Aidnography

A s I see blog posts for the development blogging audience survey popping up in my news feed, I had a moment of 'why am I even bothering with development?' on my mind. The reason was yet another article ( in German ) on how German development policy, driven by its minister Dirk Niebel, is embracing a militaristic mindset. I am aware of the 'securitisation of aid' debate, e.g. in the context of the UK , but this is not simply about policy, but about how organisational cultures and personal/professional mindsets are affected by the ideology at the top-level of policy-making. The decision of the newly established giz to participate in an arms show in Berlin later this year (the 10th Congress on European Security and Defence) may seem like a small piece of news. The giz job advertisement for an ' Expert for Communication, Video Surveillance and Security System' for the Saudi-Arabian Ministry of the Interior may be questionable, but it fits into the broader pict...

Who reads international aid and development blogs?   David Algoso had the brilliant idea to use the wisdom of the development blogging crowd and its esteemed readers to help us with empirical data on reading and sharing habits and the general 'use' of development blogs.  So a number of bloggers (that's why you may see similar posts on more than one of your favourite blogs but they all lead to the same survey) have gotten together to create a joint survey of our readers: please take the survey here . International aid and development blogs have expanded rapidly in the past few years, and our audience has expanded too. We want a better sense of just who is reading these blogs and what they're interested in. The survey will take just 5 minutes and will be available for about two weeks. All responses are anonymous, of course. This is an exciting and participatory way to create empirical data that we as a group will share with the w...

John Marsh just published an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on ' Why Education is not an Economic Panacea '. The article is long and a bit confusing to read. It is based on the author's experience in an education project for poor members of the community: The idea was simple. Faculty from the University of Illinois would offer night classes in their areas of expertise [...] for anyone in the community who was between the ages of 18 and 45 and lived at 150 percent of the poverty level of income or lower. [...] Students who completed the nine-month course would receive six hours of college credit, which they could then transfer to other institutions of higher learning. Everything would be free: tuition, books, even child care at a nearby community center. We named it after a similar program in Chicago, the Odyssey Project. In short, the programme was based on the well-known dicussion that  education pays, and pays more than ever. If so, it...

At first sight and read, Nora Lustig's latest CGDev paper looks like an unspectatcular working paper with a long sub-title: 'Scholars Who Became Practitioners: The Influence of Research on the Design, Evaluation, and Political Survival of Mexico’s Antipoverty Program Progresa/Oportunidades' . The summary does not really tell you why I like this paper either: Celebrated by academics, multilateral organizations, policymakers and the media, Mexico’s Progresa/ Oportunidades conditional cash transfers program (CCT) is constantly used as a model of a successful antipoverty program. Here I argue that the transformation of well-trained scholars into influential practitioners played a fundamental role in promoting a new conceptual approach to poverty reduction, ensuring the technical soundness and effectiveness of the program, incorporating rigorous impact evaluation, and persuading politicians to implement and keep the program in place. The involvement of scholar-practitioners al...

My colleague Joanna Wheeler from IDS sent me a message this morning about a fascinating action research-based project that the IDS Participation, Power and Social Change Team and VSO-UK are going to implement jointly as a series of PhD projects. There are more details below and an even more detailed research design outline is included as well. But before you get too excited, let me stress that this project does *not*, I repeat: NOT!, come with a scholarship to undertake a PhD at IDS / University of Sussex . VSO will cover the fieldwork under a normal volunteer contract but every candidate will have to secure funding for her/his PhD fees (approximately £3,500 for EU citizens and £9,000 per year for everybody else). If you are still interested I suggest that you get in touch with Joanna directly, ideally including your CV and a statement why you would be a good candidate for the project. But please read the complete information first: Valuing Volunteering Valuing Volunteering wil...

This is a very blunt summary of interesting research on the non-profit sector in Nova Scotia, Canada. Granted, Nova Scotia may not be a hub for international development work and my assumption is that it is a relatively small part of the non-profit sector here, but nonetheless this is an interesting view from the ‘margins’ with some likely broader implications for other parts of the world and development work in particular. Recently, the lead researcher shared some of her key findings and they are definitely food for thought.  This is in a nutshell what the project has been about: In 2007, Phoenix partnered with the Federation of Community Organizations (FOCO) to undertake a labour market study of the NFP sector in Nova Scotia.   From January to June 2011, the labour market information was followed-up with an intensive six-month mapping of sector development strategies. Labour market information on the non-profit sector is especially valuable because it helps us understa...

There's a nice new spoof video of Kittywood Studios, the entertainment empire that is responsible for all the cat videos on YouTube. As the Huffington Post writes : Meet Kittywood Studios, a hilarious (and fictional) company devoted entirely to creating cat videos. They meticulously plan cat clips down to the "prrr charts" and claim to be the creative geniuses behind "cat who likes to watch the toilet flush" and even the "kitten attacking the watermelon". If cat videos are manufactured by Kittywood Studios the obvious question is then who produces all the content for development-related blogs, which probably make up another 30-40% of Internet traffic ;))?! I have a few suspicions, because quite frankly, it's hard to believe that all this 'groundbreaking' research and 'eye-opening stories' from the field are really happening... 1. The IMF To distract from its tarnished image and play a practical joke on the colleagues from the ...