May 22, 2010
Moonshine or the Kids?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
MONT-BELO, Congo Republic
There’s an ugly secret of global poverty, one rarely acknowledged by aid groups or U.N. reports. It’s a blunt truth that is politically incorrect, heartbreaking, frustrating and ubiquitous:
It’s that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.
That probably sounds sanctimonious, haughty and callous, but it’s been on my mind while traveling through central Africa with a college student on my annual win-a-trip journey. Here in this Congolese village of Mont-Belo, we met a bright fourth grader, Jovali Obamza, who is about to be expelled from school because his family is three months behind in paying fees. (In theory, public school is free in the Congo Republic. In fact, every single school we visited charges fees.)
We asked to see Jovali’s parents. The dad, Georges Obamza, who weaves straw stools that he sells for $1 each, is unmistakably very poor. He said that the family is eight months behind on its $6-a-month rent and is in danger of being evicted, with nowhere to go.
The Obamzas have no mosquito net, even though they have already lost two of their eight children to malaria. They say they just can’t afford the $6 cost of a net. Nor can they afford the $2.50-a-month tuition for each of their three school-age kids.
“It’s hard to get the money to send the kids to school,” Mr. Obamza explained, a bit embarrassed.
But Mr. Obamza and his wife, Valerie, do have cellphones and say they spend a combined $10 a month on call time.
In addition, Mr. Obamza goes drinking several times a week at a village bar, spending about $1 an evening on moonshine. By his calculation, that adds up to about $12 a month — almost as much as the family rent and school fees combined.
I asked Mr. Obamza why he prioritizes alcohol over educating his kids. He looked pained.
Other villagers said that Mr. Obamza drinks less than the average man in the village (women drink far less). Many other men drink every evening, they said, and also spend money on cigarettes.
“If possible, I drink every day,” Fulbert Mfouna, a 43-year-old whose children have also had to drop out or repeat grades for lack of school fees, said forthrightly. His eldest son, Jude, is still in first grade after repeating for five years because of nonpayment of fees. Meanwhile, Mr. Mfouna acknowledged spending $2 a day on alcohol and cigarettes.
Traditionally, a young man here might have paid his wife’s family a “bride price” of a pair of goats. Now the “bride price” starts with oversized jugs of wine and two bottles of whiskey.
Two M.I.T. economists, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, found that the world’s poor typically spend about 2 percent of their income educating their children, and often larger percentages on alcohol and tobacco: 4 percent in rural Papua New Guinea, 6 percent in Indonesia, 8 percent in Mexico. The indigent also spend significant sums on soft drinks, prostitution and extravagant festivals.
Look, I don’t want to be an unctuous party-pooper. But I’ve seen too many children dying of malaria for want of a bed net that the father tells me is unaffordable, even as he spends larger sums on liquor. If we want Mr. Obamza’s children to get an education and sleep under a bed net — well, the simplest option is for their dad to spend fewer evenings in the bar.
Because there’s mounting evidence that mothers are more likely than fathers to spend money educating their kids, one solution is to give women more control over purse strings and more legal title to assets. Some aid groups and U.N. agencies are working on that.
Another approach is microsavings, helping poor people save money when banks aren’t interested in them. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the most powerful part of microfinance isn’t microlending but microsavings.
Microsavings programs, organized by CARE and other organizations, work to turn a consumption culture into a savings culture. The programs often keep household savings in the women’s names, to give mothers more say in spending decisions, and I’ve seen them work in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
Well-meaning humanitarians sometimes burnish suffering to make it seem more virtuous and noble than it often is. If we’re going to make more progress, and get kids like the Obamza children in school and under bed nets, we need to look unflinchingly at uncomfortable truths — and then try to redirect the family money now spent on wine and prostitution.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/opini ... nted=print
PRIVATE PHILANTHROPY
June 16, 2010
Dad Will Really Like This
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
No more neckties!
Sunday is Father’s Day, and we dads will be overwhelmed with neckties and wrench sets. We will feign ecstasy, and our loved ones will pretend to believe our protestations of pleasure.
But for a really nifty Father’s Day gift, how about sponsoring a rat? Specifically, an African giant pouched rat, about 30 inches long including tail. These are he-man rats, the kind that send cats fleeing. What’s more, we’re not talking about just any giant rat, but an educated one with the rodent equivalent of a Ph.D.
A Dutch company, Apopo, has trained these giant rats, which have poor sight but excellent noses, to detect landmines in Africa. The rats are too light to set off the mines, but they can explore a suspected minefield and point with their noses to buried mines. After many months of training, a rat can clear as much land in 20 minutes as a human can in two days.
In addition to earning their stripes as mine detectors, the giant rats are also trained in health work: detecting cases of tuberculosis. Possible TB sufferers provide samples of sputum, which are then handed over to the rats to sniff out. This detection process turns out to be much faster than your typical microscope examination. A technician with a microscope in Tanzania can screen about 40 samples a day, while one giant rat can screen the same amount in seven minutes.
What man wouldn’t pass up a necktie for the chance to be associated with an educated, supermacho giant rat? For just $36, you can buy a year’s supply of bananas to feed one of these rats. Or, for a gift more on the risqué side, $100 will buy a “love nest” for a breeding pair of rats.
Both options are at www.globalgiving.com, a site that allows donors to browse aid projects around the world and make a donation on the spot.
Father’s Day tends to be less a celebration of fatherhood than a triumph of commercialism. The National Retail Federation projects that Americans will spend $9.8 billion on Father’s Day this year. To put that in perspective, that’s more than enough to assure a primary education for every child on the planet who is not getting one right now.
In fact, we could send every child to primary school and have enough left over to get each dad a (cheap) necktie. And if we skipped store-bought cards (almost $750 million annually) and offered handmade versions, the savings alone could make a vast difference to great programs that help young American men escape poverty.
Think of the National Fatherhood Initiative, www.fatherhood.org, which works to support dads and keep them engaged in their children’s lives. There’s some evidence that absent fathers create a vicious cycle: boys grow up without positive male role models, get into trouble and then become absentee fathers themselves.
Another group is the Black Star Project, www.blackstarproject.org, which seeks to get families in low-income communities more involved in the educational lives of kids. Or there’s World of Money, www.worldofmoney.org, which coaches kids in poor communities on financial literacy and business skills.
For gadget lovers, how about a donation in dad’s name to the National Urban Technology Center, www.urbantech.org, which helps low-income youths gain computer skills?
Or for those into automotive accessories or tools and appliances (almost $1 billion a year, by the way), why not rev up instead a motorcycle used to bring medical care to people in remote areas? An aid group called Riders for Health, www.riders.org, provides motorcycles and cars to health workers in Africa, along with rigorous training on maintenance and repair. Health workers end up reaching roughly five times as many patients as they would on foot.
And if you give dad a stake in a motorcycle at a clinic in Zambia, you can be pretty sure he won’t crash it.
Wouldn’t most dads feel more honored by a donation to any of these organizations than by a donation to commercialism?
I think so. My hunch is that family members, manipulated by commercial messages, think that they aren’t showing dad enough love if they don’t buy him something expensive. But give us some credit! The friend who suggested this column, Sam Howe Verhovek, noted the huge sums spent on cuff links and Best Buy gift cards and said: “I don’t know about you, but I don’t really need any of the above. A handwritten, ‘Thanks, Dad!’ note from my kids would mean more than anything Hallmark’s poets could come up with.”
That’s the truth. But if you must pull out the credit card, this is my sincere advice: It’s a rare dad who would choose a store-bought card over a homemade card; or for that matter, a necktie over a gigantic, bomb-sniffing rat.
•
I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/opini ... ?th&emc=th
Dad Will Really Like This
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
No more neckties!
Sunday is Father’s Day, and we dads will be overwhelmed with neckties and wrench sets. We will feign ecstasy, and our loved ones will pretend to believe our protestations of pleasure.
But for a really nifty Father’s Day gift, how about sponsoring a rat? Specifically, an African giant pouched rat, about 30 inches long including tail. These are he-man rats, the kind that send cats fleeing. What’s more, we’re not talking about just any giant rat, but an educated one with the rodent equivalent of a Ph.D.
A Dutch company, Apopo, has trained these giant rats, which have poor sight but excellent noses, to detect landmines in Africa. The rats are too light to set off the mines, but they can explore a suspected minefield and point with their noses to buried mines. After many months of training, a rat can clear as much land in 20 minutes as a human can in two days.
In addition to earning their stripes as mine detectors, the giant rats are also trained in health work: detecting cases of tuberculosis. Possible TB sufferers provide samples of sputum, which are then handed over to the rats to sniff out. This detection process turns out to be much faster than your typical microscope examination. A technician with a microscope in Tanzania can screen about 40 samples a day, while one giant rat can screen the same amount in seven minutes.
What man wouldn’t pass up a necktie for the chance to be associated with an educated, supermacho giant rat? For just $36, you can buy a year’s supply of bananas to feed one of these rats. Or, for a gift more on the risqué side, $100 will buy a “love nest” for a breeding pair of rats.
Both options are at www.globalgiving.com, a site that allows donors to browse aid projects around the world and make a donation on the spot.
Father’s Day tends to be less a celebration of fatherhood than a triumph of commercialism. The National Retail Federation projects that Americans will spend $9.8 billion on Father’s Day this year. To put that in perspective, that’s more than enough to assure a primary education for every child on the planet who is not getting one right now.
In fact, we could send every child to primary school and have enough left over to get each dad a (cheap) necktie. And if we skipped store-bought cards (almost $750 million annually) and offered handmade versions, the savings alone could make a vast difference to great programs that help young American men escape poverty.
Think of the National Fatherhood Initiative, www.fatherhood.org, which works to support dads and keep them engaged in their children’s lives. There’s some evidence that absent fathers create a vicious cycle: boys grow up without positive male role models, get into trouble and then become absentee fathers themselves.
Another group is the Black Star Project, www.blackstarproject.org, which seeks to get families in low-income communities more involved in the educational lives of kids. Or there’s World of Money, www.worldofmoney.org, which coaches kids in poor communities on financial literacy and business skills.
For gadget lovers, how about a donation in dad’s name to the National Urban Technology Center, www.urbantech.org, which helps low-income youths gain computer skills?
Or for those into automotive accessories or tools and appliances (almost $1 billion a year, by the way), why not rev up instead a motorcycle used to bring medical care to people in remote areas? An aid group called Riders for Health, www.riders.org, provides motorcycles and cars to health workers in Africa, along with rigorous training on maintenance and repair. Health workers end up reaching roughly five times as many patients as they would on foot.
And if you give dad a stake in a motorcycle at a clinic in Zambia, you can be pretty sure he won’t crash it.
Wouldn’t most dads feel more honored by a donation to any of these organizations than by a donation to commercialism?
I think so. My hunch is that family members, manipulated by commercial messages, think that they aren’t showing dad enough love if they don’t buy him something expensive. But give us some credit! The friend who suggested this column, Sam Howe Verhovek, noted the huge sums spent on cuff links and Best Buy gift cards and said: “I don’t know about you, but I don’t really need any of the above. A handwritten, ‘Thanks, Dad!’ note from my kids would mean more than anything Hallmark’s poets could come up with.”
That’s the truth. But if you must pull out the credit card, this is my sincere advice: It’s a rare dad who would choose a store-bought card over a homemade card; or for that matter, a necktie over a gigantic, bomb-sniffing rat.
•
I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/opini ... ?th&emc=th
- Ismaili Billionaire - Azim Premji
Low profile Ismaili...
Interesting interview in 2 parts
http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip297667
Low profile Ismaili...
Interesting interview in 2 parts
http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip297667
40 U.S. billionaires pledge half their wealth to charity
Agence France-Presse
August 5, 2010
Clockwise from top: investment guru Warren Buffett, Microsoft mogul Bill Gates, CNN founder Ted Turner, director George Lucas, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Photograph by: AFP-Getty Images, Agence France-Presse
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 1&sponsor=
Forty U.S. billionaires and their families pledged Wednesday to give more than half of their fortune to charity in a drive organized by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
The group includes CNN founder Ted Turner, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison and film director George Lucas, as well as Microsoft mogul Gates and investment guru Buffett.
The idea, announced just six weeks ago as "The Giving Pledge," was thought up by Gates and Buffett.
"Forty of the wealthiest families and individuals in the United States have committed to returning the majority of their wealth to charitable causes," said a statement released Wednesday by www.giving-pledge.org."The pledge is a moral commitment to give, not a legal contract."
"We've really just started, but already we've had a terrific response," Buffett, the chief executive of the investment firm Berkshire Hathaway, said.
U.S. billionaires have been out of favour with the public since the 2008 financial collapse. The pledge scheme might burnish their image. But apart from good PR, the scheme raises the prospect of eye-popping amounts of money flowing to charity.
There are about 400 U.S. billionaires. If the entire group were to surrender half of its wealth, that would amount to some $600 billion US, Forbes magazine estimates.
Gates, the second richest man in the world according to the Forbes 2010 billionaires list, has some $53 billion, narrowly losing his long-held No. 1 spot to Mexican telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim, who has $53.5 billion.
Buffett, the second-richest American, already announced in 2006 that he wanted gradually to give away all of his fortune estimated this year by Forbes at $47 billion.
Agence France-Presse
August 5, 2010
Clockwise from top: investment guru Warren Buffett, Microsoft mogul Bill Gates, CNN founder Ted Turner, director George Lucas, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Photograph by: AFP-Getty Images, Agence France-Presse
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 1&sponsor=
Forty U.S. billionaires and their families pledged Wednesday to give more than half of their fortune to charity in a drive organized by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
The group includes CNN founder Ted Turner, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison and film director George Lucas, as well as Microsoft mogul Gates and investment guru Buffett.
The idea, announced just six weeks ago as "The Giving Pledge," was thought up by Gates and Buffett.
"Forty of the wealthiest families and individuals in the United States have committed to returning the majority of their wealth to charitable causes," said a statement released Wednesday by www.giving-pledge.org."The pledge is a moral commitment to give, not a legal contract."
"We've really just started, but already we've had a terrific response," Buffett, the chief executive of the investment firm Berkshire Hathaway, said.
U.S. billionaires have been out of favour with the public since the 2008 financial collapse. The pledge scheme might burnish their image. But apart from good PR, the scheme raises the prospect of eye-popping amounts of money flowing to charity.
There are about 400 U.S. billionaires. If the entire group were to surrender half of its wealth, that would amount to some $600 billion US, Forbes magazine estimates.
Gates, the second richest man in the world according to the Forbes 2010 billionaires list, has some $53 billion, narrowly losing his long-held No. 1 spot to Mexican telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim, who has $53.5 billion.
Buffett, the second-richest American, already announced in 2006 that he wanted gradually to give away all of his fortune estimated this year by Forbes at $47 billion.
World Giving Index
The “World Giving Index” is the first report of its kind looking at charitable behaviour across the world. Using data from Gallup’s Worldview World Poll CAF looked at three different types of charitable behaviour – giving money, giving time and helping a stranger and used the results to produce the “World Giving Index”.
Australia and New Zealand topped the Index. Malta was found to be the country with the largest percentage of the population (83%) giving money, the people of Turkmenistan are the most generous with their time with 61% having given time to charity and Liberia was top of the list for helping a stranger (76%).
The study also found that being happy is more of an influence on giving money to charity than being wealthy.
http://www.cafonline.org/Default.aspx?page=19428
The “World Giving Index” is the first report of its kind looking at charitable behaviour across the world. Using data from Gallup’s Worldview World Poll CAF looked at three different types of charitable behaviour – giving money, giving time and helping a stranger and used the results to produce the “World Giving Index”.
Australia and New Zealand topped the Index. Malta was found to be the country with the largest percentage of the population (83%) giving money, the people of Turkmenistan are the most generous with their time with 61% having given time to charity and Liberia was top of the list for helping a stranger (76%).
The study also found that being happy is more of an influence on giving money to charity than being wealthy.
http://www.cafonline.org/Default.aspx?page=19428
September 15, 2010
A Boy and a Bicycle(s)
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Early this year I wrote a column from Zimbabwe that focused on five orphans who moved in together and survive alone in a hut.
The eldest, Abel, a scrawny and malnourished 17-year-old, would rise at 4 o’clock each morning and set off barefoot on a three-hour hike to high school. At nightfall, Abel would return to function as surrogate father: cajoling the younger orphans to finish their homework by firelight, comforting them when sick and spanking them when naughty.
When I asked Abel what he dreamed of, he said “a bicycle” — so that he could cut the six hours he spent walking to and from school and, thus, take better care of the younger orphans. Last week, Abel got his wish. A Chicago-based aid organization, World Bicycle Relief, distributed 200 bicycles to students in Abel’s area who need them to get to school. One went to Abel.
The initiative is a pilot. If it succeeds and finds financing, tens of thousands of other children in Zimbabwe could also get bicycles to help them attend school.
“I’m happy,” Abel told me shyly — his voice beaming through the phone line — when I spoke to him after he got his hands on his bicycle.
Before, he said, he wasn’t sure that he would pass high school graduation exams because he had no time to study. Now he is confident that he will pass.
The bicycle project is the brainchild of a Chicago businessman, Frederick K.W. Day, who read about Abel and decided to make him and his classmates a test of a large-scale bicycles-for-education program in Zimbabwe.
Mr. Day is a senior executive of the SRAM Corporation, the largest bicycle parts company in the United States. He formed World Bicycle Relief in 2005 in the belief that bicycles could help provide cheap transportation for students and health workers in poor countries.
At first, his plan was to ship used bicycles from the United States, but after visits to the field he decided that they would break down. “When we got out there, it was clear that no bike made in the U.S. would survive in that environment,” he said.
After consulting with local people and looking at the spare parts available in remote areas, Mr. Day’s engineering staff designed a 55-pound one-speed bicycle that needed little pampering. One notorious problem with aid groups is that they introduce new technologies that can’t always be sustained; the developing world is full of expensive wells that don’t work because the pumps have broken and there is no one to repair them.
So World Bicycle Relief trains one mechanic — equipped with basic spare parts and tools — for every 50 bicycles distributed, thus nurturing small businesses as well. Abel was one of those trained as a mechanic this time.
In the world of aid, nothing goes quite as planned, and it’s far too early to know whether this program will succeed. World Bicycle Relief tried to get around potential problems by spending months recruiting village elders to oversee the program (it helps that the elders receive bicycles, which they get to keep after two years if they provide solid oversight). Elders will ensure that fathers and older brothers do not confiscate bicycles from girls on the grounds that females are too insignificant to merit something so valuable.
Parents sometimes try to save daughters the risk of walking several hours each way to school by lodging them in town. But the result is sometimes sexual extortion; if a girl wishes to continue her education by staying in cheap lodgings, the price is repeated rape. With bicycles, those girls will now be able to stay at home.
World Bicycle Relief has given out more than 70,000 bicycles so far, nearly 70 percent to women and girls. It expects to hand out 20,000 bicycles this year. And if all goes well, Abel may be the first of tens of thousands of Zimbabwean students to get a bike.
So, for Abel, this is something of a fairy-tale ending. But one of my challenges as a journalist is that many donors want to help any specific individual I write about, while few want to support countless others in the same position.
One obstacle is donor fatigue and weariness with African corruption and repeated aid failures. Those are legitimate concerns. But this column isn’t just a story about a boy and a bike. Rather, it’s an example of an aid intervention that puts a system in place, one that is sustainable and has local buy-in, in hopes of promoting education, jobs and a virtuous cycle out of poverty. It’s a reminder that there are ways to help people help themselves, and that problems can have solutions — but we need to multiply them. Just ask Abel.
I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/opini ... &th&emc=th
A Boy and a Bicycle(s)
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Early this year I wrote a column from Zimbabwe that focused on five orphans who moved in together and survive alone in a hut.
The eldest, Abel, a scrawny and malnourished 17-year-old, would rise at 4 o’clock each morning and set off barefoot on a three-hour hike to high school. At nightfall, Abel would return to function as surrogate father: cajoling the younger orphans to finish their homework by firelight, comforting them when sick and spanking them when naughty.
When I asked Abel what he dreamed of, he said “a bicycle” — so that he could cut the six hours he spent walking to and from school and, thus, take better care of the younger orphans. Last week, Abel got his wish. A Chicago-based aid organization, World Bicycle Relief, distributed 200 bicycles to students in Abel’s area who need them to get to school. One went to Abel.
The initiative is a pilot. If it succeeds and finds financing, tens of thousands of other children in Zimbabwe could also get bicycles to help them attend school.
“I’m happy,” Abel told me shyly — his voice beaming through the phone line — when I spoke to him after he got his hands on his bicycle.
Before, he said, he wasn’t sure that he would pass high school graduation exams because he had no time to study. Now he is confident that he will pass.
The bicycle project is the brainchild of a Chicago businessman, Frederick K.W. Day, who read about Abel and decided to make him and his classmates a test of a large-scale bicycles-for-education program in Zimbabwe.
Mr. Day is a senior executive of the SRAM Corporation, the largest bicycle parts company in the United States. He formed World Bicycle Relief in 2005 in the belief that bicycles could help provide cheap transportation for students and health workers in poor countries.
At first, his plan was to ship used bicycles from the United States, but after visits to the field he decided that they would break down. “When we got out there, it was clear that no bike made in the U.S. would survive in that environment,” he said.
After consulting with local people and looking at the spare parts available in remote areas, Mr. Day’s engineering staff designed a 55-pound one-speed bicycle that needed little pampering. One notorious problem with aid groups is that they introduce new technologies that can’t always be sustained; the developing world is full of expensive wells that don’t work because the pumps have broken and there is no one to repair them.
So World Bicycle Relief trains one mechanic — equipped with basic spare parts and tools — for every 50 bicycles distributed, thus nurturing small businesses as well. Abel was one of those trained as a mechanic this time.
In the world of aid, nothing goes quite as planned, and it’s far too early to know whether this program will succeed. World Bicycle Relief tried to get around potential problems by spending months recruiting village elders to oversee the program (it helps that the elders receive bicycles, which they get to keep after two years if they provide solid oversight). Elders will ensure that fathers and older brothers do not confiscate bicycles from girls on the grounds that females are too insignificant to merit something so valuable.
Parents sometimes try to save daughters the risk of walking several hours each way to school by lodging them in town. But the result is sometimes sexual extortion; if a girl wishes to continue her education by staying in cheap lodgings, the price is repeated rape. With bicycles, those girls will now be able to stay at home.
World Bicycle Relief has given out more than 70,000 bicycles so far, nearly 70 percent to women and girls. It expects to hand out 20,000 bicycles this year. And if all goes well, Abel may be the first of tens of thousands of Zimbabwean students to get a bike.
So, for Abel, this is something of a fairy-tale ending. But one of my challenges as a journalist is that many donors want to help any specific individual I write about, while few want to support countless others in the same position.
One obstacle is donor fatigue and weariness with African corruption and repeated aid failures. Those are legitimate concerns. But this column isn’t just a story about a boy and a bike. Rather, it’s an example of an aid intervention that puts a system in place, one that is sustainable and has local buy-in, in hopes of promoting education, jobs and a virtuous cycle out of poverty. It’s a reminder that there are ways to help people help themselves, and that problems can have solutions — but we need to multiply them. Just ask Abel.
I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/opini ... &th&emc=th
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/opini ... ?th&emc=th
September 22, 2010
Boast, Build and Sell
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
United Nations
World leaders have flown in first class to the United Nations this week to discuss global poverty over cocktails at the Waldorf Astoria.
The U.N. set eight landmark antipoverty objectives in 2000, so this year’s General Assembly is reviewing how we’re doing after a decade. We’re off-track on most of these Millennium Development Goals, so let me offer three suggestions for how the humanitarian world might do better in framing the fight against poverty:
First, boast more.
Humanitarians have tended to guilt-trip people and governments into generosity by peddling emaciated children with flies on their eyes. But relentless negativity leaves the inaccurate impression that Africa is an abyss of failure and hopelessness. And who wants to invest in a failure?
In fact, here’s the record: antipoverty work saves around 32,000 children’s lives each day. That’s my calculation based on the number of children who died in 1960 (about 20 million) and the number dying now (about 8 million a year).
