One Prologue

This is a draft of one possible prologue for the planned book, Challenging Ignorance. I phrase it that way because the book comes out of a programme of work in which many people collaborated and any of them could have written about it and made their own explanation of what led to their involvement. This version is written by Mike Powell, lead author and also director of the IKM Emergent programme. It charts his own route to interest in and engagement with international development, some of the main influences on this journey and also provides a history of the antecedents of IKM and some aspects of the history of the programme itself.