Joe Powell

Although this piece focuses on UK foreign assistance, it raises some important concerns that citizens  in the US and Canada might have about their country’s own aid. This article was originally published on The Huffington Post UK.  The debate on the UK’s aid budget has never been more polarized. A small group of aid critics use

The fight against corruption is messy, unpredictable and often dangerous. In developing countries it has historically been most acute in countries with large deposits of oil, gas and minerals, and involves the diversion of huge sums of money that could otherwise be spent on poverty eradication. That’s why last night’s agreement in Brussels for all 27 European Union member states to require extractive companies to publish the payments they make to governments is potentially such a game-changer. Transparency of this kind releases information that will make it harder for natural resource wealth to be lost to corruption or captured solely by elites.

There is big news today on both sides of the Atlantic for campaigners – including ONE – in the Publish What You Pay coalition for transparency in oil, gas and mining. The major Norwegian oil company Statoil has withheld their support from last-ditch attempts to overturn the new US rules on transparency, and a former

This year the G8 returns to the UK. Last time in 2005 Africa and international development was top of the agenda. The commitments made on aid and debt cancellation, combined with African leadership, have helped spur great progress. Since the 2005 Gleneagles summit, annual child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa has fallen by 423,000 and 21

This blog post was originally published on the Huffington Post UK‘s website. “Narrowing the development gap and reducing poverty are integral to our broader objective of achieving strong, sustainable and balanced growth and ensuring a more robust and resilient global economy for all.” Toronto G20 Summit, 2010 If prizes were awarded for warm words and

The G20 Summit in Los Cabos, Mexico this week was once again dominated by the Eurozone crisis, but I’ve been here with other NGOs and civil society groups trying to make sure the other global crises – hunger, malnutrition and extreme poverty – were not forgotten. As often happens with the communiques coming out of

The foreign aid budget isn’t just at risk in the US — it’s at risk in other countries, too. Take a look at what ONE UK is doing to protect their foreign aid budgets: In tomorrow’s budget Chancellor George Osborne is expected to announce that every UK taxpayer will receive an annual statement of what

Leading business publications the Financial Times and The Economist have recently voiced their support for transparency laws on both sides of the Atlantic that will help reduce corruption in developing countries and increase the resources spent on poverty reduction. They join the voices of 180,000 ONE members who have called for policy-makers to stand firm

Ask your friends for words they associate with elections in Africa and you’ll likely get a mixed bag of “corrupt,” “violent,” “rigged” or simply “what elections?” It’s a fair bet no one will think to mention the 2008 Ghanaian election in which two presidential candidates fought a hard campaign, ended up separated by just over

Last night UK Prime Minister David Cameron issued a strong defense of UK aid and development policy during his Mansion House speech on foreign policy. In a wide-ranging address on “Foreign Policy in the National Interest” Cameron took on the “pessimists” who have called for Britain to pull back from its aid commitments: “I believe

The campaign for transparency in the oil, gas, mining and forestry industries was given a big boost today with the publication of European Commission proposals for a new law guaranteeing all company payments to governments will be published. This means Europe will soon have matched (and in some places gone beyond) the landmark transparency amendment

Political momentum increased yesterday for a new transparency law in Europe that would help citizens in poor, but resource-rich, countries. The European Parliament endorsed plans for an EU-wide transparency law to shed light on the payments oil, gas and mining companies make to the governments where they operate. This would empower citizens with the information