The flowers adorning the green hills of Cauca in Colombia made me think of paradise. But, unsure whether that would translate culturally, I remarked merely...
Ben Phillips
Ben Phillips is an advisor to the United Nations, governments and civil society organisations, was Campaigns Director for Oxfam and for ActionAid, and co-founded the Fight Inequality Alliance. He tweets at benphillips76
Why the struggle against inequality is a transformational campaign we can win
There are three types of campaigns: the lost causes, the just a little bits, and the transformational. The lost causes can be great to begin with -...
Syria’s refugees and the kindness of strangers
It was the kindness of strangers. When Aziz fled from the Syrian conflict to Lebanon, he heard about a farmer who allowed Syrian refugees to camp on his land....
Business Development or Solidarity? How to help Palestinian farmers
"Palestinian olive oil was once world renowned," says Jamil, a livelihoods expert, in the car on the way to the factory. "With 100,000 Palestinian families...
The women of rural India are not meek – and we do not help them when we pretend that they are
The meeting started off with a comfortable simplicity. In a village in Uttar Pradesh, India, a group of semi-literate women greeted the visiting development...
It’s getting clearer and clearer we’re in an inequality crisis – so why am I optimistic?
We are not living in an age of austerity. We are living in an age of brutal inequality. Millions struggle to feed themselves and their families - even in...
This is a panacea
A powerful new paper, "This is a panacea" by Swift, J., has broken new ground in the field of development and social science research. A paper like no other....
People power has cracked the walls of tax secrecy – now we have to bring the walls down
" "But our actions are perfectly legal, and what you are calling for is completely unrealistic", said the slave traders of the early Nineteenth Century....
Revealed! Inside the IF Campaign
Now everyone's talking about the IF campaign. Saturday's rally in Hyde Park was on TV, radio, and in pretty much every Sunday paper. More importantly, the IF...
“We’ll stop hurting our brothers and sisters” – What success at the G8 would look like
It has become to fashionable to say that G8 meetings never achieve anything. It is also incorrect. Civil society campaigners have made use of G8...
How to Start Development’s Gutenberg Revolution
As a schoolboy I was troubled to learn about medieval Europe where a narrow elite maintained unaccountable power by controlling access to information; and I...
Britain’s dirty secret – the island havens that make life hell for the world’s poor
The G8 agenda on tax is getting increasingly radical, and much of the credit on that must go to to the UK Government hosts. Issues that were off the table...
“Within this Famine Pit lieth the unknown dead.”
At this year's G8 summit in Loch Erne, Northern Ireland, world leaders will meet to tackle the causes of global hunger. Sometimes the answer is right beside...
Have NGOs gone soft on the Government?
"Non-Governmental Organisation" is a foolproof reminder to us of the one thing we are not: the Government. "Remember, we don't work for them." We must ward...
More from Global Dashboard
Justice for children in detention during the pandemic
It is increasingly clear that the direct and indirect impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic are not borne equally, hitting the most marginalised and vulnerable the hardest. As an infectious disease that thrives on people being in close proximity without access to...
We can’t rely on any leader to pull us out of the inequality crisis. It’s up to us.
The acute crisis of the present moment, COVID-19, has revealed the deeper crisis of our age: inequality. And looking around at the current crop at the top of politics, it sure is hard to identify the leader who will pull us out. Dominating much of the media and policy...
Switching Ministers and Crossing Canyons
At the end of July, after months of lockdown, my first trip outside The Netherlands was to Tunisia. Just before I flew, the Tunisian prime minister tendered the resignation of his government. That meant possibly another minister of justice; the fourth in a little over...