Weekly Links — Tech in Disaster Response, 10 Top Thinkers on Development, Male Bias + More

A roundup of what we’re reading, watching, and listening to this week.

Happy new year! We hope your holiday was either restful, adventurous, or both! We’re back into the grind of work and ready to take on 2018. Here are some of the most thought-provoking pieces our team came across this week:

+4 ways technology can help us respond to disasters. “One of technology’s most meaningful benefits for society may lie in the humanitarian sector, which must reach large numbers of people, in remote and dangerous locations, to provide critical resources fast and efficiently.”

+10 top thinkers on Development, summarized in 700 words by Stefan Dercon and The Perils of Male Bias: Alice Evans replies to yesterday’s ‘Sausagefest’. Stefan Dercon, DFID’s chief economist, gave an amusing presentation on some of the most influential thinkers in development — and yet his list was heavily male. Alice Evans, Lecturer at King’s College London, responded with a list of female scholars who are equally influential but often overlooked. Together, they provide a great summary of academic work in international development.

+The Compact Experiment: Push for Refugee Jobs Confronts Reality of Jordan and Lebanon. This is one the most comprehensive pieces we’ve come across detailing the state of refugee employment in Jordan and Lebanon since the Jordan Compact was signed on February 2016. While policy has been put in place, it hasn’t transformed much on the ground (a problem we’re invested in tackling).

+Here are the 2017 innovations that changed the world. Everything from a Facebook translation bot for refugees to cardboard drones to a mobile-based ambulance taxi program in Tanzania.

+ Smart City Expert Says “Sustainable” Shouldn’t Be the Goal. His Excellency Dr. Talal Abu Ghazaleh (formerly chairman of the UN Global Alliance for ICT for Development) thinks we need to pay more attention to social indicators and start measuring them like economic indicators. “We have to have an indicator on education, social impact of education, social impact in economic level of living or poverty levels or economic well-being levels, on health, on all the battles that affect the well-being of a person.” He also offers advice on strengthening public-private partnerships.

We throw around a lot of think pieces, podcasts, research, 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.