Development

Humanitarian aid is often at the centre of debates about efficiency, corruption and costly bureaucratic procedure. Digital technology seems to offer an alternative to centralised aid governance by allowing people to take direct initiative such as in the case of crowdfunding; participate in decentralised peer-to-peer systems allowed by blockchain...

If you are a woman of reproductive age, there is a 64 percent chance that you use some form of contraception. In Europe, this figure is 80 percent, while in the United States, latest statistics reveal that there is approximately a 62 percent chance you are using contraception. While...

Tunisia is, after Jordan, the second country in the Mediterranean area to be most affected by drought and dryness. Not only is it the smallest country in the Maghreb, it is also the one with the least reliable water resources. Aware of this problem and with the intention of...

The crisis in South Sudan is now daily in the news. The extensive media reporting on the human suffering and the tireless efforts of NGOs, the UN and other humanitarian agencies to help captures for the world the dire situation. But what is the cause of this deepening crisis...

The Tunisian National Security Council, convoked by Tunisian president Béji Caid Essebsi in Carthage on 15th March 2017, talked about terrorism and national security, but also about joints. Indeed, the agenda of the meeting included the reform of Law 52, a law that imposes a minimum mandatory sentence of...

The importance of basic education, both primary and secondary, has increasingly occupied the academic literature, highlighting its relevance for economic development. Higher educational levels result in higher levels of labor productivity, which in turn, relate to higher levels of income. The universalization of basic education is often pointed out...

What sort of a society would you like to live in if you knew nothing about where you would end up? Picture yourself in an aware state before your birth but without any knowledge about what circumstances you were going to be born into: which neighbourhood you will live...

Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria is facing an unprecedented crisis in the Northeast which has now spread to the entire Lake Chad Basin region including parts of Cameroon, Chad, and Niger. The Crisis caused by the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram has displaced 2.5 million people making it the...

For decades the West’s policy in fighting global poverty has been exemplified by Bob Geldof’s immortal words: “give us the money”. Millions of people heard this call from gigs around the world, organised to raise funds for an ongoing Ethiopian famine which had impregnated and planted itself in the...

Over the past two decades, the international community has increasingly considered economic growth as the magic bullet for poverty reduction. As part of this movement, Aid for Trade emerged in 2005 as the first global initiative to support developing countries to overcome the structural and capacity-based barriers preventing them...

For technologically oriented generations, rural communities may seem disconnected from the big city, but they are crucial to sustaining the rapid growth of urban expanses globally. For example, the food produced on farms and in greenhouses nourishes millions of people that would otherwise have no resource to rely on....

Whilst the right to education is enshrined in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UNDHR, 1948) and later in the UN Convention on the Rights of Child (UNCRC, 1989), the international community has only been moving towards realising this in earnest since the 2000s. The key moment is considered...

An accountable police service which operates in the interests of the population is a fundamental foundation for any state. It is a prerequisite for social justice, democracy, peace, and the effective maintenance of security for all citizens. For Lebanon, the need couldn’t be more acute. The country’s Internal Security...

Médecins Sans Frontières or MSF ( also known as Doctors Without Borders), one of Europe’s biggest humanitarian organization, has recently released a statement criticizing the European Union’s (EU) “deterrence policies and intensifying attempts to push people and their suffering away from European shores,” and the signing of the EU-Turkey...

This article was co-written with the Managing Editor Virginia Vigliar. “Before, philanthropy was something very wealthy individuals were engaging in. Now, everybody can do . Once you empower each individual, there’s nothing more powerful.” This mission – to change the trajectory of global development through the collective power of...