Earlier this week former British prime minister Gordon Brown emerged from hibernation to lobby for a bold new plan to push education up the global agenda. The world has made progress in recent years but, Mr Brown reports, 68 million kids still get no education. Worse, he warns, cuts to aid budgets mean that we […]
“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, All the King’s horses and all the King’s men, Couldn’t put Humpty together again.” This children’s rhyme should be going through the minds of the 2,000 aid bureaucrats who are going to descend on the South Korean city of Busan next week for […]
The aid aristocracy of Britain was out in force on Monday evening for a one-night-only gala performance by Bill and Melinda Gates of a lecture on how aid is making a real difference, called ‘The Living Proof’. Much of the hour and half performance was exactly what you would expect from Gates (well, Bill anyway) – oodles of […]
What do the victory of billionaire Meg Whitman in the recent primary to be the Republican candidate for governor of California, and the controversial Gaza aid flotilla have in common? Both these recent new stories highlight the difficult questions that arise when philanthropy merges into politics. At first glance this is a bit of non-question. Doing good for […]