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 […]
Is aid a blessing or a curse for developing countries? For Imran Khan, a former cricketer turned politician, the answer for his country, Pakistan, is clear. “If we don’t have aid we will be forced to make reforms and stand on our own feet,” he told the BBC recently. This was a message that he […]
The G20 meeting in Cannes has enough on its plate figuring out a way to save the Eurozone, with or without Greece. So it is a credit to the meeting’s host, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, that he booked a slot on the agenda for a discussion of how to finance the fight against poverty based […]
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 […]
“This week Ashton Kutcher (aka @aplusk) broke the one million mark in Twitter followers and introduced Oprah (@oprah) to the phenomenon. He’s also using his fame and Twitterlebrity to raise awareness of malaria and ask fans to support Malaria No More in sending insecticide-treated mosquito nets to African countries where they are needed most.” So […]