In a blog for International Women’s Day, new parent Anthony Kamande reflects on the heavy cost his partner and family have paid for the simple act of having a baby. The world, and especially its poorer countries, needs a pregnancy rights revolution, he says, and international funders such as the IMF must play their part.
It’s time for the World Bank to show it truly cares about unpaid care
The next funding cycle for the World Bank’s International Development Association could top $100bn – and, says Fiana Arbab, we must keep a close eye on the fraction of that being committed to transforming the lives of the billions of women doing care work.
After half a century of misguided policies, here’s how the World Bank and IMF can work for the poor…
It’s time both the World Bank and IMF abandoned the short-term fixes and austerity that have repeatedly failed people in developing countries, says Anthony Kamande. With their joint annual meetings back on African soil for the first time in five decades, he sets out six ways both institutions can make real and lasting change: from debt restructuring to encouraging social spending and taxes on the wealthiest.
What is the Palma ratio? And how can it turbo-charge efforts to cut inequality?
The UN’s current inequality measure doesn’t adequately describe the gulf between the rich and the rest. As global efforts to reduce inequality falter, Anthony Kamande sets out the case for international organisations and governments to adopt and target alternative metrics.
We need to talk about inequality in West Africa
As the African Union and regional economic communities gather to discuss their economies, the gulf between the rich and the rest in West Africa needs to be top of the agenda, says Mohamadou Fadel Diop – and that conversation must give serious attention to inequality-busting policies such as reversing austerity and debt cancellation.
Austerity is not the answer to Africa’s colliding crises: it’s time to invest massively in public services and decent jobs
Our continent faces droughts and spiking prices that are pushing millions into hunger and poverty, a debt crisis and the ongoing pandemic. So why are countries cutting billions in spending? Anthony Kamande introduces a new Oxfam Pan Africa briefing based on our index that scores governments on how committed they are to cutting inequality
People can’t afford to pay for health care in a pandemic. Why isn’t the World Bank doing more to help?
As the World Bank’s Annual Meetings kick-off virtually this week, the COVID-19 pandemic is still surging in many countries, killing people, destroying livelihoods and deepening inequalities. The World Bank’s health response has been lightning-fast (by donor standards) and important, with $6 billion in initial funding to help countries coping with the health impacts of the outbreak through its COVID-19 Fast …
Decision-making for an uncertain future
Lisa Horrocks, Principal Climate Resilience Consultant at Mott MacDonald, comments on some initiatives tackling the issue around long term climate change solutions. Wherever we are in the world, economic development requires us to take decisions which either have short or very long lifetimes. Long lifetime decisions can be extremely costly and risky, especially with shifting baselines. This is the situation with …
The politics of inequality; who is measuring what and why?
Our latest real geek instalment explores different measurements of inequality and how our understanding of the data they produce is crucial to the issue as a whole. here is no one ‘right’ way to measure anything. That’s what measurement is; one way to quantify out of many. There can of course be a wrong way and plenty of statisticians work …