Rural Water Supply Network’s 6th Forum
NB – this (and all other RWSN forum posts) is a reposting of material that also exists on the page ‘Rural Water Supply Network’s 6th Forum’. I now realise that creating a new page for this was a mistake! Live and learn …. The Opening Sitting at the back of the large and luxurious Speke … Continue reading
What ever became of DRA?
Back to the blog after a long break – holidays and exploding work load … this was provoked by an interesting question that came up during a recent visit to Washington to present and discuss some of the findings from our Water Services that Last and Life Cycle Cost work. We had been presenting findings … Continue reading
Isomorphic mimicry – or the challenge of the empty organigramme
Could anyone resist a paper that, in the introduction, promises to ‘explicitly eschew the assumptions and Hegelian teleology of classic modernization theory’!?Not me anyway. While Hegelian teleology is fun, and well worth a visit to Wikipedia (for non political scientists like myself), isomorphic mimicry as a mechanism for ensuring development failure is a genuinely useful … Continue reading
Zero subsidy approaches … a barrier to the poor?
Interesting report from the Poverty Action Lab that presents overall findings (from a series of RCTs) on the impact of charging small fees to poor users of essential (primarily medical) products (‘The Price is Wrong’). The findings – in short – that charging even very low fees has a negative impact on uptake by the … Continue reading
It’s the (political) economy stu…
Thanks to the colleague who sent me the link to this interesting blog-post from the Center for Global Development: ‘an object lesson in the gritty difficulties of translating evidence into policy’. In summary: the fact that worming kids had been rigorously and gold-standardly (yes – an RCT!) proved to be really useful is, apparently and … Continue reading
Evidence schmevidence
A delightful – if unverifiable – rumour has it that top staff of ‘a leading philanthropic donor’ are not allowed to travel together on the same plane: the loss to the world of their collective brainpower in case of a sudden accident being too much to bear. That said donor is a champion of ‘evidence … Continue reading
Schumpeter: A $300 idea that is priceless | The Economist
An interesting article in the economist. Schumpeter: A $300 idea that is priceless | The Economist. Apparently some clever people in the States have decided that the next poverty killing silver bullet will be a $300 house (presumably flat-packed and arriving with a small widget to assemble!). What starts off as another article on technology/business … Continue reading
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