Slums

If anyone else was distressed by all the stuff we did on slums in 202, I have found a great website where you can donate money to upgrade sanitation facilities in slums around the world, and lots of other projects too.

www.globalgiving.com

everyone should take a look!

Radio 4 "Africalab"

An interesting programme on brain drain and its contribution to African underdevelopment. You can listen to it by going to Radio 4 'Listen Again' 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/atoz/

and finding 'Africa Lab' (under A)

Targeting versus Universalism

Here is an interesting paper on Targeting versus universalism

Mkandawire, T. (2005) "Targeting versus universalism in poverty reduction" United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. Programme paper nb 23.

http://www.unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/(httpAuxPages)/955FB8A594EEA0B0C12570FF00493EAA/$file/mkandatarget.pdf

if not just search the paper on UNRISD website: http://www.unrisd.org

generally Thandika Mkandawire (who is also the director of UNRISD) is a very interesting person writing on development. Always check his publications and UNRISD publications generally. They are very credible and not quite mainstream.

Enjoy,
Dina

From WID to GAD an Article on Gender

Good article on the Gender week:

Razavi, S. and Carol Miller (1995) From WID to GAD: Conceptual Shifts in the Woman and Development Discourse. United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD)

You can access it from the UNRISD website http://www.unrisd.org/

Your Development Photos!

This is an invitation for you to post photos you took while travelling in the south, on gap year or working/volunteering with an NGO or just randomly found online (but please put the source then) and to comment on them. Now I know that you might already have them on your facebook profiles! But I am hoping this blog will give you an opportunity to reflect on these experiences in the light of what you have been reading/discussing (Which I am not sure would be very interesting to do on facebook!). As I said earlier in the beginning of the term, one of the objectives of this class is to help you relate development theories/materials to real things that happen on the ground everyday. So let's experiment a bit and see what we'll get out of this.

Once you put some, I will also share with you some of the ones I collected during my work in an international development NGO in Egypt and some comments about them.

An Excellent Paper by David Mosse on Poverty

Hi All,

Here is an extra reading for your spare time. This is a paper by David Mosse, who is a development anthropologist based at SOAS. The paper is titled Power and the durability of poverty: a critical exploration of the links between culture, marginality and chronic poverty. It was just published in 2007.
It is a bit long and a bit dense but very very interesting linking the structural and social causes/meanings of poverty. And also linking poverty and power.

Here is a link to the paper:

http://www.chronicpoverty.org/resources/cp107.htm

Read the abstract and then you can download the paper from the right hand side icon (pretty obvious I think :))


David Mosse is generally someone whose work in development is very interesting to read. He published a book called Cultivating Development, which is basically an ethnography of a development project he worked in as part of a consultancy team with DFID. Another interesting book of his is called On Brokerage and Translation, which is an edited piece with David Lewis. This one is about people who are in between two worlds(for example those who work with local NGO's) and how they translate the meanings of development between development workers and aid receivers.

A new way of looking at "development".

I don't know if you all have seen this already, but there's a fantastic statistician called Prof Rosling, who organises development statistics in a very interesting way. His research shows that we can't think about the "developing" and "developed" world by looking at countries alone.

There is a YouTube video of one of his lectures (where he shows that students in one elite university get lower marks than chimps in a quiz on development) http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=RUwS1uAdUcI

There's lots more on his Gapminder project website, including some very cool interactive graphs.