Twelve million lives saved annually — roughly one every three seconds — is a reminder that global poverty needn’t be a depressing topic but can be a hopeful one. Ancient scourges like Guinea worm, river blindness and polio are on their way out. Modern contraception is more common than a generation ago. The average Indian woman has 2.6 children now, compared with 5.5 in 1970.
That doesn’t mean overselling how easy it is to defeat poverty. In their zeal to raise money, activists sometimes elide the challenges of corruption and dependency — and mind-boggling complexity. Helping people in truth is far harder than it looks.
For example, it’s easy to build a school, but it can be tough to make sure that teachers actually show up afterward; they may live 100 miles away in the capital, receiving their pay for doing nothing. Or kids may be “enrolled” but miss months of school during the harvest. Or they may attend school but lack pencils, paper or books. Or they may be too malnourished or anemic from intestinal worms to learn anything. And Western aid to education sometimes just displaces domestic resources, which are then diverted to buy weapons instead.
In short, building an educational system in which students actually learn is difficult, and it takes more than money poured into broken systems. But it’s also true that literacy rates and school attendance are rising sharply. More than three-quarters of African youngsters are now enrolled in primary school, up from 58 percent in 1999.
My second suggestion is to focus not just on poverty relief but also on wealth creation. The best way to overcome poverty isn’t charity but economic growth, trade rather than aid. That’s why East Asia has raised its living standards so much.
There, too, there’s progress. We’re seeing economic engines revving up from Africa to India. For the last decade, per capita G.D.P. growth in Africa has averaged more than 3 percent per year — faster than in America or Europe.
Wealthy countries could encourage prosperity creation by opening their markets wider to exports from poor countries. The United States has a program, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, or AGOA, that is an important step in that direction and should be expanded.
My third suggestion: punchier marketing. Humanitarians tend to flinch at the idea of marketing, thinking that’s what you do with toothpaste. But it’s all the more important when lives are at stake.
This United Nations summit meeting is marked by the publication of tedious reports on poverty that almost no one will read, when it might gain more support with, say, a music video. After all, one of the most powerful tools to spread the word about educating girls was a “Girl Effect” video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIvmE4_KMNw) designed by the marketing geniuses at Nike. The first Girl Effect video went viral and has been watched by about 10 million people; its successor was released this week.
My hunch is that the most effective way to market antipoverty work in coming years will be by rebranding it, in part, as a security issue. Rich country budgets are so strained that it’s unrealistic to think that governments will approve much new money — or endorse the excellent suggestion of a financial transactions tax to pay for global health programs — just to ease suffering.
But hundreds of billions of dollars will be spent fighting terrorism and bolstering fragile countries like Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan. We should note that schools have a better record of fighting terrorism than missiles do and that wobbly governments can be buttressed not just with helicopter gunships but also with school lunch programs (at 25 cents per kid per day).
International security is where the money is, but fighting poverty is where the success is.
September 22, 2010
Boast, Build and Sell
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
United Nations
World leaders have flown in first class to the United Nations this week to discuss global poverty over cocktails at the Waldorf Astoria.
The U.N. set eight landmark antipoverty objectives in 2000, so this year’s General Assembly is reviewing how we’re doing after a decade. We’re off-track on most of these Millennium Development Goals, so let me offer three suggestions for how the humanitarian world might do better in framing the fight against poverty:
First, boast more.
Humanitarians have tended to guilt-trip people and governments into generosity by peddling emaciated children with flies on their eyes. But relentless negativity leaves the inaccurate impression that Africa is an abyss of failure and hopelessness. And who wants to invest in a failure?
In fact, here’s the record: antipoverty work saves around 32,000 children’s lives each day. That’s my calculation based on the number of children who died in 1960 (about 20 million) and the number dying now (about 8 million a year).
Twelve million lives saved annually — roughly one every three seconds — is a reminder that global poverty needn’t be a depressing topic but can be a hopeful one. Ancient scourges like Guinea worm, river blindness and polio are on their way out. Modern contraception is more common than a generation ago. The average Indian woman has 2.6 children now, compared with 5.5 in 1970.
That doesn’t mean overselling how easy it is to defeat poverty. In their zeal to raise money, activists sometimes elide the challenges of corruption and dependency — and mind-boggling complexity. Helping people in truth is far harder than it looks.
For example, it’s easy to build a school, but it can be tough to make sure that teachers actually show up afterward; they may live 100 miles away in the capital, receiving their pay for doing nothing. Or kids may be “enrolled” but miss months of school during the harvest. Or they may attend school but lack pencils, paper or books. Or they may be too malnourished or anemic from intestinal worms to learn anything. And Western aid to education sometimes just displaces domestic resources, which are then diverted to buy weapons instead.
In short, building an educational system in which students actually learn is difficult, and it takes more than money poured into broken systems. But it’s also true that literacy rates and school attendance are rising sharply. More than three-quarters of African youngsters are now enrolled in primary school, up from 58 percent in 1999.
My second suggestion is to focus not just on poverty relief but also on wealth creation. The best way to overcome poverty isn’t charity but economic growth, trade rather than aid. That’s why East Asia has raised its living standards so much.
There, too, there’s progress. We’re seeing economic engines revving up from Africa to India. For the last decade, per capita G.D.P. growth in Africa has averaged more than 3 percent per year — faster than in America or Europe.
Wealthy countries could encourage prosperity creation by opening their markets wider to exports from poor countries. The United States has a program, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, or AGOA, that is an important step in that direction and should be expanded.
My third suggestion: punchier marketing. Humanitarians tend to flinch at the idea of marketing, thinking that’s what you do with toothpaste. But it’s all the more important when lives are at stake.
This United Nations summit meeting is marked by the publication of tedious reports on poverty that almost no one will read, when it might gain more support with, say, a music video. After all, one of the most powerful tools to spread the word about educating girls was a “Girl Effect” video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIvmE4_KMNw) designed by the marketing geniuses at Nike. The first Girl Effect video went viral and has been watched by about 10 million people; its successor was released this week.
My hunch is that the most effective way to market antipoverty work in coming years will be by rebranding it, in part, as a security issue. Rich country budgets are so strained that it’s unrealistic to think that governments will approve much new money — or endorse the excellent suggestion of a financial transactions tax to pay for global health programs — just to ease suffering.
But hundreds of billions of dollars will be spent fighting terrorism and bolstering fragile countries like Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan. We should note that schools have a better record of fighting terrorism than missiles do and that wobbly governments can be buttressed not just with helicopter gunships but also with school lunch programs (at 25 cents per kid per day).
International security is where the money is, but fighting poverty is where the success is.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/world ... &th&emc=th
September 23, 2010
Chinese Attitudes on Generosity Are Tested
By MICHAEL WINES
BEIJING — Like most everything else in China’s economy, philanthropy here is in a boom period, fueled by phalanxes of newly minted billionaires and foundations, encouraged by an army of professional advisers on charity and, increasingly, sanctioned by the government.
Which makes the case of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who will come to Beijing next week to share their thoughts on philanthropy with some of China’s wealthiest people, all the more curious.
Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gates, the Rockefeller and Carnegie of this age, announced plans last month to invite about 50 of China’s superrich to discuss their concept of philanthropy, which includes enlisting the world’s wealthiest people to give away at least half their fortunes.
Things appeared to be going swimmingly until early September, when the Chinese news media quoted a Beijing official of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as saying that “a small number of people” had declined to come, and that others had asked whether they would be pushed for donations.
Last week, Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett issued a letter stating that they were not coming to China “to pressure people to give,” but to listen. “China’s circumstances are unique, and so its approach to philanthropy will be as well,” they wrote.
Except for denying a report from Xinhua, the state-run news agency, that only two tycoons had accepted the invitation, the organizers of the event have largely fallen silent.
But the Chinese are unlikely to stop talking soon. In a nation where explosive growth has opened a yawning gap between rich and poor, reports that Chinese billionaires might stiff-arm the invitation have spawned a sort of national Rorschach test of Chinese generosity, not to mention attitudes toward the rich.
“Are Chinese rich scared to be charitable?” asked The Global Times, the Communist Party’s English-language newspaper. Not at all; “This is the Americans’ conspiracy,” wrote one of 2,000 people who posted comments on the controversy on Sina.com, a major Internet portal. Academics grumbled about efforts to impose Western philanthropic values on Chinese tradition.
Actually, however, Chinese philanthropic tradition was being upended well before the Gates-Buffett dinner was even conceived. In barely a decade, the Chinese economy has created at least 117 billionaires, according to a Forbes magazine ranking, and hundreds of thousands of millionaires by the estimate of Hurun Report, a magazine based in Shanghai whose target audience is the rich. Only the United States has more billionaires.
While China’s reported philanthropic donations are now comparatively tiny — about $8 billion last year, the government says, compared with $308 billion in the United States in 2008 — changes in China’s economic structure and in government policies make that figure almost destined to rise quickly. And, in contrast to the past, riches are starting to flow to social and charitable causes.
“The Chinese have been very generous for a long period of time,” Rupert Hoogewerf, who publishes Hurun Report, said by telephone. “The difference has been that they do it between families, and don’t publicize it. What we’re seeing now is a new era of transparency.”
Translucency might be a better term. More than a few fortunes have been built on corruption, and their owners stay in the shadows. The China Reform Foundation, an economic research group based in Beijing, estimated last month that about $870 billion in corrupt “gray money” was being hidden by the wealthiest 10 percent of China’s population.
Huang Guangyu, who built an appliance shop into a fortune valued at $2.7 billion to $6.3 billion, was singled out by Hurun Report in 2007 as especially miserly. Today he is in prison, convicted of stock fraud and insider trading.
A Global Times article this month stated that in the last decade, 17 members of an annual list of China’s 50 richest people had been convicted of economic crimes.
Ordinary Chinese, steeped in petty government corruption, are often bitterly cynical toward the rich.
“Of course they’ll decline the invitation,” one wrote of the invited billionaires on the Sina.com postings board. “None of their money is clean!”
Yet a growing number of China’s corporate titans are open both about their wealth and about giving it away. The leading example is Yu Pengnian, an 88-year-old real estate baron who gave the last of his $1.3 billion fortune in April to a foundation he created to fund scholarships for poor Chinese students. The latest is Chen Guangbiao, 42, a Jiangsu Province recycling-company owner who has taken the Gates-Buffett pledge to give away his $440 million fortune when he dies.
“Wealth is not something that comes to you when you are born,” he said in an interview last week. “It’s like water. If you have only a cup, you keep it to yourself. If you have a barrel, you share it with your family. And if you have a river, you share it with everyone.”
This is a new phenomenon, and not only because the money is new. China’s Communist Party claims to represent the downtrodden, and has been reluctant to turn to the private sector to address problems of poverty and disease.
But since the outpouring of support for victims of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, the government now seems to be edging toward a more accommodating attitude about private philanthropy. It offers corporations a tax break of up to 12 percent for charitable gifts, rising to 30 percent for individuals.
This year, a reregistration drive has certified more than 1,000 nonprofit groups as able to accept tax-deductible donations. Government officials have also said that they plan to enact the nation’s first charity law, with rules that clearly define what a charity is and how it must operate, by late 2011.
But whether revised rules on charities and nonprofit groups generally will broaden or restrict philanthropic work is unclear, said Jia Xijin, who directs the Nongovernmental Organization Research Center at Tsinghua University in Beijing. While the government has slowly given new leeway to some charitable groups, especially those that provide social services, it keeps a tighter rein on groups that advocate policy changes or raise money on their own.
The government’s concern is that “most public fund-raising organizations need some social cause, and if you organize people,” she said, “that means the organization represents some social force.”
For Mr. Chen, the recycling magnate, the best way to encourage philanthropy by the group invited to dine with Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gates is to publicize the names of people who decline to attend.
“I’ll help you bash them in the media,” he said. “We can’t be misers.”
Zhang Jing contributed research.
September 23, 2010
Chinese Attitudes on Generosity Are Tested
By MICHAEL WINES
BEIJING — Like most everything else in China’s economy, philanthropy here is in a boom period, fueled by phalanxes of newly minted billionaires and foundations, encouraged by an army of professional advisers on charity and, increasingly, sanctioned by the government.
Which makes the case of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who will come to Beijing next week to share their thoughts on philanthropy with some of China’s wealthiest people, all the more curious.
Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gates, the Rockefeller and Carnegie of this age, announced plans last month to invite about 50 of China’s superrich to discuss their concept of philanthropy, which includes enlisting the world’s wealthiest people to give away at least half their fortunes.
Things appeared to be going swimmingly until early September, when the Chinese news media quoted a Beijing official of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as saying that “a small number of people” had declined to come, and that others had asked whether they would be pushed for donations.
Last week, Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett issued a letter stating that they were not coming to China “to pressure people to give,” but to listen. “China’s circumstances are unique, and so its approach to philanthropy will be as well,” they wrote.
Except for denying a report from Xinhua, the state-run news agency, that only two tycoons had accepted the invitation, the organizers of the event have largely fallen silent.
But the Chinese are unlikely to stop talking soon. In a nation where explosive growth has opened a yawning gap between rich and poor, reports that Chinese billionaires might stiff-arm the invitation have spawned a sort of national Rorschach test of Chinese generosity, not to mention attitudes toward the rich.
“Are Chinese rich scared to be charitable?” asked The Global Times, the Communist Party’s English-language newspaper. Not at all; “This is the Americans’ conspiracy,” wrote one of 2,000 people who posted comments on the controversy on Sina.com, a major Internet portal. Academics grumbled about efforts to impose Western philanthropic values on Chinese tradition.
Actually, however, Chinese philanthropic tradition was being upended well before the Gates-Buffett dinner was even conceived. In barely a decade, the Chinese economy has created at least 117 billionaires, according to a Forbes magazine ranking, and hundreds of thousands of millionaires by the estimate of Hurun Report, a magazine based in Shanghai whose target audience is the rich. Only the United States has more billionaires.
While China’s reported philanthropic donations are now comparatively tiny — about $8 billion last year, the government says, compared with $308 billion in the United States in 2008 — changes in China’s economic structure and in government policies make that figure almost destined to rise quickly. And, in contrast to the past, riches are starting to flow to social and charitable causes.
“The Chinese have been very generous for a long period of time,” Rupert Hoogewerf, who publishes Hurun Report, said by telephone. “The difference has been that they do it between families, and don’t publicize it. What we’re seeing now is a new era of transparency.”
Translucency might be a better term. More than a few fortunes have been built on corruption, and their owners stay in the shadows. The China Reform Foundation, an economic research group based in Beijing, estimated last month that about $870 billion in corrupt “gray money” was being hidden by the wealthiest 10 percent of China’s population.
Huang Guangyu, who built an appliance shop into a fortune valued at $2.7 billion to $6.3 billion, was singled out by Hurun Report in 2007 as especially miserly. Today he is in prison, convicted of stock fraud and insider trading.
A Global Times article this month stated that in the last decade, 17 members of an annual list of China’s 50 richest people had been convicted of economic crimes.
Ordinary Chinese, steeped in petty government corruption, are often bitterly cynical toward the rich.
“Of course they’ll decline the invitation,” one wrote of the invited billionaires on the Sina.com postings board. “None of their money is clean!”
Yet a growing number of China’s corporate titans are open both about their wealth and about giving it away. The leading example is Yu Pengnian, an 88-year-old real estate baron who gave the last of his $1.3 billion fortune in April to a foundation he created to fund scholarships for poor Chinese students. The latest is Chen Guangbiao, 42, a Jiangsu Province recycling-company owner who has taken the Gates-Buffett pledge to give away his $440 million fortune when he dies.
“Wealth is not something that comes to you when you are born,” he said in an interview last week. “It’s like water. If you have only a cup, you keep it to yourself. If you have a barrel, you share it with your family. And if you have a river, you share it with everyone.”
This is a new phenomenon, and not only because the money is new. China’s Communist Party claims to represent the downtrodden, and has been reluctant to turn to the private sector to address problems of poverty and disease.
But since the outpouring of support for victims of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, the government now seems to be edging toward a more accommodating attitude about private philanthropy. It offers corporations a tax break of up to 12 percent for charitable gifts, rising to 30 percent for individuals.
This year, a reregistration drive has certified more than 1,000 nonprofit groups as able to accept tax-deductible donations. Government officials have also said that they plan to enact the nation’s first charity law, with rules that clearly define what a charity is and how it must operate, by late 2011.
But whether revised rules on charities and nonprofit groups generally will broaden or restrict philanthropic work is unclear, said Jia Xijin, who directs the Nongovernmental Organization Research Center at Tsinghua University in Beijing. While the government has slowly given new leeway to some charitable groups, especially those that provide social services, it keeps a tighter rein on groups that advocate policy changes or raise money on their own.
The government’s concern is that “most public fund-raising organizations need some social cause, and if you organize people,” she said, “that means the organization represents some social force.”
For Mr. Chen, the recycling magnate, the best way to encourage philanthropy by the group invited to dine with Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gates is to publicize the names of people who decline to attend.
“I’ll help you bash them in the media,” he said. “We can’t be misers.”
Zhang Jing contributed research.
October 2, 2010
At Risk From the Womb
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Some people think we’re shaped primarily by genes. Others believe that the environment we grow up in is most important. But now evidence is mounting that a third factor is also critical: our uterine environment before we’re even born.
Researchers are finding indications that obesity, diabetes and mental illness among adults are all related in part to what happened in the womb decades earlier.
One of the first careful studies in this field found that birth weight (a proxy for nutrition in the womb) helped predict whether an adult would suffer from heart disease half a century later. Scrawny babies were much more likely to suffer heart problems in middle age.
That study, published in 1989, provoked skepticism at first. But now an array of research confirms that the fetal period is a crucial stage of development that affects physiology decades later.
Perhaps the most striking finding is that a stressful uterine environment may be a mechanism that allows poverty to replicate itself generation after generation. Pregnant women in low-income areas tend to be more exposed to anxiety, depression, chemicals and toxins from car exhaust to pesticides, and they’re more likely to drink or smoke and less likely to take vitamin supplements, eat healthy food and get meticulous pre-natal care.
The result is children who start life at a disadvantage — for kids facing stresses before birth appear to have lower educational attainment, lower incomes and worse health throughout their lives. If that’s true, then even early childhood education may be a bit late as a way to break the cycles of poverty.
“Given the odds stacked against poor women and their fetuses, the most effective antipoverty program might be one that starts before birth,” writes Annie Murphy Paul in a terrific and important new book called “Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.”
Another groundbreaking and provocative book this year makes the same case: “More than Genes,” by Dan Agin, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago. Both offer a new window into the unexpected forces that shape us.
One study in this field, by a Columbia University economist, Douglas Almond, looked at children who were born after the great flu pandemic of 1918. The pandemic lasted only about five months and infected about a third of pregnant women in America, so Mr. Almond compared those who had been exposed to it while inside their mothers with others born just before or after.
Ms. Paul quotes Mr. Almond as concluding, “People who were in utero during the pandemic did worse, on average, on just about every socioeconomic outcome recorded.” They were 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school, 15 percent more likely to be poor, and 20 percent more likely to have heart disease in old age.
Stress in mothers seems to have particularly strong effects on their offspring, perhaps through release of cortisol, a hormone released when a person is anxious. Studies show that children who were in utero during the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of 1967 were more likely to have schizophrenia diagnosed as adults. And The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that Chinese born during the terrible famine from 1959 to 1961 were twice as likely to develop schizophrenia as those born at other times.
As for obesity, Ms. Paul describes several British scientists who fed pregnant rats junk food: doughnuts, marshmallows, potato chips and chocolate chip muffins. The offspring of those rats turned out to have a sweet tooth as well: they were more likely to choose junk food when it was offered and ended up 25 percent fatter than rats whose mothers were fed regular rodent chow.
This field of “fetal origins” is still in its infancy, but one implication is that we should be much more careful about exposing pregnant women to toxins, and much quicker to regulate chemicals that are now widely used even though they’ve never even been tested for safety. Professor Agin is particularly eloquent about the potential perils of lead, dioxins, PCBs, radiation and pesticides.
One study looked at Swedish children who were fetuses during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. The radiation exposure was very slight and did not seem to affect their physical health. But their cognitive abilities, especially in math, seemed affected, and they were one-third more likely to fail middle school.
The uncertainty in this field is enormous, but we have learned that a uterus is not a diving bell that insulates its occupant from the world’s perils. Chemicals like thalidomide and DES proved tragic for those exposed to them while in their mothers’ wombs. And it’s now high time to take a closer look at unregulated chemicals that envelop us — and may be shaping our progeny for decades to come.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/opini ... &th&emc=th
At Risk From the Womb
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Some people think we’re shaped primarily by genes. Others believe that the environment we grow up in is most important. But now evidence is mounting that a third factor is also critical: our uterine environment before we’re even born.
Researchers are finding indications that obesity, diabetes and mental illness among adults are all related in part to what happened in the womb decades earlier.
One of the first careful studies in this field found that birth weight (a proxy for nutrition in the womb) helped predict whether an adult would suffer from heart disease half a century later. Scrawny babies were much more likely to suffer heart problems in middle age.
That study, published in 1989, provoked skepticism at first. But now an array of research confirms that the fetal period is a crucial stage of development that affects physiology decades later.
Perhaps the most striking finding is that a stressful uterine environment may be a mechanism that allows poverty to replicate itself generation after generation. Pregnant women in low-income areas tend to be more exposed to anxiety, depression, chemicals and toxins from car exhaust to pesticides, and they’re more likely to drink or smoke and less likely to take vitamin supplements, eat healthy food and get meticulous pre-natal care.
The result is children who start life at a disadvantage — for kids facing stresses before birth appear to have lower educational attainment, lower incomes and worse health throughout their lives. If that’s true, then even early childhood education may be a bit late as a way to break the cycles of poverty.
“Given the odds stacked against poor women and their fetuses, the most effective antipoverty program might be one that starts before birth,” writes Annie Murphy Paul in a terrific and important new book called “Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.”
Another groundbreaking and provocative book this year makes the same case: “More than Genes,” by Dan Agin, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago. Both offer a new window into the unexpected forces that shape us.
One study in this field, by a Columbia University economist, Douglas Almond, looked at children who were born after the great flu pandemic of 1918. The pandemic lasted only about five months and infected about a third of pregnant women in America, so Mr. Almond compared those who had been exposed to it while inside their mothers with others born just before or after.
Ms. Paul quotes Mr. Almond as concluding, “People who were in utero during the pandemic did worse, on average, on just about every socioeconomic outcome recorded.” They were 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school, 15 percent more likely to be poor, and 20 percent more likely to have heart disease in old age.
Stress in mothers seems to have particularly strong effects on their offspring, perhaps through release of cortisol, a hormone released when a person is anxious. Studies show that children who were in utero during the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of 1967 were more likely to have schizophrenia diagnosed as adults. And The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that Chinese born during the terrible famine from 1959 to 1961 were twice as likely to develop schizophrenia as those born at other times.
As for obesity, Ms. Paul describes several British scientists who fed pregnant rats junk food: doughnuts, marshmallows, potato chips and chocolate chip muffins. The offspring of those rats turned out to have a sweet tooth as well: they were more likely to choose junk food when it was offered and ended up 25 percent fatter than rats whose mothers were fed regular rodent chow.
This field of “fetal origins” is still in its infancy, but one implication is that we should be much more careful about exposing pregnant women to toxins, and much quicker to regulate chemicals that are now widely used even though they’ve never even been tested for safety. Professor Agin is particularly eloquent about the potential perils of lead, dioxins, PCBs, radiation and pesticides.
One study looked at Swedish children who were fetuses during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. The radiation exposure was very slight and did not seem to affect their physical health. But their cognitive abilities, especially in math, seemed affected, and they were one-third more likely to fail middle school.
The uncertainty in this field is enormous, but we have learned that a uterus is not a diving bell that insulates its occupant from the world’s perils. Chemicals like thalidomide and DES proved tragic for those exposed to them while in their mothers’ wombs. And it’s now high time to take a closer look at unregulated chemicals that envelop us — and may be shaping our progeny for decades to come.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/opini ... &th&emc=th
There is a related multi-media linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/magaz ... gewanted=1
Venture Philanthropy | Rwanda • Congo • Nepal
D.I.Y. Foreign-Aid Revolution
This is a lengthy article but excerpt below is worthy of notice and attention.
"That’s Scharpf’s choice. Now 33, Scharpf was interning in the summer of 2005 for the World Bank in Mozambique, helping local entrepreneurs, when she encountered a business impediment that she had never heard of. It was unmentionable, and thus unmentioned. It was menstruation.
