by Steven Lawry Independent US foundations working internationally have advantages that other kinds of donors, such as the World Bank and USAID, generally don’t. As private funders, foundations are better able to bear risk on behalf of innovative approaches to social change and poverty reduction than are public sector funders. Where foundation-funded work yields promising [...]

  About a week ago, I was on a panel on “Bridging the Gap: Researchers and Practitioners in International Development” at the Social Enterprise Conference held at Harvard Business School.  It was a lively exchange that covered a lot of ground – both panelists and audience members drew from a breadth of experience.   I [...]

Great post and conversation over at Blood and Milk for those thinking about starting their own international development NGO:  Can you share some of your experiences in which inexperienced nonprofits did more harm than good?

Today the Hauser Center hosted Duncan Green, head of research at Oxfam GB, to discuss his new book, From Poverty to Power.  Lant Pritchett, professor of the practice of international development, offered a response. Some quick reflections: Duncan’s thesis is that development is best achieved through (1) active citizenship and (2) effective states.  While instinctively [...]

(I originally posted this on Tuesday 11/11/08 and it mysteriously disappeared, so I’m reposting.  Unless there’s been foul play from a new philanthropist acolyte, I can only chalk it up to a site glitch.  Apologies for the redundancy.) It is a truth almost universally acknowledged, at least by NGO leaders and international development policy experts, [...]

Michael Edwards, who recently stepped down as director of the Governance and Civil Society Program at the Ford Foundation, explores similar issues in “Have NGOs Made a Difference?”* He finds that development NGOs have been influential in getting the mainstream to address the negative aspects of globalization, commit to participation and human rights as basic [...]

On Monday, the Nonprofit Sector and Philanthropy Program at the Aspen Institute released Mobilizing Change: 10 Nonprofit Policy Proposals to Strengthen U.S. Communities.  Full disclosure: I helped edit the paper and wrote much of the introduction, and its recommendation for FEMA to create a high-level coordinating body to better integrate community-based nonprofits in disaster relief [...]

While both the Homi Kharas/Blum Brookings summary and the Index of Global Philanthropy focus solely on quantity, the Center for Global Development’s Commitment to Development Index (CDI) attempts to incorporate aspects of aid quality.  Since ”aid is about more than money,” the CDI rewards donor selectivity and penalizes tied aid, project proliferation, donor fragmentation, and lack of [...]