Thanks for stopping by. This DFID Bloggers site is now closed and will no longer be updated regularly. However, all the blogs that appeared here will be archived if you want to look back at any of our posts. Why …
We are in the shanty side-streets of Paoua, where crumbling buildings patched with tin crowd in on dusty alleys, and where skinny cats patrol. I am sitting with a group of thirty women, and their attention is focussed on two metal …
In May last year the Prime Minster launched the Business Call to Action (BCtA), an initiative that encourages companies to think about new business ideas that can help to alleviate poverty in poorer countries. CEOs of some of the world's largest multinationals …
I was thinking again about that local official in Paoua. He has another constraint – he can’t even get to see the area he administers. It's quite in contrast with my own role - I am traveling right across this …
As I flew in to the north west of the country today, the plane banked sharply and circled as it came in to land. On the ground, on the bumpy, dusty bit of cleared bush that acts as a runway, …
One of the important side meetings of the International Health Partnership meeting in Geneva last week was between Michel Kazatchkine, the executive director of the Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria (GFATM) and Mozambique's Minister of Health, Paulo …
Recently I spent 3 days travelling in the far NW of Nigeria to the State of Sokoto, once the heart of the Islamic Sokoto Caliphate (kingdom), which ruled much of the interior of W. Africa in the 19th Century. Sokoto …
I got the strong impression last week that Margaret Chan, the dynamic leader of the World Health Organization is a closet karaoke singer! In order to highlight that partnership between agencies, developing countries, financing partners and between governments and civil society …
I packed Barack Obama's autobiography ‘The audacity of hope' for a trip from Maputo to Geneva which I made this last week. What a great read! I am a bit of a nervous flyer - sweaty palms as soon as …
Approaching 2pm on Friday, the next event on the road home was a much more welcome spectacle, Friday prayers. A predominately male crowd surge along the roadside towards the local mosque, most in Hausa robes, with some clasping prayer mats. …
My work as education adviser involves frequent travel around the old northern region, principally to meetings with programme staff and representatives of State Ministries of Education, but whenever possible to schools. Road travel in the north of Nigeria initially seems …
