EADI Debating Development Research

By Isabelle Desportes It is inherent to times of crises, and we can witness it in the way the COVID-19 pandemic is being handled too: strong leadership emerges, many decisions and emergency legislative mechanisms are enforced, and some key issues move to the background. While such centralistic measures are often necessary, they also bear the …

Continue reading "Disaster response: why democracy matters"

By Henning Melber It might be a platitude but is a reminder for all we say and do: solidarity in its true meaning cannot be confined to words only. Unless these are also reflected in what we do and how we do it, solidarity remains a rather meaningless tokenism or lip service. Declarations are not …

Continue reading "Overcoming Developmentalism"

By Owasim Akram After working for more than ten years as a development practitioner in Bangladesh with a tremendous opportunity to observe the lives of the extreme poor while living very closely to them, one simple question kept  chasing me all the time: why do millions of them remain still poor despite huge progress in …

Continue reading "Inheriting Extreme Poverty"

By Melanie Pinet and Carmen Leon-Himmelstine Covid-19 is an unprecedented moment, halting life as we know it. For the global development community, the effects have been profound. Several NGOs have had to scale back or completely stop their operations overseas, while local actors and civil society are rapidly organising to respond to the crisis through …

Continue reading "How can Covid-19 be the catalyst to decolonise development research?"

By Ananya Chakraborty and Lennart Kaplan There has been a spurt in research to design appropriate policy solutions for achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in the Global South. Ironically, such research projects often build upon existing power hierarchies, which may result in unsafe and dangerous working conditions and undermine the Sustainable Development Goal …

Continue reading "Researchers must improve the working conditions for local collaborators"

By Maggie Carter Humanity is currently facing a threat against which scientific knowledge is our most powerful weapon. Researchers are racing to learn more about the invisible enemy that is Covid-19. However, at the same time, we face another threat, one that has been rearing its head in recent years, but is becoming all the …

Continue reading "From Science to Practice: Strengthening Research Uptake to Achieve the SDGs"

by Fabio Gatti and Oane Visser  | EADI/ISS Blog Series The potential of the digitalization of agriculture in Africa to contribute to food security, poverty reduction and environmental sustainability agendas is being increasingly recognized, as shown by growing investment in digital technologies that are supposed to help small-scale farmers to ‘upgrade’ the way they farm. However, …

Continue reading "Digitalizing agriculture in Africa: promises and risks of an emerging trend"

By Per Øyvind Bastøe, Wendy Asbeek Brusse and Jörg Faust The recent statement from the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee calls for sustained action to address the crisis in the poorest countries of the planet. In these societies, the pandemic will encounter weak public health systems. Lock-down measures will crush fragile economic structures and worsen the …

Continue reading "COVID-19 and Development Co-operation: we know a lot about what works, let’s use the evidence"

We cordially invite you to present your PhD on this blog! All accepted and published blog posts will be featured in the fortnightly EADI newsletter and via social media. During the publishing process, we will help you with the editing and with becoming familiar with the rather casual and journalistic blogging style. In October 2020 …

Continue reading "EADI Blog Prize for outstanding posts on PhD research"

By Remco van de Pas We are awakened to a new reality. The pandemic outbreak by an infectious pathogen comes to no surprise to the Global Health community. The World Health Organization (WHO) has prepared for pandemic scenarios and response plans since over a decade, albeit that they have been written for an influenza virus, …

Continue reading "The Coronavirus pandemic and the irrelevance of the SDGs"

By Ghassan Baliki, Tilman Brück, Neil Ferguson, Patricia Justino and Wolfgang Stojetz  People who live through extreme events are, often deeply, altered by the experiences they have. Even when those experiences take place predominantly in the physical realm, they are also events of consciousness. They come not only with physical impacts but also with emotional …

Continue reading "How do we live with corona?"

By Natalia Cintra, Jean Grugel and Pia Riggirozzi  Health emergencies exacerbate almost every form of social injustice in the global South. State biases, governance failures and inadequate and inappropriate policy responses leave legacies that can be as bad as the disease itself. In situations of crisis, public service provision and access to health and welfare …

Continue reading "Displaced women and girls in Latin America threatened by COVID-19"

By Barbara Oosters and Saskia van Veen EADI/ISS Blog Series My (Barbara)’s fascination and interest for the issue of civic space started in Indonesia. Local organisations struggled with the introduction of a vaguely framed law for Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), warning them not to work on issues going against ‘’Indonesian’’ values. A few years later I …

Continue reading "The Battle is on: Civic Space & Land Rights"