Development Blogs.com

Here are three recent guides that are designed to help with different facets of the research process: Guide to Locating Migration Policies in the European Commission, 2nd ed. (Migration Policy Group, Oct. 2008) [access] - This guide helps readers to locate migration policy measures in the rather complex machinery of the European Commission. Immigration Data Matters (Population Reference Bureau...

Amidst the profound concerns about a lengthy economic downturn (or worse), public officials are taking measures to improve the effectiveness of public dollars -- or public rupees, as the case may be. Here in the United States, President-elect Obama has stated that he'll look for ways to offset the cost of a proposed second stimulus package by cutting wasteful government programs. That same spirit is being felt in India. As reported by Mathaba.net: India and Britain agreed to work together to strengthen impact evaluation in the two countries for effective implementation of public welfare programs, particularly for the poor. The agreement was reached in a meeting between Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission of India and visiting Douglas...

Asylum Seekers and Refugees: Accessing Accommodation and Housing Support (Shelter, Oct. 2008) [text] Futures Denied: Statelessness among Infants, Children and Youth (Refugees International, Oct. 2008) [text] Impact Assessment of Humanitarian Response: A Review of the Literature (Feinstein International Center, Oct. 2008) [text] Impact of the EU Qualification Directive on International...

On Tuesday, Calvert mutual funds released a report entitled “Examining the Cracks in the Ceiling: A Survey of Corporate Diversity Practices in the Calvert Social Index." It spells out the business case for gender diversity and family-friendly benefits. Surveys included in the report indicate that: 79% of female consumers surveyed by the Women's Business Enterprise National Council in 2007 stated that "knowing a company purchases from women-owned businesses would compel them to try the product or services from that company, even if they were not a current customer." 81% of female respondents noted that "awareness of a company’s mission to buy from women-owned businesses would moderately or significantly solidify their brand loyalty". "Costs associated...

Thanks to Euan Semple, I recently learned about Akvo.org, the self-styled "open source for water and sanitation." Part of the project, Akvo Direct, looks like a niche version of Kiva.org: an attempt to connect directly water and sanitation projects from around the world with potential donors, cutting out the intermediaries (and associated overheads). The web at its best. But what I really liked about the site is the attempt to apply the concept of Real Simple Reporting (RSR):Funding large numbers of small projects has always been considered too expensive. A big reason is that too much time and money is spent reporting on each of them. We simplify but improve reporting with Akvo Really Simple Reporting (Akvo RSR). This is a web and SMS-based reporting system that lets project...

Documents/Reports from the 59th Executive Committee Meeting: - List of documents - Refugee Realities: Meeting the needs of refugees and other people of concern globally. Global Needs Assessment, Pilot Report (Oct. 2008) [report launched during EXCOM; related web page; press release] Evaluation Reports from the Policy Development and Evaluation Service (PDES): - Evaluation of UNHCR’s efforts...

Access to Protection at Airports in Europe (Hungarian Helsinki Committee, 2008) [text] Evaluation of UNHCR’s returnee reintegration programme in Angola (UNHCR, August 2008) [text] Forced Evictions and Disability Rights in Africa (GlobaLex, Sept. 2008) [text] Humanitarian Implications of Climate Change: Mapping Emerging Trends and Risk Hotspots (CARE, August 2008) [text via ReliefWeb]...

A new GAO Report on international food security (International Food Security: Insufficient Efforts by Host Governments and Donors Threaten Progress to Halve Hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2015) gets it almost completely right when it points to the feeble, self-defeating, and confused U.S. policies on world hunger. The report diplomatically states: The efforts of host governments and donors, including the United States, to achieve the goal of halving hunger in sub-Saharan Africa by 2015 have thus far been insufficient. The GAO is far too kind. U.S. and other donor hunger policies have been disastrous, as demonstrated by the current food price crisis. The sub-title of the GAO's Report says progress to cut hunger is threatened by these donor mistakes. In fact, as the GAO...

