We work around Africa to increase access to basic services, help after humanitarian emergencies and empower girls and women, ultimately helping people lift themselves out of poverty. In these blogs country teams discuss their work and progress towards these and other goals.
Crossing the street the other morning to get through the front door of DFID’s London Headquarters, I was suddenly confronted with a new bunch of faces. Normally I do my hour and a half commute just concentrating on getting some work done …
DFID Mozambique has been thinking about how to address the key challenges set out in DFID’s White Paper ‘Building our Common Future’, which was published in July this year. Rita Zacarias, pictured here holding the cover of the soon to …
I am writing this at the end of four intensive days of discussion on building regional and national ‘Observatories’ to track the status and progress on strengthening the health workforce in Africa. The meeting of the African Regional Health Workforce …
It’s just 7.15 am and it is already hot. Not from the morning sun (even though it's out and shining), but from the high overnight temperature that has not receded (talk about climate change!). It was a hot night and …
Coming from Khartoum, inevitably, the first thing you notice about Kinshasa is the weather. While similarly humid (I left at the end of the Khartoum rainy season), Kinshasa was a good ten to fifteen degrees cooler than Khartoum. And so …
That was the reaction I got from friends and family from my generation when I told people I was going to work in Kinshasa for two months with DFID DRC. People from older generations asked me, ‘Is that the country …
Don’t you get worried when you are given a leaving present as you are about to board the plane, and your suitcase is already stuffed to the gills with souvenirs? So when a friend gave me a beautiful painting at my leaving do last week, …
Baobab trees (genus Adansonia) are found in Africa and Australia, and have the ability to store literally tens of thousands of litres of water within their trunk giving them their distinctive shape. This gives rise to their informal name of 'bottle …
Who has the main say - donors or recipient countries? Isn't it obvious? Don't donors have all the resources and so control the show? No, it isn’t always like that, and in the last few years there has been a shift towards a more …
A current hot topic in development circles is whether at the upcoming UN general assembly meeting in New York, the advice of a topic level panel will be heeded to create a UN ‘super-agency’ for women. Currently a number of different …
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