A female boss griped to Scharpf about absenteeism caused by women reluctant to come to work during their menstrual periods. “It was because pads were too expensive,” Scharpf recalls. “I was trying to figure out why I had never heard of this before. This was causing productivity rates to go down.”
Scharpf began asking around, and everybody told her — in whispers — that, yes, of course menstruation was keeping women and girls from jobs. Back at Harvard, where she was pursuing joint degrees at the business school and the John F. Kennedy School of Government, she began asking friends from Bangladesh, Nicaragua and other countries if they were aware of this problem. Of course, they said. “This spoke to me,” Scharpf recalled. “Hasn’t every girl or woman experienced the inconvenience, the disadvantage and the embarrassment in her life, when her period strikes at the ‘wrong’ time? I think half the world can relate to that. What really struck me was that this was a global issue that seemingly had significant costs. From back-of-the-envelope calculations, it had huge costs. And it could have a simple solution.” She paused and smiled tightly. “I was a little naïve there.”
Scharpf is a mild-mannered policy wonk, but the more she thought about it, the more indignant she became. Girls were missing school because they couldn’t afford sanitary pads? Women couldn’t go to work for lack of pads? And all this was taboo to discuss? Scharpf began to scheme. "
*****
There is also a related video in the article linked at:
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/1 ... n&emc=tyb1
October 20, 2010, 9:00 am
How to Change the World
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF
I have an essay in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about do-it-yourself foreign aid, but I know that it won’t fully answer the question that many readers will have: What can I do? Originally we had a sidebar addressing that question to go with the article, but it had to be cut for space reasons – and so I’ve found a home for it here on my blog.
So for those who want to do more, here are my suggestions.
First, dip your toe in the waters to get a sense of the work that is being done and to find what resonates most with you. One way to submerge your toe is to make microloans through online organizations like Kiva or Vittana. Kiva matches a donor’s loans to needy entrepreneurs around the world (who eventually pay the loans back), while Vittana offers a similar service, but for education loans.
Another approach is to browse a comprehensive site like Global Giving, where organizations around the world have posted their wish lists. On Global Giving, my family has donated, for example, to an aid group in Bombay, India, that keeps at-risk girls from being trafficked into brothels. For Father’s Day last year, I suggested that instead of giving Dad another necktie, people sponsor a “HeroRat” through GlobalGiving. HeroRats are trained rats that sniff out landmines or TB cases, and what father wouldn’t want to be associated with a super-macho super-achieving super-altruistic oversized rat? The column raised more than $150,000, and last I heard the rats had detected 594 landmines in Mozambique.
Another easy first step is to sponsor someone abroad through a program that lets you contribute a certain amount each month to that person and exchange letters. It’s also a way to introduce your kids to global issues, as you show photos of the person you’ve sponsored. Through Plan USA, my family is sponsoring a child in the Dominican Republic.
Meanwhile, keep an eye out for a cause and organization that particularly speaks to you, that exhilarates you. Then dive in and focus your efforts on that organization. You’ll be more engaged if you concentrate your time and resources rather than spread them thin.
Also, don’t limit your involvement to writing checks. People are also needed to sign petitions and write indignant letters to members of Congress. CARE has an action network that offers advocacy ideas. Or you can volunteer at a soup kitchen or mentor a child, or find other ways to help. A stay-at-home mom in Colorado, Jenny Murphy, heard about Lisa Shannon (whose work with Run for Congo Women I describe in the magazine article) but isn’t a runner and wasn’t in a position to go off to Congo. But she browsed the Internet and through Facebook connected with a remarkable man in Congo running schools there. Now she is passionately engaged in an organization, Strong Roots, that supports those schools and works on conservation issues around Kahuzi-Biega National Park in Eastern Congo. That’s a reflection of what technology makes possible: a Mom in Colorado giving people hope in eastern Congo.
Try to visit a project that you’ve supported. For example, I’ve visited children that I’ve sponsored through Plan USA, in the Dominican Republic, Philippines and Sudan, and each time I’ve found it a fascinating and triumphal experience. Our whole family also traveled to Cambodia to attend the ribbon-cutting for a new junior high school there that we built in a rural area through American Assistance for Cambodia. We still pay for the school’s English teacher and Internet access; now we can email the teacher and students and enjoy the warm and fuzzy feeling that goes with having made a difference. That kind of experience underscores that while assistance has a mixed record helping others, it has an almost perfect record helping ourselves.
This doesn’t work for everybody, but think about volunteering for a stint abroad. You could teach English to children of brothel workers in Calcutta through the amazing New Light shelter there (where one child of a street prostitute was just accepted by a medical school!). Or you could volunteer at Kashf, a microfinance organization in Pakistan that does amazing work lifting women out of poverty.
Or there are many other organizations that will take volunteers to teach English or do other work, and it truly can be a life-changing experience. This is something that my wife, Sheryl WuDunn, and I talk about in our book “Half the Sky,” and in the back of the book we list a number of organizations that accept volunteers. We also list some of them at Half the Sky under the “get involved” tab. If you know of a good place to volunteer, or have questions, go to the “forum” tab and post a comment or question. It’s meant to be a place to trade information.
I also recommend the books by David Bornstein on social entrepreneurship. His best known is “How to Change the World,” which has become the bible of would be change-makers. He has also teamed up with Tina Rosenberg, a contributing writer for the Times Sunday magazine, ” to co-write a new blog called Fixes. It focuses on solutions to the world’s problems, instead of, well, its problems.
There’s just no limit to the ways to get involved in these issues. I just came across a group, Bald Solidarity, which is getting people to shave their heads in solidarity with women who are stripped of their rights.
If head-shaving isn’t in your future, here are some lesser-known secular organizations focused on women that I believe are making a difference, but remember that this is only a tiny sampling and only of small organizations that you might not have heard of already. There are many other groups doing great work. Please post your own ideas about how to make a difference below, and in particular list specific organizations and ways to help. The more specific and practical, the more useful it will be to other readers.
So without further ado, here are some worthy organizations:
Camfed sponsors girls for education in Africa. It pays fees, helps them manage menstruation and other challenges, and encourages them to “give back” once they have completed their education.
Afghan Institute of Learning supports girls’ education in Afghanistan and border areas of Pakistan. It is run by an Afghan woman, Sakena Yacoobi, who manages to run schools that the Taliban doesn’t burn down.
Tostan has been extraordinarily successful in overcoming female genital cutting in West Africa, and in training women and men alike and creating opportunities for them. It is based in Senegal.
Vital Voices is a Washington-based organization that supports women change-makers around the world, and is particularly staunch against trafficking.
The Fistula Foundation focuses on maternal health and surgery to repair obstetric fistulas, which are horrendous childbirth injuries that leave women incontinent.
BRAC is a Bangladeshi-based organization that focuses on education and empowerment of the very poor. It is one of the most admired development organizations from within the global south, and it is now expanding to Africa and other areas.
Pro Mujer focuses on helping women with reproductive health and small businesses in Latin America.
The Women’s Refugee Commission is an offshoot of the International Rescue Committee that focuses on women refugees, who are among the most vulnerable people on earth.
New Light India runs a shelter for trafficked women in a Calcutta red light district.
International Women’s Health Coalition is a New York-based group that works for women’s health worldwide.
Deworm the World promotes deworming programs. Worms seem to affect girls in particular by leading to anemia, and girls are already at risk of anemia from menstruation.
Global Fund for Women makes grants to innovative women’s programs in developing countries around the world.
Beyond the 11th was founded by two American widows of 9/11, and supports economic empowerment efforts for Afghan women.
Sustainable Health Enterprises, also known as SHE (and featured in my magazine story), is committed to lowering the high cost of sanitary pads in many African countries through advocacy work and by producing–and training women to distribute–lower cost products made from local materials.
The BlinkNow Foundation, created by 23 year-old Maggie Doyne, another subject of my magazine piece, was created to help children receive shelter and education in war-torn countries dealing with extreme poverty. This is what Ms. Doyne accomplished in a remote corner of Nepal, and she hopes to replicate her model in other parts of the world.
Run for Congo Women, also featured in my article, organizes runs and walks all over the word–even in Congo–to raise awareness and funds for Women for Women International’s Congo program, which supports female survivors of the ongoing war there.
So now: your turn! What are your favorite organizations and ways to make a difference?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/magaz ... gewanted=1
Venture Philanthropy | Rwanda • Congo • Nepal
D.I.Y. Foreign-Aid Revolution
This is a lengthy article but excerpt below is worthy of notice and attention.
"That’s Scharpf’s choice. Now 33, Scharpf was interning in the summer of 2005 for the World Bank in Mozambique, helping local entrepreneurs, when she encountered a business impediment that she had never heard of. It was unmentionable, and thus unmentioned. It was menstruation.
A female boss griped to Scharpf about absenteeism caused by women reluctant to come to work during their menstrual periods. “It was because pads were too expensive,” Scharpf recalls. “I was trying to figure out why I had never heard of this before. This was causing productivity rates to go down.”
Scharpf began asking around, and everybody told her — in whispers — that, yes, of course menstruation was keeping women and girls from jobs. Back at Harvard, where she was pursuing joint degrees at the business school and the John F. Kennedy School of Government, she began asking friends from Bangladesh, Nicaragua and other countries if they were aware of this problem. Of course, they said. “This spoke to me,” Scharpf recalled. “Hasn’t every girl or woman experienced the inconvenience, the disadvantage and the embarrassment in her life, when her period strikes at the ‘wrong’ time? I think half the world can relate to that. What really struck me was that this was a global issue that seemingly had significant costs. From back-of-the-envelope calculations, it had huge costs. And it could have a simple solution.” She paused and smiled tightly. “I was a little naïve there.”
Scharpf is a mild-mannered policy wonk, but the more she thought about it, the more indignant she became. Girls were missing school because they couldn’t afford sanitary pads? Women couldn’t go to work for lack of pads? And all this was taboo to discuss? Scharpf began to scheme. "
*****
There is also a related video in the article linked at:
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/1 ... n&emc=tyb1
October 20, 2010, 9:00 am
How to Change the World
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF
I have an essay in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about do-it-yourself foreign aid, but I know that it won’t fully answer the question that many readers will have: What can I do? Originally we had a sidebar addressing that question to go with the article, but it had to be cut for space reasons – and so I’ve found a home for it here on my blog.
So for those who want to do more, here are my suggestions.
First, dip your toe in the waters to get a sense of the work that is being done and to find what resonates most with you. One way to submerge your toe is to make microloans through online organizations like Kiva or Vittana. Kiva matches a donor’s loans to needy entrepreneurs around the world (who eventually pay the loans back), while Vittana offers a similar service, but for education loans.
Another approach is to browse a comprehensive site like Global Giving, where organizations around the world have posted their wish lists. On Global Giving, my family has donated, for example, to an aid group in Bombay, India, that keeps at-risk girls from being trafficked into brothels. For Father’s Day last year, I suggested that instead of giving Dad another necktie, people sponsor a “HeroRat” through GlobalGiving. HeroRats are trained rats that sniff out landmines or TB cases, and what father wouldn’t want to be associated with a super-macho super-achieving super-altruistic oversized rat? The column raised more than $150,000, and last I heard the rats had detected 594 landmines in Mozambique.
Another easy first step is to sponsor someone abroad through a program that lets you contribute a certain amount each month to that person and exchange letters. It’s also a way to introduce your kids to global issues, as you show photos of the person you’ve sponsored. Through Plan USA, my family is sponsoring a child in the Dominican Republic.
Meanwhile, keep an eye out for a cause and organization that particularly speaks to you, that exhilarates you. Then dive in and focus your efforts on that organization. You’ll be more engaged if you concentrate your time and resources rather than spread them thin.
Also, don’t limit your involvement to writing checks. People are also needed to sign petitions and write indignant letters to members of Congress. CARE has an action network that offers advocacy ideas. Or you can volunteer at a soup kitchen or mentor a child, or find other ways to help. A stay-at-home mom in Colorado, Jenny Murphy, heard about Lisa Shannon (whose work with Run for Congo Women I describe in the magazine article) but isn’t a runner and wasn’t in a position to go off to Congo. But she browsed the Internet and through Facebook connected with a remarkable man in Congo running schools there. Now she is passionately engaged in an organization, Strong Roots, that supports those schools and works on conservation issues around Kahuzi-Biega National Park in Eastern Congo. That’s a reflection of what technology makes possible: a Mom in Colorado giving people hope in eastern Congo.
Try to visit a project that you’ve supported. For example, I’ve visited children that I’ve sponsored through Plan USA, in the Dominican Republic, Philippines and Sudan, and each time I’ve found it a fascinating and triumphal experience. Our whole family also traveled to Cambodia to attend the ribbon-cutting for a new junior high school there that we built in a rural area through American Assistance for Cambodia. We still pay for the school’s English teacher and Internet access; now we can email the teacher and students and enjoy the warm and fuzzy feeling that goes with having made a difference. That kind of experience underscores that while assistance has a mixed record helping others, it has an almost perfect record helping ourselves.
This doesn’t work for everybody, but think about volunteering for a stint abroad. You could teach English to children of brothel workers in Calcutta through the amazing New Light shelter there (where one child of a street prostitute was just accepted by a medical school!). Or you could volunteer at Kashf, a microfinance organization in Pakistan that does amazing work lifting women out of poverty.
Or there are many other organizations that will take volunteers to teach English or do other work, and it truly can be a life-changing experience. This is something that my wife, Sheryl WuDunn, and I talk about in our book “Half the Sky,” and in the back of the book we list a number of organizations that accept volunteers. We also list some of them at Half the Sky under the “get involved” tab. If you know of a good place to volunteer, or have questions, go to the “forum” tab and post a comment or question. It’s meant to be a place to trade information.
I also recommend the books by David Bornstein on social entrepreneurship. His best known is “How to Change the World,” which has become the bible of would be change-makers. He has also teamed up with Tina Rosenberg, a contributing writer for the Times Sunday magazine, ” to co-write a new blog called Fixes. It focuses on solutions to the world’s problems, instead of, well, its problems.
There’s just no limit to the ways to get involved in these issues. I just came across a group, Bald Solidarity, which is getting people to shave their heads in solidarity with women who are stripped of their rights.
If head-shaving isn’t in your future, here are some lesser-known secular organizations focused on women that I believe are making a difference, but remember that this is only a tiny sampling and only of small organizations that you might not have heard of already. There are many other groups doing great work. Please post your own ideas about how to make a difference below, and in particular list specific organizations and ways to help. The more specific and practical, the more useful it will be to other readers.
So without further ado, here are some worthy organizations:
Camfed sponsors girls for education in Africa. It pays fees, helps them manage menstruation and other challenges, and encourages them to “give back” once they have completed their education.
Afghan Institute of Learning supports girls’ education in Afghanistan and border areas of Pakistan. It is run by an Afghan woman, Sakena Yacoobi, who manages to run schools that the Taliban doesn’t burn down.
Tostan has been extraordinarily successful in overcoming female genital cutting in West Africa, and in training women and men alike and creating opportunities for them. It is based in Senegal.
Vital Voices is a Washington-based organization that supports women change-makers around the world, and is particularly staunch against trafficking.
The Fistula Foundation focuses on maternal health and surgery to repair obstetric fistulas, which are horrendous childbirth injuries that leave women incontinent.
BRAC is a Bangladeshi-based organization that focuses on education and empowerment of the very poor. It is one of the most admired development organizations from within the global south, and it is now expanding to Africa and other areas.
Pro Mujer focuses on helping women with reproductive health and small businesses in Latin America.
The Women’s Refugee Commission is an offshoot of the International Rescue Committee that focuses on women refugees, who are among the most vulnerable people on earth.
New Light India runs a shelter for trafficked women in a Calcutta red light district.
International Women’s Health Coalition is a New York-based group that works for women’s health worldwide.
Deworm the World promotes deworming programs. Worms seem to affect girls in particular by leading to anemia, and girls are already at risk of anemia from menstruation.
Global Fund for Women makes grants to innovative women’s programs in developing countries around the world.
Beyond the 11th was founded by two American widows of 9/11, and supports economic empowerment efforts for Afghan women.
Sustainable Health Enterprises, also known as SHE (and featured in my magazine story), is committed to lowering the high cost of sanitary pads in many African countries through advocacy work and by producing–and training women to distribute–lower cost products made from local materials.
The BlinkNow Foundation, created by 23 year-old Maggie Doyne, another subject of my magazine piece, was created to help children receive shelter and education in war-torn countries dealing with extreme poverty. This is what Ms. Doyne accomplished in a remote corner of Nepal, and she hopes to replicate her model in other parts of the world.
Run for Congo Women, also featured in my article, organizes runs and walks all over the word–even in Congo–to raise awareness and funds for Women for Women International’s Congo program, which supports female survivors of the ongoing war there.
So now: your turn! What are your favorite organizations and ways to make a difference?
Let's remember Afghan women's successes
By Kathleen Parker, For The Calgary Herald
November 7, 2010curriebarracks
Helen Reddy's iconic "I am woman, hear me roar" is more likely to cause a cringe than goose bumps these days -- more a comical anthem to bra-burning histrionics than the soundtrack to a serious movement aimed at greater equality.
But when those same sentiments are voiced by a young Afghan woman named Fatima, who has created her own construction business amid war, corruption and a culture that barely tolerates women, one is more inclined toward the goose bump.
"Every morning, I stand in front of the mirror and say, 'I am a woman and I am powerful,' " she told a luncheon gathering here. Hosted by Daily Beast founder Tina Brown, the luncheon was in honour of four Afghan women who are graduates of Goldman Sachs' 10,000 Women business program.
Fatima's mirror-mirror mantra is one of the things she learned from her teacher: "I realized there is no difference between me and my brother."
Sitting at one of several tables set for lunch, admiring these women and hearing their stories, one couldn't help thinking how surreal their first trip to the U.S. must have been for them. Their heads covered and their faces revealing no trace of makeup, they were soft-spoken yet commanding. These women are extraordinary successes given their circumstances, including the necessity of using only their first names to protect their identities. Not everyone in Afghanistan is proud of their accomplishments. Security is still an enormous challenge. Fatima and others often have to employ men to do the "outdoor" work of making sales contacts, or keep a man nearby when they venture out.
Masooda, another graduate of the program who has a jam and pickling business, said her employees are home-based and illiterate. She employs 23 people, 20 of whom are women.
Fatima began her business when she was 15. Now 23, she employs 76 engineers and construction workers, to help rebuild her country's infrastructure. Though she began long before Goldman Sachs appeared on the scene, she had no business or marketing skills.
Begun in 2008, the program is a five-year initiative to promote social change through the economic empowerment of women. It has reached 2,000 women in more than 20 countries, including Afghanistan, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Rwanda and the U.S.
The idea is that creating a women's labour force is key to long-term economic growth. This would seem to be common sense rather than advanced economic theory, but such brilliance is scant in underdeveloped, war-ravaged countries or where women are often treated as subhuman.
Research for the program showed that investing in women would profit the human race through a multiplier effect. Not only would education lead to more employees for business and increased revenues, but more prosperous women would lead to better-educated, healthier families, followed by more prosperous communities and nations.
Hardly the stuff of stunning revelation. But whatever it takes. If the plus column of a spreadsheet means that women aren't shot in the public square, that will have been a good day's work.
Part of Goldman Sachs' mission is to create global business school partnerships to improve business education. More than 30 leading business schools are participating. Listening to Fatima, Masooda, Malalai and a second Fatima, I was struck by their humility and courage. I have met numerous Afghan women over the past year or so through various organizations working to help them, and each time they say the same thing: Don't feel sorry for us. But please, don't forget us.
How could we?
Kathleen Parker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist with Washington Post.
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... iebarracks
By Kathleen Parker, For The Calgary Herald
November 7, 2010curriebarracks
Helen Reddy's iconic "I am woman, hear me roar" is more likely to cause a cringe than goose bumps these days -- more a comical anthem to bra-burning histrionics than the soundtrack to a serious movement aimed at greater equality.
But when those same sentiments are voiced by a young Afghan woman named Fatima, who has created her own construction business amid war, corruption and a culture that barely tolerates women, one is more inclined toward the goose bump.
"Every morning, I stand in front of the mirror and say, 'I am a woman and I am powerful,' " she told a luncheon gathering here. Hosted by Daily Beast founder Tina Brown, the luncheon was in honour of four Afghan women who are graduates of Goldman Sachs' 10,000 Women business program.
Fatima's mirror-mirror mantra is one of the things she learned from her teacher: "I realized there is no difference between me and my brother."
Sitting at one of several tables set for lunch, admiring these women and hearing their stories, one couldn't help thinking how surreal their first trip to the U.S. must have been for them. Their heads covered and their faces revealing no trace of makeup, they were soft-spoken yet commanding. These women are extraordinary successes given their circumstances, including the necessity of using only their first names to protect their identities. Not everyone in Afghanistan is proud of their accomplishments. Security is still an enormous challenge. Fatima and others often have to employ men to do the "outdoor" work of making sales contacts, or keep a man nearby when they venture out.
Masooda, another graduate of the program who has a jam and pickling business, said her employees are home-based and illiterate. She employs 23 people, 20 of whom are women.
Fatima began her business when she was 15. Now 23, she employs 76 engineers and construction workers, to help rebuild her country's infrastructure. Though she began long before Goldman Sachs appeared on the scene, she had no business or marketing skills.
Begun in 2008, the program is a five-year initiative to promote social change through the economic empowerment of women. It has reached 2,000 women in more than 20 countries, including Afghanistan, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Rwanda and the U.S.
The idea is that creating a women's labour force is key to long-term economic growth. This would seem to be common sense rather than advanced economic theory, but such brilliance is scant in underdeveloped, war-ravaged countries or where women are often treated as subhuman.
Research for the program showed that investing in women would profit the human race through a multiplier effect. Not only would education lead to more employees for business and increased revenues, but more prosperous women would lead to better-educated, healthier families, followed by more prosperous communities and nations.
Hardly the stuff of stunning revelation. But whatever it takes. If the plus column of a spreadsheet means that women aren't shot in the public square, that will have been a good day's work.
Part of Goldman Sachs' mission is to create global business school partnerships to improve business education. More than 30 leading business schools are participating. Listening to Fatima, Masooda, Malalai and a second Fatima, I was struck by their humility and courage. I have met numerous Afghan women over the past year or so through various organizations working to help them, and each time they say the same thing: Don't feel sorry for us. But please, don't forget us.
How could we?
Kathleen Parker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist with Washington Post.
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... iebarracks
November 13, 2010
Here’s a Woman Fighting Terrorism. With Microloans.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
LAHORE, Pakistan
An old friend of mine here fights terrorists, but not the way you’re thinking. She could barely defeat a truculent child in hand-to-hand combat, and if she ever picked up an AK-47 — well, you’d pray it was unloaded.
Roshaneh Zafar is an American- educated banker who fights extremism with microfinance. She has dedicated her life to empowering some of Pakistan’s most impoverished women and giving them the tools to run businesses of their own. The United States should learn from warriors like her.
Bullets and drones may kill terrorists, but Roshaneh creates jobs and educational opportunities for hundreds of thousands of people — draining the swamps that breed terrorists.
“Charity is limited, but capitalism isn’t,” Roshaneh said. “If you want to change the world, you need market-based solutions.” That’s the point of microfinance — typically, lending very poor people small amounts of money so that they can buy a rickshaw or raw materials and start a tiny business.
Roshaneh grew up in elite circles here in Lahore and studied business at the Wharton School and economics at Yale. After a stint at the World Bank, she returned to Pakistan in 1996 to start her microfinance organization. She called it the Kashf Foundation.
Everybody thought Roshaneh was nuts. And at first nothing went right. The poor refused to borrow. Or if they borrowed, they didn’t repay their loans.
But Roshaneh persisted, and today Kashf has 152 branches around the country. It has dispersed more than $200 million to more than 300,000 families. Now Roshaneh is moving into microsavings, to help the poor build assets, as well as programs to train the poor to run businesses more efficiently. She is even thinking of expanding into schools for the poor.
Microfinance is sometimes oversold as a silver bullet — which it’s not. Careful follow-up studies suggest that gains from microloans are often quite modest.
