Digital Archive....

Komaza, a Forestry Company Timbuktu Chronicles How Komaza works: ...we partner with dryland farmers to help them plant drought-resistant trees on unproductive land. They get seedlings and tools on credit plus training, post-harvest processing and access to new markets.We spend less than $1 to plant a tree. And each tree returns at least $20 to the family. That's over $6,000 from half an acre.Farmers rise out of poverty . The trees restore the environment and prevent deforestation . And each tree farm yields enough extra money to start nine new farms. KOMAZA will be able to achieve self-funded growth to more families Watch related video: A KOMAZA Preview from KOMAZA on Vimeo . Sent with Reeder  

Ethically Challenged? SSIR Opinion & Analysis There's been a lot said in the past year about Slacktivism—that portmanteau of the words "slacker" and "activism" that has become a derogatory term for click-and-give philanthropy. But now, a new MacArthur-funded study says many young people, when online, simply don't act very morally or ethically and need to be mentored by the social good community to play more generously (and civically) with others. "While social media offer youth new powers, (young people) need to learn to use those powers more responsibly for good," Carrie James, the research director and principal investigator at Harvard University's Project Zero told a recent Mashable conference in New York. "Right now, our findings show that youth tend to consider their own interests above all when they're online and ignore the reality that online, they are participants in large public communities. If...

Generous gifts vs. free samples Seth's Blog Free isn't always generous. Free can be a legitimate marketing strategy, an ultimately selfish way to increase sales. Once you spread your ideas (and free is the best way to do that), there are all sorts of ways to profit. But don't be confused. Free samples and free ideas and free bonuses are not necessarily generous acts. A generous gift comes with no transaction foreseen or anticipated. A gift is a gift, not the beginning of a transaction. When you see a Picasso painting at the Met, Picasso doesn't get anything (he's dead). Even his heirs don't get anything. His art is a gift to anyone who sees it. Giving gifts is a fairly alien endeavor. In most families, even the holidays are more about present exchange than the selfless act of actually giving a gift. The cool part, the punchline, is that giving a gift for no reason and with no transaction contemplated is actually incredibly powerful. It changes your ap...

Inclusive is the new black PSD Blog - The World Bank Group One hears less about the base of the pyramid these days. Instead, "inclusive" remains the clear buzzword of choice for now. The recent UN Millennium Development Goals Summit generated a side workshop on Inclusive Business organized by a roll call of organizations. Now IFC is hosting its own event on Inclusive Business Solutions around the IMF/World Bank Annual Meetings this week. The term is pervasive. As reported locally , the Employers Confederation of Zimbabwe just completed its strategy workshop with... guess what?—a call for "Inclusive Business" as a means of national healing and sustainable economic development. Nor is it limited to low income country contexts: see last Friday's event on The Economic Impact of an Inclusive Business Community as reported by the Charlotte Observer , revealing persistent concerns over economic diversity amid the US economic downturn. I take this as good news...

34 million jobs lost PSD Blog - The World Bank Group The most recent ILO estimates —from January of this year—put global job losses between 2007 and 2009 at 34 million. This, of course, is on top of the many people who continue to have a job but have seen their hours (and wages) slashed. Some persuasive research indicates that reduced hours was more of an issue than outright job losses in middle-income countries. A report last week (again from the ILO) indicates that developing countries have fortunately started to rebound. How can this rebound be put on solid footing? That is the question that a panel of experts and officials from the Annual Meetings will be trying to answer during the Open Forum tomorrow. From 2:30pm-4:00pm on Thursday, panelists at the Jumpstarting Jobs session will look at how the financial crisis has impacted jobs, ask how developing countries can stimulate job creation, and then take a close look at issues of youth unemployment. The list of speakers is...

A Victory for LDCs in the EU Global Development: Views from the Center Finally!! After years of debating changes to rules of origin to make it easier for developing countries, especially the least-developed among them, to export duty-free under preference programs, the European Union is finally set to act at the end of this month. While the particular method chosen is not what the CGD working group on [...] Sent with Reeder  

Teacher's guide: 200 years that changed the world Gapminder Quick Links Download PDF Download Word Share Levels Secondary school Subjects History, geography & social studies. About the Lesson/Teacher's guide This teacher guide explains how you can use Gapminder World to lecture about global development from 1800 until today. For inspiration, you can watch a brief video-lecture with Hans Rosling  here . Key messages of the lecture In 1800, income per person was low and life expectancy was very short in all countries. Health is better everywhere today, even in the poorest countries. Income is much higher in most, but not all, countries today. The income and health gaps between countries are larger today. Most people today live in "middle income" countries Sent with Reeder  

Portrait of a social investor: An interview with Sam Moss of Gray Ghost Ventures Financial Access Initiative Blog   Social finance is becoming an important new area of research for FAI. As we delve into that arena, look for blog posts on this topic by us and others. Here we're pleased to feature a guest post from impact investors Gray Ghost Ventures . How does Gray Ghost define impact investing? Impact investing is a pretty broad arena. The part we focus on is looking for market-based investment solutions to poverty alleviation—the merger of both societal impact and financial return. It's a broad spectrum, but within that we're probably closer to the expectation of market-like returns, whereas others would not necessarily be on that edge—there are others who are seeking social impact and a financial return, not necessarily market-like. While we respect all the different pieces, we think that unless you get a financial return, you're less li...

"Does Inequality Make People More Conservative?" Economist's View Rising inequality is associated with a shift toward conservatism for both the wealthy and the poor: Does Inequality Make People More Conservative?, Monkey Cage : Yes, according to some new research (pdf) from Nathan Kelly and Peter Enns. They rely on a a yearly measure of "policy mood" from 1952-2006. This is an omnibus summary of the public's ideological leaning, liberal to conservative. (See the graph and corresponding Excel file at Jim Stimson's homepage .) They also draw on a specific measure of the public's support for welfare. The question is whether and how both measures respond to inequality. Their first main finding: increases in inequality are associated with a conservative shift in mood and increasing opposition to welfare. (For more on why this would be true, see this paper (pdf) by Roland Benabou.) Their second main finding: inc...

RCTs (Randomized Controlled Tweets) Innovations for Poverty Action Blog A couple of articles have got me thinking lately; a recent USIP report " Blogs and Bullets: New Media in Contentious Politics " (authored by Sean Aday, Henry Farrel, Marc Lynch, John Sides, John Kelly and Ethan Zuckerman), and a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell, " Small Change - Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted ." I've been having some nerdy fun thinking about what kind of study could examine the effects of the ever-proliferating social media tools on political and economic attitudes, behavior and outcomes. Both pieces take on popular portrayals of web-based tools like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Blogs as powerful mechanisms for social/political change, the catalyst behind the recent Iranian or Moldovan protests. Gladwell's take is that these purported impacts are overblown and rather than transforming/empowering activism, social media: " ...shift...

Social enterprise to fight poverty : " A recent article in the NYTimes focuses on Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Some of the article discusses the relative lack of philanthropy among rich Indians, but most of it is about his belief in the power of capitalism to improve living conditions in developing countries — and his lack of belief in NGOs for the same purpose. Mr. Khosla’s advocacy of the bootstrap powers of capitalism is part of an increasingly popular school of thought: businesses, not governments or nonprofit groups, should lead the effort to eradicate global poverty. … Mr. Khosla says that he is not completely opposed to charities — that his fund may even donate to some nonprofit entities. But he says he is generally skeptical that nongovernmental organizations can accomplish much because they tend to drift away from what their donors wanted them to do. I’m sure many charities will appreciate that he isn’t completely opposed to them. My v...