Digital Archive....

Thirty Million Dollars, a Little Bit of Carbon, and a Lot of Hot Air SSIR Opinion & Analysis "Vestergaard Frandsen makes an ingenious water filter that's too expensive for the people who need it." Fast Company, April 2011 Verstergaard Frandsen, maker of fine mosquito nets and the mostly useless LifeStraw Personal, has announced plans to give away a million of their LifeStraw Family water filters to households in western Kenya. CEO Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen will invest $30 million of his own money in the project—known as Carbon for Water —but according to Fast Company, "he's not worried about losing out—because for each LifeStraw he donates, he's going to be making money." How's that work? Though the magic of carbon credits, of course! Back to Fast Company: "Kenyans boil their water to eliminate waterborne diseases, using wood fires. Those fires generate a large amount of carbon, and eliminating the need to b...

Memoirs about Africa AFRICA IS A COUNTRY Timothy Burke, Swarthmore history professor–he's written a book on commodity culture in Zimbabwe –and blogger , has a great post about 'memoirs from Africa.' Basically he was asked to prepare a year-long reading of books about Africa for school alumni. Burke decided to only include memoirs or first-person perspective accounts from the last 30 years or so. He acknowledges that he's end up with "… a surplus of certain kinds of books that I find tedious because they follow such a strong template and are so driven by market fads: memoirs of white women who grew up on African farms that followed on Alexandra Fuller's great memoir of life in Rhodesia and now memoirs of child soldiers and survivors of Darfur ." Anyway, his list is interesting for what it says about who publishes memoirs in Africa and what's available outside the continent. Some of the titles that made it onto his initial list a...

SINGER: When Prevention is Better than Relief Project Syndicate - A World of Ideas - the highest quality opinion ... SINGER: When Prevention is Better than Relief People donate hundreds of millions of dollars to help people after a disaster – even after a disaster in a wealthy country like Japan – but are unwilling to invest the same amount to save lives before a predictable disaster strikes. But we should be guided by the best estimates of the chance that prevention will save lives, and by the cost of saving those lives. Sent with Reeder  

Who is making you uncomfortable? Seth's Blog Who looks you in the eye and says, "given your skills, you could do better..." "You have enough leverage to really make a difference." "What would happen if you doubled the amount you donated?" "Could you set aside the fear and go faster?" "I know you're holding back..." It takes love and kindness and confidence to bring the truth to a friend you care about. If you're insulating yourself from these conversations, who benefits? Sent with Reeder  

What's a Big Government? The Baseline Scenario By James Kwak One thing that all parties seem to be able to agree on is that big government is bad. It was President Clinton, after all, who said, "The era of big government is over." And the current Republican budget-slashing wave seems motivated by the idea that our government is too big. But what is the size of government, anyway?* When a typical anti-government person thinks of government, she probably has in mind the EPA, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the "jack-booted government thugs" at the the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, OSHA, and all those government agencies that prevent businesses and individuals from getting on with their lives. The idea here is that government intervention in the free market makes the economy less efficient and therefore reduces aggregate societal welfare. Another big part of the government is defense spending. President Reagan, the ...

China puts its mark on Malawi Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk China's presence in Malawi has been growing steadily since the two countries established diplomatic ties in 2007 and signed a trade agreement Driving through Malawi's capital, Lilongwe, it is difficult to miss the imposing building under construction in the city centre. It's the country's first five-star hotel, $90m worth of well-appointed rooms, a state-of-the-art conference centre and 14 opulent presidential suites. The hotel is being built by the Shanghai Construction Company, a Chinese firm, and is one of numerous projects funded in line with a pledge of $260m of concessionary loans, grants and aid from China to Malawi to support development, including infrastructure. At a ceremony marking the completion of the main building and conference centre, China's ambassador to Malawi, Pan Hejun, said he expects that the project will be completed by the en...