Our recent blog post criticising Muhammad Yunus for his blanket criticism of for-profit investment in microlending has sparked a lively debate, especially in the Twittersphere. The influential @socialedge called the post “must read”. @andrewsprung called it a “pitch-perfect rebuttal to Yunus”. On the other hand, @KimberleyCanada protested “Oh pls. some respect. the man is brilliant […]
For Britain’s politicians there seems to be a consensus, at least for now, that spending 0.7% of national income on government aid programmes would be the nation’s fair share of the global effort to eradicate poverty in the developing world. Indeed, aid charities and lobby groups have consistently pushed for all rich countries to hit the 0.7% target since it was endorsed by the […]
Our old sparring partner Michael Edwards has been banging the drum against philanthrocapitalism again. We actually agree on more than Michael admits – particularly that philanthrocapitalism needs transparency and accountability to succeed. And he is willing to give some grudging credit to Bill Gates for his recent pledge of $10 billion to develop vaccines against […]
Building a real partnership between donor and recipient countries based on better planning has been one of the big ideas in aid in recent years, set out in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Paris Declaration of 2005. The growing importance of philanthrocapitalists in development troubles some people, who fear that a flurry of new actors […]