Articles
Will Bill Gates' chickens help the poor in Africa?
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Bill Gates announced on 7 June that he is giving 100,000 chickens to the poor because chickens are “easy to take care of” and a woman with just five hens in Africa can make $1000 per year. For Mozambique where we work, this is remarkable – fewer than 2% of Mozambican farmers make $1000/year. What a wonderful idea. Why did no one think of this before?
Actually, they did. For a decade, Mozambique has had its district development loan fund, known locally at the “7 million” because the initial fund was Meticais 7 million per district. Most farm families have chickens running around, and one of the most common requests for loans from the fund is from people who agree with Gates that chickens are “easy” and they want to expand to commercial production. Nearly all fail, and cannot repay their initial loan. Perhaps the problem is not the initial five hens.
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The World Bank's existential crisis
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The World Bank is having an existential crisis.
For decades, the bank was the premier development finance institution, doling out loans to developing countries without rival.
The World Bank was also a pioneer - though not always willingly - in creating standards to protect people who could be harmed by its investments. In 1980, it became the first development agency to create a resettlement policy, which aims to ensure that communities displaced by bank-funded projects are not left worse off.
Financing development in Africa
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Pambazukahas a special issue on 'financing development in Africa': on the efficiency of aid, on mineral wealth, on health, women and children ... interesting reading.
SP4SD: Social Protection for Social Development
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Read this new report from UNDP on social protection as a tool for connecting different development goals.
Asylum seekers or economic migrants?
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Europe has been caught off guard by recent asylum-seeker arrivals, prompting what some have called a threat to the survival of the European Union. However, we have shown that Europe has admitted and integrated much larger numbers of refugees in the past. So why have countries been so overwhelmed this time around?
One major hurdle has been assessing the validity of such large numbers of asylum claims. Under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, every individual has the right to seek asylum from persecution. In some situations an individual’s motivations for movement—and their accompanying designation under international refugee law—are relatively evident. This is not the case for many recent arrivals in Europe.
Migration and asylum policies: Where to draw the line
