3rd December 2024
RENEWING OLD TIES: THE NEW BISHOP OF LONDON
Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office Blogs
A unique insight into UK foreign and development policy
25th November 2024
The climate crisis and gender-based violence
8th November 2024
Ecolabels: A Catalyst for Sustainable Food Choices?
18th September 2014 Budapest, Hungary
Going South
Every 2 or 3 months I try to visit one of Hungary’s regions. It’s important to get out of Budapest, get to know the whole country and make and keep good contacts in the other big cities. This week I went South and visited Pécs with the head of the British Business Centre, Oliver Strommer. […]
18th September 2014 Sofia, Bulgaria
Ruse
by Andy Anderson Andy Anderson moved to the Bulgarian city of Ruse in 1998 to work as Technical Director for the United Nations Beautiful Bulgaria Project, which renovated hundreds of monuments of culture and historic buildings across Bulgaria. Today, 16 years later, Andy still lives in Ruse and is also putting together a book about the British community […]
18th September 2014 Windhoek, Namibia
Caprivi connections
Last month I was fortunate enough to travel up to the extreme north east of Namibia to visit the Zambezi Region and catch up with some innovative UK-funded conservation and tourism projects taking place there. The region gained its new name in August 2013 but is still probably better known internationally by its former name: […]
17th September 2014
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
Box? What box?
I’ve lost count of the number of times we have been exhorted to “think outside the box”. Worthy management gurus parroting clichés and senior managers trying to sound trendy have turned it into a hackneyed and meaningless phrase. The approach it advocates is also self-defeating. It suggests that the box – and the constrained and […]
16th September 2014 Brasilia, Brazil
Speed dating UN style
The 69th session of the UN General Assembly starts today in New York. The commonly referred to Ministerial Week – when the high level meetings occur – will take place next week. For most people the UN General Assembly (UNGA) will conjure up newspaper images of that huge hall familiar from television, with rows of […]
16th September 2014 Bucharest, Romania
Sir David King visits Romania
Sir David King, the Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative for Climate Change visited Romania on 11 September. Together with Ambassador Paul Brummell, he met with Romanian officials, experts, and NGOs working on energy and climate change issues. Sir David and British embassy staff joined an event in Herastrau Park to celebrate the UK German Climate Diplomacy […]
16th September 2014
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
Darfur
Darfur continues to be a major focus for the work of this embassy. We believe strongly that there is no military solution. The fighting has to stop. All parties need to engage in discussion to agree a long-term political settlement. The Doha Document for Peace in Darfur provides a blueprint. But several rebel factions have […]
16th September 2014 Colombo, Sri Lanka
Football, Fun and Fundraising
Most ex-pats live a very privileged life in Sri Lanka, so I’m always grateful to those of my colleagues who make it easy for us to help some of the people who live so close, but are so much less fortunate. Last Saturday, the British High Commission hosted a football tournament to raise funds for […]
15th September 2014 London, UK
Consular appointments discovery – looking outside the department
This is the last in a series of three blog posts discussing the discovery phase for our consular appointments transformation. See the posts on who, what, how and identifying user needs. As part of our discovery phase for the consular appointments service, having done a fair amount of navel gazing we also wanted to look at […]
Read more on Consular appointments discovery – looking outside the department | Reply (1)
15th September 2014 Geneva, Switzerland
Universality under attack
For those of you who may have noticed me looking a little down in the mouth last week, this had little to do with work and almost everything to do with the temporary disappearance of our pet cat. She was obviously not getting enough attention having to compete in our household with two small children […]