Covid-19 diagrams translated into Arabic

My DFID colleague Emma Wind and her friend Bayan Dahdah have very helpfully translated the Covid-19 diagrams by Peter Evans, Hamsi Evans and me into Arabic. The original English-language versions featured in these two Oxfam blogs (blog 1 and blog 2), and these have been also been translated into Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. The aim is to …

On Covid-19 Social Science can save lives: where do we start?

This blog is republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. The original was published on Oxfam's From Poverty to Power blog, and the original post can be found here. It is part two of two, and the first part can be found here. In yesterday’s post, I looked at some of the social and …

What we’re reading on governance & conflict – COVID-19 edition, 3 April

Week 2 of our special ‘What we’re reading’ email focused on emerging thinking on Covid-19 and the potential implications and insights from a governance and conflict perspective. DFID Research & Evidence Division -funded research teams designated with a 🌟. The list is compiled with my DFID colleague Alisha Patel and includes contributions sent in by …

What I’m reading this month: September 2019 edition

Delayed trains or heavy traffic (papers/journal articles/longer thought pieces) Patrick Porter, Why Britain doesn’t do grand strategy This paper from 2010 came up in my Twitter feed recently, and it’s well worth a (re)read. Porter argues that Britain’s lack of ‘grand strategy’ is due in part to not having clear enemies, to ‘delegating’ strategy to …

What I’m reading this month: July 2019 edition

Quick reads for short journeys (blogs/policy briefs/podcasts) Ali Breland, The bizarre and terrifying ‘deepfake’ video that helped bring an African nation to the brink I read a lot of stuff about corruption, crime and conflict (the 3Cs troika), but I have to admit that little I’ve read recently has freaked me out as much as …

Bringing serious & organised crime into development research

In keeping with our new tradition, I did a 'Friday Thread' on some of the work I've been doing for DFID, beginning to think through what a research offer on SOC might look like. It's early days, with a lot more work to be done, and this thread shares some of this thinking. LOOK BOTH …

What I’m reading this month: June 2019 edition

Tube journeys (blogs/policy briefs/podcasts) Rim Turkmani, Devolution of power or decentralisation of power in Syria? This blog from the DFID-funded Conflict Research Programme looks at how fragmentation of the previously highly-centralised state in Syria has led to the rise of regional and local elites drawing legitimacy from ethno-sectarian narratives, the use of violence and control …

New blog in Conversation Africa: What we found out about bribery patterns in Uganda’s health care system

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. What we found out about bribery patterns in Uganda's health care system Experts fear that Uganda’s efforts to eliminate graft in its health care system are not sustainable. Suuba Trust/FlickrHeather Marquette, University of Birmingham; Caryn Peiffer, University of Bristol, …

New policy brief out on Uganda, health & bribery

Want to learn more about how bribery for health services in Uganda reduced dramatically from 2011 to 2015? Have a look at this new policy brief about Uganda's health sector as a 'hidden' positive outlier in bribery reduction. Full paper here.      

Learning about the ‘mechanics of governance’ with DFID colleagues & researchers

This blog was originally published on the DFID Research blog and was called 'The machinery of government and the mechanics of governance: Findings from the Uganda Governance Evidence Week'. It was co-authored with DFID colleagues - Peter Evans, Alisha Patel and David Pedley. In October 2018, DFID Research and Evidence Division (RED) and DFID Uganda …