New post on why ICAI criticism of BII investments in Indian cosmetics manufacturer and social media platforms miss the mark.

Symptomatic of a UK dev't sector that is too often performative and focused on pleasing specific domestic audiences.

odi.org/en/insights/on…

“What is climate finance? Dunno. But we’re definitely providing 100bn of it”.

Martha G. Bekele and I explore the resistance among providers of climate finance to agree on how to measure it, and what Charles Goodhart might have to say about the controversy

devinit.org/blog/do-we-nee…

bond.org.uk/news/2024/04/t… Good analysis of the euphemism-laden OECD Development mid-term peer review of UK ODA

The review finding that

'Further work is needed to fully seize the opportunities of an integrated ministry'

is certainly one way of putting it

That the IFC (& Bill Gates Imaginable Futures) refuse to pay compensation to victims of sexual abuse by their teachers is despicable

They knowingly financed an unregulated school chain, boasting it employed untrained teachers

When kids got raped they covered up & refused to pay up

1/7 New preliminary OECD Development #ODA data for 2023 largely follows recent trends. There is some good news, but the ongoing challenges remain clear. ODA rose 1.8% in real terms from 2022, remaining high largely due to the ongoing response to #Ukraine .

Lots interesting in new OECD Development data just out
Peripheral but I'm intrigued by the UK tripling admin costs as a % of bi ODA over last 10yrs (guessing jump since 2020 is merger)

It's a bit suspicious given flexibility in measuring this! Ranil Dissanayake any thoughts?

Good thread on new UK ODA release from Ian Mitchell

Last year I bemoaned how crazy it was that refugee costs were higher than all of FCDO's regionally allocable aid, but this year they have overtaken the FCDO's entire bilateral budget...

(Mea culpa: the updates hadn't stopped, just moved to a different site:

gov.uk/government/sta…

Bit too quick to judge the HO... )

Supplementary estimates suggest 24% increase ODA spent by the Home Office for 2023/24, so another massive increase in aid spent within the UK.

And, just when we might really want them, HO seem to have stopped publishing updates to their asylum statistics
gov.uk/government/sta…

New OECD rules for reporting ODA to the OECD could inflate aid & incentivise donors to shift from grant-based giving to loans and equity to development finance institutions (DFIs). This could become an “ODA-generating machine,” says euan ritchie
development-today.com/archive/2024/d…

Alas, I relied on other's calcs for the estimate in the excerpt. But Carbon Brief estimated that real-term fuel duty decline increased CO2 by 21mt/y by 2022.

So this one UK policy produces more emissions than Ethiopia + DRC (combined pop: 216m)

carbonbrief.org/analysis-fuel-…

Good thread shooting down some RCT-straw-manning

thanks Ranil!

New blog in which I explore how changes in reporting have exaggerated upwards trend in climate finance, using NLP tools that Alex Miller has very patiently been teaching me:
devinit.org/blog/missing-b…

Upshot: CF would have been much higher in the past if measured by today's standards

18 months ago we (euan ritchie, Susannah Hares & I) wrote 'Funding to Promote LGBTQ+ Rights is Almost Absent from UK Aid'

cgdev.org/blog/funding-p…

Great to see that is now changing!

Today Bond published a new blog with a few thoughts on the recent aid data release.

Understandably, there has been a lot of focus on Ukraine. Here, I wanted to draw attention to another worrying trend: the decline in grant financing for LDCs:

bond.org.uk/news/2024/01/w…