Some borrowers squander money or start businesses that fail. Some micro-lenders tarnish the field because they’re incompetent, and others because they rake in profits with sky-high loan rates. Microfinance has also generally been less successful in Africa than in South Asia.
Yet done right, microfinance can make a significant difference. An outside evaluation found that after four years, Kashf borrowers are more likely than many others to enjoy improved economic conditions — and that’s what I’ve seen over the years as I’ve visited Kashf borrowers.
On this trip, I met a woman named Parveen Baji, who says she never attended a day of school and until recently was completely illiterate. She had 14 children, but five died.
Ms. Parveen’s husband, who also never attended school, regularly beat her and spent the family savings on narcotics, she says. The family’s only possessions were four cots on which they slept, crammed three or four to a cot, in a rented apartment.
“One night all my children were hungry,” she remembered. “I sent my daughter to ask for food from a neighbor. And the neighbor said, ‘you’ve become a beggar,’ and refused.”
Then Ms. Parveen got a $70 loan from Kashf and started a jewelry and cosmetics business, buying in bulk and selling to local shops. Ms. Parveen couldn’t read the labels, but she memorized which bottle was which. As her business thrived, she began to struggle to learn reading and arithmetic — and proved herself an ace student. I fired math problems at her, and she dazzled me with her quick responses.
Ms. Parveen began to start new businesses, even building a laundry that she put her husband in charge of to keep him busy. He no longer beats her, she says, and when I interviewed him separately he seemed a little awed by her.
Eventually, Ms. Parveen started a restaurant and catering business that now has eight employees, including some of her daughters. She bought a home and has put some of her children through high school — and a son, the brightest student, through college. She has just paid $5,800 for a permit for him to move to London to take a health sector job.
Ms. Parveen tried to look modest as she told me this, but she failed. She was beaming and shaking her head in wonder as she watched her son speak English with me, dazzled at the thought that she was dispatching her university-educated son to Europe. “Microfinance has changed my life,” she said simply.
That’s an unusual success story. But the larger message is universal: helping people start businesses, create jobs and support education is a potent way to undermine extremism.
We Americans overinvest in firepower to defeat extremism and underinvest in development, and so we could learn something useful from Roshaneh. The toolkit to fight terrorism includes not only missiles but also microfinance and economic opportunity.
The antonym of “militant” is often “job.”
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/opini ... s&emc=a212
Here’s a Woman Fighting Terrorism. With Microloans.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
LAHORE, Pakistan
An old friend of mine here fights terrorists, but not the way you’re thinking. She could barely defeat a truculent child in hand-to-hand combat, and if she ever picked up an AK-47 — well, you’d pray it was unloaded.
Roshaneh Zafar is an American- educated banker who fights extremism with microfinance. She has dedicated her life to empowering some of Pakistan’s most impoverished women and giving them the tools to run businesses of their own. The United States should learn from warriors like her.
Bullets and drones may kill terrorists, but Roshaneh creates jobs and educational opportunities for hundreds of thousands of people — draining the swamps that breed terrorists.
“Charity is limited, but capitalism isn’t,” Roshaneh said. “If you want to change the world, you need market-based solutions.” That’s the point of microfinance — typically, lending very poor people small amounts of money so that they can buy a rickshaw or raw materials and start a tiny business.
Roshaneh grew up in elite circles here in Lahore and studied business at the Wharton School and economics at Yale. After a stint at the World Bank, she returned to Pakistan in 1996 to start her microfinance organization. She called it the Kashf Foundation.
Everybody thought Roshaneh was nuts. And at first nothing went right. The poor refused to borrow. Or if they borrowed, they didn’t repay their loans.
But Roshaneh persisted, and today Kashf has 152 branches around the country. It has dispersed more than $200 million to more than 300,000 families. Now Roshaneh is moving into microsavings, to help the poor build assets, as well as programs to train the poor to run businesses more efficiently. She is even thinking of expanding into schools for the poor.
Microfinance is sometimes oversold as a silver bullet — which it’s not. Careful follow-up studies suggest that gains from microloans are often quite modest.
Some borrowers squander money or start businesses that fail. Some micro-lenders tarnish the field because they’re incompetent, and others because they rake in profits with sky-high loan rates. Microfinance has also generally been less successful in Africa than in South Asia.
Yet done right, microfinance can make a significant difference. An outside evaluation found that after four years, Kashf borrowers are more likely than many others to enjoy improved economic conditions — and that’s what I’ve seen over the years as I’ve visited Kashf borrowers.
On this trip, I met a woman named Parveen Baji, who says she never attended a day of school and until recently was completely illiterate. She had 14 children, but five died.
Ms. Parveen’s husband, who also never attended school, regularly beat her and spent the family savings on narcotics, she says. The family’s only possessions were four cots on which they slept, crammed three or four to a cot, in a rented apartment.
“One night all my children were hungry,” she remembered. “I sent my daughter to ask for food from a neighbor. And the neighbor said, ‘you’ve become a beggar,’ and refused.”
Then Ms. Parveen got a $70 loan from Kashf and started a jewelry and cosmetics business, buying in bulk and selling to local shops. Ms. Parveen couldn’t read the labels, but she memorized which bottle was which. As her business thrived, she began to struggle to learn reading and arithmetic — and proved herself an ace student. I fired math problems at her, and she dazzled me with her quick responses.
Ms. Parveen began to start new businesses, even building a laundry that she put her husband in charge of to keep him busy. He no longer beats her, she says, and when I interviewed him separately he seemed a little awed by her.
Eventually, Ms. Parveen started a restaurant and catering business that now has eight employees, including some of her daughters. She bought a home and has put some of her children through high school — and a son, the brightest student, through college. She has just paid $5,800 for a permit for him to move to London to take a health sector job.
Ms. Parveen tried to look modest as she told me this, but she failed. She was beaming and shaking her head in wonder as she watched her son speak English with me, dazzled at the thought that she was dispatching her university-educated son to Europe. “Microfinance has changed my life,” she said simply.
That’s an unusual success story. But the larger message is universal: helping people start businesses, create jobs and support education is a potent way to undermine extremism.
We Americans overinvest in firepower to defeat extremism and underinvest in development, and so we could learn something useful from Roshaneh. The toolkit to fight terrorism includes not only missiles but also microfinance and economic opportunity.
The antonym of “militant” is often “job.”
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/opini ... s&emc=a212
November 20, 2010
When Donations Go Astray
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
This holiday season, Americans will dig into their pockets for good causes. But these gifts will sometimes benefit charlatans or extremists, or simply be wasted.
Partly that’s because religious giving — and a good deal of casual secular giving — isn’t vetted as carefully as it should be. Researchers find that religious people on average donate more of their incomes than the nonreligious, and Christians, Jews and Muslims alike write checks to charities that they assume share their values. Dangerous assumption.
Some well-meaning Christians will support Feed the Children, a major Oklahoma-based Christian charity that describes its mission as providing food and medicine to needy children at home and abroad. By some accounts it is the seventh-largest charity in America.
But the American Institute of Philanthropy, a watchdog group that also runs Charitywatch.org, lists Feed the Children as “the most outrageous charity in America.” The institute says that Feed the Children spends just 21 percent of its cash budget on programs for the needy — but spends about $55 to raise each $100 in cash contributions.
Feed the Children also has been the subject of troubling litigation and investigations. The Oklahoman newspaper says that in 2007 the charity spent $1.2 million on a house used by the founder’s daughter, a charity executive until she was fired this year. It also said that Feed the Children once lent $950,000 to a framing business headed by the founder’s son, and that the charity has sued the son for allegedly helping strip a warehouse of $5 million in materials. The son has denied the allegations in the suit.
In addition, the institute says that Feed the Children inflates the value of food and medicine to make it seem as if it does far more than it actually does.
Tony Sellars, a spokesman for Feed the Children, shrugged off the accusations as a disagreement about methodology and said that the lawsuits were being resolved. “We’ve helped 200,000 families in America this year alone,” he said. “The opinions we value are those of the people we’re helping.”
Meanwhile, American Jews sometimes support nonprofits that actually make peace for Israel less likely. A few days ago, the Hebron Fund had a gala fund- raiser in Manhattan, and some of those who attended probably thought that they were supporting Jews trying to live peacefully. In fact, the Hebron settlement is notorious for extremism and violence against Palestinians. (The settlers disagree, saying that the problems arise because Palestinians want to kill them.)
Similarly, some Muslims support Islamic charities in Gaza — some of which are manipulated by Hamas. The money ends up bolstering Hamas, oppressing Palestinians, and undermining Palestinian hopes for peace.
One of the most admirable Muslim practices is zakat, or alms-giving, whereby the wealthy often give 2.5 percent of their assets to the poor each year. But prosperous Muslims often donate in a very unbusinesslike way; if the money were used to support schools or proven poverty-alleviation programs, it could have far greater impact.
There are many reputable religious charities. For Christians, there are groups like Medical Teams International, World Vision and Catholic Relief Services. Jews can look to American Jewish World Service or Rabbis for Human Rights. Muslims can consider Islamic Relief Worldwide or smaller groups like the Afghan Institute of Learning.
And of course there are many large secular organizations with strong track records, like CARE, Save the Children, Mercy Corps and Heifer International.
Philanthropy has made huge strides in the last couple of decades, with far more emphasis on cost-effective interventions that are scalable to bring about change. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has helped lead the way, and Web sites like Givewell.org guide small-time donors. CharityNavigator.org ranks organizations partly by administrative expenses, which are less important than a charity’s impact on the needy, but it is trying to develop more useful information about impact.
Today, however, much giving remains impulsive and inefficient. When people get a call out of the blue asking them to donate to firefighters, they may imagine the caller is a volunteer; instead, he’s probably a paid fund-raiser, who will take much of what you give.
“Chuggers” — short for charity muggers — who stop people on the street likewise often work for fund-raising companies that swallow much of any donation. When people receive address labels or a key chain from a charity, they’re more likely to write a check — but that’s a terribly inefficient way to raise money.
Look, I’m nervous about this column, because I don’t want to discourage giving. But donations could accomplish far more if people thought through their philanthropy, did more research, and made fewer, bigger contributions instead of many small ones that are expensive to handle.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/opini ... s&emc=a212
When Donations Go Astray
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
This holiday season, Americans will dig into their pockets for good causes. But these gifts will sometimes benefit charlatans or extremists, or simply be wasted.
Partly that’s because religious giving — and a good deal of casual secular giving — isn’t vetted as carefully as it should be. Researchers find that religious people on average donate more of their incomes than the nonreligious, and Christians, Jews and Muslims alike write checks to charities that they assume share their values. Dangerous assumption.
Some well-meaning Christians will support Feed the Children, a major Oklahoma-based Christian charity that describes its mission as providing food and medicine to needy children at home and abroad. By some accounts it is the seventh-largest charity in America.
But the American Institute of Philanthropy, a watchdog group that also runs Charitywatch.org, lists Feed the Children as “the most outrageous charity in America.” The institute says that Feed the Children spends just 21 percent of its cash budget on programs for the needy — but spends about $55 to raise each $100 in cash contributions.
Feed the Children also has been the subject of troubling litigation and investigations. The Oklahoman newspaper says that in 2007 the charity spent $1.2 million on a house used by the founder’s daughter, a charity executive until she was fired this year. It also said that Feed the Children once lent $950,000 to a framing business headed by the founder’s son, and that the charity has sued the son for allegedly helping strip a warehouse of $5 million in materials. The son has denied the allegations in the suit.
In addition, the institute says that Feed the Children inflates the value of food and medicine to make it seem as if it does far more than it actually does.
Tony Sellars, a spokesman for Feed the Children, shrugged off the accusations as a disagreement about methodology and said that the lawsuits were being resolved. “We’ve helped 200,000 families in America this year alone,” he said. “The opinions we value are those of the people we’re helping.”
Meanwhile, American Jews sometimes support nonprofits that actually make peace for Israel less likely. A few days ago, the Hebron Fund had a gala fund- raiser in Manhattan, and some of those who attended probably thought that they were supporting Jews trying to live peacefully. In fact, the Hebron settlement is notorious for extremism and violence against Palestinians. (The settlers disagree, saying that the problems arise because Palestinians want to kill them.)
Similarly, some Muslims support Islamic charities in Gaza — some of which are manipulated by Hamas. The money ends up bolstering Hamas, oppressing Palestinians, and undermining Palestinian hopes for peace.
One of the most admirable Muslim practices is zakat, or alms-giving, whereby the wealthy often give 2.5 percent of their assets to the poor each year. But prosperous Muslims often donate in a very unbusinesslike way; if the money were used to support schools or proven poverty-alleviation programs, it could have far greater impact.
There are many reputable religious charities. For Christians, there are groups like Medical Teams International, World Vision and Catholic Relief Services. Jews can look to American Jewish World Service or Rabbis for Human Rights. Muslims can consider Islamic Relief Worldwide or smaller groups like the Afghan Institute of Learning.
And of course there are many large secular organizations with strong track records, like CARE, Save the Children, Mercy Corps and Heifer International.
Philanthropy has made huge strides in the last couple of decades, with far more emphasis on cost-effective interventions that are scalable to bring about change. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has helped lead the way, and Web sites like Givewell.org guide small-time donors. CharityNavigator.org ranks organizations partly by administrative expenses, which are less important than a charity’s impact on the needy, but it is trying to develop more useful information about impact.
Today, however, much giving remains impulsive and inefficient. When people get a call out of the blue asking them to donate to firefighters, they may imagine the caller is a volunteer; instead, he’s probably a paid fund-raiser, who will take much of what you give.
“Chuggers” — short for charity muggers — who stop people on the street likewise often work for fund-raising companies that swallow much of any donation. When people receive address labels or a key chain from a charity, they’re more likely to write a check — but that’s a terribly inefficient way to raise money.
Look, I’m nervous about this column, because I don’t want to discourage giving. But donations could accomplish far more if people thought through their philanthropy, did more research, and made fewer, bigger contributions instead of many small ones that are expensive to handle.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/opini ... s&emc=a212
Wipro chairman Azim Premji pledges $2bn to Education foundation
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/indi ... 025608.cms
http://www.bismillahnews.in/?page_id=22
BANGALORE: In the largest act of philanthropy by an Indian, Wipro chairman Azim Premji will give about Rs 8,846 crore ($2 billion) to improve school education in India. Other donations to charitable institutions by any person or corporation in India pale in comparison to this massive endowment. It effectively silences critics who say Indian billionaires are measly donors compared to foreign counterparts, and that they focus on big-name western universities rather than addressing India’s problems.
Premji, India’s third richest man with a net worth of $18 billion, will transfer 213 million equity shares of
Wipro Ltd, held by a few entities controlled by him, to the Azim Premji Trust. It will fund educational activities of the Azim Premji Foundation (APF) which works mainly with schools in rural India. He had previously transferred over Rs 700 crore to the APF.
Premji said more may come in future. “I’m completely committed to supporting the larger ambition of creating the required social change.”
The money will be transferred to the trust by next Tuesday and Wipro’s former strategy chief K R Lakshminarayana will be its chief endowment officer. A $2-billion endowment even at a conservative return of 8%-12% should generate annual returns of $160-250 million (Rs 750-1,150 crore), which will be used to run APF initiatives, including the Bangalore-based Azim Premji University.
“We believe that good education is crucial to building a just, equitable, humane and sustainable society. We want to contribute significantly towards improvement of education in India, and through that towards building a better society,” he said.
“All our efforts, including the university we are setting up, are focused on the under-privileged and disadvantaged sections of our society. Our experience of the past 10 years has motivated us to significantly scale up our initiatives, across multiple relevant dimensions.”
So far, the nine-year-old APF has worked extensively in six districts — two in Uttarakhand, two in Rajasthan and two in Karnataka.
Dileep Ranjekar, co-CEO of APF called this the beginning of APF’s second life. “The current phase we’re launching is based on 10 years of experience wherein we realized what needs to be done to scale this in a concrete manner.” His co-CEO Anurag Behar said, “The aim is to increase the deep focus to 50 more districts across India.”
Such a huge financial commitment has been made mainly because a university cannot be run without a large endowment. For example, if AP University were to follow the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) model which meets just 14%-15% of its costs from student fees, the AP University will need to meet 85% of costs from non-fee based resources.
“The foundation’s significant increase in scale and its clear focus on social purposes will require a substantial long-term financial commitment, which is the purpose this endowment will serve,” Premji said.
The university, offering post-graduate courses in education and development, will start with 200 students in 2011 and scale to 2,000 in 4-5 years.
The foundation will also create district-level institutions with 50-70 people in each and these state and district resource centres will support improvement in education, especially in disadvantaged areas.
The APF said it will continue to partner state governments (including continuing with its existing programmes), institutions, NGOs and individuals.
Will others follow suit?
Will Premji inspire rich Indians to part with their wealth? That’s a billion-dollar question but the American example may have the answer. Microsoft chairman
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathway are persuading wealthy Americans to give at least 50% of their wealth to charity. They’re even asking people to take a pledge they will do so, and with considerable success.
In India, the tech sector has led the way in giving away some of its wealth. All Infosys co-founders have charitable arms mainly in education but also in water management, health, etc.
Read more:
Azim Premji pledges $2bn to foundation - The Times of Indiahttp://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Azim-Premji-pledges-2bn-to-foundation/articleshow/7025608.cms#ixzz16uytEzAY
***
Azim Premji Profile
http://www.iloveindia.com/indian-heroes ... remji.html
Born: July 24, 1945
Achievements: Chairman of Wipro Technologies; Richest Indian for the past several years; Honored with Padma Bhushan in 2005.
Azim Premji is Chairman of Wipro Technologies, one of the largest software companies in India. He is an icon among Indian businessmen and his success story is a source of inspiration to a number of budding entrepreneurs.
Born on July 24, 1945, Azim Hashim Premji was studying Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, USA when due to the sudden demise of his father, he was called upon to handle the family business. Azim Premji took over the reins of family business in 1966 at the age of 21.
At the first annual general meeting of the company attended by Azeem Premji, a shareholder doubted Premji’s ability to handle business at such a young age and publicly advised him to sell his shareholding and give it to a more mature management. This spurred Azim Premji and made him all the more determined to make Wipro a success story. And the rest is history.
When Azim Premji occupied the hot seat, Wipro dealt in hydrogenated cooking fats and later diversified to bakery fats, ethnic ingredient based toiletries, hair care soaps, baby toiletries, lighting products and hydraulic cylinders. Thereafter Premji made a focused shift from soaps to software.
Under Azim Premji’s leadership Wipro has metamorphosed from a Rs.70 million company in hydrogenated cooking fats to a pioneer in providing integrated business, technology and process solutions on a global delivery platform. Today, Wipro Technologies is the largest independent R&D service provider in the world.
Azim Premji has several achievements to his credit. In 2000, Asiaweek magazine, voted Premji among the 20 most powerful men in the world. Azim Premji was among the 50 richest people in the world from 2001 to 2003 listed by Forbes. In April 2004, Times Magazine, rated him among the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. He is also the richest Indian for the past several years. In 2005,Government of India honored Azim Premji with Padma Bhushan.
***
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/indi ... 025608.cms
http://www.bismillahnews.in/?page_id=22
BANGALORE: In the largest act of philanthropy by an Indian, Wipro chairman Azim Premji will give about Rs 8,846 crore ($2 billion) to improve school education in India. Other donations to charitable institutions by any person or corporation in India pale in comparison to this massive endowment. It effectively silences critics who say Indian billionaires are measly donors compared to foreign counterparts, and that they focus on big-name western universities rather than addressing India’s problems.
Premji, India’s third richest man with a net worth of $18 billion, will transfer 213 million equity shares of
Wipro Ltd, held by a few entities controlled by him, to the Azim Premji Trust. It will fund educational activities of the Azim Premji Foundation (APF) which works mainly with schools in rural India. He had previously transferred over Rs 700 crore to the APF.
Premji said more may come in future. “I’m completely committed to supporting the larger ambition of creating the required social change.”
The money will be transferred to the trust by next Tuesday and Wipro’s former strategy chief K R Lakshminarayana will be its chief endowment officer. A $2-billion endowment even at a conservative return of 8%-12% should generate annual returns of $160-250 million (Rs 750-1,150 crore), which will be used to run APF initiatives, including the Bangalore-based Azim Premji University.
“We believe that good education is crucial to building a just, equitable, humane and sustainable society. We want to contribute significantly towards improvement of education in India, and through that towards building a better society,” he said.
“All our efforts, including the university we are setting up, are focused on the under-privileged and disadvantaged sections of our society. Our experience of the past 10 years has motivated us to significantly scale up our initiatives, across multiple relevant dimensions.”
So far, the nine-year-old APF has worked extensively in six districts — two in Uttarakhand, two in Rajasthan and two in Karnataka.
Dileep Ranjekar, co-CEO of APF called this the beginning of APF’s second life. “The current phase we’re launching is based on 10 years of experience wherein we realized what needs to be done to scale this in a concrete manner.” His co-CEO Anurag Behar said, “The aim is to increase the deep focus to 50 more districts across India.”
Such a huge financial commitment has been made mainly because a university cannot be run without a large endowment. For example, if AP University were to follow the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) model which meets just 14%-15% of its costs from student fees, the AP University will need to meet 85% of costs from non-fee based resources.
“The foundation’s significant increase in scale and its clear focus on social purposes will require a substantial long-term financial commitment, which is the purpose this endowment will serve,” Premji said.
The university, offering post-graduate courses in education and development, will start with 200 students in 2011 and scale to 2,000 in 4-5 years.
The foundation will also create district-level institutions with 50-70 people in each and these state and district resource centres will support improvement in education, especially in disadvantaged areas.
The APF said it will continue to partner state governments (including continuing with its existing programmes), institutions, NGOs and individuals.
Will others follow suit?
Will Premji inspire rich Indians to part with their wealth? That’s a billion-dollar question but the American example may have the answer. Microsoft chairman
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathway are persuading wealthy Americans to give at least 50% of their wealth to charity. They’re even asking people to take a pledge they will do so, and with considerable success.
In India, the tech sector has led the way in giving away some of its wealth. All Infosys co-founders have charitable arms mainly in education but also in water management, health, etc.
Read more:
Azim Premji pledges $2bn to foundation - The Times of Indiahttp://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Azim-Premji-pledges-2bn-to-foundation/articleshow/7025608.cms#ixzz16uytEzAY
***
Azim Premji Profile
http://www.iloveindia.com/indian-heroes ... remji.html
Born: July 24, 1945
Achievements: Chairman of Wipro Technologies; Richest Indian for the past several years; Honored with Padma Bhushan in 2005.
Azim Premji is Chairman of Wipro Technologies, one of the largest software companies in India. He is an icon among Indian businessmen and his success story is a source of inspiration to a number of budding entrepreneurs.
Born on July 24, 1945, Azim Hashim Premji was studying Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, USA when due to the sudden demise of his father, he was called upon to handle the family business. Azim Premji took over the reins of family business in 1966 at the age of 21.
At the first annual general meeting of the company attended by Azeem Premji, a shareholder doubted Premji’s ability to handle business at such a young age and publicly advised him to sell his shareholding and give it to a more mature management. This spurred Azim Premji and made him all the more determined to make Wipro a success story. And the rest is history.
When Azim Premji occupied the hot seat, Wipro dealt in hydrogenated cooking fats and later diversified to bakery fats, ethnic ingredient based toiletries, hair care soaps, baby toiletries, lighting products and hydraulic cylinders. Thereafter Premji made a focused shift from soaps to software.
Under Azim Premji’s leadership Wipro has metamorphosed from a Rs.70 million company in hydrogenated cooking fats to a pioneer in providing integrated business, technology and process solutions on a global delivery platform. Today, Wipro Technologies is the largest independent R&D service provider in the world.
Azim Premji has several achievements to his credit. In 2000, Asiaweek magazine, voted Premji among the 20 most powerful men in the world. Azim Premji was among the 50 richest people in the world from 2001 to 2003 listed by Forbes. In April 2004, Times Magazine, rated him among the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. He is also the richest Indian for the past several years. In 2005,Government of India honored Azim Premji with Padma Bhushan.
