Dec 8, 2017
Weekly Links — Can Global Education Learn from Health Initiatives, Cash Transfers and Temptation Goods, & Women’s Empowerment Should Include Men
A roundup of what we’re reading, watching, and listening to this week.
We throw around a lot of think pieces, podcasts, studies, and news in our Slack channels, and we wanted to open up the conversation to our readers as well. Please note that anything we post here is not an endorsement, we just hope these weekly digests will give you something to chew on over the weekend.
We’d love to hear from you! Feel free to start a discussion below, or reach out to us on Twitter or email us at airbel@rescue.org.
Read
+What global education can, and can’t, learn from global health. Paul Skidmore from Rising Academies responds to a recent article from the Center for Education Innovations. A few noteworthy arguments: 1) there are reliable measures of outcomes in education, even in the early stages; 2) policy-makers are not “doing the ‘wrong’ things so much as that they are doing the ‘right’ things and finding that they don’t work”; 3) money doesn’t flow into education systems because policymakers think “true, risk-adjusted returns are much lower”; 4) global education should think about the “politics of reform,” particular strategies that overcome institutional obstacles, that global health does really well.
+How to facilitate decision making in design reviews. A simple guideline to making sure a decision is in sight while keeping stakeholders and decision- makers in the loop.
+Holding Up the Sky: Achieving Women’s Empowerment Requires Working with Women and Men. An article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review draws attention to the marginal or potentially negative impact of only targeting women in development initiatives. “Our research suggests that single-gender spaces may be an important component of economic development for women, but in many cases, involving men will be crucial for long-term and sustainable success.”
+Cash Transfers and Temptation Goods. Evidence that debunks the myth that cash transfers increase alcohol and tobacco consumption. The study shows that there’s even a negative effect.
+Humanitarian data breaches: the real scandal is our collective inaction. Reflecting on the recent security breach of Red Rose’s beneficiary data tracking platform, an article from IRIN highlights the lack of accountability in security and data privacy. There have been active attempts to exploit vulnerable data and that risk is not likely to go anywhere anytime soon, but the aid sector has largely been slow to act.
