A warm welcome to our latest edition of Development Directions ➡️- Jonusta’s newsletter on happenings across the international development space.
Jonusta is an early-stage 🚀on-demand work marketplace connecting 🤝 for-purpose organizations and professional talent to project opportunities in the Global 🌍 South.
Our platform launches later this year. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy our newsletter. We’re always keen to improve, so please let us know (on Linkedin & Twitter) what you’d like to see more of!
Until next time! Stay healthy & keep doing great impactful work!
- Team Jonusta
What’s new?
UK Parliamentarians recently voted 🗳️ to cut aid spending to 0.5% of GNI. ODI delivered some good analysis on the three myths underlying the vote on the cuts.
No doubt that this represents a significant blow for international development worldwide, but there’s hope that UK aid will eventually recover in time, as the British economy recovers. Some groups have decided to challenge the UK Govt’s decision, including the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), which recently announced pre-legal action against the cuts.
Many countries in the Global South continue to struggle with the COVID pandemic. Whilst many Western countries run successful vaccination 💉campaigns and continue to reopen their economies; the Delta variant is surging across Africa, driven by a lack of intensive-care beds and oxygen. With the WHO warning that “with a fast-moving pandemic, no one is safe, unless everyone is safe,” there have been calls for vaccine sharing at the latest G7 meeting with a commitment from the UK and US to share vaccines.
FCDO procurement continues to reopen slowly as the department prepares its Comprehensive Spending Review for submission later in 2021. In July, the RFP for the long-awaited Evidence Fund was released with a deadline of 28/08/2021 for submissions. An Early Market Engagement notice for a £15m Water Resource Accountability project in Pakistan was also announced by the department.
Public health expert Atul Gawande will lead global health development at the U.S. Agency for International Development. His role at USAID will focus on tackling child and maternal deaths, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and infectious diseases, such as COVID-19. Meanwhile, Jan Egeland has recently taken over at the Grand Bargain - an ambitious donor partnership to get more funds into the hands of people in need. He talks about the way forward in this interesting Q&A.
The Global Partnership for Education (GPE) will hold the global education 📚 summit on 28-29 July 2021, co-hosted by the UK and Kenya. It is an important summit that will spotlight long-term funding commitments to support GPE's work to transform education systems in up to 90 countries.
What are we reading?
Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed is an absolute 💎 of a book. He looks at how examining our everyday mistakes can prevent recurrences in the same way as black box flight data analysis has dramatically reduced the incidence of airplane crashes. He examines a wide range of sectors (including international development) and is an interesting look at how changing our mindset and attitudes towards failure, questioning the assumptions that underpin long-held beliefs and the role of testing can help uncover what really works and improve many areas in society.
In an interesting blog piece, Tiina Pasanen & Pablo Yanguas consider how Monitoring Evaluation and Learning (MEL) consultants can support real change instead of creating tools or processes that are quickly forgotten without any real institutional ownership.
Productivity Tip
We ❤️ being productive. We all do lots of presentations and sometimes it’s great to try an alternative to Powerpoint, right!?! Enter, Beautiful.io. Your simple, effective and sophisticated alternative to Powerpoint. Go forth and release your creativity 🌼.
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs!
We completely get that freelancing might not be the right fit for everyone. So, below we’ve posted some really great permanent job roles you might be interested in applying for.
And if you do change your mind about freelancing, please head over to Jonusta!
We hope you’ve enjoyed our newsletter round-up and look forward to seeing you next time. In the meantime, don’t forget to visit our landing page to be notified when Jonusta launches!