MassMutual Ventures SEA, MDI Ventures and Central Capital Ventura also joined the round.

The post SE Asian insurtech startup Qoala raises $13.5m led by Centauri Fund appeared first on DealStreetAsia.

Victor Grayson was briefly the most famous socialist in Edwardian England. But in 1920 he disappeared. His fate remains one of the most compelling mysteries in British political history

“Oh mad, foolish Grayson!”
Editorial in the socialist magazine The Clarion, August 1907

In the aftermath of the general election of February 1974, the mood in Marsden socialist club in west Yorkshire was grim. David Clark, the young Labour MP for Colne Valley, in which the former mill town of Marsden sits, had lost his seat. Clark gamely attempted to lift his activists’ spirits with a rousing speech. But one elderly stalwart remained unmoved: “Old Harry was sitting at the bar nursing a pint,” recalls Clark, who is now 80 and a Labour peer. “He said: ‘All due respect to master Dave, but we’ve only ever had one true socialist MP around here. And that was Victor Grayson.’”

I am a committed fan of Danish Sait's lockdown videos. Formally, these videos with their minute observational detail of how a variety of people discuss the lockdown (like a man saying to his cook "Jaya, you're not a maid. You're a mermaid") are pithy commentaries on social attitudes, without the self-importance of social commentary. Because of their intense goofiness—Sait wearing a huge moustache as a beauty-parlour deprived woman, using tissue boxes, Bacardi bottles and dumb-bells to represent cellphones—even the most pointed comment dissolved by laughter, is taken, without sticking meanly in your throat.

My favourite sketches are of Pyaari Bakri and Gopal the Goat, featuring Cow-shik the Cow. They are full of appallingly excellent puns like "why you are looking like rogan, no josh?" The story is a proper rom-com, starting with mouth-watering mutual insults, GG admitting his love with, "I'm in love with the sheep of you" and PB being a jealous cat about, well, a cat. With Eid, will their story end like Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak? I'm keeping hausla and preparing myself. But my love for PB, is also personal.

Pyaari Bakri, I could listen to you all day, because you speak in Dakhni. I've lived in Secunderabad. "Kya dillagi karen ji" will switch on my dreamy smile in a second. But, it also reminds me of my Chawal mama who spoke in Dakhni. Not really my uncle, but a close friend of my parents from their Air Force days. I changed his name from Shahul to Chawal with my baby accent, and it became a pet name. Chawal mama told stories, especially of being hoodwinked or bamboozled, with the incipient giggle, self-deprecation and your-deprecation, the delight in outlandish behaviours and atranga characters, even those who wronged you, which come bundled with Dakhni, and make its musciality delicious. He teleported this humorous self-awareness into English. Pyaari Bakri, saying, "Gopal, kaiku itna chindi dikhra", instantly reminds me of Chawal mama exclaiming "that fellow, woh toh rascal nikla sweetheart!" Such humour sees two sides, one's own misfortune and its comedy, laughing at behaviour, not individuals.

It makes life an eccentric, liveable adventure.

I love accents. They bring out the idiomatic taste of language, the way coriander stems highlight a gravy's tendency. The distaste people have for (non-firangi of course) accents, yaniki snobbery, is so #BoreMatKarYaar. Snobs look down on people who say pijja or pis-za instead of peet-za, as provincial. Anything more provincial than snobs? Their palate cannot recognise the salty heaven of an overloaded Haji Ali pis-za, the joyful corruptions in chance encounters of languages, food, music—yaniki creativity in undesignated locations.

Imitating accents is tricky. Done generically, crude outlines of sound, it becomes a way of not knowing; of stereotyping to mock and diminish. Accents done precisely, require attention to a language's entire idiom, its way of being—context. It becomes a way to know and enjoy particularity and difference.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

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With nearly 30,000 people in south and central districts of Kerala hospitalised with chikungunya fever, an infection spread by the Aedes mosquito, the

Regular family dinners contribute positively to emotional well being, pro-social behavior and life satisfaction in ad

Dell EMC, a leading provider of IT storage solutions and Pi Datacenters, a green field data centre and an enterprise class cloud service provider, on Tuesday announced a strategic partnership.

