Aidnography

Hi all, It has been a busy week with quite a few bad news story from inside the #globaldev industry-ranging from WFP, to UNICEF UK, Amnesty & Tearfund-but on a brighter note there's a nice 'culture & development' section at the end of the first part that combines beauty with food for thought, eyes & ears. Enjoy! My quotes of the week Today, many NGOs have full-time proposal-production teams whose jobs depend on “win rates” - the number of successful bids they secure. They don’t need specialized technical expertise or experience because there’s the internet. Skilled writers read between the lines of each “Request for Proposals” to feed back winning language in a process some derisively characterize as “isomorphic mimicry.” That’s biological term for when a butterfly, for example, ends up looking like a moth so it doesn’t get eaten. You want gender? We do gender! You don’t want gender? Forget about it. As a gifted proposal writer once wrote to me about her work:“I

Hi all, Did you have enough Zoom meetings this week? Yeah, me too... Before I'm logging off for the weekend I'm happy to share some great #globaldev readings, as always! Enjoy & stay healthy! My quotes of the week Earlier this year I moved on from covering Syria after eight years of reporting on the conflict and am haunted by those stories I never told. Journalists know that not all reporting can make it onto the printed page but those untold stories can feel like an unpaid debt. Underlying this guilt is the overwhelming sense of failure that even those that made it onto the printed page have done little to change the course of the conflict or even alleviate the suffering.But war is about more than stories of loss. Like the absurdity and moments of black humor that perhaps surprisingly punctuate warzones but don’t usually get relayed because it might seem disrespectful. Or remembering those who helped us reporters do our jobs in a country that has been one of the most inho

The 2020 UN General Assembly has just kicked off, marking a key highlight of the UN@75 year of celebration. This is the perfect time to share my review of Shirley Hazzard’s People in Glass Houses , the best book about the United Nations I have ever read. It started with a simple Tweet by writer Petina Gappah and over the summer I read Hazzard’s book based on her essays published in the New Yorker between 1964 and 1967. Yes, you read that right: Hazzard’s book, more a collection of loosely connected short stories than ‘a novel’ as the subtitle claims, is more than 50 years old. But what makes People in Glass Houses such a stellar literary contribution is that the poignant observations she shares through her stories are all but historical. Her observations on the human condition of bureaucratic ordering are timeless. These profound insights that the UN is unchangeable, that it is not a lack of money or the wrong state being in charge of a committee and that the promotion of a bright mi

Hi all,  It was a very intensive week so I'm lacking the energy for a witty introduction right now... Enjoy! My quotes of the week The real story is that places like Vietnam and Mongolia have completely kicked COVID-19’s ass. The real story is that places like Rwanda and Ghana have innovated and survived. There are countless stories like this — from Sri Lanka to Trinidad & Tobago, but you wouldn’t know because we’re not rich or white. But you should know. Because we’re right. This information could save your life. (The Overwhelming Racism Of COVID Coverage) Biometrics may close the gap between an ID and its holder, but it opens a gulf between streamlined bureaucracies and people’s messy lives, their constrained choices, their survival strategies, their hopes for a better future, none of which can be captured on a digital scanner or encoded into a database. (Machine-Readable Refugees) “I have made countless decisions in this vein – from Iraq to Indonesia, from Italy to El Salvad