Women-focused aid groups welcomed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s unapologetically feminist foreign aid policy. [...] In five years, 95 per cent of Canada’s overseas development assistance will be devoted to programs that target gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. Fifty per cent of the development budget will go to sub-Saharan Africa and the amount of funding going to health and reproductive rights will double. [...] “The research shows beyond a doubt that investment in a girl’s education is the most effective investment we can make in international assistance.”

It was December in northern Syria and the temperature was dropping fast. U.S. special operations forces urgently needed to get blankets to their partners. They turned to a small charity run by Jim Hake, a former venture capitalist. Within eight hours, 200 blankets had arrived, paid for by Hake’s NGO, Spirit of America. [...] And Hake argues, if extremists are relying on private donations to launch terrorist attacks, why can’t private citizens in America donate money to help U.S. forces fighting them?  “To prevail, we need all elements of national power — private and public,” Hake said.

When dealing with the Trump administration, China should pay attention to several factors. First, China should get to know Trump's political ambitions, and establish contacts with his core team. China should strengthen the role of non-governmental actors in public diplomacy, and improve Sino-US public diplomacy by using think tanks to effectively control conflicts. Last but not the least, China needs to enhance social media communication and promote international discourse.

One example of this new method of advocacy is the Global Citizen Festival, a concert held in New York City each September to promote awareness of extreme poverty. The festival’s model is a digital facelift of the 1980s movement-building efforts of Amnesty International and an indirect descendant of Bono’s ONE campaign, which pioneered online advocacy for the development sector in 2004. 

The Amnesty International report reflects current systemic problems in the United States and deterioration in the human rights situation in Turkey, Russian Foreign Ministry Commissioner for Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law Konstantin Dolgov told TASS on Friday, commenting on the organization’s report.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs)are becoming ever-more significant on the international scene. They continue to exert substantial influence over many areas of public debate, often because they provide ammunition to government officials and bureaucrats, as well as to candidates and political parties supposedly coming from “objective” sources.