NGO Forum

The Guardian

Last week, the UN launched the biggest aid appeal on record. The amount requested by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) – $20.1bn (£13bn) – is five times the amount requested just a decade ago.

Faced with escalating conflicts and disasters and a growing number of affected people, we need to ask whether current approaches to aid and development are really the most effective ways to prevent the suffering of millions of people.

The data suggests not. The number of people in need of aid has more than doubled in just over a decade, according to OCHA.

By Editorial Board, Washington Post

IN THE early 1990s, foundations supported by the billionaire George Soros extended grants to teachers, scientists and others set adrift by the Soviet collapse, supporting projects such as writing honest history textbooks, assuring the survival of Russia’s thick literary journals and connecting universities to the Internet. Now, in an act of supreme ingratitude, Russia under President Vladi­mir Putin has blacklisted the Soros foundations as “undesirable” organizations, effectively forcing them to halt grant-making.

The Moscow Times

Russian nongovernmental organizations should form a union in order to defend their interests more effectively in disputes with the state, organizers of the third All-Russian Civil Forum hosted by former Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, were quoted by the Vedomosti newspaper as saying Monday.

The proposed organization is provisionally referred to as the Russian Third Sector Union, said Grigory Melkonyants, one of the leaders of the voters’ rights group Golos, lamenting the lack of a forum for Russian NGOs to relate their interests to authorities.