Aidnography

Maybe it was purely coincidental. Or maybe it was because I have more time to engage with digital content during my summer teaching break, but there seems to be an increased number of well-known discussions popping up that leave me a bit puzzled. The Fifty Shades of Aid facebook group discussed expat salaries and various expat-local gaps again, Duncan Green revived the discussion on whether and how academics should influence policy-making , the Guardian wrote on volunteer stress and burn-out and on Africa is a Country there was a reminder that overseas volunteering needs a reflective framework . Add to these debates the fact that a Western journalist apparently wrote a terrible book on his time in ‘Africa’ and mainstream celebrities got excited about clean water in Burundi (Beyonce) and hospital wings in Malawi named after their children (Madonna) this pretty much sounds like any other week. Some policy debates, e.g. how much spending on refugees at home should count as ODA ?...

Hi all, It's Friday-and you know what that means: New #globaldev stuff and more from Aidnography ! Development news : Immersing with a family in Kenya ; aid reforms; refugees & DAC-spending; the inflexible humanitarian architecture in Syria ; Australia wants to outlaw orphanage tourism; towards a more equitable study abroad experience; donors & their urge to professionalize grassroots movements in Nepal ; are there enough decent jobs in Kenya ? Humanosphere 's hibernation & the future of humanitarian reporting; aid worker mid-life crisis; what's the big deal about evidence? Our digital lives: The difficulties of female journalists in the Middle East; over-hyped Fintech; Twitter's glass ceiling for women and minorities; a CEO sleep-over; Tumblr is difficult to monetize. Publications: The People in the Pictures; public attitudes towards migrants; women know stuff. Academia: Better networking; morality & open access. Enjoy! New from aidnography Rad...

Jennifer Bakody’s memoir Radio Okapi Kindu-The Station That Helped Bring Peace to the Congo on her time as a UN communications officer and local radio station manager in Kindu, DRC in the early 2000s is definitely a great addition to your development-related summer reading list! After reading and reviewing quite a few memoirs of aid work(ers), Radio Okapi Kindu adds some interesting new nuances to the genre and managed to entertain me right from the beginning through Bakody’s gentle and unhurried style which allows her story to unfold and ‘breathe’ with a lot of nuances, details and space for her protagonists. Stories from and about journalists-not expat aid work in ‘Africa’ Unlike some aid worker memoirs, Jennifer Bakody manages right from the start to frame her story around the team of Congolese journalists, thereby avoiding the stereotypical pitfalls of a young Western woman going to ‘find herself’ in a remote place in the deepest and darkest and most dangerous part of Africa...

Hi all, I'm at a workshop about communication for development in the context of Germany today hosted by the University of Leipzig. There should be plenty of material for a blog post next week! In the meantime, enjoy your weekly link digest with plenty of interesting readings for the weekend! Development news: New challenges for UN peacekeeping; Louise Linton marries; key trends in humanitarian funding; British Red Cross received a lot of useless 'stuff'; Colombia's gold rush revisited; tax avoidance & illicit flows; UN struggles with open data-one pdf at the time; even the Guardian falls into white savior trap; Helen Clark hit the glass ceiling; the limits (and opportunities) of 'small is beautiful'; a long read on Bridge academies; spatial analysis in Madagascar; the impact of edutainment; the geography of humanitarian knowledge; the future of evaluation; photographing Afghanistan; remembering a priest from Nicaragua. Our digital lives: Reuters Instit...

Hi all, Happy midsommar from Sweden! Enjoy reading this weekend! Development news: Combat charities in Mosul; one year after the World Humanitarian Summit; does Daily Mail’s criticism of aid matter? NGO-government relationships in Kenya; the WHO DG reflects on her tenure; Africa is far away from being a digital knowledge economy; a refugee city in Uganda; the rhetoric of partnerships lives on; Rwanda’s dictatorship; famine as weapon. Publications: Reviewing ‘Stay & Deliver’; global humanitarian assistance report; women & world employment trends; social media tools in Kenya; do age-of-marriage laws work? (Spoiler: No!); do certification schemes help farmers? (Spoiler: Not really!). Our digital lives: Philanthropy and the program officer; the rich give little; Silicon Valley’s flawed theory of history. Academia: Reviewing MOOCs; higher ed institutions demand public scholarship-but don’t little to protect staff from backlash; open access in international organizations. Enjoy...