McLeod Group blog by Lauchlan T. Munro, March 26, 2025

Here is a sentence no one could have written in the 1980s: “Canada’s political parties and provincial governments are united in supporting free trade with the United States”. The 1980s featured a ferocious debate on whether free trade with the US would mean deindustrialization of the True North and perhaps even the end of Canadian nationhood or the beginning of a golden era ...

McLeod Group blog by Stephen Brown, March 19, 2025

The timing was unusual. After being delayed by well over a year, the Trudeau government finally released its Africa strategy, a mere eight days before a new government was sworn in and probably only a few weeks before new federal elections are called. Many outside observers weren’t sure the document was ever going to see the light of day – much like the long-promised feminist foreign policy, which ...

McLeod Group guest blog by S.L. Erikson, March 12, 2025

Aid can’t be run like a private equity or hedge fund. And yet, Benjamin Black, Donald Trump’s nominee to run the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), is eager to redirect USAID’s US$44 billion budget away from public civil servants to Wall Street financiers.

Black, a former Goldman Sachs analyst, “wants to repurpose USAID funds,” reported Forbes, Bloomberg and ...

McLeod Group blog by Lauchlan T. Munro, February 4, 2025

In a midnight post on his social media platform X, Elon Musk announced what appears to be the “shutting… down” of the 63-year-old US Agency for International Development (USAID), America’s main vehicle for delivering development and humanitarian assistance overseas. As I write this, the USAID website is unavailable. Multiple news Continue Reading →

How Haiti and Canada can turn the urban exodus into an opportunity to decentralize and build a sustainable future for Haitians

McLeod Group guest blog by Mary Durran, February 3, 2025

They flee the Port-au-Prince neighbourhoods that were once hubs bustling with traders, schoolchildren and colourful tap-tap taxis: women who have stuffed their lives into bust-up old suitcases piled on their heads and faded pillowcases stuffed full of clothes. Some don’t even have time to grab their meagre belongings before fleeing the ...

McLeod Group guest blog by John Saxby, January 27, 2025

What began as a two-year adventure turned into a lifetime commitment. In An Outsider Within, former CUSO volunteer Mary Ndlovu uses her experiences to weave together the story of her family with Zimbabweans’ struggle to end colonial rule and to create an independent country.

Mary’s prose is clear and accessible, with candour and wry humour, but few metaphors or rhetorical flourishes – if anything, it is understated. This ...

McLeod Group blog by John Cameron and Lauchlan T. Munro, January 16, 2025

With a federal election coming soon, how prepared are Canadian civil society organizations to speak out about the causes that they represent? Civil society has an important role in a democracy in holding leaders and political parties to account. In recent years, feminist, Indigenous and environmentalist movements have actively fulfilled that role in Canada. But what about civil society organizations (CSOs) working in international development?

CSOs in the international ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Belinda Dodson, Aug. 26, 2024

After years of hinting at an imminent Africa strategy, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) has launched “final consultations” on a “proposed approach to partnerships in Africa”. There are rumours that a draft framework has been in internal circulation for several months. So why hold these consultations? Is it genuine solicitation of stakeholder input or window dressing to add credibility to a predetermined outcome?

Such concerns aside, the consultations present ...

McLeod Group blog by Rhonda Gossen and Jane Cooper, August 19, 2024

The new memoir by Ian Smillie, Under Development: A journey without maps, takes the reader on the bumpy ride of international development from the late 1960s over more than four decades through the trends and geopolitical contexts that impact aid spending. An entertaining, but also challenging trip through the decades, from the “post-colonial excitement” and early international volunteering in Africa (before development kicked in) to ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Joshua Ramisch, July 17, 2024

It was the scenes of violence – Kenya’s parliament burning, protesters shot dead on the streets – that captured world attention at the end of June. A week of peaceful protests against the 2024 Finance Bill and its significant tax increases had grown steadily larger and spread countrywide. When Parliament nevertheless approved the Bill, protesters’ frustrations and the subsequent police crackdown seemed to play into a familiar pattern. But this popular ...