Archive for May 2009
Working for an organisation that funds development work (in my case DFID) means that I frequently receive requests from worthy causes for financial support. I recently got a call from a Western volunteer living in Nigeria with a difference; a brand new school built deep in the Niger Delta that has facilities and funds, but no [...]
The week started with a bang, with the official signing of Mozambique's application for round 9 funding from the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria. The meeting room of UNAIDS in the leafy Sommerschield Bairo of Maputo is becoming a familiar rendevous point for the dozens of people who have been working to [...]
I came across a very interesting article titled UN to bridge funding gap on health in the Financial Times last week (free registration required), which discusses a UN plan to launch a new initiative to raise billions of dollars in addition to government aid in order to meet basic health needs in developing countries. The plan [...]
This week I’ve been thinking about health a lot. I have two small children who are both adapting well to life in Nepal. But Nepal has different germs to Bangladesh, where we lived previously, and added to that, it is the noticeable change of seasons here, which is locally notorious as a time when lots [...]
It’s been a hectic couple of months in Basra (you may have noticed I’ve not posted recently). The big story has been the drawdown of the British military from the province. I’ll write about that in a future post. For this post I wanted to write about DFID’s work to encourage inward foreign investment to [...]
Have you heard that water flows one way down the drain in the southern hemisphere and the other way in the northern hemisphere? Is it true? I live 1 degree south of the equator, and when I experimented pouring water in my washbashin, the water flowed anticlockwise. Does it flow clockwise in the northern hemisphere? Why not try it [...]
The latest update from Mozambique is that we are in the midst of an intensive period of activity supporting the Government of Mozambique to develop its round 9 application to the Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria (GFATM). I was in a meeting of Mozambique's Country Coordination Mechanism (CCM) held at the UNAIDS office [...]
So today it was my turn in the climate change hot seat here at the World Bank in Washington. The highlight of my day was being able to approve an exciting new programme called Scaling-up Renewable Energy (SREP). SREP will focus on scaling up the use of renewables in low income countries. Yesterday I mentioned the kind of [...]
I arrived in Nepal last week and the day I arrived the Prime Minister resigned! My week since has been trying to make sense of a multitude of contradictions and intensely complex politics. I’ve arrived to head up DFID’s development programme in Nepal, which is worth about £172 million over the next three years. I [...]
Nigeria has a diverse range of challenges to deal with in providing a decent livelihood and prosperity to its population of over 140 million. One issue that gently bubbles in the background and occasionally boils over is environmental degradation; made worse by a population that has tripled in the last 50 years and the ‘power problem'. Despite the [...]
