Newsletter

Subscribe to Aidnography's newsletter!

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Aidnography:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices.

Intuit Mailchimp

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How the conservative playbook to undermine aid and reduce civil society space is working out in Sweden

Image
NightCafe prompt "Sweden cuts development aid" While the announcements of cuts that large INGOs like International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Save The Children International (SCI) have recently made receive attention in the sector, the developments in Sweden provide a glimpse what the “future of aid” may hold for traditional Western donors and particular their civil society. I agree to a large extent with Will Worley’s assessment that International aid agencies pay the price for boom and bust and that “staff cuts and financial turbulence (…) follow years of aggressive growth (…), even as government aid budgets have fallen” but what we are seeing in Sweden right now is worrisome on a different level. Just over a year ago I wrote about The worrisome shift to the right of Nordic development cooperation and the fall-out has now become quite visible in Sweden, after initially toning down feminist foreign policy and cutting development-related academic research funding. When I
Read more

Should I consider a PhD in International Development Studies?

After the Economist’s piece on the (non-)value of doing a PhD and some comments later (e.g. Prometheus doesn't read the Economist (I like the slightly cynical dichotomy between ‘civilians’ and the ‘academic insiders) or the ' 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School ' (they are only halfway through so check it out regularly in the future...) I had an interesting conversation with a prospective PhD student a few days ago. This was not the first time that I had been approached about doing a PhD and I always try to be as frank as possible, even playing the ‘devil’s advocate’ when it comes to the complicated ‘should I or shouldn’t I?’ decision-making process. At the end of our conversation I sat down and tried to summarize a few important and generic points from the point of view of doing a PhD in Development Studies and in the UK . I understand that every case is different and involves a range of motives, options and rationales, but there a few important questions and t
Read more

Guns and Almond Milk (book review)

Image
Twenty years ago, Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures was published. The catchy title ensured that the book became one of the first modern classics of aid worker literary endeavours, mixing autobiographical anecdotes, a bit of fiction and an unfiltered view of what it is really like to be a humanitarian. Mustafa Marwan’s Guns and Almond Milk is a contemporary answer to the question of how we ended up in a hospital in Yemen’s port city of Aden with a lot less sex and a whole lot more desperate measures… But let’s start at the beginning, perhaps even a bit before… When I first saw Marwan’s book, I expected something a bit more light-hearted. After all, “almond milk” has become a trope in aid worker social media circles after someone posted a question about the availability of non-dairy drinks in Lebanon in a large and well-known global aid Facebook group. “Almond milk” turned into a meme for privileged Western expectations of life in “the field”. We are not in Solferino anymore
Read more

Happy retirement Duncan Green!

One of the most influential global development bloggers announced his retirement from blogging and aid work recently and since I was socialized to some extent in German academia I was thinking of a Festschrift -style farewell publication. Only that Duncan is not an old-school professor. And in the democratic tradition of writing things on the Internet I am not his disciple. And as far as I can see, nobody else has written a post in his memory. But you still get the idea, I guess...   Blogs are linked to people, personalities and their writing style, so the retirement of Duncan from Oxfam will be another blow to global development blogging regardless of what will happen to his blog and the Oxfam blogosphere. As I wrote on the occasion of 500 weekly curated Links I Liked  last year, blogging about development is a project riding into the digital sunset and no amount of Substacks (I really like Oliver Kim's Global Developments and Ken Opalo's An Africanist Perspective , of cour
Read more

Dear white middle class British women: Please don't send used bras (or anything, really) to Africa

Image
I am supposed to be on my summer blogging break , but the world of bad development does not seem to take a vacation... The first time I came across the #SWEDOW (Stuff We Don't Want) debate about what to do with unwanted stuff and whether to send it to 'Africa' was in 2010; in fact, I wrote about a shoe donation project on the blog in 2012. Fast forward to July 2019 and a local British Women's Institute Facebook page with about 500 page likes is posting a picture of two innocent-looking parcels that has been shared very widely. The vast majority of the 500+ comments under the post are positive and I am sure that both charities will receive quite a few parcels in the next few days. It seems almost futile and pointing out bad examples of charity and development is not always the best way to communicate, but I anonymize the post as much as possible to avoid simply shaming a particular Women's Institute chapter. 'Rapey men here are the same as rapey men t
Read more