Blog
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 December 29, 2009
Rajiv Shah was confirmed as the Administrator for USAID on December 24th by unanimous consent in the Senate. Here are some related articles:
Smarter foreign aid: How to fix USAID, by David Beckmann of Bread for the World and MFAN.
Raj Shah and America’s Development Future by Bill Frist
Other development policy-related news
LOCAL NEWS
Seattle-based company WorldLink Education strands students in China.
Food coop PCC (also based in Seattle) criticizes Gates Foundation’s approach to agriculture.
COPENHAGEN
Climate talks: Clinton promises aid to poor nations – but China may resist
Adapting to less money and more migrants. The developed countries have less money to help poor countries, and there are going to be a lot more climate change refugees.
FOREIGN AID
Book Review: Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There Is A Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo; and Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman. Both books discuss the problems with foreign aid and have different controversial solutions. Dambisa Moyo suggests that Africa would be better without foreign aid, and Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman have ideas to reform aid.
CGD and Foreign Policy magazine award annual Commitment to Development award to Diego Hidalgo Schnur, a Spanish philanthropist, academic and businessman.
New details on Obama’s aid package for Pakistan.
JUST KIDDING
William Easterly pokes fun with How to Write about Poor People.
Posted on December 21, 2009
By now you have heard the news: an agreement of sorts was reached in Copenhagen, and no one is impressed. The deal falls far short of even modest expectations, and has no teeth. The silver lining is that it is possibly a first step on the way to more controls on carbon emissions. We will have to keep pushing our leaders if we want more. It will be too easy to forget about global climate change and move on to the next topic du jour, if we don’t stay vigilant. Until the one day when it is too late.
Here is a summary of the Copenhagen Agreement, from the New York Times:
from the New York Times
Posted on December 16, 2009
The Climate Summit in Copenhagen is on our minds this week. The big question: by how much will we agree to reduce emissions? And how much funding will we commit to give to developing countries to help them adjust to climate change and avoid climate-busting energy use as their economies grow? So far, the United States has proposed cutting emissions by 3 to 4 percent of 1990 levels by 2020, whereas the European Union has agreed to a 20 percent cut. Neither is considered sufficient, but at the rate the negotiations have been going, we might be lucky to have any deal at all. The COP15 has been full of the usual ups and downs of any multilateral negotiating process- complete with walkouts, accusations, and really boring speeches that say nothing new (see Washington Post article). Officials hope to have a deal by this Friday, but many observers fear that failure is looming.
Some environmental organizations are concerned that the big polluters of the world are not going to agree to reduce emissions by enough, and that the summit will not achieve anything big enough to have a significant impact on climate change. There is also concern about a great “greenwash” – where no matter how lackluster the outcome of the summit, all the publicity will gush about whatever small thing was accomplished no matter how insignificant.
The EU has offered $3 billion per year over 3 years to help developing countries cope with climate change. Experts disagree about whether this amount will have any impact, and what a sufficient amount would be.
Global Washington member Mercy Corps is one of the many NGOs represented in Copenhagen. From the perspective of Jim Jarvie on the Mercy Corps blog, it sounds like the ultimate climate change conference is taking place on the sidelines of the negotiations, with presentations and discussions led by NGOs and government agencies from around the world. Dory McIntosh writes about the peaks and troughs of the conference, especially the dismal predictions laid out by Al Gore and scientists about the effects of global climate change: “Not only are the Greenland ice cap and Western Antarctica melting far faster than was previously thought, but the Himalayan glaciers are melting at a rate that is placing the lives of more than a billion people in jeopardy. Sea level rises of around one meter are predicted by the end of the century, which would displace an estimated 100 million people from their homes and livelihoods.”
Eco-Encore is a Seattle organization throwing its support behind the goals of the summit. It has organized a media recycling drive to benefit 15 northwest environmental organizations, in conjunction with COP15.
Need more background? The Seattle Times has a good quickie background piece on the talks.
thanks to Darren Nowels for help with research on this post