Finding new sources of growth right now is tough. And in a time of rising inequality, to do so equitably and fairly is even tougher. Innovation can help, but with budgets stretched to the limit how can governments boost innovation in their economies?

The report takes a comparative look at ADB and OECD experiences, and aims to identify promising policy solutions for creating an SME base that is resilient to crisis, from a viewpoint of access to finance, and which can help drive growth and development.

In a historic visit by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to the OECD in Paris, the People’s Republic of China today decided to enhance longstanding collaboration with the OECD and to join the OECD Development Centre.

Mr. Angel Gurría, Secretary-General of the OECD, will participate in the G7 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors’ meeting in Chantilly, on 17-18 July 2019.

This taxonomy maps out the investment options available to private investors and the instruments and incentives available to attract private sector investment in infrastructure.

Interview with Georges Lemaître, OECD international migration expert, on recent migration trends in the European Union.

Emigration is a significant and growing phenomenon for Cambodia. Between 2000 and 2015, the number of Cambodians abroad increased by about 160%, from around half a million to 1.2 million people. The country would benefit from strengthening its whole-of-government approach to making migration an integral part of its overall development strategies.

The Dominican Republic stands to benefit from integrating migration further into sectoral and national development strategies, says new joint OECD Development Centre – UNIBE report

In recent decades, Thailand has been an attractive destination for migrant workers due to its relatively high wages and its fast economic growth. A joint report by the OECD Development Centre and the International Labour Organisation, How Immigrants contribute to Thailand’s economy, demonstrates the contribution of migrant workers and makes recommendations regarding the enhancement of this contribution.

Since its independence from the Soviet Union, Kyrgyzstan has rather been known as an emigration country, however around 4% of the population was born outside the current national territory and the country keeps attracting new immigrants.

How immigrants contribute to developing countries’ economies shows that negative perceptions are often unjustified. It points out that immigrants are no burden on the economies of host countries, and that in developing countries, their impact on labour markets, economic growth and public finance is generally positive although relatively limited.

The report provides an unprecedented analysis of immigrant workers’ contribution in three areas of the Dominican Republic’s economy: labour markets, economic growth and public finance. It shows that the labour market characteristics of immigrants and native-born workers in the Dominican Republic are very different.

Migration should be better integrated in labour market information and analysis. This could amplify the impact of Ghana’s efforts to enhance the economic contribution of migration, which culminated in 2016 with the adoption of a National Migration Policy aiming to mainstream migration into Ghana’s other development policies.

The rise in international investment and trade in goods and services related to renewable energy has been rapid but not always smooth. This paper surveys, through the lenses of market-pull and technology-push policies, the numerous domestic incentives used by governments to promote renewable energy, focusing on those that might have implications for trade.

This paper presents updated results for the cost of ambient air pollution in 41 countries: the 6 major emerging economies known as the BRIICS – Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China and South Africa – and the 35 OECD member countries.

Policy instruments can be applied to improve the sustainability of plastics, including regulations, market-based instruments, information and voluntary tools. The report reviews the use of these instruments, provides good practice examples, such as product taxes and charges, eco-design standards, extended producer responsibility and environmental product labels, as well as discussing opportunities for their future applications.

This report presents the OECD's assessment of recent developments in Israel in the area of labour market and social policy. It focuses on recent trends in poverty and employment outcomes and policy development to improve employment opportunities, especially for the Arab and Haredi communities

Norway is better placed to cope with population ageing than most other countries. But it could still do more to improve incentives and opportunities for people to stay working longer which would help ensure the country’s long-term future, according to a new OECD report.

The UK labour market weathered the recent recession moderately well. After a relatively limited fall, total employment recovered and it recently reached 30 million for the first time, even if a number of the new jobs created are low productivity and low paid.

The OECD and the Italian government are stepping up cooperation to ensure effective implementation of local development strategies to boost jobs, encourage entrepreneurship and increase social inclusion. An agreement, to be signed in Rome on 1 December 2015, will renew the mandate of the OECD Trento Centre for Local Development and establish a satellite office in Venice.

