- In Australia, Labor’s foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong announced that a future Labor government will lift foreign aid every year.
- Caelin Briggs comments on the donor fatigue impacting the Democratic Republic of the Congo and explains what the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade could do to help.
- In order to understand why “scaling up” good ideas is difficult, especially in the development sector, Kelsey Piper talks to Mushfiq Mobarak. Mobarak, an economics professor who works at Yale’s Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale, identifies four issues that promising programmes face.
- David Evans, lead economist at the World Bank, challenges a recently published article by The Economist that stipulates that “the big problem is teachers: often too few, too ignorant – or simply not there.” For Evans, it is the education system, not the teachers, that is responsible for low levels of education.
- In this Freakonomics episode, Stephen J. Dubner discusses how religious aid programmes are sometimes more effective than non-religious ones.
- This Economist piece discusses how language issues can be a challenge during crisis responses.
- Isis Gaddis explains why measuring poverty at the household level misses many dimensions of core inequalities between gender in poor countries.
- The US decision to withdraw support from groups battling the Syrian government has worsened the condition of living in the Rukban camp, a strip of land wedged between Syria and Jordan, illustrating the failing of the international community to help, according to Rozina Ali.