The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), International Water Association (IWA) and Asian Development Bank (ADB) has signed an agreement at World Water Week to establish an Asia-wide partnership called WaterLinks that will help provide clean drinking water and sanitation throughout the region by coordinating, promoting and aligning efforts to create Water Operators Partnerships (WOPs). WOPs have proven their value in many parts of the world by successfully pairing, or 'twinning,' wa more...

The TIPS sourcebook, produced by the Social Development Department of the World Bank, provides practical guidance how to conduct social analysis in the context of Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA). PSIA is an appraoch promoted by the World Bank to analyze distributional impacts of policy reforms on the well-being or welfare of different stakeholder groups in developing nations. 'The TIPS Sourcebook * introduces how to apply social, institutional and political analysis in a systemati more...

There is a widespread, but hard to quantify, view in Latin America that the poor are over-represented among the losers of liberalised trade. This opinion by Alina Rocha Menocal of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) responds to the pressing question: how can interested stakeholders influence trade policy-making to make trade work better for the poor?

The essays of the finalists and winners of the 2008 competition entitled 'Shaping the City of Your Dreams' are now available. Follow the link to find the practical proposals of: Pal Saptarshi from India (winner of the first prize), Mengting Wang from China (winner of the second prize), Maria Angelica Rodriguez from Colombia (winner of the third prize), Ashis Himali from Nepal, Hermann Hokou, Ivory Coast, Sara Abreu Machado from Brazil, Katarina Marsha Nugroho from Indonesia
and Jonah Obaje more...

Over 7,000 Tanzanians Give Their Opinions on livelihood, education, health, governance, infrastructure, well-being, citizen participation, and more. This report is the largest perception survey conducted in Mainland Tanzania to date. 7,879 Tanzanians, aged from 7 to 90 years, from ten mainland regions, were asked for their opinion on aspects of economic progress, their standard of living, quality of and access to economic and social services, and trends in governance.

Included in this report more...

The Global Planners Network (http://www.globalplannersnetwork.org/) has designed a capacity assessment tool, which I urge all planners to use in the next few weeks to feed into the GPN Congress and the World Urban Forum WUF 4. As a first step to addressing issues of capacity worldwide, the GPN launched a self-diagnostic tool to help planners assess the capacity for planning in their own countries. This tool takes planners through a structured assessment of capacity locally and it also gathers more...

From Poverty to Power is a major new book from Oxfam International thatargues that ending the scourges of extreme poverty, inequality, and threatened environmental collapse is the greatest global challenge of the twenty-first century. The best way to tackle them is through a combination of active citizens and effective nation states.

Why active citizenship? Because people living in poverty must have a voice in deciding their own destiny, fighting for rights and justice in their own society, more...