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Cheap Eyeglasses. In the developed world, 60–70% of people wear glasses; in the developing world, it's 5%. That's not because of better eyes but because of poor access to eyeglasses. A new invention provides one-size-fits-all glasses by using a sac filled with a variable amount of silicone. The user adjusts the amount as needed. They cost $19 now, but volume is expected to cut that dramatically. More
Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition 2010. The UW's Foster School of Business hosts an annual competition with $20,000 in prize money. Some of this year's entries were: "solar oven water purification systems in Africa, 10-cent meals from food scraps for slum dwellers in Mumbai, girl's education and microenterprise in Rwanda, pedal-powered phones in Nicaragua, [and] low cost healthcare systems in India."
Clean Water + Electricity from any Fuel. Dean Kamen, the Segway guy, has produced the Slingshot, a device costing about $1000 that produces one kilowatt of electricity using fuel like dried dung plus, with the waste heat, produces 1000 liters of distilled water per day. Video from his interview on the Colbert Report here.
Arsenic removal from water. Can nuclear waste cleanup concepts be tapped to help remove arsenic from drinking water? More.
Web 2.0 Affecting Agriculture in Africa. Ugandan farmers benefit from blogging. (Video 8:32).
One Laptop per Child. "About 500,000 of the … light and rugged [PCs] are being used in 31 countries, including Afghanistan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Lebanon, Peru, Rwanda and Uruguay. But the cost of the laptops, at less than $200 each, has been prohibitively high for many countries, and the number of laptops distributed has fallen short of early projections." Perhaps an advertising campaign will move things forward.
Low Tech Technology. The pot-in-pot refrigerator (zeer in Arabic) uses evaporation to keep perishable foods without electricity. A Nigerian man won the Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2000 for this invention.
Who Gets US Foreign Aid? The US gave about $26 billion in foreign aid in 2008 (about a tenth of the total annual amount of charitable giving by foundations and [mostly] by individuals in the US). Of the ranked list of countries, the first one that gets the kind of aid that we focus on is #5, Kenya. The top of the list is more focused on security/defense aid: Israel ($2.4 billion), Egypt (1.7), Pakistan (0.8), and Jordan (0.7). More..
The Ethics of Aid. "We explore the complex ethics of global aid with a young writer from Kenya …. He is among a rising generation of African voices who bring a cautionary perspective to the morality and efficacy behind many Western initiatives to abolish poverty and speed development in Africa." (Speaking of Faith podcast,, 52:34).
The Value of Foreign Aid. "Over $100 billion crosses the planet each year in efforts to improve life for the world's poorest, yet poverty remains a serious concern year after year, decade after decade. Where is all that money going? How is it being used? Have things changed in the past 50 years? What's expected to change in the next 5 years?" Q&A with two experts.
Why Foreign Aid Makes Sense. "Helping other nations become more stable and prosperous is not only the right thing to do—as large proportions of the U.S. general public believe—but experts on international relations say doing so is also as important for ‘us' as it is for ‘them.'" More..
The Sweatshop Problem. Is it too many of them? Or too few? "While it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don't exploit enough. Talk to [families living in a dump], and a job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty, the kind of gauzy if probably unrealistic ambition that parents everywhere often have for their children…. In the hierarchy of jobs in poor countries, sweltering at a sewing machine isn't the bottom…. The result [of labor standards] is to push companies to operate more capital-intensive factories in better-off nations like Malaysia, rather than labor-intensive factories in poorer countries like Ghana or Cambodia." More..
Where's the Money? Here's an interesting way to see which countries are doing well. This is 24 hours of large aircraft flights worldwide condensed down to about one minute. It's not surprising which parts of the world get all the flights and which don't. Video..
Development through Enterprise. The NextBillion project is trying to bring the next billion people into the middle class by enabling business to make the next billion dollars from serving this new market.
Equitable societies are better for everyone. "More unequal societies are bad for almost everyone within them—the well-off as well as the poor. The authors forcefully demonstrate that nearly every modern social and environmental problem—ill-health, lack of community, life, violence, drugs, obesity, mental illness, long working hours, big prison populations—is more likely to occur in a less equal society, and adversely affects all of those within it." More.
