Thinking on leadership, partnerships and development
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Gender Equality and the role of business
For the past eighteen months, Coracle Consulting has taken on several client assignments, respectively seeking to tackle a common goal: how to best engage the Private Sector on the subject of Gender Equality? Tackling outlandishly sized issues, such as the emancipation of women and girls, can be an equally daunting as well as inspiring proposition.… Read more
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Damn Vices
The advancement of technology, like a powerful wave in the ocean, has been unstoppable. Exponentially accelerating year on year, week on week. Steve Jobs’ role in this epic production sticks with me. Those black, turtle-necked onstage monologues of his, the famous “Here’s to the Crazy Ones” ad in 1997. Carefully choreographed to invite us all… Read more
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Good morning Vietnam
Tomorrow will mark 6 months since I last posted on definitelymaybe. Like others, I have found the groundhog day experience of this pandemic somewhat distracting. Being “stuck” – in the proverbial and the literal sense – does often feel like you have to reinvent the way you not only go about your daily work/life routines,… Read more
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Understanding CARE’s Resilient Market Systems work
In the international development sector, it’s commonplace to read about “systems change”. This is a broad objective. There are many different types of systems in the world, and many ways to change them. There’s a system for how banks distribute money, and how utility companies manage the flow of clean water to households. A system… Read more
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Johnson’s DfID merger is sending us back in time – again.
Aside from the plausible accusations that the Government’s merging this week of the Department for International Development (DfID) with the Foreign Office was a “media stunt” to distract away from their U-turn earlier in the day on free school meals, the announcement about DfID was depressingly predictable, and in-step with an administration, yet again, talking… Read more
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2020 Vision
Thanks to technology, we have all kinds of information at the click of a button. Whilst huge numbers of population groups can’t access the internet, not long from now everyone will be connected in some shape or form. Technology is helping us make better sense of our impacts on the environment, and how to resolve… Read more
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Put more women in charge
Last Thursday marked the 45th anniversary of the reunification of Vietnam. The day the “American war” officially ended. Evacuations from Saigon continued for some time after 30th April 1975, but Reunification Day is the day that residents here hoist up their flags and commemorate the end of one era, and the beginning of another. I… Read more
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Covid-19 requires us to put partnerships front and centre
Yesterday, in an interview with Peter Tufano from Saïd Business School Paul Polman concluded that covid-19 had “shown the gaps that exist in our society”, and that a “global crisis like this requires a global response”. Polman, who stood down from running Unilever at the end of 2018, is a seasoned businessman when it comes… Read more
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Making a connection in difficult times
This morning I woke up to a flurry of whatsapp messages from my cousins in the UK. The messages drew from our respective memories of making child-hood visits to our grandparent’s house, down in Ramsgate, Kent. What felt, for my brother and me back then in the early to mid 1980’s, like a life-time spent… Read more
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Tell-tale signs your Partnership is heading in the wrong direction
My apologies upfront if you arrived at this post under the impression it would offer up relationship advice. Instead, I’m here to discuss the increasingly common pursuit of Cross-Sector (in particular, business and non-profit) Partnerships, and where they often run into trouble. In many ways, looking closer at what makes for a successful individual relationship… Read more
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What I’ve been writing about
international development business CARE International Collaboration Cross-sector partnerships CSR gender equality leadership development partnerships humanitarian NGO social impact capacity building consulting strategy