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Does the international community know how to support Malian change makers for judicial reform? Does their internal programming logic allow for this?

While establishing partnerships to have a greater social impact, social enterprises also face challenges.

If you want to be a genuine agent of change while being financially sustainable you need to be able to truly listen and interact with the people you are trying to serve. In order to do this, the following points are crucial.

Seizing space for civil society: An Overview of Six Countries - EADI Policy Paper Series - July 2013

Partnerships between the private sector and like-minded organizations are key to securing genuine and lasting change in global development.

Social entrepreneurship is growing fast. However, its success depends on more than quantity alone. Isolated social enterprises cannot deliver impact beyond the microeconomic scale. They need to be part of a broader system and aware of the differen...

In their search to become more financially self-reliant development NGOs are experimenting with social entrepreneurship. Many are doing this to strengthen their financial situation, but social entrepreneurship can do much more and opens up new way...

With only a quarter of the world’s population having access to social protection, the case for expanding it is gaining ground in international discussions. The debate focuses on how best to design social protection, whether it should be universal...

If we want to increase jobs and reduce poverty, we must emphasize the private sector's role in development.

An inclusive economy requires an inclusive financial system. But in South Sudan a focus on financial inclusion, for the time being, might be undesirable.

Public private partnerships (PPPs) have become important means to pursue complex development goals, such as sustainability and food security. Recent examples include the German Initiative for Agribusiness and Food Security (GIAF) and the...

A variety of uncertainties are challenging development interventions on a daily basis. The necessity and demand for increased effectiveness and efficiency of these interventions is greater than ever. This article argues that the success of develop...

The key areas to prioritize in the UN’s Post-2015 development agenda will soon be determined in a worldwide consultation process coordinated by the UN. Feeding into this process, The Broker brings together international experts to pool their knowl...

Contributors to The Broker’s blog ‘Future Calling’.

The NGO community agrees that the foreign aid frame is no longer a viable option, even if that means that NGOs have to evolve into something else. The question is, should today’s NGO by retired, replaced or rejuvenated?

INGOs need to intensify their support to, or even become part of, global social movements if they want to introduce structural change. They must also push for the creation of a global governance system for global public goods.

INGOs are at a crossroads. Caught up in a tide of technocracy, they have become increasingly managerialist – ‘outsider’ experts disconnected from the real struggle. But which road should they take? Can they transform societies, or should they opt...

I recently chaired a forum that discussed whether a new paradigm has emerged in the field of development cooperation, and if so, what does it consist of? A great deal of time at these kinds of debates is spent exploring definitions and their usefu...

Our world is changing quickly and profoundly. Rich and poor – regardless of where they live – are faced with increasingly ‘thick’ problems and social change is more politicized and contested than ever before. And yet, most international developmen...

‘All NGOs are dead.’ Brazilian hacktivist Pedro Markun opened his session with this heavyweight missile at the conference of the HIVOS’ Knowledge Program, ‘The Changing Face of Citizen Action’, last September.

There can be no refuting Michael Edwards' claim that the world we live in is not only thick with problems, but that the problems that we are collectively trying to address are ‘thick...complex, politicized and unpredictable...complicated and...

I think the questions that are asked and discussed are based on tacit assumptions about the role of development INGOs – irrespective of whether their work is ‘thick’ or ‘thin’ in its scope – that I have difficulty saying I share.

Normally I avoid discussions about the future of NGOs like the plague – they either involve a bunch of academics with only the vaguest idea of what we actually do all day, or a lot of senior managers emitting sonorous pronouncements on how we need...

While I never trusted a direct link between economic growth and human development, questioning the automatism of the link a few years ago was often brushed aside as quite ridiculous. 

What will our world look like in, say, twenty years from now, and what does that mean for the strategic choices that NGOs, INGOs and their partners should be making within the next few years?

What is the right thing to do when you reach sixty? This is a question that many NGOs, which were founded in the burst of internationalism that followed the end of World War II, are asking themselves today as they reach late middle age. Oxfam cele...

This morning I took part in a very interesting session that reignited my enthusiasm for the Bellagio Initiative. People, power, politics was the title of our get-together.

NGOs have been joining forces to increase their effectiveness. They need to form alliances with social movements as well, however, to avoid working in isolation from broader social currents.

Freedom from Want: The Remarkable Success Story of BRAC, the Global Grassroots Organization That’s Winning the Fight Against Poverty, by Ian Smillie. Kumarian Press, 2009. A review by Annette Jansen.

From my perspective the author’s diagnosis is essentially right. There is overall consensus that recent decades have seen an increase in inequities in general and health in particular. Some LDC countries are even showing deteriorating health outco...

‘We flew in a twin propeller plane over vertiginous snowy mountain ranges and landed in a fertile valley ... The airstrip, laid down by the Russians when they were here, is made of corrugated metal ... The whole plane vibrates to a stop’, writes C...