admin October 17th, 2011
We’re going to be exhibiting at AidEx in Brussels this week – open days are Wednesday and Thursday – and participating in a roundtable organised by PA International. The roundtable will be discussing ‘The future of humanitarian aid and development assistance’, which is a large topic, but I’m sure we’ll give it a good go in the hour that we have available.
Details of the conference at AidEx are here. Entry to the show and the conference are free, so if you are in the area this week, do drop in, you’ll find Advance Aid on stand B49.
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Tags: AidEx, Belgium, Local manufacturing, Local procurement, natural disasters, Sub-Saharan Africa
admin January 10th, 2010
Excuse the tabloid style headline on this post, but when an eminent academic economist produces evidence that, despite the influx of billions of dollars of aid – some of which, of course, flowed out just as quickly to Swiss bank accounts – sub-Saharan Africa has gone backwards over the period 1970-2000 it merits a ‘shock horror’ type of response.
Not that sub-Saharan Africa is alone amongst poor regions in getting poorer. Or that, here at Advance Aid, we are that surprised, pushing as we are the view that ‘Trade not Aid’ is the answer to getting real development moving in Africa.
The analysis has been carried out by Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics and Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge and has been recently published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society under the title ‘Nature’s role in sustaining economic development’. Interested readers can download a copy of the full paper here. It’s well worth a read.
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Tags: Bangladesh, China, Human Development Index, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sub-Saharan Africa, Sustainable development, Trade not Aid
admin September 17th, 2009
So now it’s official. The World Bank has spoken. Climate change is not just the cause of more extreme weather events, which hit developing countries disproportionately, it is also disproportionately damaging to them economically.
The World Development Report 2010, the Press edition of which has just been published, comments, “Warming of 2°C could result in a 4 to 5 percent permanent reduction in annual per capita consumption in Africa and South Asia, as opposed to minimal losses in high-income countries…It is estimated that developing countries will bear most of the costs of the damages—some 75–80 percent.”
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Tags: Carbon emissions, Climate change, GDP, Sub-Saharan Africa, World Bank, World Development Report