Archive for 'donors & funding'
As I mentioned in my last blog post, I recently travelled to Bamyan and Uruzgan to see whether Strengthening Provincial Administration and Delivery (SPAD) – a UK/Denmark funded programme - can make a difference there. Bamyan is a province in the centre-west of the country and famous for the monumental Buddha statues that the Taliban [...]
No one would dare to suggest that every international development programme or policy has been a resounding success, yet finding the space to acknowledge and learn from instances of failure is still hard work. Happily though, there are signs that this is changing. Through this blog I'd welcome a conversation about how we can use these changes to increase [...]
The social media room at last week's GAVI conference was quietly buzzing. People's faces were lit by the blue light of their lap top screens and, in one corner, a steady stream of influential people commented and reported into the TV cameras. I blogged three times during the four hours and tweeted crazily to get [...]
As a child of Soweto - growing up in the sixties in apartheid divided South Africa - I have lived with inequality in all aspects of my life. But over the last six years, I have visited all corners of Africa and discovered that there is an apartheid of ill health. Poor men, women and children [...]
There is never a quiet moment in development, but the last nine months in DFID have been particularly intense. As will be apparent to anyone who reads the UK's Bilateral and Multilateral Aid Reviews, the amount of work that these represent has been staggering. However, given that together they form the basis on which we [...]
Mother's Day is usually a joyous occasion — and this year we have even more reason to celebrate. Mothers and their children are surviving today at higher rates than at any other point in history. In fact, just since 1990, the number of children who die before their fifth birthday has declined from more than [...]
When we are confronted by the image of a child trapped in the rubble of an earthquake, or of a family clinging to the roof of a flooded home, we don’t so much commit to help, as feel committed to do so – committed by our shared humanity. It is because the impulse to relieve [...]
As most people who have ever watched Comic Relief will know, I’ve been to Africa many times before. I’ve reported on the destruction wreaked by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, on drought, on famine, on kids forced to live on the streets and the devastation that conflict inevitably leaves in its wake. Right from the off though [...]
There's nothing quite like a drive in the country to understand the scale of a country's development needs. Whether in an armoured vehicle back in Helmand, on a field trip in Zambia in a previous role to see what scope there was for helping farmers adapt to climate change, or last week driving along roads [...]
It's a big week of change for DFID this week. Despite apparently being in the "sexiest" department in Whitehall (according to the London Evening Standard at least!) we're all actually reeling from the news that our fantastic Permanent Secretary Minouche Shafik is about to leave us to become a Managing Director at the IMF, and getting [...]
