What's Changing? - Development

Please see below selected recent development-related change.

See also:

December 2023

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Monday that a funding shortfall will cut the number of people who can expect the agency’s help in 2024 by 64 million. With one-third less funding in 2023 than hoped for, investments in food, water, and health projects will benefit 181 million people rather than the hoped-for 245 million.

November 2023

Africa's cities are full of people with no formal jobs, hustling for a living. They are survivors who work long hours scrabbling together a pittance. If Africa’s future depends on their labour, then Africa is in trouble. No amount of access to finance is going to turn such “enterprises” into the building blocks of a modern economy. Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion, says of the transformative effect of complex businesses: “Companies perform a productivity miracle by organising workers to reap gains from scale and specialisation”, but the roadside hustler is often neither specialised nor productive, so to romanticise such an atomised workforce is to accept poverty in perpetuity, warned the FT.

January 2023

According to Global Economic Prospects 2023, the convergence of average incomes between poor and rich countries has stalled. Worse, it might not soon return, given the damage already done and likely to persist in the years ahead. By the end of 2024, gross domestic product levels in emerging and developing economies were forecast to be 6% below those expected before the pandemic. The cumulative loss in GDP of these countries between 2020 and 2024 was forecast at 30% of 2019 GDP. In fragile and conflict-affected areas, real incomes per head are expected to have fallen outright by 2024.
McKinsey shared the findings from a dataset that breaks the world down into more than 40,000 microregions, a view 230 times more granular than a country perspective. This pixelated version of the world, compiled with cutting-edge statistical techniques like the use of night-time satellite imagery, provides a much more nuanced view of development than previous research, enhancing our understanding of global progress in ways that can help business and governments make better, more targeted decisions.

July 2021

An all-time peak in people needing humanitarian assistance was reached in 2020 - 243.8 million spread across 75 countries - and yet at the same time global humanitarian funding decreased to an unparalleled 52 per cent gap. COVID-19 exacerbated pre-existing crisis situations, and advanced economies are not meeting their targets, in part due to the demands of the pandemic.

July 2020

Official development assistance commitments by donor countries dropped by more than one third to $16.9 billion in the first five months of 2020 compared with the same period of 2019. The sharp decline - attributed to budget-tightening in major donors in response to the COVID-19 pandemic - threatens highly vulnerable people who need this assistance throughout the developing world, noted GZEROMedia.

December 2018

The head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde, told developing nations at the World Economic Forum in 2019 to stop using global consultancies to write development strategies. She criticised inefficient spending on consultants and said low-income and emerging-market economies had to raise more revenue themselves domestically and cut white elephant projects and corruption.
In December 1978, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping announced an ambitious plan to reform” and open up” the Communist country’s tightly regulated state-run economy. In the four decades since, hundreds of millions of Chinese were lifted out of poverty and the country’s share of the global economy rocketed from 3 percent to 19 percent. Deng’s bold changes transformed a poor agrarian country into an economic superpower, noted the Economist.

October 2018

The third edition of the Agenda Knowledge for Development (download here) is an initiative of the Knowledge for Development Partnership, it shares a vision of how knowledge and knowledge societies can contribute to an inclusive approach to human development. The Agenda Knowledge for Development features 14 Knowledge Development Goals (Figure 1) designed to complement the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from the perspective of knowledge. It also includes 130 personal statements in which leading individuals put forward their personal views and perspectives on knowledge societies.
Developing countries continue to depend on outside knowledge, at the expense of indigenous knowledge systems that are much more locally relevant, warned a RealKM editorial. In spite of setting up hundreds of universities and research institutes, developing countries continue to import knowledge. For instance, African countries are not just importing equipment and finished products from the West and East but also importing knowledge in the form of prescriptions on how to use those imports.

Pre 2018

Oxford Martin School's Ian Goldin, former Vice President of the World Bank and former economic advisor to Nelson Mandela, believes development is the no.1 issue facing humanity - why do some societies and some individuals develop, get richer, get rights etc....while others don't? Why is GDP so pre-dominant, meaning that destructive practices (e.g. environmental harm) are counted as economic acticity - in short, "why are the bads of economies counted as goods?" Goldin has traced the trajectory of development over recent decades. Dependency theory led to uneven development which countries tried to address through import substitution, but countries are generally not very good at state-controlled production and then the oil price rises of the 1970s led to a vicious cycle of debts and bail-outs.
The US Agency for International Development is planning to launch a family of websites to improve collaboration and knowledge-sharing among workers providing development assistance.
Technical information can be of immense value to poor people, and all those involved in development need access to it. The charity Practical Action, offers a Practical service which it claims helping hundreds of people around the world overcome their own poverty, through the provision of knowledge and information.
A leading sportswear brand claimed to be the first global business to put a true value on the natural resources used and the environmental impacts caused by providing products to its customers.
in Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, Zambian-born economist Dambisa Moyo argued that foreign aid to Africa should be cut off. Her point - that aid does more harm than good is based on the contention that billions of aid dollars haven't produced much bang for the buck and have, in fact, promoted dependency and corruption.

Topics

Development

Poverty