ODI

The largest-ever European-funded research project on migration, MIGNEX will be carried out in 25 communities across ten countries over five years.

Gender norms are the often implicit, informal rules by which people live that can lead to harmful attitudes, behaviours and actions such as violence and discrimination against women and girls. These are complex but critical concepts that need to be understood for better development policy and programming. While quality evidence on how to shift gender norms is growing, improved monitoring, evaluation and dissemination of evidence is vital for sustainable change.

The Advancing Learning and Innovation on Gender Norms (ALIGN) project, led by ODI and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is a new initiative connecting those working on social and gender norms across a range of sectors and issues. Its aim is to further knowledge sharing and innovation to ensure evidence and learning on norm change informs more effective policy and practice.

This webinar introduces the ALIGN platform and discusses some of the key debates and concepts shaping cutting-edge development work on addressing harmful gender norms. Drawing from ODI’s research on gender norms alongside the experiences of projects in Uganda and India, the panel discusses:

• What are the key concepts and evidence for understanding gender norm change?
• How can programmes better respond to emerging evidence and context-specific dimensions of gender norms?
• What challenges, opportunities and learnings can be drawn from projects in Uganda and India to inform policy and practice?

Register your attendance here. 

Biographies

Dr. Suzanne Petroni is Principal & Owner at Gender Equality Solutions and an expert in gender equity and the health and rights of women and youth.

Dr. Caroline Harper is Head of Programme and Principal Research Fellow for the Gender Equality and Social Inclusion Programme at the Overseas Development Institute, where she leads the Advancing Learning and Innovation on Gender Norms (ALIGN) project.

Dr. Ravi Verma is Regional Director for the Asia Regional Office of the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) in new Delhi, India.

Lori Michau is Co-Director for Raising Voices, a feminist non-profit organisation based in Kampala, Uganda working to prevent violence against women and children.

 

What are the opportunities and challenges to providing mental health and psychosocial support in emergencies? This event launches the latest HPN magazine.

Exploring conceptualisations of dignity in humanitarian action to better understand what dignity means to displaced people in different contexts.

The panel discuss new findings on life under the Taliban and how the international community should engage.

Based on first-hand interviews with more than 160 Taliban fighters and officials, as well as civilians, this paper examines how the Taliban govern the lives of Afghans living under their rule. Taliban governance is more coherent than ever before; high-level commissions govern sectors such as finance, health, education, justice and taxation, with clear chains of command and policies from the leadership based in Pakistan down to villages in Afghanistan. 

Where the government and aid agencies provide public goods and services, the Taliban coopt and control them. Health and education in Taliban areas are a hybrid of NGO and state-provided services, operating according to Taliban rules. The Taliban also regulate utilities and communications, collecting on the bills of the state electricity company in at least eight of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces and controlling around a quarter of the country’s mobile phone coverage.

Justice provision has also become increasingly far-reaching. Taliban taxes either coopt Islamic finance concepts or mimic official state systems.

The reach of Taliban governance demonstrates that they do not have to formally occupy territory to control what happens within it. Governance does not come after the capture of territory, but precedes it. The Taliban’s influence on services and everyday life extends far beyond areas they can be said to control or contest. That the Taliban set the rules in vast swathes of the country is a reality with which few in the international community are willing to engage. While this research has significant implications for any future peace deal, the most urgent question is what can or should be done now to shape the rules for Afghans living under the Taliban.

Two years on, the Grand Bargain is making important progress to improve humanitarian aid but faces practical and political challenges.

This event brings together researchers and officials to discuss how development agencies should be governed and structured.

Examining the internal and external challenges to financial access for local humanitarian actors in Somalia.

This article discusses how International Financial Institutions can accelerate private sector-led projects in pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The report investigates the resources and attributes of households that enable them to escape poverty sustainably.

This brief focuses on the interventions and approaches in Kenya that aim to enable poor households to escape poverty and stay out of it.

The G7's commitments to girls' education globally offer a crucial step towards achieving their empowerment and economic equality.

Some issues remain unresolved, but the mood at the Global Compact for Migration talks – concluding next month – is one of quiet determination to succeed.

Informing and influencing policies and practices for renewable energy and access to modern energy services.

Exploring the opportunities and challenges of social and economic development in the context of climate change.

Developing a greater understanding of how governments can transform fiscal policy to support social and environmental objectives.

This brief draws on results of mixed methods research in Nepal to offer policy and programming implications for sustained poverty reduction.

The focus of this report is on why, in Nepal, some households escape from and remain out of poverty, and some don't.

Natural hazard related disasters hit those living in fragile and conflict affected contexts hardest. Between 2004 and 2014, 58% of deaths from disasters occurred in the top 30 most fragile states. Yet, considerations of conflict are missing from the Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) policy, programming and financing architecture.

While the internationally agreed Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR) exists, it can only be achieved by developing an evidence base, policy and practice on how best to pursue DRR in conflict settings, and redirecting spending to those contexts. This will require challenging our existing assumptions and better understanding the relationship between hazards, vulnerability, exposure and types of conflict.

ODI research uncovers the political and institutional barriers to adapting DRR policy, practice and overseas development assistance to fragile or conflict-affected contexts. It reveals a hesitancy to explore the relationship between disasters and conflict, and tendency to prioritise peace and security over DRR in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. 

The event hosts open and frank discussions on why DRR policy, programming and financing has yet to be sufficiently applied to conflict and fragile contexts, exploring the following questions:

• What are some of the blockages and challenges to DRR in these contexts?
• What innovative and practical steps can be taken to support the implementation of the SFDRR in conflict and fragile settings?

Biographies

Sara Pantuliano is a Managing Director at ODI, where she has led the humanitarian team for six years. She is a member of the Global Future Council on the Humanitarian System of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Managing Editor of Disasters Journal and a Trustee of IRIN news and SOS Sahel. She has recently been appointed as the Vice-Chair of the Board of Muslim Aid, and has served on a range of advisory boards, including Oxford University’s Refugees Studies Centre and the UN Association of the UK.

Ayesha Siddiqi joined Royal Holloway as a Lecturer in Human Geography in February 2016. Her research focuses on climatic disasters and their interaction with politics, security and development. Ayesha has worked as a consultant for DFID to provide support on the Pilot Programme for Climate Resilience (PPCR) in Tajikistan, provided support on a UNEP project on climate change and conflict in Darfur and contributed to a UNISDR study examining pathways for transformation after disasters. Ayesha is currently leading a GCRF funded research project on disasters in insurgency affected areas in the Philippines.

Katie Peters has been a Senior Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) since 2011. Leading ODI’s portfolio on the intersection of natural hazard-related disasters, climate change, and conflict, her research focuses on disaster risk reduction in fragile and conflict-affected states, the relationship between climate change and conflict, and the securitisation of climate change.

Rina Meutia is a Disaster Risk Management Specialist at the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) at the World Bank. She has firsthand experience responding to major disasters, including the Indian Ocean Tsunami in her native Aceh, Indonesia; the Kashmir earthquake in Pakistan; and the Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar. Prior to joining the Bank, Rina was Team Leader for Reducing Vulnerabilities and Managing Risks in the World Humanitarian Summit Secretariat – OCHA at United Nations Headquarters in New York.