Our efforts toward more and better impact evaluation of development programs made a major advance this week with the announcement that Howard White, who has dedicated his career to building evidence about development effectiveness, has accepted the position as the first director of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (see the CGD initiative: Closing the Evaluation Gap). This culminates a broad international search (conducted by an excellent team at the London-based executive search firm of Heidrick & Struggles), and represents a very promising and concrete step toward the launch of the 3IE, an entity that will bring new financial and technical resources to conduct and disseminate impact evaluations around the world. Howard comes to the leadership position with a...

CGD yesterday hosted a lively book chat with Gregory Clark, author of a provocative new book, A Farewell To Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Clark, a British academic who is the chair of the economics department at the University of California at Davis, was witty and charming as he proposed a theory of economic growth that implied that most of the development work going on in the world is wrong-headed and doomed to fail.To put his views in perspective when introducing him, I offered a four-bullet intellectual history of development economics in the later half of the 20th century: It's physical capital, stupid. It's human capital, stupid. It's markets and policies, stupid. And finally, with a brief nod towards social capital we arrive at the current conventional...

CGD yesterday hosted a lively book chat with Gregory Clark, author of a provocative new book, A Farewell To Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Clark, a British academic who is the chair of the economics department at the University of California at Davis, was witty and charming as he proposed a theory of economic growth that implied that most of the development work going on in the world is wrong-headed and doomed to fail. To put his views in perspective when introducing him, I offered a four-bullet intellectual history of development economics in the later half of the 20th century: It's physical capital, stupid. It's human capital, stupid. It's markets and policies, stupid. And finally, with a brief nod towards social capital we arrive at the current...

Access to health care and human rights of asylum seekers in Malta: Experiences, results and recommendations (Médecins du Monde, 2007) [text] Fighting HIV/AIDS together with refugees and internally displaced populations: Summary of 2006 UNHCR Missions (UNHCR, Sept. 2007) [text] Impact Assessment of the Gokwe Integrated Recovery Action Project Zimbabwe (Feinstein International Center, August...

2007 Report on International Religious Freedom (U.S. Dept. of State, Sept. 2007) [text]"After the Wave: A Pilot Project to Develop Mental Health Services in Ampara District, Sri Lanka Post-Tsunami," Journal of Humanitarian Assistance (Sept. 2007) [text]Protracted displacement and remittances: The case of Somalis in Eastleigh, Nairobi, New Issues in Refugee Research Paper No. 143 (UNHCR, Aug....

Gaining from Migration: Towards a New Mobility System (OECD, Sept. 2007) [text]Information Services for Refugee Communities in Zambia, Paper presented at 73rd IFLA General Conference (15 Aug. 2007) [text]Library Services for Displaced People: Activities in Burmese Refugee Camps, Paper presented at 73rd IFLA General Conference (15 Aug. 2007) [text]The long road home: Opportunities and obstacles...

DR Congo: A Regional Analysis (WriteNet, July 2007) [text] EU needs common policy on asylum (ISN Security Watch, 31 July 2007) [text] The New Myth about Climate Change (Foreign Policy, August 2007) [text] Peace and Conflict 2008 (CIDCM, 27 July 2007) [access] - Chapter extracts, supplemental materials, and executive summary provided. Real-time evaluation of UNHCR's IDP operation in Uganda...

My previous post described the "Protracted Refugee Situations" resource now available through UNHCR's Policy Development and Evaluation Service (PDES). Apparently, this is the first of several subject-based document sets in the works. Future collections will be grouped around the following themes: - Refugee protection, asylum and international migration - The protection of refugee women and...

2007 Armed Conflicts Report: Preview (Project Ploughshares, 2007) [text] Housing and Property Restitution for Refugees and Displaced Persons: Implementing the ‘Pinheiro Principles’ (OCHA/IDD, UN HABITAT, UNHCR, FAO, OHCHR, NRC & IDMC, March 2007 (print), July 2007 (electronic)) [text] Internally displaced in Chad: Trapped between civil conflict and Sudan’s Darfur crisis (IDMC, July 2007)...

