Explore some of the issues raised in this year's Reith Lectures in more depth with our selected books and OU courses:

Books

Poverty, AIDS and Hunger: Breaking the Poverty Trap in Malawi
Anne C Conroy, Malcolm J Blackie, Alan Whiteside, Justin C Malawezi, Palgrave Macmillan

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
The Penguin Press

Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals
UN Millennium Project, Earthscan

Courses

Level 1 courses:
Introduction to the Social Sciences (DD100)
If you are wondering where to begin your Open University studies and you’re interested in the social sciences – psychology, sociology, social policy, politics, economics and geography – this course is the place to start.

You and your money (DB123)
This is an excellent course that provides a detailed understanding of many of the important personal finance issues that affect people’s lives and delivers the skills and knowledge you need to improve your personal financial capability.

Working with our environment: technology for a sustainable future (T172)
This course will suit you if you are concerned about your own impacts on the environment, about global environment issues, and the role of technology in creating a sustainable future.

Level 2 courses:
Environment (U216)
Drawing on a wide range of issues, this course encourages you to understand and debate environmental changes and responses, and to consider why it is that environmental questions are often the source of political and scientific contests and conflict.

Economics and economic change (DD202)
This course, dealing with today’s economic issues and problems, should help you to understand economic debates in the UK and in the global economy.

International development: Challenges for a world in transition (U213)
International development in its many manifestations presents the world with some of its most pressing challenges. This course introduces the main issues associated with meeting those challenges and, in so doing, looks critically at ideas about inequality at local and global levels and the relationship between the levels.

Level 3 courses:
Understanding economic behaviour: households, firms and markets (D319)
This is an economics course with a difference: it concentrates on ‘households’ and ‘firms’ as the building blocks of a market economy. But it also recognises that these economic agents interact in different ways in different economies.

Environmental modelling, monitoring and control (T308)
This course is about strategies for controlling environmental pollution; it gives information on how to analyse pollution control problems and define performance specifications.

Postgraduate courses:
Capacities for managing development (TU870)
What is development management? What do development managers do? What are the skills and strategies necessary for social change and reconstruction? These are some of the questions tackled in this course, designed for development professionals in governments, non-governmental organisations, international agencies and public and private enterprises, and for those who have an interest in public action for development.

Development: Context and practice (TU871)
What can be done to promote sustainable livelihoods and development? There are few tasks more important or more challenging, few where the answers seem so elusive. This course helps you to approach this question by teaching the context – from local to global – in which development practice takes place.

Institutional development: Conflicts, values and meanings (TU872)
This course is concerned with building institutions and making them work. It examines how institutions work and develop in quite a broad sense, so that you can look at the relationship between institutional development and action taken in the field of development.

Development management project (TU874)
This is the final, compulsory element in our MSc in Development Management. It will give you an opportunity to undertake an independent piece of work that integrates the knowledge you have gained from the programme with an example of current practice in development management.

War, intervention and development (TU875)
This course will help you to both understand and manage your work in post-conflict situations. You’ll analyse the roots of violent conflicts and gain a deeper understanding of where wars come from.