The first IFGH Development Debate was held on March 15 at Trinity College Dublin. The event was a great success, with teams of students from global health and development-related courses representing Trinity College Dublin (Kate Brady and Melaine Kermarc, TCD/UCD Masters in Development Practice) and NUI Maynooth (Luke O'Sullivan, MSc Immunology and Global Health and Eamonn Keaveny, BA Anthropology). The students debated the motion "Foreign Aid should be cut from countries whose human rights record is poor." The competition was fierce, with the TCD team winning the event.

Continue reading for links to audio files.

A new international Task Force has been set up to promote 'a fair day's work for a fair day's pay' for workers and to develop organisational capacity in lower income countries. The research which found discrepancies between the salaries earned by local and those earned by expatriate aid workers was instrumental in setting up the task force. According to the findings from a jointly funded project by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Department for International Development (DFID) an expatriate aid worker will be paid on average four times more (and sometimes much more) than a local employee doing a similar job, with local salaries pushing workers below the poverty line.