Development Blogs.com

The Iraqi government is growing in size, steadily moving towards pre-2003 levels, according to this NY Times piece by Campbell Robertson.  Not only the growth in the size of the government is putting pressures on the budget, it is also a sign of another worrisome trend - the inability of the private sector to generate jobs and provide opportunities outside of the public sector. One interesting stat: In 2006, 31 percent of Iraq’s labor force was working in the public sector, according to the agency for statistics in the Ministry of Planning. The agency expects that figure to reach 35 percent this year, about 5 percentage points short of where the C.I.A. estimated it to be on the eve of the 2003 invasion.   As the article puts it, the problems of private sector growth and job creation...

Several months ago, Paraguay embarked on an historic change of power to elect Fernando Lugo to become president of the country. The election marked the end of 60 years of rule by the Colorado Party and renewed the hopes of the Paraguayan people that real change might bring them the jobs and prosperity that they had hoped to gain from their democratic transition. This week, another historic event occurred in Paraguay when the largest gathering of business leaders ever seen in the country came together to create a private sector vision for Paraguay’s future. Over 600 business leaders met in Asunción as well as the leaders of over 55 business associations to debate key reform topics and reach consensus on the most important points. This vision will soon be consolidated and published and...

Aldo Benini was writing about and developing humanitarian information management before I even started my professional career. I’ve always respected his work and was always saddened that we didn’t have more chances to work together. I’ve just discovered that his website makes nearly all of his research is available, including his latest work on Linking [...]...

With inflation and political backtracking competing with trends of economic growth in the Middle East and North Africa, the link between economic and political reform has increasingly come under scrutiny in the region.  It was a prevailing theme in the recent roundtable that CIPE held for key partners from Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yemen in Hammamet, Tunisia. Leading private sector organizations from around the region shared successful reform approaches, focusing on entrepreneurship, advocacy, public-private dialogue, and corporate governance.  Many of these programs underscore the need for institutions that promote better economic policies and expand growth dividends across a broader segment of society.  It was interesting to see partners not...

While the Peruvian government has been busy figuring out how to talk about inequality and bold redistributive policies without scaring local and foreign investors and markets, the corporate sector has leap frogged them and is now – unlike the government – ready for radical policies. ...(read more)...

I feel duty-bound to direct you towards two exciting articles which are also quite brief, so they won’t take up too much of your day. I realise that you’re busy. First up, it’s Sahana getting a mention in the Wall Street Journal, in an article with the snappy title of (sigh) Managing Disaster. Actually it’s just [...]...

How can Africa unlock its economic potential? This was the key question of the recent 18th World Economic Forum on Africa, which took place in Cape Town and was attended by nearly 900 business, government and civil society leaders from 50 countries. Two themes clearly emerged as crucial for realizing the continent’s potential: the need to improve the quality of political leadership and the need to harness the power of the private sector for development. Participants agreed that many of the roadblocks to Africa’s development have to do with the tendency of governments to be protectionist, interventionist, and perpetuating over-regulation – often in the name of defending the poor but rarely with the result of improving their lot. Meanwhile, more than 80% of poverty reduction in...

The Food Summit in Rome turned out better than expected. It was not derailed by Robert Mugabe. It survived the unedifying wrangling over a final communiqué. It gave the topic a good hearing. It confirmed some practical actions. And it passed the torch successfully to the G8 in Japan in July....(read more)...

MapAction and BrightEarth both feature in an article in the Independent entitled “Mapping the disaster zones” - how they think up the intensely creative titles for these articles, I just don’t know. Interesting enough, but these articles always leave me with a sense that the writer just doesn’t get it - apparently “Within 48 hours: [...]...

Stuff I should have blogged at the time: What if? - New York emergency housing competition results: Last September, New York City launched “What if? “, an open competition to find innovative designs for high-density emergency provisional housing for 38,000 households in the aftermath of a hurricane and flood disaster in afictional, one [...]...

Okay, everybody try not to laugh when you read the quote from this Network World article: Big Blue this week said its researchers had created specialized algorithms to help model and manage natural disasters such as wildfires, floods and diseases…. The model allows all unforeseen challenges to be solved, mostly within an hour, and has very [...]...

Well, not yet, but they will [pdf]. Janet Ginsburg explains the development of the idea of the Humanitarian Technology Review, while Bruno Giussani covers the recent TED breakfast, where Eric Rasmussen gave an update on InSTEDD. Initially the idea of a Humanitarian Technology Review sounds like a good idea - if it’s done right. The first two questions - remember the first two questions, everybody! - are: who is the target audience, and what do you want them to do with the information you’re providing? The briefing paper I linked to above says The Review’s readers, like the Review itself, span many niches: medical researchers, software developers, policy-makers, funders, doctors, veterinarians, communities trying to prepare for or reeling from disasters - even other media....

Public transport doesn’t often provide pointers for the humanitarian community. The recent cracking of the London OysterCard (following hot on the heels of the earlier crack of the Dutch transit card system) came as no surprise to digital security experts, but it should teach us fundamental lessons about information security and personal privacy issues. Security researchers say they’ve found a way to crack the encryption used to protect a widely-used smartcard in a matter of minutes, making it possible for them to quickly and cheaply clone the cards that are used to secure office buildings and automate the collection of mass transportation fares. No electronic identification scheme is secure. It doesn’t matter how good your technology is, any system which is built by...

