Comments

Wonderful to see Robyn's outstanding work on village chickens being recognized. I have seen Robyn in action over more than 20 years, since she began work in Mozambique with Community Aid Abroad. I have admired her vision, her persistence and her long-term perspective, as she applied scientific knowledge to preventing disease in village chickens. Robyn combines the highest of academic standards with an ability to work with both governments and at community level. She is an idealist who has put her ideals into practice over the long haul. The article speaks for itself in detailing the positive results for poor rural communities in Africa.

I am a former senior education officer from the Department of Education, former Pacific islands education advisor and education monitoring and evaluation advisor for the EU funded education programmes. I am interested in the position of Head of Leadership and Education. Would appreciate guidance on how I can formally apply for the position.

Thoroughly enjoyed your paper, thank you! We need research like this.

Thanks Garth!, we are doing our best to. Terence

I think its great that you folks are continuing to help build a more complete picture about how and what people think about aid. Please keep it up.

Hi Paul, it would be interesting to see the movement of aid dollars per person per week over average income per week over time.

Thank you Finn, that's a very interesting question. It's not one we can answer with the data we have, unfortunately. Taking the quantitative approach you might get some form of answer if you were willing to pay for a bunch of questions about attitudes to the Pacific and attitudes to aid. We have this type of data for Australia (involving attitudes to Indonesia and China) and people who view these countries more positively are more pro-aid. This is the sort of quantitative work that could be done for NZ. But quite possibly this still wouldn't capture what you're after -- possibly focus groups would be better (although then there's the question of external validity). Possibly these sorts of questions are best answered by social historians? They are certainly interesting questions though. Thanks for the comment.

Hi Terence and Camilla! Interesting work! Will there be any further analysis on whether the large Pacific population has any influence on these responses? The higher visibility of Pacific people as well as a greater attachment/relationship to the region itself I feel may impact on the support for aid. Cheers,

Hi, I'm the Director of the Campaign for Australian Aid - this thread was brought to my attention. We will be amending our website to make it clearer about how organisations can becoming fee paying members of the campaign. In the meantime, if you would like to join, feel free to e-mail me at tonymilne@australianaid.org and I will send you membership information. Our first priority was uniting the NGO aid sector behind the campaign and reaching out to our core supporters to start to grow the campaign and its capacity. Our focus is now shifting to business, church, community and other groups to grow the movement. About a year ago we had 25 members, now we have 54 aid NGOs, plus 18 business, church, union and community groups. We would welcome the involvement of others - this is just the start of rebuilding the advocacy and campaign strength needed to shift the conversation on ending extreme poverty.

Thanks for the interesting summary. Glad to hear there was good discussion of gender issues, particularly GBV in the Pacific. I'm still really hung up on the question of why USAID was handing out peppermint lip balm though!

Thanks colleagues for your empathy with the content of the book. Paul, on behalf of Mark and Alyson (co-authors). The current crisis in Aurukun highlights the same problematic field yet once again!

This is a very good review and thank you. I have now ordered the book. Another I would recommend is Clare Land's <a href="http://decolonizingsolidarity.org/" rel="nofollow">Decolonising Solidarity</a>. Having spent close to 30 years in international development I am currently transitioning from east Africa to Broome with intent to start working with indigenous issues. Time to start giving back to my own country, plus a whole new learning curve.