***
Gulshan, left, and Pyarali Nanji have donated to several Canadian hospitals in gratitude to Canada for giving them refuge in 1972 when they were forced by Idi Amin to leave Uganda.
http://www.healthzone.ca/health/newsfea ... -of-refuge
Toronto philanthropist couple gives back after gift of refuge
November 26, 2010
Valerie Hauch
STAFF REPORTER
Were it not for former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau airlifting thousands of South Asians out of Uganda in 1972 — after then-dictator Idi Amin called them “bloodsuckers” and gave 60,000 of them 90 days to leave — Pyarali and Gulshan Nanji and their four children would likely never have settled in Canada.
Since arriving in Canada along with the 7,000 South Asian Ugandans who fled Amin and eventually found refuge here, the Ismaili couple has given generous donations to hospitals in Montreal, where they first settled, and in Toronto.
On Dec. 2, North York General Hospital officially reopens its renovated Medical Imaging Centre, largely funded by the Nanjis who are among the largest private donors in the hospital’s history. They live near the hospital.
In recognition of the Nanjis’ donation, the hospital is naming a section of the facility — which treats more than 200,000 patients annually — the Gulshan and Pyarali G. Nanji Ultrasound, CT and Radiography Centre.
A previous donation by the Nanjis made possible the opening of the Gulshan and Pyarali G. Nanji Orthopaedic and Plastics Centre in 2006 and they have also contributed to adolescent mental health treatment at the hospital.
Although the Nanjis won’t specify the dollar amount of their donations, their support “totals in the multi-millions,” says Harold Heft, executive vice-president of philanthropy and communications of the North York General Hospital Foundation.
The Nanjis have also previously contributed to Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and in recognition of their generosity a 2007-2008 report on donors stated that the first floor of the M-Wing was being renamed the Pyarali and Gulshan Nanji Ambulatory Centre.
St. Mary’s Hospital in Montreal was the first benefactor of the Nanjis’ generosity.
“My wife had rheumatoid arthritis,” Pyarali Nanji told the Star, and he was very pleased with the care she got. “I said to her, this hospital, we have to pay back.”
Giving back to Canada was something he vowed he would do once the family was settled in Montreal. Back in 1972, his children, then aged 12, 16, 18 and 21, were put on the first Canadian mercy flight out of Uganda. His wife followed two weeks later on another flight out, but Nanji, who had been born in Uganda and is of Indian descent, had to stay behind to try and see if he could salvage something from his luggage and wire and nails businesses.
“It was very scary. My wife had to leave, it was very tough on her. She said, ‘Should I leave you alone here, maybe never to see you again?’ I said, ‘They (the children) need you there (in Canada).’ ”
Shortly after, Nanji was able to get into Nairobi, then went to England and from there was reunited with his family in Montreal — a day “of the biggest joy.”
“I said, if ever, ever I am successful in this country . . . what the Canadian government has done was unbelievable. They give my children shelter, food, education. And the best part is security.”
From a modest start with buying some real estate in Montreal to today as president and CEO of Markham-based Belle-Pak Packaging Inc. (called one of Canada’s 50 best-managed companies), Nanji, together with his wife, has achieved the business success that has made their philanthropy possible.
He chooses to give to hospitals for a reason: “Hospitals I admire because . . . there’s no religion, no discrimination. There is no rich or poor. If I am sick, I have to stay in queue and wait until it’s my turn.
“This is an area where everybody is treated the same . . . I see government alone cannot do everything” when it comes to hospitals, says Nanji. “It’s our duty as citizens to be a part of it.”
North York General Hospital’s Dr. Elizabeth Lamere, who works in diagnostic imaging, says the Nanjis’ most recent donations that have funded the renovation of the Medical Imaging Centre have made a world of difference in “upgrading and modernizing an integral part of the hospital.”
http://www.healthzone.ca/health/newsfea ... -of-refuge
Toronto philanthropist couple gives back after gift of refuge
November 26, 2010
Valerie Hauch
STAFF REPORTER
Were it not for former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau airlifting thousands of South Asians out of Uganda in 1972 — after then-dictator Idi Amin called them “bloodsuckers” and gave 60,000 of them 90 days to leave — Pyarali and Gulshan Nanji and their four children would likely never have settled in Canada.
Since arriving in Canada along with the 7,000 South Asian Ugandans who fled Amin and eventually found refuge here, the Ismaili couple has given generous donations to hospitals in Montreal, where they first settled, and in Toronto.
On Dec. 2, North York General Hospital officially reopens its renovated Medical Imaging Centre, largely funded by the Nanjis who are among the largest private donors in the hospital’s history. They live near the hospital.
In recognition of the Nanjis’ donation, the hospital is naming a section of the facility — which treats more than 200,000 patients annually — the Gulshan and Pyarali G. Nanji Ultrasound, CT and Radiography Centre.
A previous donation by the Nanjis made possible the opening of the Gulshan and Pyarali G. Nanji Orthopaedic and Plastics Centre in 2006 and they have also contributed to adolescent mental health treatment at the hospital.
Although the Nanjis won’t specify the dollar amount of their donations, their support “totals in the multi-millions,” says Harold Heft, executive vice-president of philanthropy and communications of the North York General Hospital Foundation.
The Nanjis have also previously contributed to Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and in recognition of their generosity a 2007-2008 report on donors stated that the first floor of the M-Wing was being renamed the Pyarali and Gulshan Nanji Ambulatory Centre.
St. Mary’s Hospital in Montreal was the first benefactor of the Nanjis’ generosity.
“My wife had rheumatoid arthritis,” Pyarali Nanji told the Star, and he was very pleased with the care she got. “I said to her, this hospital, we have to pay back.”
Giving back to Canada was something he vowed he would do once the family was settled in Montreal. Back in 1972, his children, then aged 12, 16, 18 and 21, were put on the first Canadian mercy flight out of Uganda. His wife followed two weeks later on another flight out, but Nanji, who had been born in Uganda and is of Indian descent, had to stay behind to try and see if he could salvage something from his luggage and wire and nails businesses.
“It was very scary. My wife had to leave, it was very tough on her. She said, ‘Should I leave you alone here, maybe never to see you again?’ I said, ‘They (the children) need you there (in Canada).’ ”
Shortly after, Nanji was able to get into Nairobi, then went to England and from there was reunited with his family in Montreal — a day “of the biggest joy.”
“I said, if ever, ever I am successful in this country . . . what the Canadian government has done was unbelievable. They give my children shelter, food, education. And the best part is security.”
From a modest start with buying some real estate in Montreal to today as president and CEO of Markham-based Belle-Pak Packaging Inc. (called one of Canada’s 50 best-managed companies), Nanji, together with his wife, has achieved the business success that has made their philanthropy possible.
He chooses to give to hospitals for a reason: “Hospitals I admire because . . . there’s no religion, no discrimination. There is no rich or poor. If I am sick, I have to stay in queue and wait until it’s my turn.
“This is an area where everybody is treated the same . . . I see government alone cannot do everything” when it comes to hospitals, says Nanji. “It’s our duty as citizens to be a part of it.”
North York General Hospital’s Dr. Elizabeth Lamere, who works in diagnostic imaging, says the Nanjis’ most recent donations that have funded the renovation of the Medical Imaging Centre have made a world of difference in “upgrading and modernizing an integral part of the hospital.”
Aga Khan in Prestigious Jury for First-Ever Business Leader’s Award to Fight Human Trafficking
http://simerg.com/special-series-his-hi ... afficking/
Article compiled by Simerg
The Jury is composed of individuals of high moral stature with a demonstrated commitment to the ideals of the United Nations who have distinguished themselves in their respective careers…(United Nations Statement)
Photo credit: www.businessleadersaward.org
Ten years after the Palermo Protocol, top world personalities will convene from December 10-12 in an International Forum in Luxor, Egypt, to outline a roadmap for ending human trafficking. The Forum is organized by End Human Trafficking Now! and The Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking (UN.GIFT).
The Luxor Forum will aim to achieve the following:
1. Fully capture the various dimensions of human trafficking as a modern form of slavery and the heavy toll it poses to human dignity and security;
2. Engage moral figures, business leaders, artists and academics to assume the role of champions of this worthy cause;
3. Build on the dynamism and power of youth to jointly develop tangible solutions to combat human trafficking. A special effort will be made to link with other campaigns such as human rights protection,violence against women and children, HIV/AIDS, and the campaign against missing children.
End Human Trafficking Now!, is an initiative of the Suzanne Mubarak Women‘s International Peace Movement (SMWIPM). It is the first global campaign to involve the business community in anti- trafficking efforts. Most anti-trafficking initiatives today have been undertaken by governments and NGOs. Very few programmes have actually engaged the business sector and made use of their global reach and network of connections.
“Luxor is a call to fully engage the private sector in the fight against human trafficking,” said Egypt’s First Lady. ”Today‘s economic engine is enterprises, and their social responsibility is pivotal for putting an end to this terrible scourge,” she added.
The Luxor International Forum has resonated well with the business community, which will be represented by CEOs of major corporations covering very diverse sectors – from Oil to Tourism.
One of the main messages of the Luxor Forum is that no country is exempt. With an estimated 27 million victims, Human Trafficking is the world‘s second most profitable crime, after Arms. And it is a crime that knows no boundaries. According to the International Labour Organizarion (ILO), forced labour of trafficked persons raises profits of US$ 38 billion a year, including US$ 28 billion from the sexual exploitation of women and children, half of which is in industrialised countries. This has been exacerbated by globalisation, including the use of the Internet.
Illegal trafficking also brings huge and quick benefits. Traffickers can be ‘reimbursed’ within three months of their ‘investment’, while the victims can be sold over and over again, making this crime highly lucrative.
“I thought slavery had died out hundreds of years ago,” said Sir Richard Branson, Chairman, Virgin Group. “It was only recently that I found out that human trafficking still existed.”
The Forum wants to make it clear that slavery is still very real and needs to be eradicated. With a unique mix of participants – youth, media, government, the entertainment industry – the Luxor Forum hopes to provide a platform for the business community to diversify its partners, understand its responsibility within its own area of operation, and identify and share its role within the anti-trafficking campaign.
On the last day a prestigious jury including Suzanne Mubarak, Princess Mathilde of Belgium and the 49th Ismaili Imam, His Highness the Aga Khan, will present the first-ever award in history to recognize a business executive‘s energy and commitment in tackling human trafficking.
In a statement the United Nations said that the jury is “composed of individuals of high moral stature with demonstrated commitment to the ideals of the United Nations.”
The Evaluation and Selection process for the Award is as follows:
1. Qualifying entries were reviewed by members of the Advisory Committee who used an average score system to produce a shortlist of 25 candidates.
2. A detailed reference and fact check of the short listed candidates was then conducted by the award secretariat.
3. This was followed by a second round of screening by the Advisory Committee using a preferential voting system to select five nominees for consideration by the Jury.
4. A further evaluation of the five finalists was then conducted, including include site visits and one-on-one interviews to provide in-depth information on the businesses executive and the initiative.
5. The five final candidates were informed of their position and invited to the award ceremony to be held in Luxor in 12 December 2010, where a final decision on the winner of the award will be taken by the Jury .
The trophy will take the form of a glass sculpture of symbolic and artistic value, designed exclusively by luxury watch, jewellery, and accessories designer Chopard. This will be accompanied by a certificate of commendation signed by the jury members. There is no monetary prize attached to the award.
The Award Ceremony will take place every two years at the end of the award cycle.
The Jury and their Terms of Reference:
The Jury is composed of individuals of high moral stature with a demonstrated commitment to the ideals of the United Nations who have distinguished themselves in their respective careers. Members of the Jury serve in their individual capacity.
The Jury functions as an independent body responsible for the selection of the winner for each award cycle. The decisions of the Jury are final.
Her Excellency Suzanne Mubarak
Founder and President of the Women’s International Peace Movement
H.E. Mrs. Suzanne Mubarak, wife of Egypt’s President Mubarak, is a social scientist and Founder and President of the Women’s International Peace Movement She spent her early career studying closely disadvantaged communities to understand better ways and means of improving their living conditions. These early experiences have greatly shaped her outlook and determination to place the human being at the centre of all development activities.
His Highness the Aga Khan
His Highness the Aga Khan, a direct lineal descendant of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), is the 49th hereditary Imam – spiritual leader – of the Shia Ismaili Muslims. Consistent with general Muslim tradition, the Imam’s mandate is to guide his community in matters of faith, and to work for its security and improved quality of life, alongside that of wider society. The Aga Khan is the founder and Chairman of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), a group of non-denominational international development agencies, active in 38 countries, dedicated to improving the quality of life of vulnerable societies.
Mr. Antonio Maria Costa
Mr. Antonio Maria Costa served as Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and Director-General of the United Nations Office in Vienna (UNOV) from 2002 to 2010. Mr. Costa was born in Italy. He holds a degree in political science from the University of Turin (1963), a Degree in mathematical economics from the Moscow State University (1967), and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley (1971). From 1969 to 1983, Mr. Costa served as senior economist in the United Nations Department of International Economics and Social Affairs in New York.
Mr. Georg Kell
Georg Kell is the Executive Director of the United Nations Global Compact, the world’s largest voluntary corporate responsibility initiative with More than 6,000 participants in over 130 countries. Spanning More than two decades, his career with the United Nations began in 1987 at the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva. In 1997, Mr. Kell joined the Office of the UN Secretary-General in New York
Mr. Henrik O. Madsen
Dr. Madsen is the President and CEO of Det Norske Veritas (DNV), a leading international provider of services for managing risk and an independent foundation with the purpose of safeguarding life, property and the environment. Dr. Madsen began his career in DNV in Oslo in 1982 as Chief Scientist in Structural Reliability Analysis. Since then Dr. Madsen has held various leading positions in DNV. In May 2006, Dr. Madsen assumed the position as President and CEO of DNV. He introduced ambitious strategic goals for DNV to grow and focus its services towards selected industry sectors. Dr. Madsen’s attention today is very much focused on corporate responsibility, environment and climate change issues, and how DNV can contribute to a safe and sustainable future. Dr. Madsen is a Council member of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD).
Date article posted on Simerg: December 12, 2010.
*****
Examples of human trafficking
BBC Documentary: Chocolate - The Bitter Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjwkRkdP5i4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-1B7zOz4qM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYvSMVblrVk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvcoCiD7ygg
http://simerg.com/special-series-his-hi ... afficking/
Article compiled by Simerg
The Jury is composed of individuals of high moral stature with a demonstrated commitment to the ideals of the United Nations who have distinguished themselves in their respective careers…(United Nations Statement)
Photo credit: www.businessleadersaward.org
Ten years after the Palermo Protocol, top world personalities will convene from December 10-12 in an International Forum in Luxor, Egypt, to outline a roadmap for ending human trafficking. The Forum is organized by End Human Trafficking Now! and The Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking (UN.GIFT).
The Luxor Forum will aim to achieve the following:
1. Fully capture the various dimensions of human trafficking as a modern form of slavery and the heavy toll it poses to human dignity and security;
2. Engage moral figures, business leaders, artists and academics to assume the role of champions of this worthy cause;
3. Build on the dynamism and power of youth to jointly develop tangible solutions to combat human trafficking. A special effort will be made to link with other campaigns such as human rights protection,violence against women and children, HIV/AIDS, and the campaign against missing children.
End Human Trafficking Now!, is an initiative of the Suzanne Mubarak Women‘s International Peace Movement (SMWIPM). It is the first global campaign to involve the business community in anti- trafficking efforts. Most anti-trafficking initiatives today have been undertaken by governments and NGOs. Very few programmes have actually engaged the business sector and made use of their global reach and network of connections.
“Luxor is a call to fully engage the private sector in the fight against human trafficking,” said Egypt’s First Lady. ”Today‘s economic engine is enterprises, and their social responsibility is pivotal for putting an end to this terrible scourge,” she added.
The Luxor International Forum has resonated well with the business community, which will be represented by CEOs of major corporations covering very diverse sectors – from Oil to Tourism.
One of the main messages of the Luxor Forum is that no country is exempt. With an estimated 27 million victims, Human Trafficking is the world‘s second most profitable crime, after Arms. And it is a crime that knows no boundaries. According to the International Labour Organizarion (ILO), forced labour of trafficked persons raises profits of US$ 38 billion a year, including US$ 28 billion from the sexual exploitation of women and children, half of which is in industrialised countries. This has been exacerbated by globalisation, including the use of the Internet.
Illegal trafficking also brings huge and quick benefits. Traffickers can be ‘reimbursed’ within three months of their ‘investment’, while the victims can be sold over and over again, making this crime highly lucrative.
“I thought slavery had died out hundreds of years ago,” said Sir Richard Branson, Chairman, Virgin Group. “It was only recently that I found out that human trafficking still existed.”
The Forum wants to make it clear that slavery is still very real and needs to be eradicated. With a unique mix of participants – youth, media, government, the entertainment industry – the Luxor Forum hopes to provide a platform for the business community to diversify its partners, understand its responsibility within its own area of operation, and identify and share its role within the anti-trafficking campaign.
On the last day a prestigious jury including Suzanne Mubarak, Princess Mathilde of Belgium and the 49th Ismaili Imam, His Highness the Aga Khan, will present the first-ever award in history to recognize a business executive‘s energy and commitment in tackling human trafficking.
In a statement the United Nations said that the jury is “composed of individuals of high moral stature with demonstrated commitment to the ideals of the United Nations.”
The Evaluation and Selection process for the Award is as follows:
1. Qualifying entries were reviewed by members of the Advisory Committee who used an average score system to produce a shortlist of 25 candidates.
2. A detailed reference and fact check of the short listed candidates was then conducted by the award secretariat.
3. This was followed by a second round of screening by the Advisory Committee using a preferential voting system to select five nominees for consideration by the Jury.
4. A further evaluation of the five finalists was then conducted, including include site visits and one-on-one interviews to provide in-depth information on the businesses executive and the initiative.
5. The five final candidates were informed of their position and invited to the award ceremony to be held in Luxor in 12 December 2010, where a final decision on the winner of the award will be taken by the Jury .
The trophy will take the form of a glass sculpture of symbolic and artistic value, designed exclusively by luxury watch, jewellery, and accessories designer Chopard. This will be accompanied by a certificate of commendation signed by the jury members. There is no monetary prize attached to the award.
The Award Ceremony will take place every two years at the end of the award cycle.
The Jury and their Terms of Reference:
The Jury is composed of individuals of high moral stature with a demonstrated commitment to the ideals of the United Nations who have distinguished themselves in their respective careers. Members of the Jury serve in their individual capacity.
The Jury functions as an independent body responsible for the selection of the winner for each award cycle. The decisions of the Jury are final.
Her Excellency Suzanne Mubarak
Founder and President of the Women’s International Peace Movement
H.E. Mrs. Suzanne Mubarak, wife of Egypt’s President Mubarak, is a social scientist and Founder and President of the Women’s International Peace Movement She spent her early career studying closely disadvantaged communities to understand better ways and means of improving their living conditions. These early experiences have greatly shaped her outlook and determination to place the human being at the centre of all development activities.
His Highness the Aga Khan
His Highness the Aga Khan, a direct lineal descendant of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), is the 49th hereditary Imam – spiritual leader – of the Shia Ismaili Muslims. Consistent with general Muslim tradition, the Imam’s mandate is to guide his community in matters of faith, and to work for its security and improved quality of life, alongside that of wider society. The Aga Khan is the founder and Chairman of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), a group of non-denominational international development agencies, active in 38 countries, dedicated to improving the quality of life of vulnerable societies.
Mr. Antonio Maria Costa
Mr. Antonio Maria Costa served as Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and Director-General of the United Nations Office in Vienna (UNOV) from 2002 to 2010. Mr. Costa was born in Italy. He holds a degree in political science from the University of Turin (1963), a Degree in mathematical economics from the Moscow State University (1967), and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley (1971). From 1969 to 1983, Mr. Costa served as senior economist in the United Nations Department of International Economics and Social Affairs in New York.
Mr. Georg Kell
Georg Kell is the Executive Director of the United Nations Global Compact, the world’s largest voluntary corporate responsibility initiative with More than 6,000 participants in over 130 countries. Spanning More than two decades, his career with the United Nations began in 1987 at the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva. In 1997, Mr. Kell joined the Office of the UN Secretary-General in New York
Mr. Henrik O. Madsen
Dr. Madsen is the President and CEO of Det Norske Veritas (DNV), a leading international provider of services for managing risk and an independent foundation with the purpose of safeguarding life, property and the environment. Dr. Madsen began his career in DNV in Oslo in 1982 as Chief Scientist in Structural Reliability Analysis. Since then Dr. Madsen has held various leading positions in DNV. In May 2006, Dr. Madsen assumed the position as President and CEO of DNV. He introduced ambitious strategic goals for DNV to grow and focus its services towards selected industry sectors. Dr. Madsen’s attention today is very much focused on corporate responsibility, environment and climate change issues, and how DNV can contribute to a safe and sustainable future. Dr. Madsen is a Council member of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD).
Date article posted on Simerg: December 12, 2010.
*****
Examples of human trafficking
BBC Documentary: Chocolate - The Bitter Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjwkRkdP5i4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-1B7zOz4qM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYvSMVblrVk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvcoCiD7ygg
January 14, 2011
Sacrificing Microcredit for Megaprofits
By MUHAMMAD YUNUS
Dhaka, Bangladesh
IN the 1970s, when I began working here on what would eventually be called “microcredit,” one of my goals was to eliminate the presence of loan sharks who grow rich by preying on the poor. In 1983, I founded Grameen Bank to provide small loans that people, especially poor women, could use to bring themselves out of poverty. At that time, I never imagined that one day microcredit would give rise to its own breed of loan sharks.
But it has. And as a result, many borrowers in India have been defaulting on their microloans, which could then result in lenders being driven out of business. India’s crisis points to a clear need to get microcredit back on track.
Troubles with microcredit began around 2005, when many lenders started looking for ways to make a profit on the loans by shifting from their status as nonprofit organizations to commercial enterprises. In 2007, Compartamos, a Mexican bank, became Latin America’s first microcredit bank to go public. And this past August, SKS Microfinance, the largest bank of its kind in India, raised $358 million in an initial public offering.
To ensure that the small loans would be profitable for their shareholders, such banks needed to raise interest rates and engage in aggressive marketing and loan collection. The kind of empathy that had once been shown toward borrowers when the lenders were nonprofits disappeared. The people whom microcredit was supposed to help were being harmed. In India, borrowers came to believe lenders were taking advantage of them, and stopped repaying their loans.
Commercialization has been a terrible wrong turn for microfinance, and it indicates a worrying “mission drift” in the motivation of those lending to the poor. Poverty should be eradicated, not seen as a money-making opportunity.
There are serious practical problems with treating microcredit as an ordinary profit-maximizing business. Instead of creating wholesale funds dedicated to lending money to microfinance institutions, as Bangladesh has done, these commercial organizations raise larger sums in volatile international financial markets, and then transmit financial risks to the poor.
Furthermore, it means commercial microcredit institutions are subject to demands for ever-increasing profits, which can only come in the form of higher interest rates charged to the poor, defeating the very purpose of the loans.
Some advocates of commercialization say it’s the only way to attract the money that’s needed to expand the availability of microcredit and to “liberate” the system from dependence on foundations and other charitable donors. But it is possible to harness investment in microcredit — and even make a profit — without working through either charities or global financial markets.
Grameen Bank, where I am managing director, has 2,500 branches in Bangladesh. It lends out more than $100 million a month, from loans of less than $10 for beggars in our “Struggling Members” program, to micro-enterprise loans of about $1,000. Most branches are financially self-reliant, dependent only on deposits from ordinary Bangladeshis. When borrowers join the bank, they open a savings account. All borrowers have savings accounts at the bank, many with balances larger than their loans. And every year, the bank’s profits are returned to the borrowers — 97 percent of them poor women — in the form of dividends.
More microcredit institutions should adopt this model. The community needs to reaffirm the original definition of microcredit, abandon commercialization and turn back to serving the poor.
Stricter government regulation could help. The maximum interest rate should not exceed the cost of the fund — meaning the cost that is incurred by the bank to procure the money to lend — plus 15 percent of the fund. That 15 percent goes to cover operational costs and contribute to profit. In the case of Grameen Bank, the cost of fund is 10 percent. So, the maximum interest rate could be 25 percent. However, we charge 20 percent to the borrowers. The ideal “spread” between the cost of the fund and the lending rate should be close to 10 percent.
