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Contributor Guidelines
Submitting guest blogs is open to Global Washington’s members of the Atlas level and above. We value a diversity of opinions on a broad range of subjects of interest to the global health and development community.
Blog article submissions should be 500-1500 words. Photos, graphs, videos, and other art that supports the main themes are strongly encouraged.
You may not be the best writer, and that’s okay. We can help you shape and edit your contribution. The most important thing is that it furthers an important conversation in your field, and that it is relatively jargon-free. Anyone without a background in global development should still be able to engage with your ideas.
If you include statistics or reference current research, please hyperlink your sources in the text, wherever possible.
Have an idea of what you’d like to write about? Let’s continue the conversation! Email comms@globalWA.org and put “Blog Idea” in the subject line.
Posted on February 11, 2011
While the U.S. Agency for International Development is facing rising opposition in Congress, and the legislative reform process has virtually come to a halt, the agency responsible for implementing foreign assistance is proceeding with internal reforms. In a speech on January 19th, Administrator Raj Shah announced a new monitoring and evaluation policy for USAID’s projects abroad. Committed to accountability to stakeholders and learning from past experiences to implement more effective strategies in the future, the new policy will do much to strengthen USAID.
As a part of USAID’s new reform agenda, USAID FORWARD, the new evaluation policy is critical to the knowledge of the agency and the efficacy of the projects. As Administrator Shah acknowledged in the preface to the policy, “this policy will make us better able to identify areas where we are more capable of achieving development results, and those where we have less success and therefore need to improve.” Given that official evaluations submitted to USAID fell by two-thirds and program funding has tripled since 1994, this policy will play a crucial role in revitalizing USAID’s evaluation capacity.
Apart from a clearly delineated organizational structure and hierarchy, the new evaluation policy sets forth new evaluation and monitoring practices as well:
- -The initial design of projects will now take into consideration the evaluations that will ultimately review the efficacy of the project. An average of 3 percent of the project funds will also be made available for the evaluation.
- -In an effort to dispel biased measurement and reporting, evaluations will be conducted by an external entity with no stake in the implementation of the project. However, internal evaluations will still be conducted to contribute to institutional learning.
- -In an effort to support local ownership of development projects, local entities with no affiliation to the projects will be called upon to implement the reviews.
- -To increase transparency, USAID will publish the results and findings of each project’s evaluation for public consumption.
- -Each evaluation will be designed to include both qualitative and quantitative review processes.
As another step along the road to reform, this new evaluation policy helps to make USAID more transparent and accountable, while supporting local capacity at the same time. However, in order to make USAID as effective as possible, more reforms will be necessary.
Posted on February 7, 2011
“Today, it is not surprising and is rather, somewhat expected, that CEOs devote a portion of their time in Davos to articulating what their companies are doing to advance the global development agenda. And that increasingly there is an inextricable link between that agenda and the prosperity of their own enterprises” writes Joe Cerrell, director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s European Office.
In a recent Reuters blog post called “Global Development crashes the Davos party,” Cerrell discusses the increasing presence of a global development agenda at the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
Cerrell briefly traces the history of this trend in Davos over the last 10 years starting when Bill Gates launched the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) in 2000. While the forum has perhaps moved away from the years when celebrities like Bono, Sharon Stone, and Angelina Jolie could steal the Davos spotlight to push forward development issues, Cerrell thinks that these years have brought about a lasting shift; global development is now accepted as a normal part of the WEF’s conversation on business and economics.
Cerrell hopes to see global development “crashing” more and more gatherings to which it was previously uninvited. At Global Washington, we share his desire to explore these issues in diverse sectors. Our membership consists of nonprofits, foundations, businesses, and academic institutions in the state of Washington, all united in common goal of making the world a more equitable and prosperous place. As this kind of dialogue continues in prominent venues, we hope to also see innovative and mutually beneficial partnerships formed to address important needs in health, education, environmental sustainability, poverty alleviation and other global issues
Posted on February 1, 2011
On January 24th, Michelle Bachelet announced a 100-day action plan for U.N. Women, a newly-formed agency for promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women around the globe. “Women’s strength, women’s industry, women’s wisdom are humankind’s greatest untapped resource,” said Bachelet, a former president of Chile and executive director of the fledgling agency.
Bachelet laid out five priorities for U.N. Women: enhancing women’s leadership and participation; ending violence against women; supporting women’s role in peace and conflict resolution; bolstering economic opportunities for women; and placing gender equality high on the agenda of national, local and sectoral planning and budgeting. She also discussed five core principles for the agency: enhancing implementation of international accords by national partners; backing intergovernmental processes to strengthen the global framework on gender equality; advocating gender equality and women’s empowerment; promoting coherence with the UN on the issue; and acting as a global broker of knowledge and experience.
U.N. Women—which is officially called the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women—was established by the general assembly last year, merging four former U.N. entities into one. The main functions of the agency are to support inter-governmental bodies in their formulation of policies and standards as they relate to women; to assist U.N. members in the implementation of those standards through technical and financial support as needed and by creating effective partnerships; and to provide accountability to the U.N. for its own commitments relating to gender equality.
Bachelet’s remarks came during the inaugural session for the agency’s executive board. U.N. Women’s formal launch will be February 24th, 2011.
For more information on U.N. Women and the 100-day action plan, please visit: