27. DEVELOPMENT AND RIGHTS: THE UNDENIABLE NEXUS.
For this issue of the Reader, I find it fitting to excerpt and adapt from Mary Robinson’s (High Commissioner of Human Rights’s) statement to the Copenhagen Plus Five meeting in…
26. CAVEAT EMPTOR: A PARTICIPATORY APPROACH IS NOT A HUMAN RIGHTS APPROACH!
Beware: The fashion is out. Everybody wants to jump into the bandwagon of Human Rights. It is coming to our attention that to be ‘up to the times’ a number…
25. FOOD FOR DONORS DEEP THOUGHTS
It should be clearer to many of you by now that focusing on sustainable poverty alleviation is inseparable from bringing about greater respect of Human Rights and greater equity. As…
24. FOOD FOR NGO’S DEEP THOUGHTS.
In the 2001 World Development Report devoted to poverty, it is stated that there are limits to a micro-level approach to poverty, and a macro-level approach is advocated for. The…
23. ON STATISTICS.*
Statistics create subjects; they tell stories and shape cultures. Over the past five decades, development practitioners have prided themselves on successfully creating more sophisticated ways to measure and compare. Statistics…
22. VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY THE CHILEAN WRITER ISABEL ALLENDE.
Inspired, extracted (plagiarized) and paraphrased from her novel “The Daughter of Fortune”, Plaza y JanesEditores SA, Barcelona, 1999, pp 296-301. Some of us have for too long lived surrounded by…
21. ON MORALITY, FREEDOM, CHOICES, JUSTICE AND THE NEED FOR PEOPLE’S POWER.
Variations on a theme by South African Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer.Inspired, plagiarized and paraphrased from her novel “A Sport of Nature”, Penguin Books, N.Y. 1988. I am not lonely.…
20. ON DEVELOPMENT, THE REAL WORLD, POWER GAMES AND THE UGLY FACES OF GREED
Variations on a theme by the Danish writer Peter Hoeg. Inspired, extracted (plagiarized) and paraphrased from his short story “Reflections of a young man in balance”, in Tales of the…
19. HEALTH SECTOR REFORM AND THE UNMET NEEDS OF THE POOR: A CRITIQUE
I have been re-reading some of the Health Sector Reform (HSR) and health and poverty literature. I have been amazed by the ambiguity, lack of clarity and of a sense…
18. SOME PEARLS OF WISDOM ABOUT HEALTH CARE FINANCING.
Equity in health means equal access for equal need. Near-zero-priced public services for the poor is an essential public policy towards equity. Government intervention in the inequitable workings of the…