Marginalia
Cartoon essays on development work — drawn in the margin, footnoted in earnest.
Every panel runs the same device: someone in a lanyard says the thing the sector says, and someone who does the actual work — a field officer, an ASHA, a farmer, a beneficiary — says the thing the sector tends not to write down. The reply is the note scribbled in the margin of the script, and the margin is where those voices usually get filed. The jokes are drawn; every footnote is real. A companion in spirit to the Between the Logframes podcast.
Capacity for Irony
The language of help meets the people it claims to help. Capacity-building, scale, pilots, logframes, “mainstreamed” gender, the last mile — each cliché answered by the frontline worker who already knew better.
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The Fine Print
Every promise has a clause the slide leaves out: inclusion with stairs, ownership without the budget, evidence that never reaches the allocation, resilience without reducing the shock. The headline, and the small type underneath.
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Marginalia grows a few cartoons at a time. Each essay collects ten drawings around a theme and pairs every one with two or three cited, evidence-based paragraphs — so the punchline lands and then holds up under a footnote.