To enforce such a cap, every country where microloans are made needs a microcredit regulatory authority. Bangladesh, which has the most microcredit borrowers per square mile in the world, has had such an authority for several years, and it is devoted to ensuring transparency in lending and prevented excessive interest rates and collection practices. In the future, it may be able to accredit microfinance banks. India, with its burgeoning microcredit sector, is most in need of a similar agency.
There are always people eager to take advantage of the vulnerable. But credit programs that seek to profit from the suffering of the poor should not be described as “microcredit,” and investors who own such programs should not be allowed to benefit from the trust and respect that microcredit banks have rightly earned.
Governments are responsible for preventing such abuse. In 1997, then First Lady Hillary Clinton and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh met with other world leaders to commit to providing 100 million poor people with microloans and other financial services by 2005. At the time, it looked like an utterly impossible task, but by 2006 we had achieved it. World leaders should come together again to provide the powerful and visionary leadership to help steer microcredit back on course.
Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/opini ... emc=tha212
Sacrificing Microcredit for Megaprofits
By MUHAMMAD YUNUS
Dhaka, Bangladesh
IN the 1970s, when I began working here on what would eventually be called “microcredit,” one of my goals was to eliminate the presence of loan sharks who grow rich by preying on the poor. In 1983, I founded Grameen Bank to provide small loans that people, especially poor women, could use to bring themselves out of poverty. At that time, I never imagined that one day microcredit would give rise to its own breed of loan sharks.
But it has. And as a result, many borrowers in India have been defaulting on their microloans, which could then result in lenders being driven out of business. India’s crisis points to a clear need to get microcredit back on track.
Troubles with microcredit began around 2005, when many lenders started looking for ways to make a profit on the loans by shifting from their status as nonprofit organizations to commercial enterprises. In 2007, Compartamos, a Mexican bank, became Latin America’s first microcredit bank to go public. And this past August, SKS Microfinance, the largest bank of its kind in India, raised $358 million in an initial public offering.
To ensure that the small loans would be profitable for their shareholders, such banks needed to raise interest rates and engage in aggressive marketing and loan collection. The kind of empathy that had once been shown toward borrowers when the lenders were nonprofits disappeared. The people whom microcredit was supposed to help were being harmed. In India, borrowers came to believe lenders were taking advantage of them, and stopped repaying their loans.
Commercialization has been a terrible wrong turn for microfinance, and it indicates a worrying “mission drift” in the motivation of those lending to the poor. Poverty should be eradicated, not seen as a money-making opportunity.
There are serious practical problems with treating microcredit as an ordinary profit-maximizing business. Instead of creating wholesale funds dedicated to lending money to microfinance institutions, as Bangladesh has done, these commercial organizations raise larger sums in volatile international financial markets, and then transmit financial risks to the poor.
Furthermore, it means commercial microcredit institutions are subject to demands for ever-increasing profits, which can only come in the form of higher interest rates charged to the poor, defeating the very purpose of the loans.
Some advocates of commercialization say it’s the only way to attract the money that’s needed to expand the availability of microcredit and to “liberate” the system from dependence on foundations and other charitable donors. But it is possible to harness investment in microcredit — and even make a profit — without working through either charities or global financial markets.
Grameen Bank, where I am managing director, has 2,500 branches in Bangladesh. It lends out more than $100 million a month, from loans of less than $10 for beggars in our “Struggling Members” program, to micro-enterprise loans of about $1,000. Most branches are financially self-reliant, dependent only on deposits from ordinary Bangladeshis. When borrowers join the bank, they open a savings account. All borrowers have savings accounts at the bank, many with balances larger than their loans. And every year, the bank’s profits are returned to the borrowers — 97 percent of them poor women — in the form of dividends.
More microcredit institutions should adopt this model. The community needs to reaffirm the original definition of microcredit, abandon commercialization and turn back to serving the poor.
Stricter government regulation could help. The maximum interest rate should not exceed the cost of the fund — meaning the cost that is incurred by the bank to procure the money to lend — plus 15 percent of the fund. That 15 percent goes to cover operational costs and contribute to profit. In the case of Grameen Bank, the cost of fund is 10 percent. So, the maximum interest rate could be 25 percent. However, we charge 20 percent to the borrowers. The ideal “spread” between the cost of the fund and the lending rate should be close to 10 percent.
To enforce such a cap, every country where microloans are made needs a microcredit regulatory authority. Bangladesh, which has the most microcredit borrowers per square mile in the world, has had such an authority for several years, and it is devoted to ensuring transparency in lending and prevented excessive interest rates and collection practices. In the future, it may be able to accredit microfinance banks. India, with its burgeoning microcredit sector, is most in need of a similar agency.
There are always people eager to take advantage of the vulnerable. But credit programs that seek to profit from the suffering of the poor should not be described as “microcredit,” and investors who own such programs should not be allowed to benefit from the trust and respect that microcredit banks have rightly earned.
Governments are responsible for preventing such abuse. In 1997, then First Lady Hillary Clinton and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh met with other world leaders to commit to providing 100 million poor people with microloans and other financial services by 2005. At the time, it looked like an utterly impossible task, but by 2006 we had achieved it. World leaders should come together again to provide the powerful and visionary leadership to help steer microcredit back on course.
Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/opini ... emc=tha212
Religious tradition is turning a corner
Religious institutions, traditionally the principal drivers of philanthropy in India, are rethinking their strategies and anecdotal examples show this shift is happening across all denominations
Mumbai: Normally, the Rural Development and Self Employment Training Institute (Rudset), a programme kicked off by the Sri Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara Educational Trust, would have been viewed as a routine project, albeit a little different, designed to provide a launch pad to budding rural entrepreneurs. It isn’t actually. The joint venture, which includes Syndicate Bank and Canara Bank as partners, is unique because of its third stakeholder: the Lord Manjutha Swamy Temple. Based out of Ujire, Karnataka, it is a pilot project, started in 1982 that helps unemployed young men and women set up businesses in just 30 days. “We help them get the business model in place, help them get loans, teach them the concepts of running a business, and hand-hold them as they become rural entrepreneurs,” said Veerendra Heggade, the chief priest of the temple.
Anecdotally, it is yet another example about how religious institutions, traditionally the principal drivers of philanthropy in India, are rethinking their strategies: teaching people how to fish instead of handing out fish. Empirically, it is difficult to establish. Not because of a lack of numbers. Instead, it has to do with the fact that there is no national database to tap.
For instance, the charity commission office of Mumbai knows there are more than 7,200 religious trusts in the city alone, but it is yet to reach out to counterparts elsewhere in the state and country to draw up a bigger picture. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is also no record of donations. A clerk who handles the religious trusts at the commission’s office in Mumbai, but did not want to be identified, admitted that even though all are required to submit audits under the Bombay Public Trusts Act, many of them do not do so until they are forced to.
Yet there are scores of examples to suggest that Heggade’s initiative is not the only one. According to him, the government now wants to take the programme national. “The bottom line is that if someone in the village wants to be self-employed, he should have help. We offer that help and monitor his progress for two years after,” said Heggade, adding that he already runs 25 such institutions across India and is willing to train personnel for all the new institutes the government will set up.
Also Read
Other stories in the series
The field they deal with
The use of religion to spur this new brand of philanthropy could be potentially powerful. According to the 2001 census, of the country’s 1.02 billion population, the proportion of Hindus was 80.5%, of Muslims was 13.4%, of Christians was 2.3%, and of Sikhs was 1.9%. Significantly, the anecdotal examples throwing light on this shift in approach to philanthropy is visible across all denominations.
Several big religious institutions have already moved well ahead in stepping in to fill the gap, where the government infrastructure has been found wanting, particularly in health services. A good example of this kind of work is that provided by the Sathya Sai Baba chain of hospitals to address the health needs of the not so poor. Similarly, the Isha Foundation, pioneered by Sadhguru, has undertaken the Action for Rural Rejuvenation in 2003 improve the overall health and quality of life of the rural poor. This works by enhancing existing development schemes by supporting locally available models of health and at the same time supplementing them with healthcare support through their own qualified and trained personnel.
Now, religious institutions are effecting another shift in strategy. “Drop by drop, a lake is filled…so everyone gives. Some give Rs10,000, some give Rs100, some give Rs50, some give Rs10… But everyone gives for social causes, even the poor,” said Fr Alias Gonzales, director of the Center for Social Action, an archdiocesan body that is a wing for social work in Mumbai, Raigad and Thane.
Every year, the Catholic Bishops’ Commission of India (CBCI) chooses themes that will define the agenda for Catholic charities across the country. “For instance, we had a Right to Food project last year. This year, the theme is Right to Livelihood for the poor,” said Gonzales, explaining a project that hopes to help poor entrepreneurs set up businesses.
But the scope of the programme extends beyond entrepreneurship to protecting the livelihoods of marginalized groups such as the fisherfolk of Mumbai whose villages and traditional fishing grounds are threatened by infrastructure projects. “This city belonged to them once. Now, even the little pocket they have will vanish, and then what will they do? We want development and (want to) help the empowerment of people, but we also want to make sure that groups of people are not left behind,” said Gonzales.
His sentiment reflects the concerns within religious organizations, mirroring the ongoing debate on inclusion that is politically playing out across the country. For these organizations, the question is an important one as they seek to adapt to a new focus: how to balance charities that helps others help themselves, while continuing to help those who cannot help themselves? And as they choose to invest in individual empowerment, entrepreneurs and social causes that resonate with the masses, such as corruption and equal opportunity, the nature of religious philanthropy in India is transforming.
“Last week, on the NDTV show, We the People, they were talking about the ‘coming of age’ of philanthropy in India. One man said if he had Rs1 lakh and he had to choose between Mother Teresa and a businessman who would use it for education or entrepreneurship, he would give it to the businessman… People got upset with that. Rightly so... We cannot just forget the poor and the sick,” Gonzales said.
The Aga Khan Development Network embodies the idea that both ends of the spectrum must be served. Since Islam requires religious leaders to interpret the faith and also shoulder the responsibility of helping to improve the quality of life in their community and in the societies in which they live, this network of private, non-denominational agencies has focused on global issues of health, education, culture, and rural and economic development. At the same time, it runs free clinics and outreach centres such as the Cancer Rehabilitation Centre, where care extends from physical well-being to emotional wellbeing.
At the Prince Aly Khan Hospital in Mumbai, volunteers and cancer survivors help patients regain self-confidence and the tools to take back their lives. “I had cancer. I managed well, so the doctor sent a few patients to me after their surgery to talk and we realized that talking to someone who had been through a similar experience helped them,” said Anita Vesuwala, a breast cancer survivor who has run the centre since its inception.
Going forward, this trend will only accelerate, especially since the young demography—50% of India’s 1.3 billion is less than 25 years of age—would be ready to join the work force and opportunities may be hard to come by. By refocusing their focus on empowering people by providing them new skills, the philanthropy of religious institutions in the country could, if coordinated, provide an alternative path to economic inclusion.
[email protected]
http://www.livemint.com/2011/01/2100004 ... .html?h=A1
Religious institutions, traditionally the principal drivers of philanthropy in India, are rethinking their strategies and anecdotal examples show this shift is happening across all denominations
Mumbai: Normally, the Rural Development and Self Employment Training Institute (Rudset), a programme kicked off by the Sri Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara Educational Trust, would have been viewed as a routine project, albeit a little different, designed to provide a launch pad to budding rural entrepreneurs. It isn’t actually. The joint venture, which includes Syndicate Bank and Canara Bank as partners, is unique because of its third stakeholder: the Lord Manjutha Swamy Temple. Based out of Ujire, Karnataka, it is a pilot project, started in 1982 that helps unemployed young men and women set up businesses in just 30 days. “We help them get the business model in place, help them get loans, teach them the concepts of running a business, and hand-hold them as they become rural entrepreneurs,” said Veerendra Heggade, the chief priest of the temple.
Anecdotally, it is yet another example about how religious institutions, traditionally the principal drivers of philanthropy in India, are rethinking their strategies: teaching people how to fish instead of handing out fish. Empirically, it is difficult to establish. Not because of a lack of numbers. Instead, it has to do with the fact that there is no national database to tap.
For instance, the charity commission office of Mumbai knows there are more than 7,200 religious trusts in the city alone, but it is yet to reach out to counterparts elsewhere in the state and country to draw up a bigger picture. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is also no record of donations. A clerk who handles the religious trusts at the commission’s office in Mumbai, but did not want to be identified, admitted that even though all are required to submit audits under the Bombay Public Trusts Act, many of them do not do so until they are forced to.
Yet there are scores of examples to suggest that Heggade’s initiative is not the only one. According to him, the government now wants to take the programme national. “The bottom line is that if someone in the village wants to be self-employed, he should have help. We offer that help and monitor his progress for two years after,” said Heggade, adding that he already runs 25 such institutions across India and is willing to train personnel for all the new institutes the government will set up.
Also Read
Other stories in the series
The field they deal with
The use of religion to spur this new brand of philanthropy could be potentially powerful. According to the 2001 census, of the country’s 1.02 billion population, the proportion of Hindus was 80.5%, of Muslims was 13.4%, of Christians was 2.3%, and of Sikhs was 1.9%. Significantly, the anecdotal examples throwing light on this shift in approach to philanthropy is visible across all denominations.
Several big religious institutions have already moved well ahead in stepping in to fill the gap, where the government infrastructure has been found wanting, particularly in health services. A good example of this kind of work is that provided by the Sathya Sai Baba chain of hospitals to address the health needs of the not so poor. Similarly, the Isha Foundation, pioneered by Sadhguru, has undertaken the Action for Rural Rejuvenation in 2003 improve the overall health and quality of life of the rural poor. This works by enhancing existing development schemes by supporting locally available models of health and at the same time supplementing them with healthcare support through their own qualified and trained personnel.
Now, religious institutions are effecting another shift in strategy. “Drop by drop, a lake is filled…so everyone gives. Some give Rs10,000, some give Rs100, some give Rs50, some give Rs10… But everyone gives for social causes, even the poor,” said Fr Alias Gonzales, director of the Center for Social Action, an archdiocesan body that is a wing for social work in Mumbai, Raigad and Thane.
Every year, the Catholic Bishops’ Commission of India (CBCI) chooses themes that will define the agenda for Catholic charities across the country. “For instance, we had a Right to Food project last year. This year, the theme is Right to Livelihood for the poor,” said Gonzales, explaining a project that hopes to help poor entrepreneurs set up businesses.
But the scope of the programme extends beyond entrepreneurship to protecting the livelihoods of marginalized groups such as the fisherfolk of Mumbai whose villages and traditional fishing grounds are threatened by infrastructure projects. “This city belonged to them once. Now, even the little pocket they have will vanish, and then what will they do? We want development and (want to) help the empowerment of people, but we also want to make sure that groups of people are not left behind,” said Gonzales.
His sentiment reflects the concerns within religious organizations, mirroring the ongoing debate on inclusion that is politically playing out across the country. For these organizations, the question is an important one as they seek to adapt to a new focus: how to balance charities that helps others help themselves, while continuing to help those who cannot help themselves? And as they choose to invest in individual empowerment, entrepreneurs and social causes that resonate with the masses, such as corruption and equal opportunity, the nature of religious philanthropy in India is transforming.
“Last week, on the NDTV show, We the People, they were talking about the ‘coming of age’ of philanthropy in India. One man said if he had Rs1 lakh and he had to choose between Mother Teresa and a businessman who would use it for education or entrepreneurship, he would give it to the businessman… People got upset with that. Rightly so... We cannot just forget the poor and the sick,” Gonzales said.
The Aga Khan Development Network embodies the idea that both ends of the spectrum must be served. Since Islam requires religious leaders to interpret the faith and also shoulder the responsibility of helping to improve the quality of life in their community and in the societies in which they live, this network of private, non-denominational agencies has focused on global issues of health, education, culture, and rural and economic development. At the same time, it runs free clinics and outreach centres such as the Cancer Rehabilitation Centre, where care extends from physical well-being to emotional wellbeing.
At the Prince Aly Khan Hospital in Mumbai, volunteers and cancer survivors help patients regain self-confidence and the tools to take back their lives. “I had cancer. I managed well, so the doctor sent a few patients to me after their surgery to talk and we realized that talking to someone who had been through a similar experience helped them,” said Anita Vesuwala, a breast cancer survivor who has run the centre since its inception.
Going forward, this trend will only accelerate, especially since the young demography—50% of India’s 1.3 billion is less than 25 years of age—would be ready to join the work force and opportunities may be hard to come by. By refocusing their focus on empowering people by providing them new skills, the philanthropy of religious institutions in the country could, if coordinated, provide an alternative path to economic inclusion.
[email protected]
http://www.livemint.com/2011/01/2100004 ... .html?h=A1
January 31, 2011, 9:15 pm
When Microcredit Won’t Do
By TINA ROSENBERG
If you asked poverty experts to name the single most significant new concept in the field in the last few decades, chances are they would say microcredit. Microcredit is the lending of very small amounts of money to very poor people to help them invest in things that have the potential to bring income later on — a loan of $50 to buy a sewing machine to make clothes, for instance, or piglets to raise and sell. It reaches nearly 100 million clients in more than 100 countries.
One of the reasons that microcredit is so exciting is that its benefits can go beyond the women (and they are almost all women) who borrow money. Not only does their increase in income add to the economy of the whole village, they can start businesses that sell needed goods and services to their neighbors. After all, much of rural development involves bringing to villages the same things that city dwellers take for granted. For example, a borrower can use her loan to buy a cell phone and charge her neighbors for calls and messages. She has a new business and her neighbors have a link to the outside world.
But microcredit isn’t a panacea. It has always been vulnerable to abuse. The most recent example is a scandal in India, where banks have been luring microborrowers into excessive debt, just as predatory lenders lured millions of Americans into unsustainable mortgages. Loans can be malignant. Some people shouldn’t take on debt. Some businesses are too risky. And the temptation is always present to spend the loan on food for the family or shoes for the children.
In the hills of rural Guatemala, a different kind of microfinance, one that doesn’t involve loans, is doing something microcredit can’t. A company called Soluciones Comunitarias (“community solutions”) is selling products that improve the health and prosperity of villagers, and doing it in a sustainable way while providing rural people — the vast majority of them women — with new business opportunities that do not require risk or debt.
Dominga Akalo‏, a Guatemalan MicroConsignment Model entrepreneur, tracks sales and inventory in a village in Solola.Community Enterprise Solutions Dominga Akalo, a Guatemalan Soluciones entrepreneur, tracks sales and inventory in a village in Solola.
Soluciones Comunitarias uses the same model employed by second-hand clothing and furniture shops in the United States and elsewhere: consignment. It’s an old idea. What’s new is using it to improve the lives of the rural poor.
Take reading glasses. Imagine you are a rural Guatemalan in your forties. You make a living as a tailor, weaver, carpenter or mechanic, but to your horror, your close vision is getting more blurry each day. It seems like the end of your livelihood. If you were middle-class and lived in a city this wouldn’t be a big deal — you’d just get reading glasses. But not only were these not available in villages, few rural Guatemalans even knew about them. Their progressive blurriness seemed, to them, incurable.
Microcredit cannot help get reading glasses to Guatemalans in mountain villages. With microcredit, an entrepreneur would first take out a loan, then buy an assortment of glasses, sell them to her neighbors and repay the loan. But there’s no existing market for reading glasses. A good sales force can create one, by teaching people that their vision problems are curable — and that this is the cure. And while it’s not hard for an ambitious entrepreneur to learn to test eyes and find the right glasses, someone has to teach her. She has to be confident in her ability to sell people a product they don’t realize they need. She has to acquire the credibility to sell a health product. It’s one thing to take on debt to buy a cell phone or baby chicks to sell — she knows there will be a market for phone calls and chickens. Reading glasses are too much of an unknown. “Lots of women are afraid of debt,” said Clara Luz de Montezuma, a Guatemalan who trains women entrepreneurs for Soluciones. “When you borrow money, you fear you won’t be successful, and it will be very difficult to pay it back.”
Greg Van Kirk was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nebaj, Guatemala, a town of about 10,000 people in a mountainous Mayan region, when he thought of consignment as the solution. He was an unusual Peace Corps volunteer, having already had one career as an investment banker. He had worked in structured finance for UBS, helping companies do complex deals to buy, sell or lease airplanes and power plants.
Greg Van Kirk teaches Margarita, a Guatemalan entrepreneur, how to give an eye exam.Darby FilmsGreg Van Kirk teaches an entrepreneur how to give an eye exam.
Van Kirk’s adventures in less-structured finance didn’t start with reading glasses, but with cookstoves. He saw that families in the region cooked on open fires on the dirt floors inside their houses. Their ceilings were black from smoke. People coughed all the time and children were always sick. (Respiratory illnesses are a leading cause of death in poor countries, and indoor cooking is a significant cause.) Open-pit fires, moreover, were inefficient. The heat dispersed, and only one pot could be heated at a time. That meant the family had to collect or buy a lot of firewood. Moreover, fires were unsafe, especially for children, and cooking on the floor was unhealthy, luring ants and the family’s chickens into the house.
Van Kirk worked with a local mason named Augustín Corrio to try to find something better. Corrio took a standard stove design and rejiggered it in various ways. The best model had cement block legs, a brick chamber surrounding the fire on three sides, a metal sheet over the fire so several pots could be heated at once, and a chimney to take the smoke outside the house. This stove used 60 to 70 percent less wood than an open fire — so even though it costs about $100 it could pay for itself quickly. Buyers could pay in installments. It could be locally produced from basic construction materials.
The problem was how to sell it on a wide scale. No micro-borrower would take out the enormous loan necessary to buy a number of stoves to resell.
An Ixil Guatemalan woman with her improved cookstove provided through the MicroConsignment Model.Community Enterprise Solutions An Ixil Guatemalan woman with her improved cookstove provided through Soluciones.
Van Kirk thought that consignment was the answer. With consignment, a supplier gives a product to a retailer, who then sells it. After the sale is completed, the retailer reimburses the seller, keeping a commission. The risk is taken not by the retailer, but by the supplier. Van Kirk made a deal with Corrio: Corrio went around to groups of people in Nebaj and surrounding villages to talk about the stove and show pictures. When a family ordered one, Corrio built it right in their house with materials Van Kirk had bought for him. Families paid in installments about equal to the money they saved by buying less wood. As payments came in, he repaid Van Kirk and kept a commission.
The stoves and the consignment model were both successful. Soon Van Kirk and a fellow Peace Corps volunteer, George Glickley, began to train local women to sell the stoves and protective glasses, eye drops and reading glasses supplied by VisionSpring, a nonprofit organization that sells eye glasses to poor people all over the world. (My co-author, David Bornstein, is a member of VisionSpring’s board.)
VisionSpring had started out using microcredit for part of its sales — its retailers took out loans to buy glasses to sell. But it didn’t work very well. “We needed a financing arm — but we weren’t a microfinance institution,” said Malini Krishna, the company’s vice president of development. At Van Kirk’s urging, in 2004 the organization switched from microcredit to a consignment model. “Why put all that risk on somebody up front?” said Krishna. “Why not help them put the glasses out there and then get repaid when glasses sell?”
One of the first entrepreneurs Glickley and Van Kirk trained was Yolanda García. She was a primary school graduate and housewife — she knew the men because Glickley had lived in her family’s house when he was in the Peace Corps. Consignment was key for her, she said. “If I had had to take out a loan I wouldn’t have done it. I always felt I wanted to do something, but we didn’t have the economic resources beyond what we needed for the day.”
Maria, a Guatemalan MicroConsignment Model entrepreneur, administering an eye exam in a village in Quetzaltenango.Community Enterprise SolutionsA Soluciones entrepreneur administered an eye exam in a village in Quetzaltenango.
Van Kirk and Glickley trained her in how to test eyes and fit glasses, but more important was boosting her confidence to sell a mystery product. “No one knew about reading glasses,” she said. “People thought I was crazy.” That wasn’t the only obstacle. Her first customer was eager — she wanted to be able to read her Bible again. “But who will do the examination?” she said, looking around. Clearly, there was no doctor there.
“I will,” said García.
García nervously took out her charts and instruments. A few minutes later, the customer was reading small print and grinning from ear to ear.
Related
More From Fixes
Read previous contributions to this series.
“Luckily, “the ‘aha!’ moment comes quickly,” says VisionSpring’s Krishna.
