James5

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or to email alerts. Thanks for visiting!

Rodrik’s article in the Guardian makes some good points about the recent failure over Doha. Let’s hope that when things get back on track we can get a real development agenda going and the WTO can start living up to its preamble more.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Over the winter I visited Geneva for two weeks studying Institutions in International Law, this post is part of a series on what I learnt and thought about the institutions we visited. See them all here.

UNESCO is the United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organisation. It was instituted to:

contribute to peace and security by promoting international collaboration through education, science, and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, the rule of law, and the human rights and fundamental freedoms proclaimed in the UN Charter.

So they do a range of difference things from promoting literacy, to registering cultural heritage sites, to improving the freedom of the press.

UNESCO is one of the older international institutions, established in 1946 and carrying on from the work of League of Nations’ International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation.

What I found most interesting about the presentation we heard on UNESCO was the increasing work they do in fields such as development. Encouraging increased literacy is a good example of this. While UNESCO was designed with a wide, almost vague, mission - it seems that their modern work covers an extremely wide range of fields. Human rights, development, cultural heritage. Not only does this mean UNESCO has a lot to do, within a constrained budget, but it also means there’s overlap with the work of agenices such as the UNDP, UNICEFs, and NGOs and government.

Sure a ‘holistic’ view of their work is important when you consider what UNESCO does, but I worry that this expanding ‘mission creep’ is not in the best interest of UNESCO, the people being helped or other groups doing development. What’s wrong with a bit of specialisation?

Popularity: 3% [?]

Here’s a real interesting read on mobile banking in South Africa and Kenya. Mobile telephone companies and banks are teaming up to provide targeted financial services to the poor. For example, money can be sent via SMS, and cashed out at a mobile operator. This avoids the need for a bank account and in a country where 60% of people don’t use banks this creates whole new opportunities for a vast range of people.

Popularity: 2% [?]

It looks like Google is expanding its African presence. They’ve launched a blog, set up offices in Jo’burg and Nairobi, and are on a hiring spree. This is great news. Technology services and infrastructure are such an important part of development for Africa, see, for example, Tech comes to Rwanda.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Meaningfulness of Little Things has another great post on religion and development. Take a look through the archives for some more good reading. As many development experts come from anthropology, sociology, economics backgrounds, it can be easy for them to not understand what religion is all about. A secular university subject on the anthropology of religion won’t prepare someone for the how and why’s of religion in the real world. Tip: it’s more than just about building a community, helping the poor or preserving power…

Popularity: 2% [?]