Showing items 1 to 13 of 13
It’s August 2013 and I’m about as broke as a ‘banker’ in London can be. I had eagerly taken up my first position in the big city: interning at RBS’ risk department. That’s right, I had made it to the big time… And then rent happened… And bills… So with accrued holiday time but no […]
The household economy approach (HEA) is a method for assessing the vulnerability of rural populations to economic shocks and changes, based on their livelihood patterns and market information. It is now widely used as a method of famine early warning by many governments and humanitarian agencies, and also has important applications for managing the impacts […]
As an economist, I have always found it logical that NGOs should be expected to demonstrate the impact of their work. Once we have set our objectives, we need to know whether we are achieving them and how we might do better. That means measurement. At Farm Africa, we support smallholder farmers to increase their […]
The data revolution in international development continues to draw attention and take shape as the third annual International Conference on Financing for Development approaches in Addis Ababa this July. At Evidence for Development, the pursuit of strong data and baselines for programme design, monitoring and evaluation is central to our work in measuring and supporting […]
Almost 15 years after the UN General Assembly proclaimed 18 December to be International Migrants Day (IMD), how has the occasion been received and observed, whose rights does it champion, and which groups does it currently exclude? Migrants and refugees: what’s the difference? In December 2000, two global days of observance related to migration were […]
As mobile data collection in remote regions and developing countries becomes more viable for development organisations, the robustness of the methodologies used must be considered in relation to the goal of evidence-based development. Expanded possibilities According to the UN International Telecommunication Union, “by the end of 2014, 55% of all mobile-broadband subscriptions are expected to […]
LSE’s recent JSRP conference on politics and evidence in international development highlighted problems inherent in the ways ‘evidence’ tends to be defined and used in mainstream development discourse and practice. How can Evidence for Development’s individual household method (IHM) and current involvement in the ‘Assessing Rural Transformations’ project inform the discussion and help to oil […]
Using public money to reduce global poverty is a tough enough ‘task’ even without having to account for each pound spent every five minutes. But aid professionals can hardly claim to be less susceptible to self-serving group-think than anyone else, and indeed the case for strong reality checks on aid expenditure will remain particularly strong […]
Practical and reliable estimates of wealth and poverty are becoming increasingly important as more countries introduce social protection systems, and as development programmes place a greater emphasis on targeting. However, there is not yet a widely-accepted ‘gold standard’ measuring method – and in the absence of this, it is difficult to assess the relative merits of […]
Idly scanning the pages of the Observer on Sunday morning, this graphic caught my eye in Will Hutton’s article about inequality in Britain. Evidence for Development has a large collection of individual household income data from some of the poorest countries in Africa, and Hutton’s chart on wealth inequality in the UK reminded me […]
I did my first, and possibly last, Ignite talk at Strata London recently. If you don’t know the format it goes like this: 5 minutes, 20 slides; the slides automatically advance every 15 seconds and you have to tell your story and finish on time. The story I was telling wasn’t about Acunu, nor even […]
You might remember all the attention last year on stopping Joseph Kony and the LRA. For the past two weeks I’ve been with Self Help Africa (SHA) in a region of northern Uganda that was severely affected by the conflict – in many villages, a whole generation of young adults are missing – and there […]
All of us at Evidence for Development are delighted to be launching our new website (generously designed pro bono by an anonymous-for-the-moment friend), complete with a section for blog posts. We’ll use these blogs to share EfD news and insights, start new development debates or add our own perspectives to existing ones. We’re hoping to […]