Sometime during a recent PEXForum conference, I wrote on my notepad that resilience has become the development sector’s new buzzword. Others have made the same discovery. PSJP’s new paper, Building Resilience in International Development lists a raft of references to the term in the later literature of development and it seems that multilateral organisations, foundations,…
This blog post is prompted by the provocative article entitled Institutional Philanthropy and Popular Organising in Africa: Some Initial Reflections from Social Movement Activists by Halima Mohamed which draws on the experiences of activists from 13 different movements across Africa. I am part of one of those movements. Social movements are proof of ordinary people’s…
By Andrew Milner, Lisa Jordan and Stef van Dongen As the pandemic has stood the world on its head, one of the debates which has been thrown wide open is that of the future of the economy. PSJP has therefore launched an inquiry into how markets can be made to work for the common good…
“What’s on your secret excel spreadsheet?” This was the question posed to a room of Brazilian civil society practitioners, who had been convened by Candid in 2019 to discuss the topic of measurement in their work. Over 2018 and 2019, the GFCF had similarly coordinated a separate learning group of 15 community philanthropy partners to explore the…
The Government of India passed the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2020 on 23 September, less than 72 hours after it was tabled without any prior consultation, taking both civil society in India and the international donor community by surprise. The President gave his assent on 28 September, despite nationwide outcry from civil society and condemnation from the…
What builds community resilience? In this article posted on the India Development Review, Ruchita Chandrashekar, a behavioural health researcher and independent psychologist focusing on trauma and post-violence recovery offers important lessons for development and philanthropic organizations in their attempt to support communities through difficult times. As elements that are integral to building community resilience, she…
Since March 2020, Indonesia has recorded 127,000 cases of Covid-19 at the time of writing, the 24th highest figure in the world. While the pandemic has brought crises and apprehension, it has also brought some blessings in disguise. For one thing, it has stimulated a rise in giving during the first few months of pandemic,…
To follow up his article, #BuildBackBetter, Barry Knight is researching practical ways to make this happen. In the first of a series of articles, he examines the role of the individual, and concludes that a necessary condition of rebuilding society is to face the ‘shadow’ we all have within ourselves. The air is thick with chickens…
Sex workers are a hypervisible population — in popular imagination, in media, in sketches of the ‘bad woman’, but strangely they are also completely invisible — in government policies, the healthcare sector, etc. This hypervisibility/invisibility means that sex workers are viewed through the lens of criminality, morality or victimhood while finding themselves on the periphery…
Looking at the history of poverty, there appears to be one certainty: poverty has been a feature of every human society since time immemorial. As the Bible says: ‘The poor you will always have with you’ (Matthew 26:11). A breakthrough In the 19th century, philanthropy worked hard to overcome this, and by 1909 there was a…