The hidden heist – offshore plunder is hurting Africa

Forget the UK’s phoney political war over the offshore fund created by Prime Minister David Cameron’s late father. This is a Panama Papers sideshow that is diverting attention from a heist that is siphoning billions of dollars out of the world’s poorest countries in Africa, reinforcing poverty, undermining growth and facilitating corruption on an industrial scale.

Over the past fifteen years, Africa’s vast natural resource wealth has acted as a magnet for foreign investment. Much of that investment has been channelled through offshore centres, with the British Virgin Islands (BVI) the circuit of choice. Fortunes have been made. Elites have been enriched. But the minerals boom has done little to improve the lives of ordinary people.

Five myths about poverty, growth and inequality

Today, development experts from a range of organisations and universities, including the World Bank, are gathering at ODI to discuss how we can end extreme poverty. 

'Pro-poor' or 'inclusive' growth - ensuring that growth benefits the poor  more than the average  -  is a popular mechanism for achieving this. For example, the Sustainable Development Goals and the World Bank both have targets that aim to promote income growth for the bottom 40% of every country’s population.

The Most Important Thing, and It’s Almost a Secret

We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees, Volkswagen corruption, dysfunctional government.

Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover planes that crash, not planes that take off. Indeed, maybe the most important thing happening in the world today is something that we almost never cover: a stunning decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease.

Zero poverty, zero emissions: eradicating extreme poverty in the climate crisis

Eradicating extreme poverty is achievable by 2030, through growth and reductions in inequality. However, unless global emissions peak by around 2030 and fall to near zero by 2100, catastrophic climate change could draw up to 720 million people back into extreme poverty. 

Building on previous ODI research, this report looks at how poverty can be eradicated by 2030 and how, contrary to popular belief, low carbon development is compatible with the zero poverty agenda. Showing how policy incoherent it is for gas emitting countries to support poverty eradication without moving their economies towards zero net emissions, we lay out the path we need to take to reduce both poverty and emissions together. 

Financing the future: How international public finance should fund a global social compact to eradicate poverty

This year the world will agree new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to shape global development policy until 2030. Achieving these goals would have transformative effects, eradicating the scourge of global poverty and expanding opportunities for many millions worldwide. Success will require political leadership backed by financial commitments.

Data Revolution: Development's Next Frontier

Governments have been collecting data on their citizens almost from the first moment that they came into being. Data was needed to determine what was out there that could be extracted: The Egyptian Pharaohs conducted a census to find out the scale of the available labor force to build the pyramids, and in the Roman Empire, the five-yearly census was all about finding out who was available for military service and what wealth existed to be taxed. But governments have also used data to find out what people needed: The ancient Babylonians collected data from their citizens nearly 6,000 years ago in order to understand how much food was required to feed their population, and the Egyptian census was also used to work out how to divide the land after the flooding of the Nile. 



As the activities of governments have become more complex, and people’s expectations have grown, more and more data has been collected. Early censuses just recorded numbers of people, with basic information about wealth and maybe occupation. It’s all more complicated now—the most recent U.K. census, held in 2011, had 56 different questions. And that’s not even including data collected by the health service, the education department or the myriad other public and private bodies who collect and use information about individuals.

U.N. Looks to High Seas to Alleviate Food Crisis

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 11 2013 (IPS) - The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is convinced there is sufficient global capacity to produce enough food to adequately feed the world’s seven billion people.

Dr. Palitha Kohona. UN Photo/Mark Garten

But despite progress made over the last two decades, says FAO, some 870 million people still suffer from chronic hunger.

What if the earth’s finite agricultural resources run out as a result of drought, desertification, climate change and natural disasters?

There is always the high seas and ocean floors, says Ambassador Palitha Kohona, who co-chairs a U.N. Working Group on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity Beyond Areas of National Jurisdiction.

The seas and oceans, which cover 70 percent of the planet, are probably the last frontier on earth with vast areas still to be explored and life forms still to be discovered, he told IPS. And 65 percent of the oceans are beyond national jurisdiction, he added.

More Children in Greece Are Going Hungry

As an elementary-school principal, Leonidas Nikas is used to seeing children play, laugh and dream about the future. But recently he has seen something altogether different, something he thought was impossible in Greece: children picking through school trash cans for food; needy youngsters asking playmates for leftovers; and an 11-year-old boy, Pantelis Petrakis, bent over with hunger pains.

Angelos Tzortzinis for the International Herald Tribune

Michalis Petrakis, who is jobless and whose son Pantelis has been going to school hungry, opened his nearly empty refrigerator.

