Financial Transparency Coalition

During the last century there have been many successes in women’s’ rights movements, but there remains a lot of work to be done in accomplishing gender equality. In the book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, authors Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn retell an experience had by Bill Gates during a speaking engagement in Saudi Arabia.

Every other week, the Task Force will be highlighting a Featured Allied Organization. The Task Force has 125 member organizations from all over the world which endorse its mission. Click here to access previous Featured Allied Organization posts. This week’s Featured Allied Organization is Pragati, Koraput. Pragati, Koraput was established in January 1992 with the mission

An explosion of anti-corruption protests this month saw effigies burnt in India, hundreds protesting in Russia, and mass riots in China. As tensions rise, the focus of the anti-corruption debate has begun to shift. Instead of seeing corruption as hurtful because it destroys the environment, weakens governments, and harms the poor, some governments have begun to see corruption as hurtful because of its economic consequences. A recent Moscow Times article by Anders Aslund incorporates this shift in thinking. Claiming corruption is so pervasive that investments to increase productivity are virtually impossible, Aslund writes: “Russia cannot build public infrastructure because standard...

‘Give a man a fish’, goes the old saying, ‘and he’ll eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he’ll eat forever.’ In its time, this was a progressive message, arguing for sustainable development approaches over simple aid-giving, but it now sounds rather dated. Worse than the apparent gender bias is the underlying assumption that development solutions involve ‘us’ teaching ‘them’ how to avoid being poor. The thrust of Christian Aid’s work on financial integrity, and that of the Task Force and its other members,...