Digital Archive....

How to bring education to the poor in Africa – By Richard Dowden African Arguments A Mvule Trust pupil goes to school in Uganda. In 2006 some friends of mine were given $5 million by Lisbet Rausing for education in Uganda. They set up an NGO called Mvule (named after a beautiful Ugandan tree), and asked me to be a Trustee. We decided to spend the money on adolescents, especially girls, who had done well at primary or secondary school but had to drop out because their families were too poor to support them. Identifying them was a labour-intensive and expensive business, but over the next five years some 2500 were selected and places in good schools found for them. They were supported throughout, not just with the fees, uniforms and books, but everything that would try to make them equal to other students, such as travel money, soap and sanitary towels for the girls. They were also provided with mentors and visited regularly by Mvule workers. We also set aside mon...

Who Created M-Pesa? Bankelele M-Pesa is officially over five years old and is celebrated as the greatest use of mobile money in the world with about 15 million users. But the question of who created M-Pesa has never been resolved..until now.  On Sunday, there was a day long outage of M-Pesa which Safaricom attributed to  a power outage on a Vodafone server in Germany and this started quite a bit of discussion on twitter about why the service is run from Germany and how authentically Kenyan M-Pesa really is.  I've been in touch with Paul Makin before and so I invited him to join the conversation by tagging him and he went on to engage by giving answers to questions from twitter pals like @MediaMK @IddSalim @TerryAnneChebet and @Coldtusker who were genuinely interested and drove the conversation.  Excerpts:  - No-one GIVES me authority. As the original architect, I TAKE it. - Original team was Nick Hughes and me. I came ...

Co-operative model could be the answer to economic woes Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk Beyond the ethics, co-operatives have weathered the recession well – and private enterprise would do well to take note Jiang Xingsan's day job is helping to run a vast agricultural group, the All-China Federation of Supply and Manufacturing Co-operatives, which serves millions of farmers across China, and has increased its payroll by 200,000 in the past year alone. But he was in Manchester last week, paying tribute to the Rochdale Pioneers. "I'm especially proud to come to Manchester, because this city was the birthplace for co-operatives," he says. When the so-called Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society set up shop in 1844, promising good quality food at fair prices, and a share of the profits for their customers, they couldn't have known that their big idea would spread around the world. More than 7,000 people, from 90 countries...

Economists: Things We Are Ignorant About The Big Picture Economists have been stumped by the past dozen years. The Dotcom collapse was an early warning that economists, as a class, were not clued in. Sure a handful recognized that there were budding problems — think Bob Shiller — but he was notable as an exception. Then we had the entire debacles of 2000s – derivative implosion, housing collapse, credit crisis, market crash — and we found that the vast majority of economists are academic theorists who were completely blindsided by events in the real world. And those were the good ones, as opposed to the biased hacks whose goals have nothing to do with discerning objective reality. We need to admit that Economists, as a profession, are stumbling around in the dark. To quote  Edward Hadas, " Policymakers and pundits still make confident pronouncements, but the conclusions are radically different. The expert disagreements give away the truth: ignorance reigns ." ...

Just Do It SSIR Opinion & Analysis By Liana Downey & Megan Golden When it comes to measuring impact, perfect is often the enemy of good. Nonprofits and governments often aim too high and struggle to get started as a result. Most organizations understand that by measuring impact they can identify problems, improve their programs, and attract funders, but many organizations still are not doing it. In our work with nonprofits and governments around the world, we've heard leaders articulate a number of barriers to impact measurement. Three of the most common ones are: It's hard to get reliable data on our impact. We won't know if our program caused any changes. We don't have the resources to measure our impact. The most important first step in overcoming these barriers is to put the ideal of perfection aside and just get started using existing tools. Getting accurate data on impact Program managers face two challenges: choosi...