“If you are stolen, call the police at once”

“Please omnivorously put the waste in garbage can. Deformed Man Lavatory” These are examples given by Michael Errard in his thought provoking essay about how Chinglish (a hybrid between Chinese and English) might become one important language of the future. His post: “How English is evolving into a language we may not even understand” in the Wired [...]

Let’s not call a “spade” a “big spoon”

I’m always amazed at the way English is not one but many languages. Maybe, by not being a native speaker and moving around a bit between different English speaking areas, I’ve become more aware of the potential misunderstandings than most of my British or American or ex-British-colonies friends. One good example is the term “motivation”. [...]

HIV/AIDS and Nutrition

How does HIV/AIDS affect the ability of people and communities in poor countries to feed themselves? How does food insecurity increase the risk of HIV infection? RENEWAL, the Regional Network on AIDS, Livelihoods and Food Security (lead by Stuart Gillespie, IFPRI) is a network-of-networks that attempts to further locally relevant research around the issue of AIDS [...]

Incentives, institutional boundaries and life bird traders

I’m sitting here comparing the Net-Maps we have drawn to understand the risks and interventions around avian flu in different African countries and that gets me thinking about incentives and institutional boundaries (more info about the project). Both Ghana and Ethiopia impressed me in their considerably fast reaction to the threat. Avian flu, with its [...]

Network learning left and right

At the annual meeting of Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev) Marc Steinlin played an interesting game with us to deepen our understanding for all the different challenges that come from working in complex interrelated systems that we only understand halfway. A group of people moves around in a room, everybody silently picks two other people [...]

Confusing people for money

Sometimes, when people ask me what I do for a living, that’s my answer: “I confuse people for money.” “Why would anyone do that, pay you to confuse them?” Well, because I don’t just deliver any old confusion that leaves you helpless and, well, confused, but I help to get you to the fruitful state of [...]

Martin Luther King about Power and Love

“Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change. … What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the [...]

How do we have to analyze this now?

I think my colleagues were hoping for the standard answer: If you draw a Net-Map, these are the steps you have to do and these are the centralities / network properties you have to look at and if the value is over 0.5 it means this and that. Yesterday I sat down with Ekin Birol [...]

How to scare the right people enough…

… without scaring the wrong people too much? That’s a question that hovers over the discussions in our avian flu project, both in Ghana and in Ethiopia (and, if I listen to my colleagues’ experience, as well in Indonesia and Nigeria). When mapping out value networks, risk communication and response, we hear the concrete examples: [...]

Managing for Impact

My colleague Elias Zerfu (IFPRI) works in the IFPRI offices in Addis and yesterday he showed me some of his exciting work that runs under the title “Managing for Impact” (read their cool blog). He promised to write some more about it, but let me sneak in this picture of a power map that he [...]