The O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference is another one of these confabs that I watch from a distance, filled with a mixture of awe and dread. (Awe at the sheer brainpower that you can see in the many presentations, and dread at what might happen next.) This year, Jesse Robbins and Mikel Maron gave a presentation on DisasterTech to the poor and huddled masses that attended, updating some of their earlier thoughts on areas such as SMS, open source and distributed approaches. Now I like Jesse and Mikel, and I agree with the lines along which they’re thinking, but when I see slides that say “225,000 deaths preventable with existing technology”, I start to worry about whether the expectations of those poor and huddled masses from the technology world are being...

Ed Granger-Happ is taking a sabbatical from his job as CIO of Save the Children US, and spending the next few months as an executive fellow and the CIO-in-Residence at the Center for Digital Strategies at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. This is great news for Ed, and for the Center as well, since Ed has a track record of innovation that will hopefully encourage some of the Tuck staff and students to get more engaged in our sector. Even better, he’s started blogging as he begins the residency (I have no idea who managed to persuade him to commit to that…) and I hope that he’ll keep posting on a regular basis at his Dartmouth Fellowship blog....

In the last of four blogs with reflections and predictions from Davos, I look at web 2.0, Africa, governance and institutions....(read...

In the third of five blogs, I consider perspectives in three key areas- biofuels, climate change adaptation and water....(read...

Last week, I attended the World Economic Forum in Davos. This is the first of five blogs with my reflections and predictions on how the debates will be taken forward in 2008....(read...

Cisco have done a lot of good in our sector through their support to NetHope and similar initiatives, no doubt about that. However the promo video on their Telepresence site manages to showcase the least useful way we could possibly use their technology, as well as putting the stereotypical “young white middle class aid worker” in the centre of the frame - instead of the people that we’re supposed to be helping. UPDATE: Okay, so I got hit by the grumpy stick this morning.  On the other hand, the first draft of this post was far more vitriolic… UPDATE 2: Also, did you catch the obscure Western reference?  This blog is in danger of becoming too much like my personal blog…...

Tom asked me to elaborate on a point about NGO technology choices and (despite the fact that he’s failed to deliver the blog posts he promised, ahem) I think it’s worth putting something out there. I haven’t seen anything written about the issue of NGO technology markets anywhere else, but it seems to be a key issue given the recent development of some key applications and platforms. Basically the problem is this: the humanitarian community (but particularly NGOs) seems to make quite poor choices in terms of software. We then have to live with legacy software and all sorts of compatibility issues, while we lag behind developments such as Web2.0 and tend to deploy the sort of technology that only increases the gap between ourselves and our beneficiaries. To some extent...

… for one very good reason, and that’s because I’m not at the Global Sympsium +5 in Geneva. However it would be remiss of me not to blog about it, since it’s a pretty big deal. I’m also not liveblogging the NetHope Bi-Annual Summit in Panama, and that’s because I’m not there either. I’m sure that there are good explanations for my otherwise inexplicable absences, but that’s not important right now. The Symposium +5 is being held five years after the Symposium on Best Practices in Humanitarian Information Exchange (hence the +5 title - do keep up). That first symposium was a very mixed bag - it was the first time that the various actors in the sector had come together, so it was a very big deal. Because it was the first time,...

Conflict, Security and Development, vol 7, no. 3 (2007) [contents] - Focus is on disarmament, demobilisation & reintegration (DDR); includes an article on protracted refugee situations. Development Policy Review, vol. 25, no. 5 (Sept. 2007) [contents, selected full-text] - Special issue focusing on the "developmental state": "the issue seeks to inform the process of rethinking how more...

The Ethical Corporation is running a poll on its website, wondering whether companies have a role in helping poor countries address governance failures.  Thus far, it seems like 75%  think that companies should use their resources to help countries improve governance standards (25% agree that its a job of NGOs and governments to do so, not the private sector’s responsibility). It seems to me that whether companies should improve governance in poor countries or not is not an appropriate question.  A more interesting question we should be asking ourselves is - how can and do companies help improve governance in poor countries? Investment is one answer.  By investing in countries, companies certainly improve governance standards.  They do so by creating incentives to improve the...

Wired have just published their article on the Crisis in Darfur layers. It’s nice coverage (a little late, maybe), obviously focused on the technical aspect, but it also contains an update about Google’s involvement in this area. They’ve just announced a new nonprofit initiative called Google Earth Outreach, designed to provide more resources for these kinds of projects. There’s a showcase of a range of projects which I didn’t know about, and some nifty tutorials. The really appealling part is the Pro License Grant, which will make the full version of Google Earth more accessible to the sector, so it’s a pretty nice package overall. However I need to make a correction, which I’ve also added to the Wired site. The article refers to me as the...

The Disaster Resource Network at the World Economic Forum is an initiative that aims to network the private sector in support of disaster response activities. Generally speaking I’m strongly in favour of this kind of engagement, as long as everybody’s agenda is kept on the table, and it seems like there’s been a proliferation of private-public initiatives of this sort in the last few years. Only time will tell which ones really deliver - in the meantime, it can get distracting. DRN has just released the report (.doc, 350k) from an interesting survey on the use of ICT in emergencies, based on a desk review, survey and interviews. (Disclosure: I was one of the interviewees.) There’s no revelations in the actual findings, so you might want to skip to the bottom...

Another ridiculously late notice on an article in TechNet magazine from October: Communication & Collaboration: Building an Emergency Operations Center on Groove and SharePoint. As always, mine eye is drawn to the lessons that can be drawn from these experiences, which the article sums up as: First, network connectivity and bandwidth are not guaranteed… Second, the Internet isn’t always there. This may seem like a given in light of the previous constraint, but it’s important to highlight the potential frailty of an Internet uplink…Third, the definition of “users” expands greatly… How many organizations are ready to bring potentially hundreds of volunteers, contractors, and various civilian and military governmental staff into their...