Digital Archive....

http://www.barefootcollege.org/ Who make the best solar engineers? Men, women or grandmothers? According to  Bunker Roy , the founder of the  Barefoot College  in India, it's the grandmothers. "One lesson we learned," he told the TED audience on Thursday, "is that men are untrainable. Men are restless, they're ambitious, they're compulsively mobile and they want a certificate." Roy's great belief is that the poor have all the skills they need to help themselves, and his organisation has had huge success in bringing education and services to the rural poor around the world. The problem with training men, he says, is that they tend to want to leave the villages, and take their skills with them. His solution has been to train the grandmothers. In Sierra Leone right now, 150 grandmothers are being trained as solar engineers, who will be able to go and electrify theirs and others' villages. In a few months, he says, "they will know more about sol...

Can aid work? Owen abroad Primary school close to our house in Addis Ababa Living in Ethiopia for the last three years, I saw aid working every day. I saw children going to school, health workers in rural villages, and food or cash preventing hunger for the poorest people.  The academic debates about aid effectiveness seem surreal when you are surrounded by tangible, visible evidence of the huge difference aid makes to people's lives. But on the whole the sceptics are not disputing that kids are going to school because of aid. They are asking what effect that has on the country as a whole. Does it lead to economic growth? Does it drive up the exchange rate and so damage competitiveness? Do governments become dependent on donors and so less accountable to their own citizens?  Does aid keep the bad guys in power? It is possible that aid  is effective  in terms providing people with basic services, and at the same time that it is  not eff...

Naive or professional? Seth's Blog The naive farmer farms as his parents, grandparents and great grandparents did. She plants, hopes and harvests. Anything that goes well or poorly is the work of the gods. The professional farmer measures. She tests. She understands how systems work and is constantly tweaking to improve them. When failure happens, she doesn't rest until she understands why. I didn''t use the word amateur, because money isn't the point. The naive farmer is failing to take responsibility and failing to learn. The naive marathon runner straps on sneakers and runs (but doesn't finish). The professional marathoner trains. The naive office worker empties his inbox. The professional works to understand how the office functions. Mostly, the professional asks questions... What's next? How to improve? What's this worth? Why is this happening? [By the way, it's possible to be naive and happy. It's difficult to be...

The Luxury of Wealth and Responsibility of Poverty A View From The Cave This is a fantastic thought from Esther Duflo. We tend to be patronizing about the poor in a very specific sense, which is that we tend to think, 'Why don't they take more responsibility for their lives?' And what we are forgetting is that the richer you are the less responsibility you need to take for your own life because everything is taken care for you. And the poorer you are the more you have to be responsible for everything about your life….Stop berating people for not being responsible and start to think of ways instead of providing the poor with the luxury that we all have, which is that a lot of decisions are taken for us. If we do nothing, we are on the right track. For most of the poor, if they do nothing, they are on the wrong track. She said it at the Center For Effective Philanthropy and I ripped this quote right off the blog of Brigid Slipka . It was too good no...

HIV/AIDS, the silent war in Africa Africa Can... - End Poverty Damien de Walque Deon Filmer Under-5 mortality is often used—perhaps implicitly—as a measure of "population health".  But what is happening to adult mortality in Africa?  In a recent working paper i , we combine data from 84 Demographic and Health Surveys from 46 countries, and calculate mortality based on the sibling mortality reports collected from female respondents aged 15-49. The working paper is available here and the database we used for the analysis can be found here . We find that adult mortality is quite different from child mortality (under-5 mortality) 1 .   This is perhaps obvious to most readers, but is clearly illustrated in figure 1 . While in general both under-5 and adult mortality decline with per-capita income, and over time, the latter effect is much smaller...

East Africa drought - in pictures Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk East Africa is experiencing the worst drought for 60 years, which has led to the devastation of farmland, failed harvests and livestock deaths. At least 10 million people are expected to need humanitarian assistance Sent with Reeder  

Tap the Crowd with iStart SSIR Opinion & Analysis Have you thought about running a contest or crowdsourcing ideas for your organization or community group? If you have, you certainly aren't alone. In a previous job, I had the opportunity to help run crowdsourcing contests for new and innovative technologies that help nonprofits and the world. One of the biggest lessons from my experience running contests and watching the crowdsourcing phenomenon expand online is that if you don't have access to a tipping point of people, you won't get the responses or participation you're after. There's a new platform hoping to help you do just that: iStart . The Value of Crowdsourcing There are many ways to approach crowdsourcing, but the value usually focuses on three components: • Exposing your organization, campaign, program, etc. to people in the crowd (as in, expand beyond your community) • Recruiting new volunteers, donors, or activists that ...

'Doing the Right Thing:' A Brief Guide to the Jargon The Business Ethics Blog Everyone agrees that business should "do what's right," even if they disagree over what the right thing is. One significant barrier to even talking about doing the right thing is vocabulary. The vocabulary applied to "doing the right thing" is messy and varied. Here's a brief critical guide to the most common terminology: Business Ethics. This is the most general term, and the one that can be defined more or less uncontroversially. As a field of study, business ethics can be defined as the critical, structured examination of how people & institutions should behave in the world of commerce. There are two problems with the term. One is that the word is too often associated with scandal. I once had a business group ask me to come speak to its members, but could I please not use the word "ethics." The second problem is that people some...