Digital Archive....

Impact Market Failure SSIR Opinion & Analysis I was dragging my feet on the way to the Skoll Forum in Oxford. I'd been in Africa for a month, connecting with 20 organizations in 4 countries in 4 weeks, and I was pretty desperate to get home and sleep in a room I didn't have to check out of. I'm really glad I went, though. Among other things, the organizers did a beautiful job of bringing serious funders together in a productive way. Those who came seemed like a different breed of donors, in a different kind of mood. There is a high ratio of doers to donors at Skoll, which may explain why the donors there seemed less afraid of hanging out with doers and more serious about funding them. As for doers, the Skoll social entrepreneurs are the kind of people who make you feel optimistic about the fate of the world, and it's nice to see them celebrated. All the hoopla makes it that much weirder when you talk to them and find that almost all are i...

Good Intentions vs. Good Results Tactical Philanthropy One way to think about the big shift in philanthropy is a shift in focus from intentions to results. We are starting to care more about whether a donation make a difference rather than simply applauding the gift. We are starting to talk more about how donors can actually help rather than simply urging people to give. One person who is very focused on this topic is Saundra Schimmelpfennig who runs the aptly named Good Intentions Are Not Enough consultancy and blog. Over the last few days Saundra has been leading a social media campaign against TOMS Shoes . TOMS is a media darling of the for-profit for good space. The company donates a pair of shoes to "a child in need" for every pair of shoes that customers buy. Any reading of the founder's biography seems to make clear that he has completely good intentions. But does TOMS actually create good results for the children they seek to help? Saund...

Who Else is Too Big to Fail? The Business Ethics Blog The notion that some companies are "too big to fail" — too large and too interconnected with the rest of the economy for their failure to be permitted by government — is lamentably familiar to most of us in the wake of the 2007-2010 financial crisis. The term has most famously been applied to the biggest American banks (e.g., Bank of America) and insurance companies (e.g., AIG), and it motivated the multi-multi-billion-dollar government bailouts of 2008/2009. In some ways, it's a radical notion: for most of modern economic history, the assumption has been that the economy could operate according to something like survival of the fittest. If a company is so mismanaged that it fails, so be it. That's life in a competitive market. Of course, governments have from time to time propped up companies seen as particularly important employers, but such moves are always divisive. There has seldom been...

When is a Land Deal a Land Grab? Development Horizons from Lawrence Haddad A new report will be released this week in concert with the international conference on the global land grab to be held at IDS next week . The Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) Forum on global land grabbing, with three leading commentators, debates the sometimes hidden impacts of land deals and sets the scene for wider debates at the upcoming conference. The papers are available here: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g935339693 Klaus Deininger, a senior economist at the World Bank examines the risks associated with single owners of large land holdings and the institutional reforms needed to make land deals successful. Olivier de Schutter, the UN Rapporteur for the Right to Food and Professor of Law and Human Rights at the Catholic University of Louvain, promotes small family farms and human rights in the context of contemporary debates on land grabbing. And Tania Murr...

debating the Millennium Villages Texas in Africa Sorry I've been off the radar for awhile. China jet lag is the worst jet lag I've ever had, and going to bed at 9pm is interfering with my blogging. Anyway, I wanted to draw your attention to this long-awaited event, happening today at 2pm Eastern time. From Center for Global Development Senior Fellow Michael Clemens: Since the debate via blogs didn't seem to be making much headway, Gabriel and I offered twice to hold a public discussion with MVP leaders, in October and December. Those invitations weren't accepted. Philanthropy Action and AidWatch expressed dismay at the MVP's lack of public engagement, and an online petition sprang up urging the MVP to engage us in a public discussion. The MVP's home, Columbia University, is a world-class institution of critical and meritocratic thinking. I like Columbia, where more than one member of my family has served on the faculty. I wishe...

The African Success Story Aid Watch If there was a theme to the development stories I read last week it was that the good news about rising standards of living on much of the African continent is not getting the recognition it deserves in the mainstream imagination. In case you don't agree that people have a negatively skewed image of Africa as a whole, try this experiment: Ask an educated, well-read (but non-Africanist) friend or relative to estimate what percentage of African countries are at war right now. Let me know what you find. I've done it many times and have never gotten anything but a huge overestimate. Or take a look at the op-ed by rock musician (cum Africa expert?) Ted Nugent, actually published in the Washington Times (HT Wronging Rights ): There is no country in Africa that truly respects freedom or the rule of law. The majority of countries in Africa are in economic ruin because of political corruption and a history ugly with cruel desp...

Malaria, past and present Aid Watch Paul Russell, the main architect of the Malaria Eradication Program, had promised the Eisenhower Administration that the DDT-spray teams would extend a hand of friendship to wavering Cold War allies, revive the entrepreneurial spirit of populations made dull and sickly by malaria, open up huge areas of fertile land for cultivation, pro-mote economic development, end poverty, and spur demand for American products. But the global DDT campaign turned out to be one of the most famous and costly failures in the history of public health. Although by 1970 the disease was eradicated in eighteen countries, most were already controlling it relatively effectively before the program began. Where malaria had been an unmanageable problem, the DDT program had little effect. After retreating for a few years, the malarious mosquitoes returne...