Book Recommendations on Development Aid
We would highly recommend Raj Kumar’s and Melinda Gates books.
Our motto from day one was “Do Good. Do It Well.” By this we mean that it’s not enough to try to do good, as the $200 billion aid industry certainly does. Instead, we need to make the aid industry more efficient and effective. To get there, our journalism highlights what works, but also calls out what doesn’t. We help professionals, especially from developing countries, get jobs on aid projects in their own countries. We match up organizations with funding opportunities and maintain the largest database of grants, tenders, and other funding information. We try to make sense of an important but complicated industry.
What started in the proverbial college dorm room in 2000 had morphed, by 2007, into a full-fledged media platform — the Washington Post compared us that year to a “Bloomberg-style platform for the aid industry.” Today Devex has around 150 full-time staff around the world, with an audience of more than a million aid-industry professionals. We are invited to moderate sessions in Davos, help recruit aid workers for the World Food Programme, and advise Fortune 100 corporate foundations how to be more effective. Our news has been cited in congressional testimony, used to inform deliberations in the European Parliament, and included in briefing books for prime ministers and corporate CEOs. Everywhere I travel, from Ethiopia to Myanmar to Colombia, I meet aid workers who say they found their job, funded their NGO, or get their news from Devex. We’ve become a kind of connective tissue for the aid industry.
Kumar, Raj. The Business of Changing the World
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