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A new study published in Science claims that funds for HIV prevention (like most funds directed at Africa, cynics might argue) are being wasted. Telling people to use condoms doesn’t work, they say; asking them not to have sex is religion-inspired lunacy; testing for HIV has had little impact so far (although forthcoming research on [...]

What are the connections between climate change and migration? Not as obvious as one might think… one of the conversations we’ve been having in the coffee break is the lack of hard evidence when it comes to the relationship(s) between development, conflict, and climate change and the increasing difficulty to demonstrate cause and effect. Rhetorically [...]

Despite having practically invented modern counter-insurgency, today Britain is woefully ill-equipped for this kind of complex, mosaic-style warfare. The Times, echoing David’s post from a few days ago, has picked up on the problems Britain has in spending money in places like Afghanistan.
As readers will know, even though the Labour government sought to overcome the [...]

England football manager Fabio Capello went on an unusual overseas tour earlier this month. His destination? Maseru in Lesotho, where he visited an HIV testing centre. What was really unusual, however, was the ingenious method the centre used to grab the saturnine coach’s attention. They sat him in a room with a 14-year-old boy who [...]

Nice to see an integrated approach to UK operations in Afghanistan…
When I asked the men of 3 Para what their first tour had achieved, they all fell silent. “It was very frustrating,” said [Major Paul] Blair. He believes that his men could have achieved something in the town of Gereshk, where they were first [...]

I’m a big fan of Foreign Policy editor Moises Naim - he was the first person to spot the potential for China’s Olympics to become a debacle, for instance - but I was left a bit cold by his LA Times article yesterday on the pressures that accompany the emergence of a truly global middle [...]

I normally leave  scarcity issues to the other, better-informed contributors to this blog, but this week’s food riots in Haiti have brought UN peacekeepers face-to-face with the effects of rising prices, so I can’t keep my head that deep in the sand.  UN officials can talk about little except food prices at the moment.  John Holmes, [...]

I recently interviewed Sergei Markov, who is a key spin-doctor to the Kremlin. He told me that the West had completely underestimated the extent to which things will change under Russia’s new president, Dmitry Medvedev.
He said: “Most western observers expect no change because Medvedev is the new president. On the contrary, Putin chose Medvedev precisely [...]

A useful travel guide for would-be migrants, from Foreign Policy magazine. My only quibble would be their listing of Spain as one of the best countries to migrate to. This might be true if you’re a retired Brit with a fondness for sherry or cheap wine, but it will be interesting to see how tolerance [...]

A few weeks back the Guardian noted the transformation of Guinea-Bissau, a tiny, jungly and desperately poor country on the tip of West Africa, into the world’s first “narco-state.” Presumably this phrase means that its economy relies on drugs, though it has never been clearly defined and Guatemala and Afghanistan have also laid claim to [...]

As Charlie noted earlier this week, the World Food Programme has again called for half a billion extra dollars to cope with higher food and transport costs.  (The FT just doesn’t seem to tire of running this story: it first appeared on July 16 last year, and made the front page then as well.)
While no-one’s [...]

A new report by the Agency Co-ordinating Body for Afghan Relief (Acbar) says the international aid effort in Afghanistan is in large part “wasteful and ineffective”, with as much as 40 per cent of funds spent going back to donor countries in corporate profits and consultant salaries. This is worrying but not really news…
As far [...]

As if to prove the point I made back in January about Ban being the ’scarcity SG’, given his interest in climate change and water scarcity, here’s a piece of his on food prices from the Washington Post today.  What he thinks needs to be done:
First, we must meet urgent humanitarian needs. This year, the [...]

That’s the headline conclusion of an IPS analysis piece by John Vandaele.  Average GDP growth in developing countries today is 7 per cent, compared to 3 per cent for developed countries; and even per capita income grew faster in South than North between 2003 and 2007 (old news in East and South Asia, but a [...]

Dani Rodrik is wondering whether we might be seeing a new paradigm in development economics:
Until very recently, if you spent anytime thinking about development policy, the chances are that you fell into one of three groups.  One group believes the problem with developing countries is lack of resources. So the solution is a vast increase [...]

“If you see people throwing stones, it means if they had guns, they would have been shooting”, observes Frederick, an economics grad who drives a motorcycle taxi in Douala, Cameroon. 
The FT’s Matthew Green explains:
Only a few crumbs were left on the counter at the Boulangerie du Rail delicatessen in Douala after looters swept the shelves [...]

[Last updated: April 23rd] 
Now that food prices are moving fast up the agenda, you might want to check out some of the wider briefing available on the web.  Here are some sources worth a look:

The Food and Agriculture Organisation has set up a new portal on the world food situation. It’s got a news feed on news from countries [...]

Lots of concerns lately about stagflation, given how commodity prices have continued their inexorable rise even as the US economy falters.  Inevitably, some have wondered whether it means it’s the 1970s all over again. But here’s another reason to think about dusting off those flares: what about the risk of a new third world debt [...]

In late 2006 Manuel Miranda accepted an offer by the Department of State to join their diplomatic mission in Baghdad as a Senior Advisor to the Iraqi Prime Minister’s legal office and the Government of Iraq on legislative process.  In the following year he established the Office of Legislative Statecraft. When he left in 2008 [...]

John Githingo - Kenya’s crusading anti-corruption champion, who was permanent secretary in charge of governance and ethics until he had to flee to the UK in 2005 - offers a succint analysis of how aid donors have contributed to instability in Kenya:
To many in the west confronted with images of machete-wielding Africans, what has happened [...]

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