system” barely existed. The government – this one, as well as the Congress government that preceded it – deliberately dismantled what little medical infrastructure there was. This is what happens when a pandemic hits a country with an almost nonexistent public healthcare system. (...). The resources that remain in the public sector are systematically siphoned into the private sector by a nexus of corrupt administrators and medical practitioners, corrupt referrals and insurance rackets. (‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe) Most participants said they did not feel engaged in consultations and decision-making processes. Some said only Mahjis or volunteers are cons...

Hi all, This week contains a few deja vu moments about aid cuts (UK), conflict & the periphery (Sudan), revolutions & digital tools (Myanmar), child sponsorship (has impact, still not the stuff for 21st century #globaldev...) & even Louise Linton makes a re-appearance...plus lots of food for thought for debates on decolonization & more! Enjoy! My quotes of the week Amid the heartbreak, the sight of a tall, silent man carrying a grimy pink bassinet slung around his neck with tiny twin girls would still bring out the kindness of strangers, even from the ethnicity targeting them. ( 'Look after my babies': In Ethiopia, a Tigray family's quest) What I was unpacking in actuality, was the notion of decoloniality — an aspiration to restore, renew, elevate, rediscover, acknowledge and validate the multiplicity of lives, lived-experiences, culture and knowledge of indigenous people, people of colour, and colonised people as well as to decenter hetere/cis-norm...

Hi all, It feels good to be back after a short break (actually, I managed to write two new posts since my last review); the decolonized, diversified & localized 'future of aid' has not happened in the meantime as this week's articles remind us...but we are working on it :) ! Enjoy! My quotes of the week When I look at the work of the UNDP I no longer see a project aimed at changing the world and ending underdevelopment. Instead, I now see a political project aimed at perpetuating an evolutionist, Eurocentric and liberal way of understanding the world, showing as natural and universal something that is rooted in British liberal thought of the apogee of the colonial period. (Looking at the UNDP with different eyes) Amid all these flaws in efforts to promote governance, the result is something like “governance theater”. Tellingly, “governance” is always someone else’s problem to solve, never the speaker’s responsibility. The elites in Paris, Washington, Niamey, Ouagadoug...

A few reflections on curating humanitarian content & the limits of virtual knowledge repositories My colleagues of the International Humanitarian Studies Association (IHSA) encouraged me to share a few thoughts on the occasion of their first anniversary of IHSA's curated newsletter .   Blogging and curating international development and humanitarian content have played an important part in my digital life for almost ten years now and I recently shared my 400 th weekly development content review here on the blog and started to experiment with my own newsletter . But as tempting as positive metrics are, they cannot capture some of the bigger issues in our otherwise small community and we need to stay humble and realize that we are communicating in a very small bubble… One of the big challenges I have found throughout my years of communicating on social media is that expanding readership and engagement into any ‘popular’ arena is difficult and most nuanced content, often f...