No matter how self-aware we are when we come into international aid, philanthropy, or social enterprise, most people, especially in the beginning, operate from a worldview in which change in poor people’s lives is possible with our help.

As I've written before, the jury is still out on this in my mind.

In my career, I have…

Calling all women photographers...amateur or otherwise. We're looking for 10 photographs to be published the book: Chasing Misery which is an anthology of essays by women in aid work. Essay submissions are due 30 March and we're just putting the broad call out for photograph submissions as well. If you have a picture that was taken during a humanitarian response in the last 10 years that you think is brilliant please submit it to: kelseyhoppe@inkampala.com by Mar 30 - (under 5MB for the…

Calling all women photographers...amateur or otherwise. We're looking for 10 photographs to be published the book: Chasing Misery which is an anthology of essays by women in aid work. Essay submissions are due 30 March and we're just putting the broad call out for photograph submissions as well. If you have a picture that was taken during a humanitarian response in the last 10 years that you think is brilliant please submit it to: kelseyhoppe@inkampala.com by Mar 30 - (under 5MB for the…

Attention all writers/aspiring writers on the subject of humanitarian aid. We're looking for women who have worked in a humanitarian response in the past 10 years who would like to submit an essay for an upcoming anthology collecting views and experiences. Visit: http://www.chasingmisery.blogspot.com/ for all guidelines.

At WhyDev, we recently received an email asking about organisations communicating effectively about aid. 

We'd love to throw this topic out to the AidSource community, and do some classic crowd sourcing:

- What organisations that are communicating effectively about foreign aid?

- Of the organisations that are communicating about aid effectively, what makes them effective?

- What are the barriers to communicating effectively about aid?

Looking forward to your…

Many humanitarian aid professionals believe that negotiation is perhaps the activity in which they spend most of their time in both field and headquarters situations. Almost everything that humanitarian workers need to achieve has to be negotiated with donors, host governments, local structures, communities, beneficiaries, other humanitarian agencies and their own staff. This course gives students an…

Many Government Organizations (GO), Non Government Organizations (NGO) and international Aid Agencies work in many countries for social and economical development. There are various types of projects and programs implemented for developing the socio-economic conditions of those countries, especially in developing and under developed countries. Since hundreds of years, the development agencies have been working in many countries only for doing various development issues. Thousands of…

I almost didn't do it this year. But in the end Tom Murphy and Lina Srivistava talked me into it. And there's been so much great #SWEDOW in the ambient aid environment this year, that it'd be a real shame to let it all go uncelebrated.

So...

Announcing the hottest new thing in the aid blogosphere, guaranteed to get at least 30 hits. Which is practically the same thing as viral in a crowd…

The other day Bonnie Koenig posted this over on her site, Going International:

Are We Readying Ourselves for Significant Change?

She outlines five emerging trends in the aid and development world. They are:

• New international configurations…

[This post originally appeared on the now closed Blogspot version of Tales From the Hood on 7 September, 2008. The original published title was "Here beneath the blue suburban skies", after the lyrics to "Penny Lane" by The Beatles]

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A few months ago on the way home from another…

The Guardian pubished an article on women working in Silicon Valley. Check it out here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2012/oct/05/women-work-life-balance-twitter

It contains many interesting observations on how women act in a male dominated industry. I'm interested to know how applicable you all feel this is to the aid and development world? And what any particular differences are? Are women…

Many Donor organizations and countries of the world have been donating or lending billions of money as aid for long time in many third world countries and underdeveloped and developing countries for organising various types of social and economical development programs including poverty alleviation. Many countries do their development works by using the foreign assistance. There are many NGOs and Government Organizations establish for doing various types of development activities…

When people ask me what job I do, I always struggle to find the appropriate response. It tends to differ according to who is asking me, and will range from ‘development/aid/humanitarian/human rights worker’ to ‘advocacy/policy/programmes officer’. This linguistic difficulty is not only due to needing to second guess whether the person I’m talking to will actually understand what any of these terms mean; it’s also because I myself am not sure what I am. Maybe the blanket term is ‘activist’ –…

This post originally appeared on AidSpeak, the external blog for AidSource admins. Read the original here.

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How YOU Would Make Aid Better

We want to thank those of you who took the time to churn out a few hundred words and go through the 5 or so mouse clicks necessary to add your thoughts to our collection of blog posts on how you would make aid…

(AFakeP) In a move that surprised industry leaders,  the United Nations announced on Sunday that they were abolishing all non-UN foreign aid. UN Senior Official Juan von Bonbon made the announcement from the UN headquarters in New York.

Source: United Nations…

1. Abolish earmarking

I think it is ridiculous and against the intentions of most non-institutional donors, that some disasters are overfunded, while others barely have money at all.…

How would you make aid better?

We all love to whinge and moan about how bad things are in aid. The big INGOs are bureaucratic money pits. Little LNGOs have low capacity and aren't accountable. Expats ride around disaster zones in white Landcruisers. Too many journalists. Too few journalists. Aid workers are cynical. Aid is an instrument of foreign policy for wealthy Western countries. Aid organizations do not put enough sit-reps up on their websites... and on…

My brother sent me the following email last week:

“I just caught up on your blog. As you may or may not know, I’ve had trouble dealing with poverty emotionally from a young age (like the day trip we took to NYC back in the day.. as we were arriving back at the car I was crying because I didn’t know how to make sense of all the homeless people we had seen that day). Of…

Welcome. Velkommen. 欢迎光临. Sohm swaakohm. G’day, how’s it going?

This site has been a work in progress since May 2010 and we’re pleased to announce that we have completely revamped it. We think that you’ll be pleased with the look, feel and navigation of the new site.

One of the main changes in the new site is that it reflects the direction in which WhyDev is moving. We’ve been known for our contribution to discussion around aid and development. Our…