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March 31, 2008

CGD Faith and Development Meetup Raises More Questions Than Answers

Posted by Lindsay Morgan in Faith and Development Tags:

Faith and Development MeetupLast week CGD hosted a Global Development Meetup event on faith and development with Brady Walkinshaw of the Development Dialogue on Values and Ethics at the World Bank. The event was well-attended, with guests from the Jubilee USA Network, Church World Service, Search for Common Ground, the Inter-American Dialogue, the U.S. Department of State, and USAID. (To receive information about future CGD Global Development Meetups, sign up here)

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February 25, 2008

Faith and Development in Zambia

Posted by Lindsay Morgan in Africa, Faith and Development, Regions Tags:

The role of faith-based organizations (FBOs) in development can be contentious. Some consider faith in itself unempirical or irrational and thus unintelligent. Some think faith groups base their programs and policies on feelings rather than facts. Others worry that FBOs do not respect peoples’ local beliefs and customs; they shudder at the thought of someone demanding conversion in exchange for life-saving medicine. And since President Bush, who went on a five-country tour of Africa last week, made supporting FBOs a pillar of his support for African and other assistance efforts, many fear that condom distribution has taken a back seat to abstinence-only education (even though PEPFAR, the U.S. president’s AIDS program, is one of the largest distributors of condoms in the world).
Last month I had an opportunity to visit the southern African nation of Zambia to look at the role of FBOs. Here’s what I found:

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January 26, 2007

A “Surprise Party” Update: Will the Candidates Surprise Us in 2008?

Posted by Sarah Jane Staats in Advocacy, Faith and Development, Foreign Aid Reform, Global Development, Migration and Labor Mobility, U.S. Foreign Aid Reform Tags: , ,

Just after the 2006 midterm elections, I blogged about CGD research that suggested the new split between a Republican president and Democratic Congress would increase pressure on the foreign aid budget. CGD Senior Fellow Todd Moss, author of “The Surprise Party: An Analysis of ODA Flows to Africa” to which I referred, has now updated his data. His new note,”U.S. Aid to Africa After the Midterm Elections? A ‘Surprise Party’ Update” says U.S. aid to Africa has soared under the Bush administration and that a divided government, if history holds true, will lower aid.

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October 30, 2006

One Week Until the U.S. Elections: Has Global Poverty Become a Voting Issue?

Posted by Sarah Jane Staats in Advocacy, Aid Effectiveness, Faith and Development, Global Health, Migration and Labor Mobility Tags:

Voting Line
In response to my blog a few weeks back on translating conscious consumerism like PRODUCT (RED) and other advocacy efforts into the U.S. elections, Gawain Kripke from Oxfam commented that it would nice if development and poverty were voting issues. Last week, the ONE Campaign launched a “ONE Vote” video that attempts to bridge that gap.

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October 20, 2006

Let’s Talk About Faith, Development – and Evidence

Posted by Lindsay Morgan in Advocacy, Aid Effectiveness, Faith and Development, Global Health, Migration and Labor Mobility Tags:

Talking about religion, or faith to use a more general term, is about as popular a thing to do as overpaying your taxes, especially in the policy world. We shy away from the topic because of the personal, sometimes intense, reaction it elicits and, I suspect, because faith feels a little soft, emotional, even anti-intellectual when compared with hard political and economic realities. But since faith impacts U.S. policy, it is a conversation we ought to be having. This is especially true in development, where faith-based organizations (FBO) play a significant role in the delivery of humanitarian assistance abroad.

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July 17, 2006

The Archbishop of Cape Town and Sen. Barack Obama on Faith and Development

Posted by Ruth Levine in Faith and Development, Global Development Tags: ,

Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane of South AfricaThe importance of involving communities and civil society organizations in development features prominently in the discourse of international agencies. Community involvement is vital, we hear, to reforming dysfunctional education systems, fighting disease, and overcoming corruption. But we hear much more about communities than from them.
How to reach the communities, and how to know if they have been reached? The answer, according to the Most Reverend Njongonkulu Ndungane, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, is involve churches, mosques and other religious institutions as core partners, for implementation of programs and for monitoring of the development process. In Africa, he argued in a well-attended CGD event last week, religious life is a fundamental dimension of people’s lives. Houses of worship, however humble, provide education and information, community cohesion, and defense against the vagaries of government. (See One Year After the G8 Gleneagles Summit: Implementation, African Development and the African Monitor for transcript and video of the event.) Faith-based institutions can play a vital role in promoting development, and will do so more and more, as the Archbishop implements the African Monitor, a home-grown effort to track the effects of development policies at the local level through the region’s network of religious organizations.

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