McLeod Group guest blog by John Saxby, January 27, 2025

What began as a two-year adventure turned into a lifetime commitment. In An Outsider Within, former CUSO volunteer Mary Ndlovu uses her experiences to weave together the story of her family with Zimbabweans’ struggle to end colonial rule and to create an independent country.

Mary’s prose is clear and accessible, with candour and wry humour, but few metaphors or rhetorical flourishes – if anything, it is understated. This ...

McLeod Group blog by John Cameron and Lauchlan T. Munro, January 16, 2025

With a federal election coming soon, how prepared are Canadian civil society organizations to speak out about the causes that they represent? Civil society has an important role in a democracy in holding leaders and political parties to account. In recent years, feminist, Indigenous and environmentalist movements have actively fulfilled that role in Canada. But what about civil society organizations (CSOs) working in international development?

CSOs in the international ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Belinda Dodson, Aug. 26, 2024

After years of hinting at an imminent Africa strategy, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) has launched “final consultations” on a “proposed approach to partnerships in Africa”. There are rumours that a draft framework has been in internal circulation for several months. So why hold these consultations? Is it genuine solicitation of stakeholder input or window dressing to add credibility to a predetermined outcome?

Such concerns aside, the consultations present ...

McLeod Group blog by Rhonda Gossen and Jane Cooper, August 19, 2024

The new memoir by Ian Smillie, Under Development: A journey without maps, takes the reader on the bumpy ride of international development from the late 1960s over more than four decades through the trends and geopolitical contexts that impact aid spending. An entertaining, but also challenging trip through the decades, from the “post-colonial excitement” and early international volunteering in Africa (before development kicked in) to ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Joshua Ramisch, July 17, 2024

It was the scenes of violence – Kenya’s parliament burning, protesters shot dead on the streets – that captured world attention at the end of June. A week of peaceful protests against the 2024 Finance Bill and its significant tax increases had grown steadily larger and spread countrywide. When Parliament nevertheless approved the Bill, protesters’ frustrations and the subsequent police crackdown seemed to play into a familiar pattern. But this popular ...

McLeod Group blog by Laura Macdonald, July 15, 2024

On June 2, 2024, Claudia Sheinbaum won a convincing victory in Mexico’s presidential elections and will become the country’s first woman president, defeating another dynamic female leader, Xochitl Gálvez. Sheinbaum gained 62% of the popular vote. She was the candidate of the populist left-wing Morena party founded by the current Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (widely known as AMLO) and benefited from his high levels of popularity. But as the first ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Nicholas Coghlan, May 21, 2024

By most measurements, Sudan is the gravest humanitarian crisis in the world today. One theatre of a country-wide war – Darfur – is seeing a reprise of the genocide of 2002-2003, as the descendants of the Janjaweed prepare an onslaught on the city of El Fasher. Khartoum, the national capital, is contested block by block while the country’s breadbasket, Gezira State, is another battlefield. Five million are ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Adam R. Houston, March 11, 2024

What lessons did the Canadian government learn from the COVID-19 pandemic? On the issue of equitable global access to medicines, the government’s recent actions suggest that it has learned the wrong ones. The gulf between the rhetoric and the reality of the government’s stance on global COVID-19 vaccine access was a particular low point of Canada’s pandemic response. This makes it all ...

McLeod Group blog by Rhonda Gossen, February 21, 2024

The general elections in Pakistan on February 8 shocked those who had written off the banned party of the jailed former prime minister Imran Khan. Over half of the 60 million voters selected candidates backed by his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party – an unprecedented as well as unexpected outcome after months of repressive measures against the party, particularly since Khan’s arrest on May 9 last year. Despite PTI being excluded from the list ...

McLeod Group guest blog by Daniel Livermore, December 14, 2023

The Senate has weighed in on the reform of Canada’s foreign service. Its Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade’s report of early December owes much to the experienced hands of its chair and vice-chair, Senators Peter Boehm and Peter Harder. And it has given the Trudeau government a prudent, sensible roadmap for conducting a complete revamp of Global Affairs Canada’s personnel, programs, and administration, aimed ...