Archive for the 'Global Perspectives' Category

In July 2012, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced  a 27 member High-level Panel (HLP) to advise on  a new set of global development goals. These new goals are to replace the  Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)  whose final target date was set in 2000 for 2015.  The new process has thus been dubbed post-2015.  The UN and the HLP have made a special effort at outreach during this process, with numerous meetings being held around the world by the panel members together and individually. In addition, a site for online input My World was created.

The process has generated a lot of …

Most of my work is done with NGOs and n the civil society sector.  But as I feel strongly about cross-sector exchange, and finding few conferences that bring together diverse perspectives, I try to go to meetings that focus on different sectors.  Last week I went to a business conference on “Emerging Markets” in which the conference organizers included sessions on Africa, China, India, and Latin America.  Using my cross-sector lens, here are some of my observations:

Commonalities

• Finding the right global/local balance, customizing what needs to be ‘core’ and what can vary locally is a challenge faced by all

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This is an update on the piece on Global Health Trends (Whither Global Health?)  I wrote a little over two years ago.  In addition to what I have been observing in the interim,  I also polled some colleagues who work in the Global Health field.  These are some of the additional trends we have been noticing:

1.      An acceleration of the integration of issues (now including for example the role of climate change in health; and a focus on health clinics/systems more than any one disease)

The awareness that challenges are linked and solutions must be integrated as …

Reading and thinking about Oxfam America’s new aid campaign and some of the reactions to it, made me think about the title of a song my kids used to listen to years ago “We’re All in this Together”.   As the greater community of “we” try to figure out what Smart Aid or Disruptive Development  or whatever we want to call it is, and how we transform from where we are to where we want to go, it’s a giant puzzle, with many moving and interconnected parts,  and we need to be listening to and talking to each other.  Is some …

We seem to be in a period where there is a lot of talk (and indeed a fair amount of action) around ‘the need for change’ and ‘doing things differently’.  Google the phrase ‘changemakers’ and pages appear.  Some people love the term innovation, others say it is becoming overused and perhaps less relevant.

I am particularly interested in initiatives around changing systems – collaborative efforts to think differently together and then put that thinking into practice – transformative not just incremental change.  What are some of the characteristics of these initiatives?

1. Broad based:  Although what they are learning may

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