Digital Archive....

Michael Clemens ( @m_clem ) 22-10-10 14:57 Don't miss this chance to learn: My co-author and I respond to the Millennium Village Project http://bit.ly/9bOC4d

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/10/17/the_empathy_deficit/?page=full

Philanthropedia Launches Expertise on Demand SSIR Opinion & Analysis Back in May, I announced that I would be chairing a steering committee to help the nonprofit research group Philanthropedia launch a project called Expertise on Demand . The project is the realization of the Tactical Philanthropy Knowledge Network I had been working on and is designed to connect donors and funders with leading experts who can help them make informed giving decisions. Expertise on Demand has now officially launched. From the Philanthropedia website: "Expertise on Demand is a new Philanthropedia service that acts as a trusted intermediary connecting major donors, philanthropy advisors, and foundations with experts who can help fill knowledge gaps quickly and efficiently and channel more money to high-impact nonprofits and projects. Donors use this service by filling in a brief form with the question they would like to ask an expert. Philanthropedia then sea...

Just how stereotypical are images of Africa? Scarlett Lion Following a link for Aid Watch , I read this article with interest: The World Bank has apologized for displaying damning images of Ghana at its recent annual meeting in Washington DC. Some of the pictures have half-naked women breastfeeding their kids and portray a country high on poverty levels. A journalist with the Daily Guide newspaper intercepted the images while covering the conference. He told Joy News the World Bank portrayed Ghana as a country full of hungry and miserable people. But the World Bank said the images are old and weren't meant to tarnish the image of the country. The Country Director of the World Bank, Ishac Diwan, explained that the Bank's photo library was linked to a website that was available to delegates attending the conference and the reporter saw the photos because of that linkage. He commended the Daily Guide reporter for his observation and "for alert...

Jake Kendall from the Gates Foundation on Mobile Savings Financial Access Initiative Blog People often find it hard to save money, the poor no less than the better off. Human nature plays its role, of course: it is hard to save for some intangible future when our wants in the present are so concrete. But the poor also lack convenient and inexpensive mechanisms to save. So what could happen if we remove those barriers? "There are two interrelated challenges in getting viable savings services to the poor," says Jake Kendall, microfinance program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "The first is that the poor live too far away from bank branches, and the second is that their deposit levels are too small to make it cost-effective for banks to serve them. So our guiding light has been to promote business models that simultaneously extend geographic outreach and dramatically lower the cost of dealing with the poor. To date, mobile ap...

Not one, but two quotes of the day Chris Blattman The first is from the world's most notorious aid critic: What governments spend on relief work is secondary to what it spends on its armies. …Merchants are the knights who will save this region from famine and must avoid investing in worthless projects. Yes folks, that is Osama bin Laden in an 11-minute tape called  Reflections on the Method of Relief Work. Ironically, those are among the most intelligent 33 words I have ever read on development. The NY Times has the full story . Hat tip to Eric Green , who also gets the second quote of the day: In the second volume of  Methods , Bin Laden is expected to call for evidence-based aid and the need for more randomized controlled trials. Sent with Reeder  

The new African jungle Baobab   SITTING in an old planters house high up on the Usambara mountains in Tanzania the air is chill, the cows have Swabian cowbells from the German colonial period, and Catholic nuns compete with the Lutherans in production of jams, cheeses, yoghurts, and sides of gammon. It is not an idyll. On the contrary, life here is for many closer to purgatory, the trees hacked down, the soil ravaged, and the spirit of many of the young men broken. That story is coming, but for me, mzungu, visitor, it is quiet, pastoral, a place to read and think bigger Baobab thoughts. In this regard, I was recently sent the latest edition of the remarkably nourishing Lapham's Quarterly . This one is all about the city, with essays, thoughts, and illustrations on the city over the ages. It gets me thinking about a favourite subject of mine: African cities. There is not much written on the tropical black cities that lie between South Africa and Egypt. The...

