Development Roast Giving international development a proper roasting

“It is hard to summarize all the new information that was presented to me by Bolivian locals and from the wonderful professionals – now friends – that I met on the trip. I went in with just an interest in food, and left a food activist.” – Participant in 2011 Food …

In December, Development Roast asked are genetically modified (GM) foods a friend or a foe? Proponents claim that GM crops can help alleviate poverty and hunger by producing better seed technologies that resist drought and pests. Dr Channapatna Prakash of Tuskegee University embodied this view in his millennial article for AgBioForum, the …

January has truly been a wonderful 2013 start for INESAD: prolific, impactful and full of news. INESAD Ranks Number One: To begin with, according to the recently released 2012 Global GoTo Think Tank Report – an international survey of over 1,950 scholars, public and private donors, policy makers, and journalists …

By David Harper. Who’s to blame for poverty?  Is it the poor themselves?  Or society?  Or is it just bad luck or fate? Just over forty years ago, American sociologist Joe Feagin asked over a thousand Americans and found that 53 percent blamed the poor themselves, 22 percent blamed societal …

Take up the White Man’s burden— Send forth the best ye breed— Go send your sons to exile To serve your captives’ need To wait in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild— Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half devil and half child. (First stanza of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White …

In the career of political leadership, history shows the ease with which persons, facts, and even words are sanctified or demonized. Anything goes in the race to conquer people’s hearts! In this game of seduction, valuable discussion gatherings have been done away with, much to the frustration of unbelievers, specialists, …

Does money make you happy? This question has been asked many times before, and has featured in many of this month’s Development Roast articles. The first post of the month asked ‘How poor do poor people feel?‘ The answer was that some of them don’t feel as poor as other …

As shown in our post “Is there more to life than money? Mapping happiness of people and planet”, several attempts have been made to measure happiness and wellbeing globally. However, consensus proved elusive since different studies brought very diverse results. That is because happiness is a very hard thing to …

All this month Development Roast has looked at different psychological issues involved in poverty. Today we ask: Does a population’s mentality affect a nation’s development? More specifically, is it possible that when many inhabitants of a country are children of multiple generations of poverty that they can suffer from what …

By Erin Taylor What is the psychology of poverty? This question has been a contentious one in anthropology, particularly during the last half a century. In La Vida (1966), a study of poor Puerto Rican families, Oscar Lewis argued that poverty produces certain psychological traits and social behaviours that become …