Guess who’s back… back again.
Happy New Year to all. After a hiatus due to being very busy with work, here’s your Saturday morning reading…
1. This Year Today: What Kim & Kanye mean for development | Brendan Rigby – WhyDev
On soils, youths, the Millennium Falcon, the Fugees, My Own Social Enterprise, beyond aid, business time for development and Brendan’s continuing obsession with Kimye. If you’re interested in development (and I’ll assume you are) you should be subscribed to ‘The Week Today’.
2. Six resolutions for aid workers | Maria May – Global Development Professionals Network
2015 is a big year for goals in international development. Maybe these resolutions will not be in the news when it comes to the big summits but “truly can improve an aid worker’s performance as well as an organization’s impact.”
Maybe you can guess one of my resolutions from me posting Saturday Morning Reading for the first time in 4 months!
3. Migration and Development: Small Tweaks for Big Benefits | Owen Barder and Theodore Talbot – Center For Global Development
While the public discourse about migration in the UK concentrates on new ways to keep people out, CGDev see this as a window of opportunity and have suggested thirteen innovations to deliver development benefits.
“They fall into three broad categories: capturing gains from immigration, for example by training and hiring more nurses from developing countries, rationalizing our rules about immigration, for example rolling back the nonsensical limits on the number of overseas students who can come to the UK temporarily to study, and innovating, by re-jigging global rules and domestic policies to help developing countries capture more of the benefits of sending their workers to the UK, however briefly.”
4. Working With The Grain: an important new book on rethinking approaches to governance | Duncan Green – From Poverty to Power
Duncan reviews a new book on ‘doing development differently’/’thinking and working politically’
“Overall, the book is subtle, complex, often confusing and repays careful study. The complexity is born of deep first hand knowledge, and in the end, suggests that for all Levy’s heroic attempts to distil some general lessons, the roots of success and failure are really only visible with hindsight. Governance advisers and reformers will continue to flounder in the fog, but WWTG, and the other revisionist books and papers, can help a little by discounting some of the bad ideas, and maybe showing people how to look for (and recognize) success a little earlier. That feels like a worthwhile contribution.”
5. Institutions eat interventions for breakfast | 59 minutes of development
“The idea that the development community should focus on interventions or even technologies and spot the winners is itself problematic. Donors need to get better at spotting leaders and organizations that routinely find and implement effective solutions, and support them to expand their efforts and/or find solutions to other pressing problems. These are actually capabilities that are extremely valuable, especially when paired with the political savviness to keep stakeholders, like the national government, happy.”
6. The future of work: There’s an app for that | The Economist
“Freelance workers available at a moment’s notice will reshape the nature of companies and the structure of careers”. Technology is transforming labour markets in developed countries. Given the spread of mobile money in any developing countries, opportunities abound.