‘Development’ has failed to deliver. The reason, Jason Hickel argues, is that development organisations have failed to address the structural drivers of poverty
The big question is whose interests the World Bank really serves. While they spend considerable time and money painting themselves as champions of the poor, the Bank has a battery of practices and policies that suggest a very different truth.
There are, essentially, two grand narratives about these times we live in. We can think of each as a kind of foundational logic, invoked as a way to frame the vastly complex reality we see all around us, and therefore help determine how we understand and respond to it.
Bill and Melinda Gates just released their annual letter, "Our Big Bet for the Future," with their thoughts on the current state of global poverty and the suite of projects they are funding to tackle it. While their hopeful tone and a good deal of what they are proposing is...
Almost every day there is a news story that tells us that economic inequality has reached an all time high. The wealth gap is becoming a chasm. How did we get here? What is it that has made our world so unequal?
We know that many people in the UK misunderstand poverty and development: there’s reams of evidence on that. But there are interesting lessons to be had when we look at what it is that they actually think. For example: the idea that Oxfam run orphanages, something that surfaced when Oxfam...
The way people perceive poverty is problematic. For years, popular media and advertising has made us believe that poverty is natural. It happens to people who don’t work hard enough. That’s not true.
As United Nations officials struggle to define the development priorities of the next 15 years, the UN Millennium Campaign, the World Bank, and many other organs of the development industry tell us that we are nearing the end of poverty.
