There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root. - Henry David Thoreau
Highlights and summarizes lessons from a new series of papers on Oxfam’s program work on local governance and community action.
Source: Oxfam From Poverty to Power Blog
Corrects “confusion among policymakers between graduation to middle-income status and graduation from aid dependency.”
Source: The Guardian Poverty Matters Blog
Religion, making babies and “peak child”: brilliant new Hans Rosling video
Source: TED via Oxfam From Poverty to Power Blog
New book out from environmental writer Fred Pearce on the land-grabbing epidemic that he charges with doing more harm to the world’s poor than climate change.
Source: The Guardian Environment Blog
Openly available data collected by Google on how 13,000 people in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda use the internet, presented with visualization and comparison.
Source: InsightsAfrica.com (via White African Blog)
Updated reprint of report on SABMiller’s tax dodging, which now includes
Source: ActionAid via ActionAid Campaign Blog
Staying focused on how humans interact with a system, and open to new theories—both because of the fallibility of human understanding, and the inevitability that a subject of study will change—is crucial to building successful systems, including social movements.
Choice quote: Never stop questioning your assumptions about how the world works.
Source: Cognitive Policy Works Blog
Great summary of research showing that the income share of the top decile and politics are the driving forces behind inequality, and what policy directions this implies.
Choice Quote: ‘In Latin America the middle classes seek to defend their share of income with different forms of alliances with the élite (some more successfully than others). This is different to India, for example, where the administrative classes defend their position mostly via alliances with the poor (which gives them the political power to mediate in the different conflicts between the capitalist élite and the state)’.
Source: Oxfam From Poverty to Power Blog
Reporting on the tax debate held May 8th in the City of London between tax experts from multinationals and accountancy and law firms, and hope that increasing awareness of corporate tax will encourage greater transparency.
Fascinating: In response to a question from ActionAid about how companies should be considering their tax payments as part of their corporate citizenship there was acceptance of this concept. One speaker referred to the situation in Japan where companies allegedly see it as an honour to pay tax and all aspire to be at the top of the government’s list of the largest taxpayers.
Source: ActionAid Campaign Blog
Summarizes how certain global context changes affect—or should affect—poverty research and analysis.
Choice quote: The key problem the paper addresses is the mismatch between the complex nature of poverty and the reductionist nature of measures used to track it. On top of this familiar paradox comes another: that poverty and inequality are rooted in asymmetric power relations, while the policy machineries we work through to address poverty are very much a part of those power structures.
Source: ODI Blog
