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The role of pension funds Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk Pension funds that invest in the commodities market are pushing up food prices with catastrophic consequences for the poorest Hunger is a scourge that has many causes. Some are natural, the cyclones and tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes that devastate communities and destroy crops. Others are entirely our own fault. They include wars – the spectre of hunger is never far away when fighting starts – and the hapless economic policies foisted on poor countries by richer nations in recent years as the price for trade and aid. Tax-dodging by some unscrupulous multinationals, which deprives developing countries of badly-needed revenues, is another problem. Today, hunger is growing as food prices reach record levels, and a further 44 million people, according to the World Bank, have found themselves reduced to conditions of extreme poverty since the middle of last year. ...

Helping Ugandan families save for school fees Innovations for Poverty Action Blog Sarah Kabay The  Boston Review recently hosted a forum  beginning with the article "Small Changes, Big Results" by Rachel Glennerster and Michael Kremer.  The forum featured seven responses, each focusing on a different concern, though as  Glennerster and Kremer later noted , "One of the themes of the responses is that randomized evaluations are not the only method that can help inform policy in developing countries." Chloe O'Gara argued  that randomized control trials "complement but do not replace the insights of other approaches – such as participatory rural appraisal, whereby an outsider facilitates conversation within a community about its problems – that aim to collect timely, valid, and useful information for program design."  This is a common critique of randomized con...

Four more short form ideas, mostly on crowdsourcing PHILANTHROPY 2173 Four more " short thoughts " - will be back with more. 1) Foundations and social media I'm participating in some very interesting discussions and watching some experiments on this. It's always important to stay up on what Beth Kanter is talking about in this regard, and her report from the CEP conference is one of the best . It's almost time for me to check back in with the good folks at the @IrvineFdn on their experiments . I'm also intrigued by the crowdsourcing effort that Natan is undertaking. For a new media initiative they've asked the community to help design the application process itself. Take a look here . Now funders are opening up all kinds of things, but the actual design of the application process? That one was new to me. I asked Felicia Herman, Executive Director of Natan, "what are you trying to do here?" She said: "...we recognize...

Being the Only B SSIR Articles Being the only one of something—whatever that something is—generally has one of two results. Either it makes you hot stuff or it backfires. In business, you hope for the first. It's supply and demand at its finest: Less of you increases the desire for you. But move away from theory and into practice, and real life may not always work that way. Sometimes being the only one of something means that fewer people understand you or realize what you truly have to offer. Instead of becoming rare, you become an anomaly—the product people aren't quite sure what to do with, an outcast. I am the owner of In Every Language, Kentucky's only certified B Corporation. Not only are we the only B in Kentucky, which means we've been certified as a socially responsible business, we're the only B in our industry. So if anybody understands what it's like to be the only one of something in business, it's me. Even before certifi...