Poverty blogs
Palm wine, bat stew and carbon markets all made it into the same discussion in Parliament last night – likely for the first time.
REDD+ aims to reward or compensate tropical developing countries for keeping their forests intact or for reducing the scale of deforestation. It’s predicted that financial flows to these countries from REDD+ could reach up to US$30 billion a year. So getting the issue of REDD+ benefit distribution right is crucial, not only to ensure that it is benefiting the poorest of the poor (or at least not harming them), but for building REDD+’s legitimacy both at the national and international level, which in turn will help preserve forest ecosystems.
There were 50 ape experts in a room and a quick game to play to break the ice. “If you agree with the statement, go to the left side of the room,” said the facilitator.
Communities often develop from a sense of place and a shared sense of belonging to that place. So, how do you bring a community together in a slum where people aren’t allowed to ‘belong’ because they don’t have anywhere to live, or they’re living illegally in a shack and know they might be evicted tomorrow?
BBC journalist Paul Mason’s “Our World,” shown on the 26th August 2011, relies once more on professionalized solutions to offer hope to those living in Manila, the capital of the Philippines – and the most densely populated city on earth. But they’re not a viable solution for the 900 million people living in informal settlements and other forms of inadequate accommodation such as crowded inner city dwellings.
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo's book, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, is making waves in development circles. Beyond the strong focus on randomised control trials, the book distinguishes itself by wading into issues on which the development community has often ignored or made uninformed guesses. These include the rationale behind the decisions made by the poor, whether they make the "best" decisions available, and how policymakers should respond.
The Centre for Social Protection´s conference ‘Social Protection for Social Justice’, came, in the words of the Institute for Development Studies’ Stephen Devereux, a full 11 and ¾ years after the term ‘social protection’ was first coined. Since then, social protection has risen steadily up the development agenda, and emerging economies such as Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa have rolled out extensive schemes which transfer cash directly to the poor. This conference challenged delegates to think more critically about the role and limits of such schemes in promoting social justice and challenging structural inequalities.