If you want a model for how the world can solve its most pressing problems in the 21st Century, it is the posse. As governance systems go, the Wild West approach of rounding up a few available hands and driving the bad guy out of town is certainly messy, but, if our favourite westerns are […]
“Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. […]
So the long wait for Barack Obama to nominate America’s international development czar is over. Congratulations to Raj Shah, who should breeze through the confirmation process to become head of US AID, having already been approved for his current post in the Department of Agriculture. Shah, who is just 36, takes on this crucial job […]
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 […]
Bill Gates unleashed mosquitoes on the trendy techies gathered at the TED conference last week to highlight the dangers of malaria. But is he also unleashing dangerously misleading data about the deadly disease? Yes, according to an interesting post from aid sceptic Bill Easterly (author of White Man’s Burden) on his new blog, Aid Watch. (Thanks […]