Aidnography

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 for j

In the scope of the contemporary planetary crisis this post probably qualifies as less urgent and a little bit rant-y, but today I ’ d like to talk about reports, as in: Digital publications, usually pdf documents, that many large #globaldev organizations publish as a staple product for communication, engagement and reminding people that they still exist... tl;dr I read a lot of stuff on the Internet. I also skim-read a lot. I open a lot of pdf files, too. Please re-consider your organizational practice to have a report starting between page 10 to 15. Tell me as early as possible why I should engage with your report, why I should invest precious time to read it, perhaps even share it in my weekly #globaldev link review… I have mentioned it more than once in my curated #globaldev links that most organizational landing pages/repositories/libraries particularly of international organizations have room for improvement. I don’t really want to shame a particular organization, but many look s

Hi all, Happy Friday & a joyful weekend! We have COVID-19 & #globaldev insights from Canada, Yemen, Australia, the military-industrial complex and Western anthropologists 'stuck' in Africa...and there's much more from Lebanon, Greece, Romania, Afghanistan, Tibet & Libya. Plus, how white people took over philanthropy & a great new Nyerere biography! Enjoy! My quotes of the week Our detached and benevolent claim to ethnographic participant observation, always from a position of privilege and relative security, is put into question at precisely the moment when true participation finally becomes inevitable. Now it is us who “are participated” (as the old aid-worker joke went) by the pervasive virus that is in every touch—maybe in our body, maybe in that of the other. It challenges differentiation, threatening pathogenic communion. And the escape route that we had been able to count on for six decades of post-colonial anthropology is finally being