The plight of the African intellectual – a moral fable Aid Watch Once upon a time, there were two great lands: Donorlandia and Africa. Donorlandia had many intellectuals who opined about the solutions for Africa, who received much attention in the media of Donorlandia. Few African intellectuals received as much, or even any, such attention when they discussed their own land. Donorlandia's intellectuals could work for great universities, or for think tanks, or for aid agencies. What's more the aid agencies and charitable foundations often gave no-strings-attached funding to the independent intellectuals at think tanks or universities who worked on Africa, or created new Research Centers on Africa. Independent African intellectuals had small cash-starved African universities or think tanks, and they received hardly any no-strings-attached funding from Donorlandia's aid agencies or charitable foundations. The main option for African intellectuals ...

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Corn fed The Economist: Daily news and views Another agricultural commodity surges THE US Department of Agriculture's unexpected warning that America's production of corn (elsewhere known as maize) would drop by 4% in 2010 has sent prices rocketing. They rose by 8.5% on October 11th, the biggest one-day rise in 37 years, and by mid-week corn was trading at $5.88 a bushel. The fact that prices for other crops such as soyabeans and wheat are also bubbling makes it difficult for farmers to judge which will be the most profitable crop to sow for next season, and that may hamper an immediate supply response. The concentration of farming in a few big countries means that a hungry world is dependent for its food on stable production patterns in a small number of places. Whether Russian wheat or American corn, problems in one country can send shock waves through global markets. Sent with Reeder  

Ethics and Economics (And Coffee Too) The Business Ethics Blog A bit of economics can go a long ways in helping understand a range of issues in business ethics. I'm not an economist myself, but I've read a fair bit of economics here & there. And I want to read more. In order to arrive at sound ethical conclusions, you need more than just ethical beliefs: you need some understanding of how the world works. For many issues in business ethics, economics provides relevant facts. For example, consider ethical issues related to price. Prices are clearly important to all of us: the price of a thing tells us how much we would have to pay to get it. But economists recognize that prices play two other very important social roles, roles that are important to the way the economy as a whole operates. First, a price conveys information . When something is expensive, that tends to convey the fact that it is scarce — scarce enough that buyers are willing to p...

Deworming research results based on work in Busia by ICS, largely funded by Liberty Foundation > http://weber.ucsd.edu/~tkousser/Miguel and Kremer.pdf

Millennium Villages: don't work, don't know or don't care? Aid Watch UPDATE 10/16 12:25PM:  Tim Harford in FT also covers Clemens and Demombynes paper and gets response from Sachs. In a new paper , Michael Clemens and Gabriel Demombynes ask: When is the rigorous impact evaluation of development projects a luxury, and when a necessity? The authors study the case of the Millennium Villages, a large, high-profile, project originally meant to demonstrate that a package of technology-based interventions in education, health and agriculture could lastingly propel people living in the poorest African villages out of poverty within five (now ten) years. One way Clemens and Demombynes get at their central question is to examine how the Millennium Villages are (so far) being evaluated, and ask whether a more rigorous method of evaluation would be 1) feasible and 2) likely to yield very different results. They answer 1) yes and 2) yes. They start by l...

the Ghosts of Africa's future Africa Works The future of Africa remains a prisoner of Africa's past — but not for the reasons usually invoked. The legacy of colonial rule and the earlier ravages of slave trade forever changed the "trajectory" of African development. That is the biggest cliche of African studies, however axiomatic. What is less appreciated is how "independence" from colonial rule was constructed in order to promote personal rule of a sort that, however unique to the sub-Saharan, exhibited parallels with forms of personal rule elsewhere in the world, notably in China (under Mao) and the Soviet Union (under Stalin). Zambia provides a lesson in microcosm of the past as prologue for Africa's future. The country's independence movement delivered a crypto-Marxist national leader, Kenneth Kuanda, who over the years constructed a form of personal rule that profoundly influenced Zambian society as well as its polit...

NPC ( @NewPhilanthropy ) 18-10-10 16:48 Why impact measurement is best kept simple: latest from NPC's blog http://tiny.cc/51dpk