COHRE, Global Survey on Forced Evictions: Violations of Human Rights (Dec. 2006) [text] Joint Committee on Human Rights, The Treatment of Asylum Seekers (House of Lords & House of Commons, 30 March 2007) [text] Lambert, B. and C. Pougin de la Maisonneuve, UNHCR’s response to the Tsunami emergency in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, December 2004 - November 2006: An independent evaluation, PDES/2007/01...

Jeff Crisp of UNHCR's Policy Development and Evaluation Service (PDES) very kindly passed along the following references to supplement my earlier post on Kakuma refugee camp. They include, respectively, 1) studies that consider the overall situation in Kakuma, 2) evaluations of specific programmes implemented in the camp, and 3) further reading on research into the socio-economic aspects of life...

(Updated April 26) Benchmarks for Durable Solutions for Internally Displaced Persons (IASC, March 2007) [text] Contingency Planning and Humanitarian Action: A Review of Practice, Network Paper no. 59 (HPN, March 2007) [text] Coordinating the Humanitarian Response to Refugee Situations: The Role of Power and Trust in Humanitarian Networks, Sussex Migration Working Paper No. 42 (Sussex Centre...

"Countries know where they want to be, but they may not know the best way of getting there. We would like to see the development of a new institution which can help us generate and use impact evaluation findings and help build capacity within our country to develop evidence and answer some of our enduring questions." --Margaret Kakande, Ugandan Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development Bellagio, Italy, may be far removed from the government offices in developing countries where policymakers seek evidence to guide large social and economic programs. Nevertheless, a couple of weeks ago important strides were made at the Rockefeller Foundation's conference center there toward the launching of a new entity that will promote learning for social and economic development...

The October issue of the CGIAR ICT-KM News links to a report (PDF format) on the ICT-KM Program's experience to date in Monitoring and Evaluation.The paper gives an outline of the ICT-KM Program and M&E approach; it describes the M&E strategies used; gives an overview of the results; and identifies 5 generic challenges that program and project managers can face regarding M&E. The paper offers suggestions, based on experiences within the ICT-KM Program, for meeting these challenges.Tags: agricultural information cgiar monitoring...

When New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s anti-poverty commission recommended this week that the city pay poor people to send their kids to school and keep up-to-date on immunizations (see Increasing Economic Opportunity and Reducing Poverty in New York City the idea had an oddly familiar ring to it. This is just the type of "conditional cash transfer" that's been implemented at large scale in Mexico, Brazil and elsewhere, often with strikingly positive results. There's little doubt that the commissioners were inspired by those experiences, whose impact has been convincingly demonstrated through careful evaluations, and documented in a veritable library of research papers and policy reports (for a start, see: From Social Assistance to Social Development: Targeted Education...

The New York Review of Books' Aid: Can it Work? is a wide-ranging review of Bill Easterly's recent book The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Easterly discussed his book at a CGD event last March, transcript available.) Much more than an informed book review, Nicholas Kristof's article paints an excellent picture of the state of the debate on foreign aid. In sum, “The conundrum facing the rich countries is that everywhere in the developing world, and particularly in Africa, you see children dying for want of pennies, while it's equally obvious that aid often doesn't work very well.” As is done in the article, Jeffrey Sachs and Bill Easterly are often placed at opposite ends of the spectrum of aid...

CTA just released a book on impact assessment. Entitled 'Perceptions and Practice: an Anthology of Impact Assessment Experiences' it collects the experiences of 61 storytellers — recounted through interviews and transcribed into stories — in assessing the impact of information-related development projects.From an agricultural perspective, it includes studies from: National Agricultural Marketing and Development Corporation (NAMDEVCO) information products, Trinidad and Tobago; Electronic Delivery of Agricultural Information (EDAI) telecentres project, Uganda; Aqua Outreach Programme (AOP) extension materials project, Thailand; Agricultural research organisations’ capacity development project, Latin America; and the CTA Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI) service, AfricaTags:...