Still, García said, it was not a very successful campaign. She sold five pair of glasses and netted 65 quetzales — about $8. But García was thrilled to be earning anything. She spent the money on school supplies for her kids.
In 2006, Van Kirk and Glickley founded Soluciones. Its entrepreneurs — the vast majority of them women — now travel from village to village selling glasses, water-purifying buckets, solar flashlights, a solar panel that powers a lamp and cell phone charger, eye drops, sunglasses, energy-efficient light bulbs and vegetable seed packets. (The stoves are mainly sold around Nebaj.) A campaign in a village takes two days — one for publicity and one for sales — and usually nets each entrepreneurs some 200 quetzales, although once in a while a lucky salesperson can triple that. Van Kirk said that a new salesman started just two weeks ago and has already earned $100 — more than he would make in two or three months in a different job.
Soluciones is still very small. In the last two years, it has sold fewer than 7,000 pairs of glasses. The solar lamps are the most popular big-ticket item, with 3,000 sold since their debut. Soluciones today is owned and run by eight Guatemalans who were its original entrepreneurs, including Yolanda García and Clara Luz de Montezuma. By the end of the year, it will be running a consistent profit.
Soluciones is an incubator, testing new strategies and new products that may some day sell all over the world. (Van Kirk and Glickley have more information about their non-profit efforts at cesolutions.org.) Improved cookstoves, reading glasses, water purifiers, solar lamps — these are all products that can provide equity, in the form of ability to work and better health, to villagers who before only had access to microcredit debt. Yet the real news here isn’t the cookstove or the lamp. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of such practical and ingenious products exist. Yet they do little good if the rural poor can’t use them. A constant drumbeat of the Fixes column is that the more important innovation is the delivery mechanism.
Is microconsignment a system that can deliver these products on a sustainable basis and large scale to people who need them? If so, how? Saturday’s column will respond to comments, and will explore answers to those questions.
Join Fixes on Facebook »
Tina Rosenberg
Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and now a contributing writer for the paper’s Sunday magazine. Her new book, “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World,” is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... n&emc=tya3
When Microcredit Won’t Do
By TINA ROSENBERG
If you asked poverty experts to name the single most significant new concept in the field in the last few decades, chances are they would say microcredit. Microcredit is the lending of very small amounts of money to very poor people to help them invest in things that have the potential to bring income later on — a loan of $50 to buy a sewing machine to make clothes, for instance, or piglets to raise and sell. It reaches nearly 100 million clients in more than 100 countries.
One of the reasons that microcredit is so exciting is that its benefits can go beyond the women (and they are almost all women) who borrow money. Not only does their increase in income add to the economy of the whole village, they can start businesses that sell needed goods and services to their neighbors. After all, much of rural development involves bringing to villages the same things that city dwellers take for granted. For example, a borrower can use her loan to buy a cell phone and charge her neighbors for calls and messages. She has a new business and her neighbors have a link to the outside world.
But microcredit isn’t a panacea. It has always been vulnerable to abuse. The most recent example is a scandal in India, where banks have been luring microborrowers into excessive debt, just as predatory lenders lured millions of Americans into unsustainable mortgages. Loans can be malignant. Some people shouldn’t take on debt. Some businesses are too risky. And the temptation is always present to spend the loan on food for the family or shoes for the children.
In the hills of rural Guatemala, a different kind of microfinance, one that doesn’t involve loans, is doing something microcredit can’t. A company called Soluciones Comunitarias (“community solutions”) is selling products that improve the health and prosperity of villagers, and doing it in a sustainable way while providing rural people — the vast majority of them women — with new business opportunities that do not require risk or debt.
Dominga Akalo‏, a Guatemalan MicroConsignment Model entrepreneur, tracks sales and inventory in a village in Solola.Community Enterprise Solutions Dominga Akalo, a Guatemalan Soluciones entrepreneur, tracks sales and inventory in a village in Solola.
Soluciones Comunitarias uses the same model employed by second-hand clothing and furniture shops in the United States and elsewhere: consignment. It’s an old idea. What’s new is using it to improve the lives of the rural poor.
Take reading glasses. Imagine you are a rural Guatemalan in your forties. You make a living as a tailor, weaver, carpenter or mechanic, but to your horror, your close vision is getting more blurry each day. It seems like the end of your livelihood. If you were middle-class and lived in a city this wouldn’t be a big deal — you’d just get reading glasses. But not only were these not available in villages, few rural Guatemalans even knew about them. Their progressive blurriness seemed, to them, incurable.
Microcredit cannot help get reading glasses to Guatemalans in mountain villages. With microcredit, an entrepreneur would first take out a loan, then buy an assortment of glasses, sell them to her neighbors and repay the loan. But there’s no existing market for reading glasses. A good sales force can create one, by teaching people that their vision problems are curable — and that this is the cure. And while it’s not hard for an ambitious entrepreneur to learn to test eyes and find the right glasses, someone has to teach her. She has to be confident in her ability to sell people a product they don’t realize they need. She has to acquire the credibility to sell a health product. It’s one thing to take on debt to buy a cell phone or baby chicks to sell — she knows there will be a market for phone calls and chickens. Reading glasses are too much of an unknown. “Lots of women are afraid of debt,” said Clara Luz de Montezuma, a Guatemalan who trains women entrepreneurs for Soluciones. “When you borrow money, you fear you won’t be successful, and it will be very difficult to pay it back.”
Greg Van Kirk was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nebaj, Guatemala, a town of about 10,000 people in a mountainous Mayan region, when he thought of consignment as the solution. He was an unusual Peace Corps volunteer, having already had one career as an investment banker. He had worked in structured finance for UBS, helping companies do complex deals to buy, sell or lease airplanes and power plants.
Greg Van Kirk teaches Margarita, a Guatemalan entrepreneur, how to give an eye exam.Darby FilmsGreg Van Kirk teaches an entrepreneur how to give an eye exam.
Van Kirk’s adventures in less-structured finance didn’t start with reading glasses, but with cookstoves. He saw that families in the region cooked on open fires on the dirt floors inside their houses. Their ceilings were black from smoke. People coughed all the time and children were always sick. (Respiratory illnesses are a leading cause of death in poor countries, and indoor cooking is a significant cause.) Open-pit fires, moreover, were inefficient. The heat dispersed, and only one pot could be heated at a time. That meant the family had to collect or buy a lot of firewood. Moreover, fires were unsafe, especially for children, and cooking on the floor was unhealthy, luring ants and the family’s chickens into the house.
Van Kirk worked with a local mason named Augustín Corrio to try to find something better. Corrio took a standard stove design and rejiggered it in various ways. The best model had cement block legs, a brick chamber surrounding the fire on three sides, a metal sheet over the fire so several pots could be heated at once, and a chimney to take the smoke outside the house. This stove used 60 to 70 percent less wood than an open fire — so even though it costs about $100 it could pay for itself quickly. Buyers could pay in installments. It could be locally produced from basic construction materials.
The problem was how to sell it on a wide scale. No micro-borrower would take out the enormous loan necessary to buy a number of stoves to resell.
An Ixil Guatemalan woman with her improved cookstove provided through the MicroConsignment Model.Community Enterprise Solutions An Ixil Guatemalan woman with her improved cookstove provided through Soluciones.
Van Kirk thought that consignment was the answer. With consignment, a supplier gives a product to a retailer, who then sells it. After the sale is completed, the retailer reimburses the seller, keeping a commission. The risk is taken not by the retailer, but by the supplier. Van Kirk made a deal with Corrio: Corrio went around to groups of people in Nebaj and surrounding villages to talk about the stove and show pictures. When a family ordered one, Corrio built it right in their house with materials Van Kirk had bought for him. Families paid in installments about equal to the money they saved by buying less wood. As payments came in, he repaid Van Kirk and kept a commission.
The stoves and the consignment model were both successful. Soon Van Kirk and a fellow Peace Corps volunteer, George Glickley, began to train local women to sell the stoves and protective glasses, eye drops and reading glasses supplied by VisionSpring, a nonprofit organization that sells eye glasses to poor people all over the world. (My co-author, David Bornstein, is a member of VisionSpring’s board.)
VisionSpring had started out using microcredit for part of its sales — its retailers took out loans to buy glasses to sell. But it didn’t work very well. “We needed a financing arm — but we weren’t a microfinance institution,” said Malini Krishna, the company’s vice president of development. At Van Kirk’s urging, in 2004 the organization switched from microcredit to a consignment model. “Why put all that risk on somebody up front?” said Krishna. “Why not help them put the glasses out there and then get repaid when glasses sell?”
One of the first entrepreneurs Glickley and Van Kirk trained was Yolanda García. She was a primary school graduate and housewife — she knew the men because Glickley had lived in her family’s house when he was in the Peace Corps. Consignment was key for her, she said. “If I had had to take out a loan I wouldn’t have done it. I always felt I wanted to do something, but we didn’t have the economic resources beyond what we needed for the day.”
Maria, a Guatemalan MicroConsignment Model entrepreneur, administering an eye exam in a village in Quetzaltenango.Community Enterprise SolutionsA Soluciones entrepreneur administered an eye exam in a village in Quetzaltenango.
Van Kirk and Glickley trained her in how to test eyes and fit glasses, but more important was boosting her confidence to sell a mystery product. “No one knew about reading glasses,” she said. “People thought I was crazy.” That wasn’t the only obstacle. Her first customer was eager — she wanted to be able to read her Bible again. “But who will do the examination?” she said, looking around. Clearly, there was no doctor there.
“I will,” said García.
García nervously took out her charts and instruments. A few minutes later, the customer was reading small print and grinning from ear to ear.
Related
More From Fixes
Read previous contributions to this series.
“Luckily, “the ‘aha!’ moment comes quickly,” says VisionSpring’s Krishna.
Still, García said, it was not a very successful campaign. She sold five pair of glasses and netted 65 quetzales — about $8. But García was thrilled to be earning anything. She spent the money on school supplies for her kids.
In 2006, Van Kirk and Glickley founded Soluciones. Its entrepreneurs — the vast majority of them women — now travel from village to village selling glasses, water-purifying buckets, solar flashlights, a solar panel that powers a lamp and cell phone charger, eye drops, sunglasses, energy-efficient light bulbs and vegetable seed packets. (The stoves are mainly sold around Nebaj.) A campaign in a village takes two days — one for publicity and one for sales — and usually nets each entrepreneurs some 200 quetzales, although once in a while a lucky salesperson can triple that. Van Kirk said that a new salesman started just two weeks ago and has already earned $100 — more than he would make in two or three months in a different job.
Soluciones is still very small. In the last two years, it has sold fewer than 7,000 pairs of glasses. The solar lamps are the most popular big-ticket item, with 3,000 sold since their debut. Soluciones today is owned and run by eight Guatemalans who were its original entrepreneurs, including Yolanda García and Clara Luz de Montezuma. By the end of the year, it will be running a consistent profit.
Soluciones is an incubator, testing new strategies and new products that may some day sell all over the world. (Van Kirk and Glickley have more information about their non-profit efforts at cesolutions.org.) Improved cookstoves, reading glasses, water purifiers, solar lamps — these are all products that can provide equity, in the form of ability to work and better health, to villagers who before only had access to microcredit debt. Yet the real news here isn’t the cookstove or the lamp. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of such practical and ingenious products exist. Yet they do little good if the rural poor can’t use them. A constant drumbeat of the Fixes column is that the more important innovation is the delivery mechanism.
Is microconsignment a system that can deliver these products on a sustainable basis and large scale to people who need them? If so, how? Saturday’s column will respond to comments, and will explore answers to those questions.
Join Fixes on Facebook »
Tina Rosenberg
Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and now a contributing writer for the paper’s Sunday magazine. Her new book, “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World,” is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... n&emc=tya3
Family's challenging past inspires £2.6 million programme to encourage new generation of African leaders
A husband and wife, who were forced with their families to leave the brutal dictatorship of 1970s Uganda, are making a generous donation to help a new generation of African leaders develop their skills.
US-based Firoz and Najma Lalji have made an initial gift of almost £1 million through their charitable foundation to help establish the Firoz and Najma Lalji Programme in African Leadership at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
Firoz and Najma LaljiEach year the programme will enable 30 high-achievers from Africa to attend an intensive executive training course in London . They will benefit from high quality teaching in areas including government, economics, development and law from LSE and partner universities around the world. Participants will later be invited to an annual forum in Africa to help refresh their skills and form leadership networks across the continent.
After meeting and marrying in their native Uganda, Mr and Mrs Lalji and their families were forced out of the country in 1972 when dictator Idi Amin expelled many of its Asian citizens. This came shortly after Mr Lalji had completed a degree in economics at LSE. The Laljis moved to Canada where Mr Lalji built up a successful chain of 225 camera stores in Canada and USA which was sold in 1997. He is now owner and chief executive of Zones Inc, a national provider of IT products and solutions to businesses, based in Seattle, Washington state.
The Programme in African Leadership will focus not on Africa in isolation, nor does it aim to teach Africans about Africa. Its main aim is to help some of Africa's most dynamic emerging leaders get access to high level academic thinking and policy ideas from around the world.
African Initiative logoThe programme, which will run for at least five years initially, will become a vital part of LSE's African Initiative. This was set up in 2009 to link African students and teachers into worldwide research networks and to improve international understanding of contemporary Africa. It is envisaged that the most successful of the Lalji leadership alumni will be invited back to LSE as occasional guest lecturers and will mentor students on the programme in future.
Mr and Mrs Lalji commented: 'This will be a highly-competitive programme that we hope will bring a new class of African leaders to the world stage. We know some of the difficulties that can hold back talent from Africa and we want to unleash and support the next generation of leaders.
'It is absolutely fitting that the programme should be established at LSE, whose alumni include many of those involved in the first wave of post-independence leadership, inspirational figures such as Jomo Kenyatta and Dr Kwame Nkrumah.We hope others will join us in supporting a venture which offers such an innovative approach to globalising African talent.
'Our vision is that the programme will foster emerging leaders who promote the best possible social and economic development in their countries and contribute to helping alleviate poverty in Africa.'
Mr Lalji added: 'One of my teachers at LSE, Margaret Mead, told me and my classmates to "never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." I have remained inspired by her words and it is bearing this in mind that Najma and I make our gift to LSE'.
The initial £1 million gift will help set up the programme's infrastructure. Once it is established, the Laljis have agreed to make a second donation of £1.6 million towards bursaries and final delivery.
The first participants will join the programme in September 2011. While most of the original course content will be provided by experts from LSE, it is hoped that faculty from some or all of LSE's global partner institutions will join the programme over the coming years. LSE's global partners are the University of Cape Town, Sciences Po in Paris, Columbia University in New York, Peking University and the National University of Singapore.
Professor Thandika Mkandwire, who holds the first Chair in African Development at LSE and leads the African Initiative, said: 'This is not just an extremely generous donation but an extremely well thought out initiative which can transform the relationship between African leaders and their peers around the world. For too long we have allowed Africa's best minds to be cut off from education and training of the highest quality.
'This programme will help give African leaders a sense of confidence and the ability to work on an equal footing with the rest of the world. I am proud and pleased that Firoz and Najma Lalji have chosen to work with LSE on this innovative project.'
A director for the programme will be appointed in early 2011 and will oversee curriculum development, with input from Professor Mkandawire. Key areas that will be addressed include governance, public management, finance, social policy, politics of policy advice, enterprise development, globalisation and strategy, international diplomacy, international economic law and international tax systems.
Firoz and Najma Lalji have already provided support of $1 million to endow a Master's scholarship at LSE, which targets students from Uganda. A third Lalji scholar is studying at LSE this year. The youngest of the Lalji's two daughters, Natasha, followed her father's path by studying at LSE, graduating with a BSc in Social Policy and Administration in 2009.
More information about LSE's African Initiative
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/news ... rican.aspx
A husband and wife, who were forced with their families to leave the brutal dictatorship of 1970s Uganda, are making a generous donation to help a new generation of African leaders develop their skills.
US-based Firoz and Najma Lalji have made an initial gift of almost £1 million through their charitable foundation to help establish the Firoz and Najma Lalji Programme in African Leadership at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
Firoz and Najma LaljiEach year the programme will enable 30 high-achievers from Africa to attend an intensive executive training course in London . They will benefit from high quality teaching in areas including government, economics, development and law from LSE and partner universities around the world. Participants will later be invited to an annual forum in Africa to help refresh their skills and form leadership networks across the continent.
After meeting and marrying in their native Uganda, Mr and Mrs Lalji and their families were forced out of the country in 1972 when dictator Idi Amin expelled many of its Asian citizens. This came shortly after Mr Lalji had completed a degree in economics at LSE. The Laljis moved to Canada where Mr Lalji built up a successful chain of 225 camera stores in Canada and USA which was sold in 1997. He is now owner and chief executive of Zones Inc, a national provider of IT products and solutions to businesses, based in Seattle, Washington state.
The Programme in African Leadership will focus not on Africa in isolation, nor does it aim to teach Africans about Africa. Its main aim is to help some of Africa's most dynamic emerging leaders get access to high level academic thinking and policy ideas from around the world.
African Initiative logoThe programme, which will run for at least five years initially, will become a vital part of LSE's African Initiative. This was set up in 2009 to link African students and teachers into worldwide research networks and to improve international understanding of contemporary Africa. It is envisaged that the most successful of the Lalji leadership alumni will be invited back to LSE as occasional guest lecturers and will mentor students on the programme in future.
Mr and Mrs Lalji commented: 'This will be a highly-competitive programme that we hope will bring a new class of African leaders to the world stage. We know some of the difficulties that can hold back talent from Africa and we want to unleash and support the next generation of leaders.
'It is absolutely fitting that the programme should be established at LSE, whose alumni include many of those involved in the first wave of post-independence leadership, inspirational figures such as Jomo Kenyatta and Dr Kwame Nkrumah.We hope others will join us in supporting a venture which offers such an innovative approach to globalising African talent.
'Our vision is that the programme will foster emerging leaders who promote the best possible social and economic development in their countries and contribute to helping alleviate poverty in Africa.'
Mr Lalji added: 'One of my teachers at LSE, Margaret Mead, told me and my classmates to "never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." I have remained inspired by her words and it is bearing this in mind that Najma and I make our gift to LSE'.
The initial £1 million gift will help set up the programme's infrastructure. Once it is established, the Laljis have agreed to make a second donation of £1.6 million towards bursaries and final delivery.
The first participants will join the programme in September 2011. While most of the original course content will be provided by experts from LSE, it is hoped that faculty from some or all of LSE's global partner institutions will join the programme over the coming years. LSE's global partners are the University of Cape Town, Sciences Po in Paris, Columbia University in New York, Peking University and the National University of Singapore.
Professor Thandika Mkandwire, who holds the first Chair in African Development at LSE and leads the African Initiative, said: 'This is not just an extremely generous donation but an extremely well thought out initiative which can transform the relationship between African leaders and their peers around the world. For too long we have allowed Africa's best minds to be cut off from education and training of the highest quality.
'This programme will help give African leaders a sense of confidence and the ability to work on an equal footing with the rest of the world. I am proud and pleased that Firoz and Najma Lalji have chosen to work with LSE on this innovative project.'
A director for the programme will be appointed in early 2011 and will oversee curriculum development, with input from Professor Mkandawire. Key areas that will be addressed include governance, public management, finance, social policy, politics of policy advice, enterprise development, globalisation and strategy, international diplomacy, international economic law and international tax systems.
Firoz and Najma Lalji have already provided support of $1 million to endow a Master's scholarship at LSE, which targets students from Uganda. A third Lalji scholar is studying at LSE this year. The youngest of the Lalji's two daughters, Natasha, followed her father's path by studying at LSE, graduating with a BSc in Social Policy and Administration in 2009.
More information about LSE's African Initiative
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/news ... rican.aspx
...Coming soon to Salamieh.
By Ali Al-Khateeb, translation by Sameer Kassam
Published on 28 February 2010
The Salamieh ReefNet Centre, in cooperation with the British NUHA Foundation, has launched its English Conversation Programme (ECP), which can be considered as the first activity of the ‘Public English Library’ Project that will be inaugurated soon in the centre of Salamieh as the first library of its kind in Syria.”
E-Syria was amongst the attendees of the first meeting for participants held on Wednesday 24th February 2010. There, Mr. Nabil Eid, head of the ReefNet Centre in Salamieh, commenced proceedings by speaking to us about the ‘Public English Library’ Project.”
“The Public English Library”, he said, “offers its visitors a large collection of diverse English language references which will allow for the building of students’ capacities and the strengthening of their skills in using the English Language. Additionally, it will offer several training and improvement courses specifically for the English Language, and all of this will be undertaken free of charge for the children of this region.”
Mr. Nabil Eid also spoke to us about the background to the launching of this distinctive project by reviewing the steps taken thus far. He said: “Recently, a memorandum of understanding was signed between the British NUHA Foundation and the ‘Strategic Programme for the Use of Information and Communication Technology in Social and Economic Development in Syria’, as represented by the Ministry of Communication and Technology and the UNDP through its ReefNet Programme, in the knowledge that NUHA is a British foundation which will supply books and various programmes on a complementary basis to the local communities.”
Mr. Nabil Eid added: “This library is the first of its kind in Syria and an agreement is currently in the pipeline for the development of a similar library in the Abu Kamal region in the Governorate of Deir Al-Zur, as well as for many other regions in Syria within local communities, and all this forms part of the guidelines to transform Telecentres into Knowledge Hubs.”
Mr. Sameer Kassam, a British national, is working as a volunteer with the UNDP programme, and is supervising the ECP, which is the programme’s first activity. Speaking to me about this, he said: “The ECP is divided into three parts, the first for University Students, the second for English teachers and the third for people actively involved in the local community in Salamieh. The courses will last for just over two months and during that period I will drill the students in the English language in a way that differs from school curricula. Both I and the team I work with will think about what the students need and want from this language, and then we will select a training curriculum, for I do not wish to impose my thoughts on them, rather they are the ones who should decide what they want to speak about.”
Mr. Sameer Kassam studied Arabic and Spanish, and he is preparing to take a Masters degree in Middle East Studies, having spent 6 months at the University of Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. However, in his remaining time here, he wants to give something to the city of Salamieh which, as he said with a smile, he loves.”
I also asked him about what motivates a young man like him to offer voluntary services in Salamieh. “My parents raised me to believe that the culture of giving is a wonderful thing”, he replied, “and through my numerous visits to this city it has endeared itself to me, and I want to give something back to its people in the time that I have before I leave. So, we researched as to what could be offered that would be both beneficial and sustainable, and as you can see, here we have the ECP which has begun today.”
On the extent of the participation of the students in the presentation session, he said: “Generally, when there is a large room filled with very many students, the participation level will be relatively low, for they are not very used to dealing with foreigners and they lack conversational practice, in addition to feeling shy, due to the somewhat different atmosphere of this session. However, I noticed, from their answers to the questionnaire, that they have written well and I will review these questionnaires to deduce the topics for future sessions.”
As a final remark he commented: “The enthusiasm which the students brought with them today perhaps represents, for me, a sort of responsibility – that of the necessity to benefit them in the greatest way possible.”
Mr. Ismail Al-Khateeb, a student of English Literature, works with the ECP team in his capacity as a volunteer with the British NUHA Foundation. He explained to me his goal from volunteering by saying: “I personally hope that a culture of exposure to sources in their original language is spread in my city, for the benefit to the reader would be even greater. I want to thank Mr. Nibras Aldibbiat who has played a great role in the accomplishments of the ‘Public English Library’ Programme and in the NUHA Foundation. I also wish to thank him as he opened the door for me to be here at its first activity.”
One of the student participants, Mais Habeel, had a simple comment to make: “I think that I am fortunate to be a participant in a programme that is being done for the first time in Salamieh. Truth be told, I am in need of an opportunity like this because it will go a long way in helping me to find employment opportunities inside and outside Syria, especially as I study Archaeology.”
A programme of this sort, if the efforts and opportunities are made available to complete its expansion to the national level, will surely open wider horizons in the thinking of our youth and, of course, in their various subjects of study. When all is said and done, I cannot but wish for it all the continuity and success.
Please click here to return to the ECP Pilot page, or here to find out more about NUHA in the press.
