reforming international development

There’s only one thing people hate giving away more than money. Power. In fact, the power to give away money is something people with large amounts of it tend to greatly enjoy. But power is …

Our consultations about the future of international development show that responsibility for deciding how money is spent should be transferred to people who receive the money rather than retained by those who give it.  This …

Read a translation of this article in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, or Ukrainian. What is this? This is an invitation to crowdsource with and beyond our community and activist networks, so we co-create a diverse …

In today’s globalised landscape, as the Covid-19 pandemic has starkly illustrated, an event in one region can send shockwaves around the world. The indiscriminate spread of the virus, unbounded by national lines or economic status, …

1. A heated argument about unrestricted funding Early one morning some years ago, my wife Sandra and I were marooned in the lounge of our hotel in Kolkata, because a visit to one of our …

1. Like tourism, International Development is heavily Eurocentric. It started off on the wrong note – advancing white supremacy, white saviourism, racism and domination over the global south. Today there are multiple unresolved and ongoing …

In this article, we report progress on our consultations across the ‘development’ ecosystem in the nine months since the publication of the Jigsaw report that called for root and branch reform of international development. The …

‘Efforts to bring successful results to scale have, for the most part, fallen on stony ground. Rather than consolidating gains and developing assets further, donors shift from one ‘magic solution’ to another with no reliable …

 ‘As soon as donor money stops, the project ends.’ This remark, by Rakesh Rajani, Vice President of Programs at Co-Impact, sets out the prevailing orthodoxy in international aid. In light of this, why do funders …

INGOs prefer unrestricted funds, often for good reasons. For funders this can feel like: ‘Just give us the money and go away .’ Yet many funders like me want to be part of the process …