Digital Archive....

One in three Africans is now middle class Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk Findings challenge view of continent as a place of famine and poverty One in three Africans is middle class, a rising group of consumers to rival those of China and India, researchers have found. Record numbers of people in Africa own houses and cars, use mobile phones and the internet and send their children to private schools and foreign universities, according to the African Development Bank. Mthuli Ncube, the bank's chief economist, said the findings should challenge long-held perceptions of Africa as a continent of famine, poverty and hopelessness. "Hey you know what, the world please wake up, this is a phenomenon in Africa that we've not spent a lot of time thinking about," Ncube said. "There is a middle class that is driven by specific factors such as education and we should change our view and work with this group to create a ne...

Everything Old Is New Again, and Nonprofits Should Stay That Way SSIR Opinion & Analysis A couple of weeks ago, I received a press release about the new Palindrome Advisors group with the subject line, "Redefining the Nonprofit Model." Doubtless, you're all familiar with the genre: A group of business people get together and decide that the nonprofit sector hasn't cured cancer or ended poverty because people in the nonprofit sector are inadequate, and that an infusion of good old hard-headed American for-profit business practices will compensate for that. Voilà: instant Great Society! This particular redefinition is truly revolutionary: One hundred advisers, including many of Silicon Valley's elite, are coming together to disrupt the nonprofit space….[They] have committed to one full year of serving on the board of a nonprofit….[and] attending monthly salons where they will discuss the specific pain points of their assigned nonprof...

L.I.F.E. Lessons (A Short Guide to Ethics) The Business Ethics Blog In this blog, I spend a lot of time talking about particular ethical issues in the world of commerce. "What are the limits on honesty in business?" "How should we handle conflicts of interest?" And so on. But one of the questions I get asked most frequently, as a professor and as a consultant, is about how to go about making ethical decisions, quite generally. It's not an easy question. There have been many, many attempts to sum up our ethical obligations, none of them fully satisfactory. Naturally, you're never going to find a brief summary — let alone a slogan or single word — that captures everything about how we ought to think about complex issues involving a range of values, virtues, and principles. But it can be useful to think in terms of a brief acronym that serves to jog the memory, to remind us of the major elements that make up our ethical responsibilities...

Ontwikkelingssamenwerking vergeet gehandicapten Vice Versa - vakblad over ontwikkelingssamenwerking In ontwikkelingslanden leven 260 miljoen gehandicapten vaak in grote armoede. Zij worden uitgesloten van onderwijs en gezondheidszorg en nemen geen deel aan de samenleving. Recent werden enkele initiatieven gestart om hierin verbetering te brengen. Helaas worden ze doorkruist door de Nederlandse bezuinigingen op ontwikkelingssamenwerking. ' Ziko Kasonga uit Malawi raakte op zijn veertiende verlamd aan zijn benen. Zij moeder dacht dat hij behekst was en nam hem mee naar een traditionele genezer. Het baatte niet. Ziko kreeg nooit medische hulp en ging niet naar school. Zijn benen raakten ernstig vergroeid. Vandaag slijt hij zijn dagen bedelend in een winkelstraat. Hij ziet geen andere manier om aan geld te komen.'   Meedoen Het is één van de schrijnende voorbeelden uit de campagne ´Meedoen´ van het Liliane Fonds, een hulporganisatie voor kinderen met ee...

South Africa's white farmers are moving further north Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk Other countries believe their agricultural expertise can kickstart an agrarian revolution across the African continent They are calling it the next great trek . Almost two centuries after Boers hitched their wagons to oxen and headed inland to establish the South African republic, they are on the move again. This time they are flying – and their destination is the whole of the African continent. White South African farmers are now being courted by the north, by countries who believe their agricultural expertise can kickstart an agrarian revolution across the continent. They are being offered millions of hectares of allegedly virgin rainforest and bush, as well as land already farmed by smallholders or used as pastures by herders. In the biggest deal to date, Congo-Brazzaville has offered South Africa farmers long leases on up to 10m hecta...

Controlled experiments and uncontrollable humans Aid Watch Bill reviewed two much-awaited books for the Wall Street Journal last weekend: Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, and More Than Good Intentions by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel. The Good: The books' signal achievement is in addressing two disgraceful problems that beset humanitarian aid. The first is that the effectiveness of aid is often not evaluated at all; the second is that even when aid is evaluated, the methods are often dubious, such as before-and-after analysis that doesn't take into account variables that have nothing to do with the aid itself. Humanitarian aid is usually flying blind. These books take the blinders off—de-worming does work, many other efforts do not. But things are not as simple as they first appear. The authors are brutally honest about how difficult poverty-alleviation is…. … In addition to testing out ideas, such field work also has the benefit o...