Why do People Give? "Gifts given anonymously tended to be smaller, while gifts that were publicized in a big way were larger." Tax breaks are one motivator for donation, of course, "But most interesting is another explanation, which is that people do good in part because it makes them look good to those whose opinions they care about. Economists call this ‘image motivation.'" Perhaps there are clues here that could help us increase spontaneous donations at our grant evenings. More. "Looking good by doing good" " in the Economist (subscription required).
Giving Circles Workbook. This brochure walks through the challenges and options to creating a giving circle. Source: The Institute for Philanthropy.
Sharing the Tourism Revenue in Kenya. "On World Responsible Tourism Day, an indigenous community in Kenya—evicted from their land to make way for a world-famous nature reserve—appealed for a portion of the revenue generated by the region's thriving tourism industry." More.
How Rich Are You? See how you rank among the world's population. (This may be a tonic against our recent financial worries—if you're an American, you're probably pretty darn rich by world standards.) More.
Income Inequality. "Not everyone agrees that income inequality is a problem to be solved. America and Britain are reckoned to have among the greatest inequality, among rich countries, as measured by the Gini coefficient. Such inequality may be associated with certain problems, for example a study produced last year by Unicef, the UN children's agency, suggested that the two countries have particularly low levels of child wellbeing. For many ordinary Americans and Britons, however, social mobility and getting opportunities to prosper may be more important. Nordic countries, which are the most equal, regularly do well in happiness surveys. The highest levels of inequality are in poor countries, especially in South America and Africa."
United Nations Development Programme. The data on income inequality is available from the UNDP's Human Development Report, , which could be a useful source for data about different countries and issues.
Aid Corruption ‘A Serious Threat.' More.
Problems with World Bank Projects? A summary o of one multi-billion-dollar World Bank project and the problems it caused.
Climate Change. "More Media Coverage of Climate Change a Necessity." This page has a number of links to good background articles on the climate change problem.
How to Save the World. "‘Saving our civilization is not a spectator sport,' says Lester Brown, author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. To effect change we must get active and we must do it now, concludes the environmental expert." More
Clean Water … in the West. The Thames of the mid-19th century was effectively an open sewer. Thomas Crapper's toilet added to the problem. "The Great Stink" of 1858 forced Parliament to deal with the problem with thousands of miles of sewers. Prince Albert died from typhoid fever in 1861, leading Queen Victoria to wear black for the rest of her long life and insist that the sanitation project be done properly. More o on this history.
Hurricanes in Central America. Though Hurricane Mitch struck ten years ago, dumping as much as six feet of rain in some areas, it has lessons for us today. More.
World Water Week. "20 percent of the world's population already can't get enough water. Americans aren't helping things by guzzling 400 liters on average every day, compared to 200 liters for the average European and just 10 liters per day for the rest of the world." More
Top 10 Water Wasters. Here's what you can do t to minimize water waste.
Is Human Action Aiding Dengue Fever? A drought in Australia has caused people to storage tanks for rainwater—a great breeding ground for dengue-carrying mosquitoes. The simple solution: cover your water containers. More.
Parasitic Worms. A slide show o of 8 parasitic worms. (Caution: don't be eating your lunch when you view these!)
World Malaria Day is April 25. World Malaria Day is a World Health Organization effort to reach the Millennium Development Goal of 2010 "delivering effective and affordable protection and treatment to all people at risk of malaria" by 2010. The related Nothing But Nets campaign is distributing $10 nets to millions of people.
World Toilet Summit. 2.5 billion people don't have proper toilets, and one of the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals is to cut that number in half by 2015. More on the conference.
Fighting Malaria in Refugee Populations. 630,000 refugees in East Africa will receive insecticide-treated bed nets. More.
Good News on Malaria. First Mauritius, and soon Swaziland may eliminate malaria. "Malaria kills more than 1 million people worldwide, most of whom are children under five and almost 90 percent of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa." More.
Malaria: Bed Nets. How to get bed nets used properly? If they're not valued, they're used as fishing nets or wedding veils. A model pioneered in Malawi pays for itself and ensures that the nets are used.
Dengue vaccine? Dengue causes 500,000 hospitalizations every year, but a vaccine may be available in a decade. More.
History of Burma (Myanmar). Here's a short history of modern Burma: Part 1, 2, and 33.
