Tagged: a deeper look

  • Women as leaders in conflict response

    The international community is not giving enough attention to the impact that humanitarian crises have on women and girls or to the role they play in emergency response. We need to. It’s time to examine how women are disproportionately affected by conflict and emergencies and how they fill the roles of first responders, caregivers and peacebuilders.

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  • The famine and food security crisis

    Food insecurity is on the rise again. Driven by conflict, the consequences of famine and food insecurity are a central feature of today’s humanitarian crises and complex emergencies.

    In this episode, I talk with Matt Nims, the acting director of Food for Peace at the U.S. Agency for International Development. We discuss the impact of food insecurity on affected populations, the challenges in responding and the promising approaches that can mitigate the severity of a food security crisis.  

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  • New approaches to refugee and migration needs

    It’s a new year. There is a lot to be hopeful about as we look ahead, and we heard a great deal of that optimism during our podcast last year on the Sustainable Development Goals. Yet increasingly, the progress we have seen in human development is threatened by larger, and more devastating, complex emergencies.

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  • In many parts of the world, countries are aligning their national development plans around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In other nations, the global goals don’t have the same moral authority.

    In this podcast, I speak to Dan Runde, a prominent conservative voice in the development community. Dan is the director of the project on prosperity and development at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

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  • Words count!

    Let’s start the New Year by looking at how we talk about development. It is striking how certain concepts and buzzwords rally people around ideas and mobilize us into action. The buzzwords themselves become powerful change agents. Yet, when they mature into unquestioned orthodoxy, they can restrict our vision and dull our understanding. Here are two buzzwords we love to use in development that are ripe for a deeper look.

    Sustainability

    Development and sustainability go together like bricks and mortar. But this term now has two distinct meanings in development parlance. One meaning refers to policies and actions that safeguard the environment and do not deplete our natural resources. This meaning has gained currency over the last 15 years. The second, and at least in my experience more common use, refers to a recipient partner’s interest and ability to continue projects or reforms financed by donors once donor funding ends. This use is closely associated with the concept of country ownership. When USAID adopted sustainable development as its credo in the mid-1990s, it was a response to the criticism that donor-funded projects collapsed when the funding ran out, often up-ending years of effort. This was partly a result of donors not wanting to take on recurrent costs that were seen as the partner’s responsibility. The lack of serious planning for recurrent costs remains a major challenge in international development.

    Yet, should sustainable development even be an objective in a world where technology is changing everything around us at an exponential rate? Do we really want to sustain yesterday’s solutions? I think not.

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