Jennifer Bussell and Asim FayazMay 2017 Overview This case study discusses government capacity to prepare for and respond to natural disasters – floods, earthquakes, and heat waves – in Pakistan. The analysis finds that several hypotheses described at the start of this report are particularly relevant to explaining the extent of disaster preparedness and risk […]
Reading Robert Chamber’s paper “Poverty and livelihoods: whose reality counts?” reminded me of an incident a friend narrated a couple of years back. At the time, he was working for a development sector think-tank in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. The incident occurred after he had just arrived at a 5-star hotel to attend a USAid-funded conference […]
Despite having seen some really dumb “development” ideas in the past waste a large amount of time and money, I recently came across something so… wrong, that it actually made me angry enough to write about it! According to Wikipedia, the PlayPump Water System (shown above) is… “… like a playground merry-go-round attached to a water pump. The […]