As the year draws to a close, the temptation to claim wisdom from adversity and experience becomes irresistible. We did it last year, by exploring what we learnt while the world burned around us. 2021 was perhaps a marginal improvement: not quite the best of times, but not quite the worst of times, ...

We congratulate the FCDO on the landmark paper on Health Systems Strengthening (HSS) and offer three recommendations for implementation: 1) further clarify strategic priorities, for example by articulating a poverty focus and prioritising partnership with low-and middle-income governments; 2) p...

We know that one of the main impacts of climate change will be an increase in all forms of mobility around the world. People will move in the wake of both sudden- and slow-onset disasters, responding to the negative impacts of climate change on their daily lives by seeking new lives and livelihoods ...

The UK made the largest absolute contribution in the last replenishment of the World Bank’s International Development Association (IDA), the bank’s main instrument for assisting the world’s poorest countries. As the World Bank mobilizes for the IDA replenishment next month, we take an analytical ...

Today the UK government’s new policy of mandatory vaccination for care home workers takes effect. By the government’s own reckoning this could result in up to 12 percent  of workers in residential care settings leaving their jobs. How worried should we be about staff shortages in the care secto...

The UK government has announced that it anticipates a return to spending 0.7 percent of gross national income (GNI) on official development assistance (ODA) in three years’ time. It is confident enough in this that the just-published Spending Review, which sets departmental budgets up to the 2024/25...