November 06th, 2017

One would want the first blog entry to be brilliant.  However, it is probably best to leave room for improvement.  Taking the second approach, this introduction will be brief and mainly try to address the ‘why’ of this blog.
To begin with, some background.  Having grown up in Africa, and worked for a long time in development cooperation ( on Africa and Asia and in global policy roles), I’ve been left with a lot of questions.  These range from the practical (along the lines of, ‘what works and what does not’), the more philosophical / historical (along the lines of, ‘why is the world as it is’), but also personal and psychological (along the lines of, ‘what does all of this mean to me’). 
Though I have written bits and pieces on and off, this has never been very structured.  This site and blog is an attempt to improve on this.  Also, the exercise of having run a website briefly in an earlier work position has given me a bit of appetite to explore a bit more the how and what of this.  Finally, Duncan Green, a prominent development blogger (amongst other things) for Oxfam has given excellent overview of the more serious reasons to blog (and he has further interesting posts, including on blogging and development).
So here we go!
p.s., more on the website name, logo, and quote later…
Niamey, Niger, 03.11.2017