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 ...

McLeod Group blog by Laura Macdonald, July 15, 2024

On June 2, 2024, Claudia Sheinbaum won a convincing victory in Mexico’s presidential elections and will become the country’s first woman president, defeating another dynamic female leader, Xochitl Gálvez. Sheinbaum gained 62% of the popular vote. She was the candidate of the populist left-wing Morena party founded by the current Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (widely known as AMLO) and benefited from his high levels of popularity. But as the first ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Nicholas Coghlan, May 21, 2024

By most measurements, Sudan is the gravest humanitarian crisis in the world today. One theatre of a country-wide war – Darfur – is seeing a reprise of the genocide of 2002-2003, as the descendants of the Janjaweed prepare an onslaught on the city of El Fasher. Khartoum, the national capital, is contested block by block while the country’s breadbasket, Gezira State, is another battlefield. Five million are ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Adam R. Houston, March 11, 2024

What lessons did the Canadian government learn from the COVID-19 pandemic? On the issue of equitable global access to medicines, the government’s recent actions suggest that it has learned the wrong ones. The gulf between the rhetoric and the reality of the government’s stance on global COVID-19 vaccine access was a particular low point of Canada’s pandemic response. This makes it all ...

McLeod Group blog by Rhonda Gossen, February 21, 2024

The general elections in Pakistan on February 8 shocked those who had written off the banned party of the jailed former prime minister Imran Khan. Over half of the 60 million voters selected candidates backed by his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party – an unprecedented as well as unexpected outcome after months of repressive measures against the party, particularly since Khan’s arrest on May 9 last year. Despite PTI being excluded from the list ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Daniel Livermore, December 14, 2023

The Senate has weighed in on the reform of Canada’s foreign service. Its Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade’s report of early December owes much to the experienced hands of its chair and vice-chair, Senators Peter Boehm and Peter Harder. And it has given the Trudeau government a prudent, sensible roadmap for conducting a complete revamp of Global Affairs Canada’s personnel, programs, and administration, aimed ...

McLeod Group blog by Lauchlan T. Munro, November 30, 2023

Halfway to the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) target date of 2030, the UN’s recent assessment of the world’s progress is pessimistic: “the climate crisis, the war in Ukraine, a weak global economy, and the lingering effects of… COVID-19… have… hindered progress towards the Goals… (T)he world’s poorest and most vulnerable… are experiencing the worst effects of these unprecedented global challenges”. While those factors have undoubtedly had important ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Edward Jackson, November 23, 2023

This year’s conference of the parties on climate change, COP 28, promises to be as complex, contentious, and consequential as any of its predecessor gatherings. It will also feature the broadest representation of constituencies in the meeting series to date – except, bizarrely, for workers.

Steps Toward Inclusion

The COP process is, in fact, becoming more inclusive. As with earlier COPs, government ministers, investment bankers, company executives, UN officials, and NGO leaders will ...

McLeod Group blog by Lauchlan T. Munro, September 11, 2023

Is the UN just an ineffectual talking shop, incapable of meaningful action? Richard Jolly does not think so. In his short, insightful and easy-to-read autobiography-cum-UN history, Jolly shows that the UN has long been at the forefront of intellectual and practical innovation in international development, though this contribution is widely overlooked. And, he asserts forcefully, ideas do matter.

Born into a middle-class English family, Jolly was sent as ...

McLeod Group guest blog by John Cameron, June 26, 2023

With Canadian official development assistance (ODA) stuck below the OECD average for more than 20 years, a federal election possible at any time, the governing Liberal Party agnostic towards ODA and opposition Conservatives likely to propose cuts, it is time for civil society organizations (CSOs) to radically rethink advocacy and public engagement strategies. Approaches based on maintaining good relationships with government officials have not resulted in more or substantively better ODA. ...