By Rahul Daswani The reason there are 9 “Major Groups” of stakeholders as part of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development is because these groups are the ones who are pushy and vocal. Felix Dodds (Executive Director of Stakeholder Forum), shared his tips during a talk at the Harvard Kennedy School on November 10 2011: [...]

By Abby Bellows In April 2011, the Indian middle class started to wake up. Development activist Dr. R. Balasubramaniam (Balu) (HKS Mason Fellow, 2009-10) shared the story in a talk at the Hauser Center on October 31, 2011. India’s “dying democracy,” he explained, was revived by a convergence of factors – the Arab Spring uprisings [...]

By Stefania Milan What is the role of social media in the organization, unfolding, and diffusion of the #occupy protests? Here I argue that, as a result of the diffusion of social media, we have now entered the age of cloud protesting, where individuals and networked collective action have taken central stage. In computing, “cloud” [...]

By Lakshmi Iyer I have always believed that a successful NGO develops successful partnerships. In the non-profit funding world, it is a critical challenge for NGOs to ensure that relationships with donors are not muddled with power imbalances but, in fact, are true joint efforts to achieve a shared mission. The April 8 NGOs & Development [...]

By Sherine Jayawickrama On April 21, a panel on Seizing Opportunities to Enhance U.S. Aid Effectiveness brought NGO and U.S. government perspectives together in a lively exchange (video below and blog post follows).  Professor Nicholas Burns, from the Harvard Kennedy School, moderated the panel.  Panelists were: Steve Feldstein, Professional Staff Member, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, U.S. [...]

The last session of this year’s NGOs & Development Study Group will be held on Thursday, April 22 from 4.00 to 5.00 pm in Belfer L4 at Harvard Kennedy School. The session is titled “The Challenges of Haiti: A Critical Test for International NGOs.”  Peter Bell, Senior Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations and [...]

The Humanitarian & Development NGOs domain of practice at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations is pleased to host a panel on Seizing Opportunities to Enhance U.S. Aid Effectiveness: The State of Play and Ways Forward. Wednesday, April 21, 4.00 pm – 5.30 pm Weil Town Hall (Belfer L-1), Harvard Kennedy School, 79 John F. [...]

The 2010 Harvard International Development Conference gets underway today (it runs from the afternoon of April 9 through the evening of April 10) at the Harvard Kennedy School.  Run by students, this conference usually attracts some 400 participants from a variety of disciplines – scholars and practitioners – fosters discussion on several particularly timely themes. The [...]

By Lakshmi Iyer Most of us interested in solving humanitarian or development issues get excited about the term ‘social innovation’ – i.e. finding new, sustainable models to achieve high social impact. But are we paying attention to what drives innovation? Why is it that new ideas that solve age-old problems usually come from specific geographical [...]

The next session of the NGOs & Development study group, organized by the Humanitarian & Development NGOs Domain of the Hauser Center, will be held on Thursday, April 8th from 4:00-5:00pm in Weil Town Hall (Belfer L1) at the Harvard Kennedy School.  The session will be lead by Shalaka Joshi, Vice President of Global Strategies, CSO Partners, and Salimah Samji, who was [...]