The small CGD team in Europe tries to keep abreast of what is going on in development policy around Europe, for our own benefit and to share with CGD colleagues. We thought others might be interested to receive our weekly digest of up to a half dozen stories which have caught our eye.
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.
The always-insightful Duncan Green discusses on his blog why migration is a ‘Cinderella issue’ in development, following a talk by Michael Clemens at a lunchtime meeting in London hosted by CGD in Europe and IPPR.
Duncan says part of the problem may be the ‘sedentary prejudice’:
Before he became the UK Secretary of State for International Development, Andrew Mitchell was scathing about the habit of having big international conferences to ‘put large sums of money on the table’.
This is a joint post with Rita Perakis
Last week, CGD and Social Finance launched a new high-level Working Group to consider Development Impact Bonds, a new mechanism to enable private investment in development outcomes. Owen Barder and Rita Perakis explain.
There is nothing new about the idea that development assistance is an investment: spending money today in the hope of future benefits. Putting money into immunizing kids or giving them an education is an excellent investment in the future well-being of those people. But if there are financial returns they are often far in the future and cannot be directly linked back to the investment. For many development investments the returns are mainly social, not financial. And the absence of financial returns on a reasonable timescale could be why there is no market for investing in development. There is a small pool of investors who are willing to be paid in good karma; but most would rather be paid in dollars, sterling or euros.