“He had eaten almost nothing at home,” Mr. Nikas said, sitting in his cramped school office near the port of Piraeus, a working-class suburb of Athens, as the sound of a jump rope skittered across the playground. He confronted Pantelis’s parents, who were ashamed and embarrassed but admitted that they had not been able to find work for months. Their savings were gone, and they were living on rations of pasta and ketchup.

The Guardian: Greece is facing a humanitarian crisis

'The number of homeless people has risen to unprecedented levels for a European country: unofficial estimates put them at 40,000.' Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

European societies typically assume that humanitarian crises only take place in the aftermath of natural disasters, epidemics, wars or civil conflicts.That such a crisis could happen in a European country, especially one that is a member of the European Union, seems out of the question to many of us.

And yet a number of experts would maintain that Greece is currently in the centre of a humanitarian crisis. The head of Médecins du Monde, Nikitas Kanakis, the largest and most prominent NGO in Greece, was among the first to declare it openly. The port area of Perama, near Athens, in particular, is in the midst of a humanitarian disaster. The Medical Society of Athens, the largest professional body of its kind, has even sent a formal letter to the UN asking for intervention.

Is the new IF campaign trying to ‘Make Poverty History’, again?

With the Enough Food for Everyone IF campaign launch this week, we have over 100 charities working together for the first time since the Make Poverty History campaign in 2005. Once again, the UK is hosting the G8 but, while Make Poverty History had some real successes, the issues and debates have moved on – and so has public opinion.

Nursery school pupils learn with teaching aids during a class at the Christower International School, Ibafo district in Ogun State, southwest Nigeria. Photograph: Getty Images.

In 2013 we need a new public conversation, on what aid and development means in the twenty-first century. And it needs to start with where people are. ODI-IPPR research into UK public attitudes found people tired of the traditional ‘aid story’. Repeated messages which focus on a bleak (African) continent and the horrors of extreme poverty can both overwhelm people and reinforce a sense that there has been little progress over time. Too often, people hear a lot about need, and some stories of success (children vaccinated, schools built), but are given very little information about how change happens or how aid works.

Can we fight poverty by ending extreme wealth?

Nonprofits owe much of their budgets to wealthy donors, so it’s unusual for a major charity group to implicate extremely rich individuals as part of the problem.

A Yemeni shoe repairman, Zakaria Saleh, 25, left, works on a street in Sanaa, Yemen. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed)

In a sign that the “Occupy” and “99 percent” movements that swept the United States in recent years have taken on increased global relevance, Oxfam International this week called for “a new global goal to end extreme wealth by 2025,” as a way to stem income inequality and continue the fight against poverty.

Between Climate Catastrophe and Civilisational Renewal: How the Rural Poor Might Yet Save Us All

Although governments around the world ostensibly agree that our carbon targets must aim to keep global temperatures below the 2 degrees Celsius tipping point, it's now clear that we have failed dramatically to stick to our commitments.

According to the latest report from the Global Carbon Project, the rate of growth of carbon dioxide emissions of 3.1% a year is on track to lead to a 4-6C rise by the end of the century - the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) worst case scenario that would lead to an uninhabitable planet.

When people don’t behave according to economic models

What falls outside the standard assumptions and models of economics?  How does that matter for development?  Last week, the Africa Chief Economist’s Office and the Development Economics Research Group of the World Bank sponsored a star-studded course exploring exactly this issue.

Nobel Prize winner George Akerlof highlighted how, because of all the advantages of markets, we ignore the traps that come along with them.  Sellers can deceive buyers and prey on their unconscious biases, lack of self-control, and naiveté. 

Using his famous “lemons” market example, Akerlof showed that, instead of there being no equilibrium, naïve buyers will in equilibrium buy poor-quality used cars. He calls this phenomenon “Phishing for Phools”.

Decisions are also consistently affected by beliefs about what is right and what is normal, the “framing” of our choices.  World Bank economist Karla Hoff showed how soap operas have dramatically affected people’s beliefs about reconciliation and a willingness to disagree with leaders in post-genocide Rwanda; they have also positively affected views of women’s roles in India.  Likewise, quotas on women community leaders in India have transformed people’s views on the appropriateness of women in leadership positions.  Not only is framing powerful: Popular media can be used to shape frames and open people to a wider array of choices.

Esther Duflo of MIT showed how a rational decision maker could be affected by hope and hopelessness, often leaving him or her in a poverty trap.  Imagine a business which must cross a certain threshold to reach high profitability.  A small business owner who doesn’t believe she has a chance of ever crossing that line may decide it isn’t worth doing her best on other business decisions.  Likewise, someone who doesn’t believe they’ll ever be truly healthy may not see a point in investing in nutrition.  “A little bit of hope allows people to realize their potential,”  she said.