DAI is Founding Sponsor of Guardian Global Development Professional Network

November 28, 2012

DAI is delighted to be a founding sponsor of a new professional network launched this week by The Guardian to complement its global development website.

According to The Guardian, “the aim of the new network is to offer a space where professionals can network as well as share knowledge and expertise. We hope to achieve this through a blend of comment, analysis, online discussions, and offline events, recognizing that the day-to-day lives of development professionals are constantly in flux as a result of changes in technology, policy and collaborations across the public and private sectors.”

The network is open to practitioners working for nongovernmental organizations, bilateral and multilateral agencies, governments, private business, academia, and research groups.

DAI has its own partner zone as part of the network that highlights new and innovative ways of doing development work. Among the featured items at kickoff are:

• A slideshow that visually tells the story of the USAID Urban Gardens Program in Ethiopia.

• A film about a loan fund that incentivized water companies to pipe clean water to more rural Filipinos.

• An article on the unique partnership between Chevron and its foundation in Nigeria.

• A short video introducing the recent issue of Developing Alternatives on the jobs challenge.

• An article by a Guardian reporter about how the growing economies of developing countries may affect the models of international development, quoting, among others, Claudia Manning, Managing Director of DAI’s Johannesburg office.

The logic behind the network, according to The Guardian, is that “the best understanding of the world is achieved when we collaborate, share knowledge, encourage debate, welcome challenge and harness the expertise of specialists and their communities. That is particularly true of development, where professionals working across the world, sometimes in remote locations, hold great stories of knowledge and expertise that too often go unheard.”

A prime example of this knowledge sharing and debate occurs November 29, when DAI’s Julian Lob-Levyt co-hosts a distinguished roundtable at Guardian headquarters in London, focused on the changing face of development in Africa.

Join the network and follow the conversation on Twitter at @GuardianGDP and on Facebook.