I was fortunate enough to join the UK Ambassador's visit to Kajaki – a remote and volatile district in Northern Helmand where the surrounding mountains contrast against blue skies and the crystal clear waters of Kajaki Lake.  Many of you may have heard of Kajaki in relation to the Kajaki Dam - one of the two major hydroelectric power dams [...]

"Green growth" is en vogue in the development and international affairs world.   The Republic of Korea has created a new Global Green Growth Institute, and a major UN Summit to be held in Rio de Janeiro in July 2012 will focus on two topics – one of which will be "green economy". The OECD has [...]

An increasingly important factor in development work is the interplay with markets, especially with commodities or goods that are instrumental for personal wellbeing, health and fulfilment.  It's been recognised for decades that the mass provision of imported food aid can solve an immediate crisis (i.e. famine), but can have unintended consequences such as creating parallel [...]

As a development economist, I’m itching to read Poor Economics, the new book by the amazing Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee. Unfortunately, it's not yet widely available in UK bookshops. Thankfully, there’s a wonderful visual web version of the book's key findings, and it’s been reviewed in The Economist and by several UK economists such as Diane [...]

With all the media's attention focussed on Libya and other Middle Eastern countries, you might have noticed Afghanistan has slightly fallen off the media radar recently. That's not necessarily a bad thing – it means those of us who work here can quietly get on and do what we want to do without the world’s [...]