Aidnography

Hi all, Glad to be back with a fresh curation of #globaldev links! USAID with little impact, climate refugees in Tuvalu, the challenges of growing megacities like Mexico-City & Lagos, pracademics, internships, AI & much more! Happy reading! My quotes of the week After eight years and billions of dollars, there is little independent evidence that USAID, Chemonics, and its partners have actually strengthened a global supply chain that millions rely on for lifesaving medical supplies. ('Too big to fail': How USAID's $9.5B supply chain vision unraveled) a colleague working in the area of participation, inclusion and social change asked “What does it mean if we no longer ‘swim’ in the data?” As evaluators and researchers we live it, breathe it, dream it, and ponder it endlessly. We feel a kind of emotion or connection with data when we are “in it.” Do we want to hand that over to a machine to spit out some conclusions? (What’s next for Emerging AI in Evaluation? Takeaw

Hi all, Migration, carbon offsetting, politics around UN jobs, deforestation, urbanization & impact of thinks tanks + World Bank reports are only some of the topics this week; and does it pay off to do a PhD...well, that depends... P.S.: This is the time of the semester again where things get a bit busy-so next week I will be examining student blog projects with my colleague among many other things and then I'm off to Germany for a week for family time & a conference-so the links will be back in November :) ! My quotes of the week Yes, the Pakistani government is wrong for making this rash announcement, which won’t begin to address the security issues plaguing its citizens. But it also offers a reminder that those claims of empathy from supposed rights champions in Western capitals now ring more hollow than ever. ( Deporting a million Afghans won’t solve Pakistan’s problems) Our findings show that aid can cause a short-lived reduction in migration aspirations, except in fra

Hi all, This week's #globaldev review ends on a paper from 2018 that introduces the concept of 'oxygen of amplification' which seems particularly relevant in the last few days. The focus this week is on Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Kenya & Dominica, but also on harmful loan scams, child protection & voluntourism, loss + damage, a LiveAid musical, Lumumba's legacy & much more! And for the first time in many, many years I joined a new social platform... Bluesky it is for the moment. My quotes of the week As Kimathi sees it, the multinational tech firms and their outsourcing partners made one big, potentially fatal miscalculation when they set up shop in Kenya: They didn’t anticipate a workers’ revolt. If they had considered the country’s history, perhaps they would have seen the writing of the African Content Moderator’s Union on the wall. (Silicon Savanna: The workers taking on Africa's digital sweatshops) Golden passports play a central role in Dominica’s e

Hi all, My favorite quotes from our alumni meeting last week were from a student who described our course far better organized than meetings she has experienced in the financial sector & another student who confessed that our Communication for Development program saved her from finishing her accounting degree ;). So all in all we had a great day with alumni, students & friends! After last Friday's break this week's review is a bit more extensive-Haiti, aid fraud, ESG scams, the end of NGOs, digital divides & often elusive quests for impact from conference diplomacy to rainfed agriculture. So lots to explore, ponder, agree & disagree with! Happy reading! My quotes of the week The current ESG focus at many companies, and among investors, may therefore prove insufficient to address negative environmental externalities, especially in the presence of weak public governance. (Better state governance reduces local environmental footprints from oil drilling, “better” co