Bono appeared at the TED event this week to discuss ending global poverty. He suggested that it was possible to imagine eradicating $1.25 a day poverty by around 2030. And I believe him –at least in my more optimistic moments. The U2 frontman noted one of the benefits if that happened: “you won’t have to listen to an insufferable jumped-u
With the Spice Girls back together, temporarily we must hope, for the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games, David Cameron could have been forgiven for making the most of the public’s desire to celebrate the success of the Olympics. Instead he risked being the party pooper, by convening a summit in Downing Street about hunger with Vice President Michel Temer of Brazil.
Martin Kirk, former Head of UK Campaigns at Oxfam GB, has a brave and interesting paper in Ethics and International Affairs (the article is temporarily ungated) which says that NGOs are:
locked in a toxic and inaccurate paradigm, described through an increasingly outmoded core “charity” story that is unrepresentative of the reality of global development and that restricts their appeal to the public.
Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist Nick Kristof joined us this week for a small roundtable discussion on his work. This time last year we helped Nick select the finalists for his 2011 Win-A-Trip contest, and we’ll be helping again on the 2012 contest—more on that below.
In "The Future of Statistical Computing," Leland Wilkinson argues that technological advances are going to shape the future of statistical analysis more than most other factors. The article is a helpful overview of today's statistical analysis, let alone predicting the future, for someone who remembers doing his first statistical models in Gauss (does anyone else even remember that package?).
At the first joint public appearance of the U.S. foreign assistance triumvirate this week, Henrietta Fore, acting director of foreign assistance and acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, John Danilovich, CEO of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and Mark Dybul, U.S. global AIDS coordinator, argued U.S.
The UN Security Council has lifted its ban on diamond exports in Liberia, on the grounds that the post-conflict country has made significant progress in establishing necessary internal controls to comply with the Kimberley Process--a mec
John Edwards released the first global poverty proposal of the '08 presidential campaigns yesterday. In "Restoring America's Moral Leadership by Fighting Worldwide Poverty", Edwards' campaign says:
Randall Tobias, the first U.S. director of foreign assistance, had back-to-back hearings last week with the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations.
The founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar, has named a new leader for his personal philanthropy, Omidyar Network, as he explores ways to play a bigger role in shaping public policy, the NYT reported yesterday.