As countries undertake the world’s largest vaccination drive, the innovation, expertise, and community reach of civil society organizations should be a key component. Given the unprecedented scale of this undertaking, as well as the numbers and logistics involved, this will be extremely challenging. A key but previously underutilized set of…...
How to Monitor Procurement During a State of Emergency: 4 Lessons Learned from Argentina
As COVID-19 swept the globe, the government of Argentina responded by imposing a state of emergency, sidestepping traditional procurement safeguards in the interest of speeding up emergency response. While it was important to provide relief as quickly as possible, the state of emergency also created a series of conditions which…...
In Myanmar, Ten Years of Democracy Produced Today’s Youthful Protestors and Tomorrow’s Leaders
As protesters laid siege to the US capitol last month, many wondered whether the United States’ imperfect democracy would survive. “Democracy has prevailed,” US President Joe Biden said in his inaugural address, and indeed it has for now. However, Myanmar has not been as fortunate, facing a coup on February…...
PEACE Project in Myanmar: Lessons for CSO Capacity Building for Civic Engagement
A recently concluded project in Myanmar has demonstrated the importance of not only training civil society organizations to enhance their civic engagement capabilities, but also giving them opportunities to apply learnings to achieve the best results. Ultimately, this project was “very successful” in its efforts to “sustainably increase civic engagement…...
Challenge One: Confronting The World’s Unprecedented Humanitarian Crisis
The world faces an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. The impact of the pandemic on middle- and low-income countries is significantly greater than the enormously challenging situation in Western industrial nations. It is too early to gauge with any accuracy the full scale of the global humanitarian crisis, but not too late…...
Maximizing Citizen Engagement to Beat COVID
As governments and the international aid community scramble to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, direct citizen engagement in public health programs has already had a demonstrable positive impact on the success of these programs. While governments in both middle-income and low-income developing countries face the pandemic with support from international…...
