As I sat at my computer wondering what to write, I picked up an email message announcing a new World Bank study. Voices of the Poor, it is claimed, ‘gathers the voices of 60,000 poor men and women from 60 countries’. This reminded me of something I know only too well: that if there is one thing in which Alliance is failing (I’m sure there are many), it is in reaching sufficiently into these and other poor countries, in terms of both writers and subject-matter. It is something I am constantly trying to put right.