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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 April 16, 2014
By Kelly Gibbs
Running an effective awareness campaign was the topic at last week’s Global Washington Executive Director Roundtable. Jennifer Norling, Director of Development and Communications for Seattle-based Water 1st, was the presenter. She was speaking to the group in the aftermath of the organization’s successful World Water Day campaign that took place in March.
Water 1st chose to use Facebook to launch its World Water Day campaign. It asked its followers on the social media site to post self-portraits or “selfies” of themselves holding a piece of paper with the message “Because I don’t have to carry water 5 hours a day, I can” and asked them to fill in the blank. In the end, 200 people posted pictures and re-shared their messages in less than 24 hours. If you were using social media on March 22, I’m almost certain that you saw someone you know holding up their sign! Continue Reading
Posted on April 10, 2014
By Hien Tran, Director of Global Advocacy, Landesa
This post is part of a series developed by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and GlobalWA member Landesa to highlight the importance of securing land rights for smallholder farmers. This series is running concurrently with the World Bank’s 2014 Land and Poverty Conference taking place in Washington, DC. Follow the conversation on Twitter with hashtag #landrights.
As discussions continue around the shape of the post-2015 development agenda and how to measure progress towards achieving new global goals, it is useful to step back and consider the story of the drunkard and the streetlight.
The story is that one night, a police officer sees a drunk man searching under a streetlight and he asks what the man has lost. The man responds that he lost his keys and they proceed to search together. After a few minutes, the police officer asks if the man is sure he lost them near the streetlight. The man responds, no, he lost his keys in the park, but he is searching near the streetlight because “that is where the light is.”
In our current dialogue regarding the framework to replace the expiring Millennium Development Goals, we have to guard against this “observational bias” – we need to select goals, targets, and indicators that represent the critical dimensions that must be addressed in the fight against global poverty and inequality, rather than choosing goals, targets or indicators that are less meaningful but can be measured relatively easily.
Although it is often extremely difficult to reliably measure what is truly important—we must and we can do better. Continue Reading
Posted on April 3, 2014
By Tim Hanstad, President and CEO of Landesa and Board Member of Global Washington
This post is part of a series developed by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and GlobalWA member Landesa to highlight the importance of securing land rights for smallholder farmers. This series is running concurrently with the World Bank’s 2014 Land and Poverty Conference taking place in Washington, DC. Follow the conversation on Twitter with hashtag #landrights.
More than one billion of the world’s poorest people share three traits: they live in rural areas, rely on the land to survive, and they lack secure legal rights to the land on which they depend.
Most either toil in other people’s fields for pennies a day or struggle on land which they temporarily control, but insecurely — with the constant threat of displacement.
The coins they earn can never stretch far enough to allow them to buy their own plot, and they have little long-term incentive to improve the plot they currently farm. Often, they can’t send their children to school or obtain other government services, like agricultural credit or inputs, because they are not landowners. As a result, they lack opportunity and are vulnerable to displacement, exploitation, and calls to extremism. Without a fundamental change, their children and grandchildren face a similar future.
Creating a better and safer future for us all depends upon giving these modern-day serfs the opportunity for better life.
Land is at the center of both the problem and the solution.
Continue Reading
