By Juan Fernández
Impact investing is on the rise. This is mainly fuelled by the rising public awareness on the societal and environmental impacts of investments – in both the positive and the negative sense. A 2020 report by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), estimates the size of the impact investing market between $505 billion and $2.1 trillion in managed assets. Continue reading “Social Impact Bonds: Doing real good or a wolf in a sheep’s clothing?”
By Sarah Nischalke and Sebastian Forneck
Finding people who love to feast on insects and collect them from the wild, handing them a few plastic boxes with simple trays for vegetable waste from the kitchen, water and for egg laying/breeding- and ready is the mini-livestock farm that produce crickets, locusts or other insects that go into processing for snacks made of insect flour, and, voila: there is a vibrant insect market… Continue reading “Insects on the Plates!”
By Owasim Akram
After working for more than ten years as a development practitioner in Bangladesh with a tremendous opportunity to observe the lives of the extreme poor while living very closely to them, one simple question kept chasing me all the time: why do millions of them remain still poor despite huge progress in the economy, policy changes and many development interventions both from the Government and other development partners? Is it because such efforts fail to bring the intended benefits across to their lives, or is there something that we are missing and therefore never considered while planning, designing, programming or making our decisions? Continue reading “Inheriting Extreme Poverty”
By Ananya Chakraborty and Lennart Kaplan
There has been a spurt in research to design appropriate policy solutions for achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in the Global South. Ironically, such research projects often build upon existing power hierarchies, which may result in unsafe and dangerous working conditions and undermine the Sustainable Development Goal for decent work (SDG 8). Continue reading “Researchers must improve the working conditions for local collaborators”
By Maggie Carter
Humanity is currently facing a threat against which scientific knowledge is our most powerful weapon. Researchers are racing to learn more about the invisible enemy that is Covid-19. However, at the same time, we face another threat, one that has been rearing its head in recent years, but is becoming all the more visible in this unprecedented moment: a growing skepticism of and even hostility towards science. While this is hindering global efforts to reduce the spread of Covid-19, it also has implications that go far beyond the current crisis. Continue reading “From Science to Practice: Strengthening Research Uptake to Achieve the SDGs”
