Digital Archive....

We Should Expect Good Giving To Be Hard SSIR Opinion & Analysis Great giving opportunities are few and far between; rather than offering to help donors "check the legitimacy" of particular groups, I believe in urging them to give to only the very best charities. In fact, it's fundamentally very difficult for an individual donor to meaningfully help people. When you want to help people as a donor, you have to get in line behind all of the groups below. For-profit companies. I believe that most of the things you can do that make strangers' lives better are things you can get paid for. Every day people help each other send packages, prepare food, recover from illness, etc. via market transactions. This may seem like a trivial and obvious point, but it's the reason we are so focused on helping the very poor. When you're trying to help people who aren't poor, you're competing with for-profit enterprises. And even the very ...

Report from the field: SafeSave, a different kind of microfinance methodology Financial Access Initiative Blog Last week I had the pleasure to visit SafeSave , an unconventional microfinance institution operating in Dhaka, Bangladesh. SafeSave was founded by Stuart Rutherford (among other things, author of The Poor and Their Money and co-author of Portfolios of the Poor ) and puts a very interesting twist on the traditional model of credit-led microfinance institutions. (To see Stuart Rutherford discussing SafeSave, see Video IV , at the 5:30 mark.) SafeSave provides financial services to very poor clients without relying on group meetings, joint liability, guarantors, or even fixed weekly loan repayments. It was set up as an experiment, to learn whether a flexible, non-group lending methodology would be sustainable. In practice, a lot of the common microfinance wisdom is challenged, and it works: the repayment rate, for example, stands at 95 percent. This is...

Clever Solutions: Zero-energy light Innovations for Poverty Action Blog Nathanael Goldberg Just a bottle filled with water (and a bit of bleach): it's amazing how much light it appears to give off. Obviously only works during the day but for homes without electricity it can be surprisingly dark inside even in the middle of the day. I wonder how well it holds up to rainstorms though (Personally I'd aim for the peak of the roof where you could flash the sheeting to shed water away from the hole). http://isanglitrongliwanag.org/ video here Sent with Reeder  

No such thing as business ethics Seth's Blog The happy theory of business ethics is this: do the right thing and you will also maximize your long-term profit. After all, the thinking goes, doing the right thing builds your brand, burnishes your reputation, helps you attract better staff and gives back to the community, the very community that will in turn buy from you. Do all of that and of course you'll make more money. Problem solved. The unhappy theory of business ethics is this: you have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit. Period. To do anything other than that is to cheat your investors. And in a competitive world, you don't have much wiggle room here. If you would like to believe in business ethics, the unhappy theory is a huge problem. As the world gets more complex, as it's harder to see the long-term given the huge short-term bets that are made, as business gets less transparent ("which company made that, exactly?...

Fulfilling the Promise: Social Investment SSIR Opinion & Analysis Social investment can offer social entrepreneurs the chance to scale up their impact tremendously, fulfilling the promise and potential of their organizations. It can also lead to unintended consequences when there is a mismatch between the investor and the entrepreneur, or between the financing terms and the dynamic aspects of the social enterprise. We at the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship collected data and narratives from several dozen social entrepreneurs around the world about their experiences with social investment. Social investment is a means to provide capital, in a business practical approach, to organizations that bring social change. While the general consensus is that social investment is an overwhelmingly positive force, a handful of social entrepreneurs have reported less glowing experiences. I offer here two examples, not to point fingers or question intent...

on malawi Texas in Africa Last week's 20 July protests in Malawi were met with a violent response from the country's police force, leading to 19 deaths and to President Bingu wa Mutharika to deploy the army to restore calm and openly threaten to "smoke out" the protest leaders if they continued. The horrible famine in the Horn of Africa and the tragic events in Norway have largely eclipsed this story, but it's one that needs telling in the international press in order to prevent more deaths and ensure that democracy remains strong in Malawi. If you're looking for more resources to help tell this story, Global Voices' Steve Sharra wrote an excellent backgrounder that's available here . Malawian scholar Paul Zeleza provides excellent analysis of the politics behind the crisis here . Texas A&M political scientist and Malawi politics expert Kim Yi Dionne is keeping close tabs on events there; I highly recommend following ...