Marginalia
Cartoon essays on development work — the sector’s claim, the field’s reply, and a footnote to back it up. Five essays, fifty drawings, and counting.
Every cartoon runs the same setup: someone official says the polished thing the development sector likes to say, and someone who does the real work — a field officer, an ASHA, a farmer, a beneficiary — says what usually goes unsaid. 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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The Indicator Ate the Village
Monitoring & evaluation meets the people it measures: the baseline that learns nothing, the dashboard at 87% beside an empty clinic, real-time data for whom, the endline that never saw the year after exit, and accountability that only points up.
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The Beneficiary Is Not a Job Title
The sector’s vocabulary meets the people it files under it — sensitised, hard-to-reach, vulnerable, captured, amplified, people-centred. Each label is answered by the person wearing it, and footnoted with the evidence behind the reply.
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The Theory of Change
The logic-model industry meets the district it diagrams — the theory of change drawn after the plan, the logframe that can’t be reopened, the assumptions in six-point font, systems change in a two-year grant. Each planning-tool cliché answered by the field, and footnoted with the evidence.
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The Proposal Wrote the Programme
The gap between the proposal and the programme: community-led on paper, demand-driven until the donor’s priorities arrive, the innovation angle nobody asked for, the consortium that meets more than it delivers, and the sustainability plan written to be filed, not followed.
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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.