In Jaffna, Sri Lanka, sanitation workers employed by the state all belong to one caste: the Parayar. Here, Aftab Lall argues that the institutionalisation of Parayar workers as low-status government officials legitimates the discrimination they face, and ignores its origins. ...
Women in one village in the Jaffna district of northern Sri Lanka have been rolling beedi with their bare hands for over fifty years in a gendered survival economy. This is no accident....
The SLRC Panel survey is examining people’s access to services, livelihoods and perceptions of governance in 5 countries. We’re now carrying out the second round after a first round in 2012. The survey aims to inform debates around whether and how delivering services and supporting...
Sunday 11 October was International Day of the Girl. This year’s focus is on Adolescent girls. Despite the MDG targets to achieve universal primary education and eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2015, according to Afghanistan’s most recent census only 23% of...
Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime. But what happens when he is unable to practice what he was taught? ...
Richard Mallett reflects on the importance of capacity building in this blog posted by Devex....
The response to Ebola has overlooked the political dimensions of this crisis, argues Lisa Denney in this IDS blog....
[vc_row css_animation="" row_type="row" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no" type="grid" angled_section="no" text_align="left" background_image_as_pattern="without_pattern" padding_top="55"][vc_column][vc_column_text] The 2015 OECD report on States of Fragility [^] proposes a new way of measuring and classifying fragility that is really exciting and ground-breaking, but it’s less exciting once it gets to the policy prescriptions. We seem...
This Sunday will mark International Women’s Day across the world. Many will celebrate the progress that has been made towards eliminating gender inequality. However, for women living in conflict there is still a long way to go. Over the last four years, we have been...
Last Wednesday, we were lucky enough to be invited along to the launch of the Institute of Development Studies’ Ebola: Lessons for Development papers [^]. The event got us thinking about what the Ebola crisis tells us about our conventional ways of doing state-building and...