Sexual Slavery. "Somaly Mam was born in a remote village in the forests of Cambodia and sold into a brothel when she was twelve. Over the next decade she would be raped repeatedly, tortured, starved, and beaten. That she is still alive today is nothing short of miraculous. And yet alive she is, and since escaping the brothels her humanitarian organization AFESIP has rescued over 4,000 girls from sexual slavery. Her book, The Road of Lost Innocence chronicles this journey." More from this report here (scroll down to the relevant article). Somaly Mam has also done a short video interview. She also has a web site with helpful background on the sex trade:
The Seattle Times has a several-article series on her as well: "Sex Trafficking: the evil behind the forced smiles" (1/5/09) "Sex trafficking: Time to launch a 21st-century abolitionist movement" (1/5/09) Book review of Somaly Mam's The Road of Lost Innocence.
Efforts to Reduce Slavery. The ups and downs of addressing human trafficking in the Bush administration. More.
New Constitution in Nepal. "The government of Nepal has prioritized the drafting of a new constitution but failed to properly address judicial corruption and human rights abuses perpetrated during the 10-year conflict." More.
A New Buddha in Nepal? An 18-year-old is claimed by followers to have meditated for months without food or water. More here and here.
European Colonization of Africa. A number of technologies were relevant, but quinine may have been the most important technology to allow colonization. More.
Malawi Background Information. This guide is from OneWorld.net. "Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world. It is landlocked, densely populated, has limited natural resources, suffers from severe environmental degradation and is being ravaged by HIV/AIDS. However, unlike many other developing countries, Malawi is a functioning multi-party democracy with strong civil society institutions, a free press and a tradition of peace. The bulk of the country's foreign debt was forgiven by international donors in 2006, thereby greatly improving prospects for economic growth and development." More on measures to adapt to climate change in Malawi.
Governance in Africa. "The quality of governance improved in 31 of 48 African nations surveyed, with particular advances in participation and human rights." More.
Report Card: Corruption in Africa. "Africa's economy has grown much faster since 2000, but fears regarding corruption have risen too. Africa's average score on Transparency International's Corruptions Perceptions Index has fallen steadily since 2000, reaching a new low of 2.75—out of a possible ten—in 2008. Of the 47 Sub-Saharan countries ranked in the 2008 survey, 64% score less than three out of ten, a level that, according to Transparency International, indicates ‘rampant corruption.'" Atthe top of the list of Sub-Saharan Africa: Botswana, Mauritius, Cape Verde, and South Africa. Countries that we care about: Tanzania (#16), Malawi (#18), Ethiopia (#25), and Kenya (#32). At the bottom of the list: Sudan, Guinea, and Somalia. More.
Report Card: African Governance. And here's another report card, this time by the Ibrahim governance index. There's also an interactive map showing each country.
Population growth. Beginning in the 1970s, the government of Bangladesh provided low-cost contraceptive supplies and advice, and its birth rate fell from six children per woman to three. "Given the choice, people want fewer children…. Even if everyone moved to birth rates of around two children per woman tomorrow, we would still hit 8.5 billion" (though that's only 25% more than our current population of 6.8 billion now). In practice, experts predict the population to top out at 9.2 billion in 2050, before it begins to fall. More.
The Man Who Planted Trees. This classic novella has been made into a video. It's basically a long version of Margaret Mead's famous observation: "Never doubt a small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." Highly recommended!
An Open-Source Approach to Social Change. ChangeMakers.net encourages entries from organizations on various topics, and readers vote on which ones to fund. One is called Ending Global Slavery (Maiti Nepal is listed here). This might be a good resource if we want to find additional worthwhile organizations.
"A News Service for the Unimaginable Future." There's a TED video of Ed Burtynsky, who has created a gallery of his photos of the "manufactured" (human-changed) landscape. He recommended WorldChanging.com, which says, "We inspire readers around the world with stories of the most important and innovative new tools, models and ideas for building a bright green future. Our readers are ready to change the world, and Worldchanging links them to the first steps."
Mayan History. An interactive map explores fifteen Mayan sites in the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.
Organization in Central America: Sustainable Harvest International. "SHI's 40 local field trainers have helped families to plant more than 2.3 million trees and convert thousands of acres of land to sustainable uses, thereby saving tens of thousands of acres from slash-and-burn destruction. With organic vegetable gardens, wood-conserving stoves, community loan funds and a host of other projects, participants dramatically improve their quality of life while restoring the environment." More.