Tax incentives are used widely across OECD countries to incentivise individuals to invest in education and training, but are they effective? Recent evidence from the USA highlights the risk of creating overly complex systems in which the embedded incentives are no longer fully understood by individuals. This carries an important lesson for other countries in designing their own tax measures for skills investments.

In 2015 the Lithuanian government launched an ambitious Social Model reform agenda aimed at balancing flexibility of the labour market and security provided through the system of social protection.

The OECD Trento Centre and the Venice office are pleased to announce a call for internship applications. Deadline for applications: Sunday, 19th August 2018 at 23.59 (Italian time).

Antoine Fuqua's "The Magnificent Seven", has nothing to boast of. It is a remake of a remake that owes its roots to Akira Kurosawa's 1954 classic, "Seven Samurai".

France should intensify its efforts to combat the bribery of foreign public officials. Only five convictions – of which one, under appeal, involves a company – have been handed down in twelve years.

Australia’s enforcement of its foreign bribery laws has been extremely low, with just a single case leading to prosecutions out of 28 referrals in 13 years. Cases may have been closed prematurely. Australia must vigorously pursue foreign bribery allegations.

8-10 October 2014, Paris, France: Discussions at this meeting will focus on implementing the Istanbul Anti-Corruption Action Plan; monitoring reports for Armenia and Kazakhstan; and, progress reports from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

This meeting will focus on the third round monitoring reports under the Istanbul Anti-Corruption Action Plan for Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine. The meeting will also include progress reports from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

This cross-country report on prevention of public sector corruption analyses the preventive measures that have proven to be effective and successful in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The review focuses on twenty-one countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and includes examples from OECD countries.

This cross-country report analyses the legislation on liability of legal persons for corruption and its enforcement in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, highlighting national practices that may be promoted as good practice. While it focuses on 25 countries participating in the Anti-Corruption Network for Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ACN), examples from OECD countries are also included.

Israel is not sufficiently proactive in detecting and investigating foreign bribery, with no prosecutions over the past 7 years, despite 14 allegations of foreign bribery involving Israeli individuals or companies. The OECD Working Group on Bribery is, however, encouraged by the recently-opened investigations, and will pay close attention to how these evolve.

21 April 2016, Paris: The OECD will host a High-Level Meeting on boosting the impact of anti-corruption reforms in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

This study explores what governments, business associations, NGOs, and companies do in order to strengthen business integrity with a particular focus on anti-corruption measures in and for the private sector in countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as in selected other countries.

Countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia have introduced important anti-corruption reforms in recent years. However, corruption in the region remains high. This report identifies progress achieved as well as challenges which require further action by countries.

Corruption and abuse of public office are a blight on democracies and a drain on public finances. With trust in government flagging in many countries and voter disillusionment on the rise, raising standards of integrity is more important than ever.

This meeting of the Anti-Corruption Network for Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ACN) will take place at the OECD on 12-14 September 2017.

By Charles Fadel - Founder & chairman, Center for Curriculum Redesign It has become clear that teaching skills requires answering “What should students learn in the 21st century?” on a deep and broad basis. Teachers need to have the time and flexibility to develop knowledge, skills, and character, while also considering the meta-layer/fourth dimension that includes learning how to learn, interdisciplinarity, and personalisation.

La calidad del sistema educacional de hoy es la base para la prosperidad económica y social del país de mañana.

What is the nature of modern childhood? Released today, the book Trends Shaping Education 2016 looks at major social, demographic, economic and technological trends affecting the future of education

School leaders are calling the PISA-based Test for Schools one of the better indicators out there of how well students are prepared for 21st century learning.

In 2015 the Lithuanian government launched an ambitious Social Model reform agenda aimed at balancing flexibility of the labour market and security provided through the system of social protection.

This public session will discuss the financial incentives to invest in education, with a particular focus on how tax systems impact skills development in OECD countries. The webinar will present some of the key findings from the OECD’s new report, Taxation and Skills and their implications for policy makers.

This public session discussed the financial incentives to invest in education, with a particular focus on how tax systems impact skills development in OECD countries. The webinar presented some of the key findings from the OECD’s new report, Taxation and Skills and their implications for policy makers.

This book examines regional innovation in central and southern Denmark, looking at its role in the economy, its governance and policy context and regional strategies for innovation driven growth.