Got some time in the New Year and want to increase your knowledge and skills in a particular area? Here is a round-up of free online courses for international development / aid professionals that you can take anytime, anywhere. The courses, often called MOOCs (short for Massive Online Open Course), …
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Want to improve your skills with learning and don’t have training budget? There are lots of free options for International Development professionals, including courses from platforms such as Coursera, EdX, Udacity and NovoEd. These courses are often called MOOCs (short for Massive Online Open Course) and are run over the …
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It used to be that finding national statistics was a time consuming business. You had to hunt through government reports, many of which were not available online, or were of dubious origin. You could spend days just trying to find a few numbers for the opening sentence of your proposal or presentation. These …
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Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) is quickly taking the international development / global aid world by storm. According to the Institute of Development Studies it is now being used “in more than 50 countries, of which at least 15 have made CLTS official national policy”. Traditional sanitation programs usually distribute free or subsidised concrete …
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Clean water is generally defined as water that is free from microbial, chemical and physical contamination. This includes contaminants that present a health risk (e.g. disease-causing bacteria, toxic metals) and those that have no health risk but can make the water unpleasant to drink (e.g. poor taste resulting from high …
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Working with orphans and vulnerable children can be extremely challenging in developing countries. There are usually only a small number of staff available to monitor the children’s well-being, and often those staff have limited training and experience. As a result, many programs deliver a standard set of interventions for every …
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Improving people’s quality of life is the ultimate goal for many international development programs, even though it might not be stated as such. Having a high quality of life just means having a full and happy life. For example, programs to increase people’s income or health only do this so those …
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According to the WHO, diarrhea is “the passage of three or more loose or liquid stools per day, or more frequently than is normal for the individual”. Diarrhea is often a symptom of a gastrointestinal infection which can be caused by bacteria, virus or parasite. It can also be a …
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The Atlas of Global Inequalities by Ben Crow and Suresh Lodha is one book in a series of international development atlases published by The University of California Press. The same series includes titles such as The Atlas of Human Rights and The Atlas of Climate Change. The purpose of the atlas is to …
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