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Afghanistan – since I had to…
I volunteered to work for the polio programme in Afghanistan in 2008, fresh from my first international assignment in Nigeria. It was only in 2010 that this materialised. I spent half a year with UNICEF working on eradicating polio, a job that came quite naturally to me since I wrote my book, but nothing had prepared me for the complexities that came with working in a country that had only known conflict. At the end of six months, I was weary and weatherbeaten. But Afghanistan was a drug that was hard to shake. So I returned. This time, I transitioned from polio (and public health) to regional integration and from…
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Pandemic & the Poverty trap
India holds the record for pulling the most number of people out of poverty in a single decade. The UNDP’s multidimensional poverty index of 2019 calculated that from 2005 until 2016/17, 271 million people had been lifted out of poverty in India. This stunning feat rested largely on targeted poverty eradication programmes in several low income states, many of them supported by the World Bank. All these programmes hinged on women’s self help groups that started out as a savings initiative to leverage institutional credit, transforming over time, into undertaking businesses at scale and forming producer companies. Since 2003, I have observed groups in different Indian states, form, flop, dissolve,…