Austerity is not the answer to Africa’s colliding crises: it’s time to invest massively in public services and decent jobs

Anthony KamandeDebt, Inequality, Research

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?

Anna MarriottHealth, Inequality

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

Dr Lisa HorrocksClimate Change

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?

Deborah HardoonInequality, Methodology, Real Geek

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 …