Aidnography

Hi all,  Welcome back! Link review #375 is another (smaller) milestone in my regular curation efforts & I hope you have a great weekend and time to enjoy some critical #globaldev readings! Enjoy! My quotes of the week Dos and don’ts for international development partnerships DO – Be crystal clear about what impact you aim to achieve. DO – Work with a stakeholder map. DO – Build trust. DO – Be transparent about the type of partnership you have. DO – Be realistic about the challenges you may face. DON’T – Don’t determine your impact goals through partnership processes. DON’T – Don’t partner if you believe you can go it all alone. DON’T – Don’t manipulate, bluff, or overpromise. DON’T – Don’t partner just because everyone else does. DON’T – Don’t set up your staff for failure. (International Development Partnerships – Dos and Don’ts) One lightbulb moment was when one of the staff involved in lobbying with politicians gently pointed out that evidence actually isn’t that important in

Hi all, The first week of term kicked off with about 150 new & returning students, but there was still time to collect a few interesting readings this week as well... My quotes of the week “Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it,” he told the Guardian in 2015 – even admitting that his own work could be meaningless: “There can be no objective measure of social value.” (David Graeber, anthropologist and author of Bullshit Jobs, dies aged 59) The Haiti Community Foundation’s comprehensive, inclusive and bottom-up community planning process generated unprecedented community response, support and engagement because of its passionate emphasis on, and its deep investment in, the power of local communities and their leaders. In so m

Hi all, The Scandinavian summer is almost over, the new semester about to start & your favorite #globaldev link review is back! As I promised in early July , we will dive right into a new, important, stimulating list of readings (well, I included some from earlier in August...) including an extended section on great new open access books! Enjoy! My quotes of the week Taken together the empirical evidence indicate that aid is not effective at deterring migration and it should be used for other purposes. There is no convincing evidence that development assistance reduced migration flows. In the best-case scenario, aid will have a very limited deterring impact on migration flows with high costs per deterred migrant. (Development Aid does not deter Irregular Migration) I have followed closely how a gender and development institute in DRC, built around four women PhD holders, could easily find work as a sub-contractor for research, but once they developed their own agenda and proposals,

As you may have heard if you are interested in Canadian #globaldev discussions, the Toronto-based WE charity has been involved in a bit of a political controversy. In addition to ongoing political debates , more and more criticism on the charity’s volunteering and development model have emerged, including from my esteemed colleagues Rebecca Tiessen ( ' an organizational restructuring is insufficient for addressing its contradictory messaging,  problematic practices and international development identity problem '), David Jefferess (' accusations of racism within WE have been marginalized, as have discussion of the way WE gained such influence within Canadian schools, media, and politics as models of white saviourism ') and the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development (CASID-ACEDI) (' CASID condemns the WE model of development '). These debates inspired me to take a closer look at WEconomy-You can find meaning, make a living, and change th