More on Nibras Aldibbiat: http://iis.ac.uk/view_person.asp?type=user&id=100488
More on Sameer Kassam: http://www.theismaili.org/cms/506/Two-c ... mon-values
By Ali Al-Khateeb, translation by Sameer Kassam
Published on 28 February 2010
The Salamieh ReefNet Centre, in cooperation with the British NUHA Foundation, has launched its English Conversation Programme (ECP), which can be considered as the first activity of the ‘Public English Library’ Project that will be inaugurated soon in the centre of Salamieh as the first library of its kind in Syria.”
E-Syria was amongst the attendees of the first meeting for participants held on Wednesday 24th February 2010. There, Mr. Nabil Eid, head of the ReefNet Centre in Salamieh, commenced proceedings by speaking to us about the ‘Public English Library’ Project.”
“The Public English Library”, he said, “offers its visitors a large collection of diverse English language references which will allow for the building of students’ capacities and the strengthening of their skills in using the English Language. Additionally, it will offer several training and improvement courses specifically for the English Language, and all of this will be undertaken free of charge for the children of this region.”
Mr. Nabil Eid also spoke to us about the background to the launching of this distinctive project by reviewing the steps taken thus far. He said: “Recently, a memorandum of understanding was signed between the British NUHA Foundation and the ‘Strategic Programme for the Use of Information and Communication Technology in Social and Economic Development in Syria’, as represented by the Ministry of Communication and Technology and the UNDP through its ReefNet Programme, in the knowledge that NUHA is a British foundation which will supply books and various programmes on a complementary basis to the local communities.”
Mr. Nabil Eid added: “This library is the first of its kind in Syria and an agreement is currently in the pipeline for the development of a similar library in the Abu Kamal region in the Governorate of Deir Al-Zur, as well as for many other regions in Syria within local communities, and all this forms part of the guidelines to transform Telecentres into Knowledge Hubs.”
Mr. Sameer Kassam, a British national, is working as a volunteer with the UNDP programme, and is supervising the ECP, which is the programme’s first activity. Speaking to me about this, he said: “The ECP is divided into three parts, the first for University Students, the second for English teachers and the third for people actively involved in the local community in Salamieh. The courses will last for just over two months and during that period I will drill the students in the English language in a way that differs from school curricula. Both I and the team I work with will think about what the students need and want from this language, and then we will select a training curriculum, for I do not wish to impose my thoughts on them, rather they are the ones who should decide what they want to speak about.”
Mr. Sameer Kassam studied Arabic and Spanish, and he is preparing to take a Masters degree in Middle East Studies, having spent 6 months at the University of Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. However, in his remaining time here, he wants to give something to the city of Salamieh which, as he said with a smile, he loves.”
I also asked him about what motivates a young man like him to offer voluntary services in Salamieh. “My parents raised me to believe that the culture of giving is a wonderful thing”, he replied, “and through my numerous visits to this city it has endeared itself to me, and I want to give something back to its people in the time that I have before I leave. So, we researched as to what could be offered that would be both beneficial and sustainable, and as you can see, here we have the ECP which has begun today.”
On the extent of the participation of the students in the presentation session, he said: “Generally, when there is a large room filled with very many students, the participation level will be relatively low, for they are not very used to dealing with foreigners and they lack conversational practice, in addition to feeling shy, due to the somewhat different atmosphere of this session. However, I noticed, from their answers to the questionnaire, that they have written well and I will review these questionnaires to deduce the topics for future sessions.”
As a final remark he commented: “The enthusiasm which the students brought with them today perhaps represents, for me, a sort of responsibility – that of the necessity to benefit them in the greatest way possible.”
Mr. Ismail Al-Khateeb, a student of English Literature, works with the ECP team in his capacity as a volunteer with the British NUHA Foundation. He explained to me his goal from volunteering by saying: “I personally hope that a culture of exposure to sources in their original language is spread in my city, for the benefit to the reader would be even greater. I want to thank Mr. Nibras Aldibbiat who has played a great role in the accomplishments of the ‘Public English Library’ Programme and in the NUHA Foundation. I also wish to thank him as he opened the door for me to be here at its first activity.”
One of the student participants, Mais Habeel, had a simple comment to make: “I think that I am fortunate to be a participant in a programme that is being done for the first time in Salamieh. Truth be told, I am in need of an opportunity like this because it will go a long way in helping me to find employment opportunities inside and outside Syria, especially as I study Archaeology.”
A programme of this sort, if the efforts and opportunities are made available to complete its expansion to the national level, will surely open wider horizons in the thinking of our youth and, of course, in their various subjects of study. When all is said and done, I cannot but wish for it all the continuity and success.
Please click here to return to the ECP Pilot page, or here to find out more about NUHA in the press.
More on Nibras Aldibbiat: http://iis.ac.uk/view_person.asp?type=user&id=100488
More on Sameer Kassam: http://www.theismaili.org/cms/506/Two-c ... mon-values
February 14, 2011, 9:30 pm
Villages Without Doctors
By TINA ROSENBERG
For the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about an idea that can make people healthier while bringing down health care costs, both in poor countries and in the United States.
The strategy is to move beyond doctors — to take the work of health care and shift down from doctors and nurses to lay people, peers and family. In the United States and other wealthy countries, lay people can fill in the gaps in left by doctors’ care. In poor countries, people with no or little formal medical training are successfully substituting for doctors and nurses.
This is fortunate, as villagers in many developing countries rarely see doctors or nurses. Especially in English-speaking parts of Africa and south Asia, doctors and nurses are often poached by better pay and conditions offered by Canada, the United States, Britain and Australia. Half the doctors trained in Ethiopia or Zambia, for example, have emigrated. (And each doctor who goes from, say, Kenya to Britain represents a transfer of about $600,000 from a poor country to a wealthy one.)
More...
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... &emc=thab1
Villages Without Doctors
By TINA ROSENBERG
For the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about an idea that can make people healthier while bringing down health care costs, both in poor countries and in the United States.
The strategy is to move beyond doctors — to take the work of health care and shift down from doctors and nurses to lay people, peers and family. In the United States and other wealthy countries, lay people can fill in the gaps in left by doctors’ care. In poor countries, people with no or little formal medical training are successfully substituting for doctors and nurses.
This is fortunate, as villagers in many developing countries rarely see doctors or nurses. Especially in English-speaking parts of Africa and south Asia, doctors and nurses are often poached by better pay and conditions offered by Canada, the United States, Britain and Australia. Half the doctors trained in Ethiopia or Zambia, for example, have emigrated. (And each doctor who goes from, say, Kenya to Britain represents a transfer of about $600,000 from a poor country to a wealthy one.)
More...
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20 ... &emc=thab1
The Will To Build
Alykhan and Farzana got married in May 2010. They built a school in
Kenya with the money they received as Wedding Gifts. Here is the thank
you note and video that they sent to the donors:
(1:15) Video:
http://videos3.freethechildren.com/watc ... zanavirij/
It's a short clip of Marc Keilburger, the co-founder of Free The
Children, in Motony, Kenya (the community where you helped us build a
school). We just received the video and we wanted to share it with you
and say Thank You!! It was because of your generosity that we were able
to make our dream a reality.
Now Latisha Daya who is 16 years old, is inspired by what Farzana and
Aly did for their wedding. So she has formed an Ismaili Youth Group who
is planning to go to Kenya this summer to build another school for the
same Charity- Free The Children.
They are holding a fundraiser. Please see Information below. Tickets
are $25 each, of which $15 will go to Sagan Banquet Hall and $10 to
charity.
========================================================================
=====================================
"THE WILL TO BUILD" FUNDRAISER DINNER AND DANCE
A dinner and dance fundraiser event will be held on March 18th at Sagan
Banquet Hall ( www.saganbanquethall.com ). All proceeds will be going
towards our 'Me to We' trip to Kenya.
Most of the children in this village outside Nairobi are not literate
and have never gone to school. In addition, some of the others have been
taken out of school after the first couple years so that they may work
out in the fields ...and help their parents. Currently, a greater
understanding for the need for education has been seen in this village
and more and more children are looking to go to school. The schools
however are far and packed with students. One small school contains only
1 classroom and is packed with 300 students! Me to We and Free the
Children are working in these villages in Kenya and in other parts of
Africa to build more schools, to train more teachers, and to provide
free education for all. This trip to Kenya this summer will help the
children in this village, providing them with the vital education they
need, and in turn, helping to build the foundation of a successful
society for the future.
Alykhan and Farzana got married in May 2010. They built a school in
Kenya with the money they received as Wedding Gifts. Here is the thank
you note and video that they sent to the donors:
(1:15) Video:
http://videos3.freethechildren.com/watc ... zanavirij/
It's a short clip of Marc Keilburger, the co-founder of Free The
Children, in Motony, Kenya (the community where you helped us build a
school). We just received the video and we wanted to share it with you
and say Thank You!! It was because of your generosity that we were able
to make our dream a reality.
Now Latisha Daya who is 16 years old, is inspired by what Farzana and
Aly did for their wedding. So she has formed an Ismaili Youth Group who
is planning to go to Kenya this summer to build another school for the
same Charity- Free The Children.
They are holding a fundraiser. Please see Information below. Tickets
are $25 each, of which $15 will go to Sagan Banquet Hall and $10 to
charity.
========================================================================
=====================================
"THE WILL TO BUILD" FUNDRAISER DINNER AND DANCE
A dinner and dance fundraiser event will be held on March 18th at Sagan
Banquet Hall ( www.saganbanquethall.com ). All proceeds will be going
towards our 'Me to We' trip to Kenya.
Most of the children in this village outside Nairobi are not literate
and have never gone to school. In addition, some of the others have been
taken out of school after the first couple years so that they may work
out in the fields ...and help their parents. Currently, a greater
understanding for the need for education has been seen in this village
and more and more children are looking to go to school. The schools
however are far and packed with students. One small school contains only
1 classroom and is packed with 300 students! Me to We and Free the
Children are working in these villages in Kenya and in other parts of
Africa to build more schools, to train more teachers, and to provide
free education for all. This trip to Kenya this summer will help the
children in this village, providing them with the vital education they
need, and in turn, helping to build the foundation of a successful
society for the future.
There is a related video at:
http://www.vancouversun.com/health/Exil ... story.html
Exiled from Uganda as teen, New Westminster doctor returns to help children
New Westminster physician is responsible for establishing a club foot treatment campaign in Africa that is spreading internationally
By GERRY BELLETT, Vancouver Sun March 16, 2011
Dr. Shafique Pirani, an orthopedic surgeon, is one of the speakers at a Simon Fraser University symposium, “Engaging Diaspora in Development,” on Wednesday at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, 530 West Hastings St., from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Dr. Shafique Pirani, an orthopedic surgeon, is one of the speakers at a Simon Fraser University symposium, “Engaging Diaspora in Development,” on Wednesday at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, 530 West Hastings St., from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Photograph by: GLENN BAGLO, Vancouver Sun
In 1972, dictator Idi Amin read a message in the heavens telling him to expel all Ugandans of Indian origin from their African home.
The resulting diaspora included 15-year-old Shafique Pirani, who along with his parents, grandparents and five siblings, packed his life in a suitcase and fled before Amin’s 90-day deadline expired.
But it’s a measure of the human capacity for forgiveness that when the teenager grew up to become an eminent surgeon, he would return to his birth land to help cure Ugandan children of club foot deformity.
Dr. Shafique Pirani, an orthopedic surgeon, is one of the speakers at a Simon Fraser University symposium, “Engaging Diaspora in Development,” on Wednesday at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, 530 West Hastings St., from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m.
The New Westminster physician is responsible for an international club foot treatment campaign that can be traced to a 1995 visit he and his parents made to Uganda, their first visit since the expulsion.
“It was only a five-day visit to see our home and the old school I went to, but the problem with club foot was apparent. By then I’d been practising several years and I had an interest in club foot because worldwide it affects one baby out of 150,000 born each year,” he said.
At that time, club foot was treated surgically, which placed it beyond the means of children in a poor country like Uganda. However, in 1997 Pirani discovered that an American physician, Ignacio Ponseti, had developed a non-surgical method of treating club foot. The Ponseti Method had been developed 50 years ago, but failed to catch on.
“I started using his technique. In club foot deformity the foot’s all there, it’s just twisted out of shape and people end up standing on top of the foot with their toes curled back,” he said.
Using the Ponseti Method “you push very gently and accurately on the foot to uncurl it and then put a cast on. You put another cast on five weeks later and make a slight incision in a tendon and after that the foot’s corrected and looks like normal. To keep it from coming back you put a brace on at night,” he said.
As the Ponseti Method doesn’t involve surgery, Pirani believed it could be taught to paramedics in Uganda, so in 1998 he put together the Uganda Clubfoot Project.
Beginning in 1999, he would revisit Uganda and on subsequent visits for the next four years would train paramedics in the Ponseti Method using $225,000 raised for the purpose by the Rotary Clubs of Burnaby and New Westminster.
In 2003, he evaluated the program and found the results had not been as successful as hoped.
“We found it hadn’t worked in all cases. There had been problems with supplies, a child would come back for the second cast and there was no plaster available, or no brace, or after we’d trained a paramedic they’d return to their clinics and their supervisors wouldn’t allow it,” he said.
“So now we formed the Uganda Sustainable Clubfoot Project. When I first went there as an orthopedic surgeon I didn’t have the skills to provide sustainability but now I brought with me public health professionals and the Uganda ministry of health became involved,” he said.
In 2004, the Canadian International Development Agency put up $1 million for a seven-year program to build capacity in the Ugandan health system so the procedure would be available at the country’s 38 clinics. It also trained medical and paramedical professionals and nurses to identify club foot in newborn babies. Last year, more than 700 children with club foot were treated.
“It costs about $150 per treatment which if you divide it by a life expectancy of 50 years comes out to $3 a year,” he said. “And when you realize that if you have such a condition in Uganda you can’t work, you won’t get married and the chances are you’ll live in poverty for the rest of your life. So it’s a bargain,” said Pirani who has visited Uganda 30 times in the last 10 years.
The program has been so successful that it has been expanded to Malawi, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Bangladesh and has drawn interest from Brazil, Honduras, India and Nepal.
http://www.vancouversun.com/health/Exil ... story.html
Exiled from Uganda as teen, New Westminster doctor returns to help children
New Westminster physician is responsible for establishing a club foot treatment campaign in Africa that is spreading internationally
By GERRY BELLETT, Vancouver Sun March 16, 2011
Dr. Shafique Pirani, an orthopedic surgeon, is one of the speakers at a Simon Fraser University symposium, “Engaging Diaspora in Development,” on Wednesday at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, 530 West Hastings St., from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Dr. Shafique Pirani, an orthopedic surgeon, is one of the speakers at a Simon Fraser University symposium, “Engaging Diaspora in Development,” on Wednesday at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, 530 West Hastings St., from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Photograph by: GLENN BAGLO, Vancouver Sun
In 1972, dictator Idi Amin read a message in the heavens telling him to expel all Ugandans of Indian origin from their African home.
The resulting diaspora included 15-year-old Shafique Pirani, who along with his parents, grandparents and five siblings, packed his life in a suitcase and fled before Amin’s 90-day deadline expired.
But it’s a measure of the human capacity for forgiveness that when the teenager grew up to become an eminent surgeon, he would return to his birth land to help cure Ugandan children of club foot deformity.
Dr. Shafique Pirani, an orthopedic surgeon, is one of the speakers at a Simon Fraser University symposium, “Engaging Diaspora in Development,” on Wednesday at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, 530 West Hastings St., from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m.
The New Westminster physician is responsible for an international club foot treatment campaign that can be traced to a 1995 visit he and his parents made to Uganda, their first visit since the expulsion.
“It was only a five-day visit to see our home and the old school I went to, but the problem with club foot was apparent. By then I’d been practising several years and I had an interest in club foot because worldwide it affects one baby out of 150,000 born each year,” he said.
At that time, club foot was treated surgically, which placed it beyond the means of children in a poor country like Uganda. However, in 1997 Pirani discovered that an American physician, Ignacio Ponseti, had developed a non-surgical method of treating club foot. The Ponseti Method had been developed 50 years ago, but failed to catch on.
“I started using his technique. In club foot deformity the foot’s all there, it’s just twisted out of shape and people end up standing on top of the foot with their toes curled back,” he said.
Using the Ponseti Method “you push very gently and accurately on the foot to uncurl it and then put a cast on. You put another cast on five weeks later and make a slight incision in a tendon and after that the foot’s corrected and looks like normal. To keep it from coming back you put a brace on at night,” he said.
As the Ponseti Method doesn’t involve surgery, Pirani believed it could be taught to paramedics in Uganda, so in 1998 he put together the Uganda Clubfoot Project.
Beginning in 1999, he would revisit Uganda and on subsequent visits for the next four years would train paramedics in the Ponseti Method using $225,000 raised for the purpose by the Rotary Clubs of Burnaby and New Westminster.
In 2003, he evaluated the program and found the results had not been as successful as hoped.
“We found it hadn’t worked in all cases. There had been problems with supplies, a child would come back for the second cast and there was no plaster available, or no brace, or after we’d trained a paramedic they’d return to their clinics and their supervisors wouldn’t allow it,” he said.
“So now we formed the Uganda Sustainable Clubfoot Project. When I first went there as an orthopedic surgeon I didn’t have the skills to provide sustainability but now I brought with me public health professionals and the Uganda ministry of health became involved,” he said.
In 2004, the Canadian International Development Agency put up $1 million for a seven-year program to build capacity in the Ugandan health system so the procedure would be available at the country’s 38 clinics. It also trained medical and paramedical professionals and nurses to identify club foot in newborn babies. Last year, more than 700 children with club foot were treated.
“It costs about $150 per treatment which if you divide it by a life expectancy of 50 years comes out to $3 a year,” he said. “And when you realize that if you have such a condition in Uganda you can’t work, you won’t get married and the chances are you’ll live in poverty for the rest of your life. So it’s a bargain,” said Pirani who has visited Uganda 30 times in the last 10 years.
The program has been so successful that it has been expanded to Malawi, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Bangladesh and has drawn interest from Brazil, Honduras, India and Nepal.
April 2, 2011
Doctors Go Far Afield to Battle Epidemics
By CELIA W. DUGGER
MASHAI, Lesotho — At a clinic in the mountains, reached only by crossing a churning river in a rowboat, Dr. Paul Young, a pediatrician raised in the housing projects of Savannah, Ga., soothed a fussy baby. She stared at him, fascinated, as he made soft popping sounds with his lips and listened to her heart through a stethoscope.
“I used to be afraid to look at the babies’ test results,” he said after examining a bunch of children, who were born healthy despite having H.I.V.-positive mothers. “But now, most of them are negative.”
Dr. Young, 33, and the nurses he trained here have persuaded many pregnant women to get tested and take the drugs that prevent them from passing the disease to their newborns. It is all part of a charitable effort he joined in 2008 for $40,000 a year and the chance to work in this AIDS-afflicted country, which has just one pediatrician in its entire government health system.
“If this was the last thing I did, if this was the only job I ever had in life, I would have served my purpose,” he said.
Dr. Young represents the surging interest of young Americans in combating the deadly epidemics ravaging the world’s poorest countries, fueled in part by the billions of dollars that the American government, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other organizations have poured into international health in recent years.
Across sub-Saharan Africa, an extreme shortage of health workers remains a critical barrier to fighting illness. The region bears a quarter of the world’s burden of disease, but has only 3 percent of its health care workers, according to the World Health Organization.
Public health experts say efforts like the one involving Dr. Young have proved particularly useful on a continent that sorely needs pediatricians, surgeons and other specialists to train African doctors and nurses in the field.
And demand for such opportunities is rising. More than 70 universities in the United States and Canada now offer formal academic programs in global health, most of them developed in just the past five years, according to the Consortium of Universities for Global Health.
“Today’s students really want to make a difference in the world,” said Michael H. Merson, director of Duke University’s Global Health Institute. “They have a passion for sacrifice and service. It reminds me of the ’60s.”
The children of powerful politicians are part of this new generation of global health enthusiasts. Vanessa Kerry, 34, a Harvard-trained doctor and the daughter of Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, is advocating a Peace Corps-like federal program that would send American doctors and nurses to work and train health workers in developing countries.
And Barbara Bush, 29, a daughter of former President George W. Bush, co-founded the nonprofit Global Health Corps, which this year sent 36 college graduates from eight countries to work with nonprofit groups, mostly in Rwanda, Burundi, Malawi and Uganda. More than 1,000 people applied for the yearlong fellowships.
The Pediatric AIDS Corps that sent Dr. Young here, largely financed by the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation and the Baylor College of Medicine, never advertised for applicants after the first class of doctors was recruited in 2005. Word of mouth produced far more highly qualified physicians from universities all over the United States than the project could ever hire.
In addition to the salary, the program paid down as much as $40,000 of the doctors’ educational debt for each year of service — making it possible for Dr. Young to join, though he owed $170,000 after his undergraduate and medical studies. His mother was an assembly-line worker, and in hard times the family relied on Medicaid. Dr. Young himself never had a steady pediatrician as a child.
With a laugh, he said that his friends back home asked him if he had running water or used an outhouse in Africa. “We’re not roughing it here by any means,” he tells them. He drives a 10-year-old Opel Corsa, but lives in a pleasant town house in the sleepy capital, Maseru, with wireless Internet and a housekeeper who comes twice a week. For the first time in his life, he has gone skiing — in Lesotho’s breathtaking mountains.
But it is the work that gives the job its meaning, the doctors say. Lineo Thahane attended Princeton University and got her medical degree at Washington University in St. Louis. It was a 2003 rotation in Lesotho’s main public hospital during her residency — when children were still dying of AIDS for lack of antiretroviral treatment — that made her want to return to Africa. Her parents were both from Lesotho, but she was born and raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
Dr. Thahane, 35, joined the first crop of Pediatric AIDS Corps doctors in Lesotho, and now helps her mother, Dr. Edith Mohapi, 64, who for 20 years managed pediatric outpatient services at Arlington Hospital in Virginia, to run Baylor’s pediatric H.I.V. programs in Lesotho.
“I felt, ‘This is where the need is,’ ” Dr. Thahane said.
Over the past five years, the corps has had 50 to 60 doctors working in Lesotho, Swaziland, Malawi and Botswana. The hospitals and clinics they supervise now care for more than 50,000 H.I.V.-positive children, Baylor estimates.
The project’s impact should also last beyond its financing, which ends in June. The 128 doctors who served in the corps in the past five years trained about 3,000 African professionals, who will carry on. And in July, Baylor will start another project with 32 pediatricians to work on a broader array of diseases.
Dr. Grace Phiri, an overworked Malawian who has been the only pediatrician in Lesotho’s government service for most of the past 17 years, said the arrival of 10 AIDS Corps doctors in 2006 — just as AIDS drugs for children were becoming more widely available — drastically improved the survival chances of H.I.V.-positive children.
Until 2005, not a single child with AIDS was on publicly financed antiretroviral therapy in Lesotho.
“Every morning, I had to check on who is alive and who is not alive,” she recalled. “So many passed away. Most of those dying were under the age of 2. It went on for years. You see, in the ’90s we didn’t even have enough kits for H.I.V. testing.”
Dr. Phiri, who spent every weekend on call for years, said the help from the corps doctors on the ward had lightened her load and improved care. She dreads their departure. “They have shared the weekends and covered me when I’m on holiday,” she said. “I’ve learned a lot from them.”
More than 6,500 children in Lesotho, a country with a population of two million people and the world’s third-highest rate of H.I.V. infection, now receive the lifesaving medications. While that is progress, it is still only about a quarter of those in need of treatment, according to Unaids, the United Nations AIDS agency.
Dr. Mphu Ramatlapeng, Lesotho’s minister of health, said the country could not have reached as many children without the corps.
“These were serious professionals willing to dirty their hands,” she said.
Dr. Young set off one recent morning for a village clinic he visits one day a month. He drove into the lush green mountains, past men draped in traditional blankets, through hamlets of mud huts crowned with conical thatched roofs, over crystalline streams flowing down from the peaks.
“They know me here in the mountains,” he said.
When he arrived at the clinic, families were already waiting on wooden benches to see him. Relebohile Mosehle, 27, an energetic nursing assistant he has trained, sat at his side in a small examination room. She lives at the clinic, which has neither running water nor electricity. She and a Kenyan nurse are the backbone of medical care in this area.
Tsiu Lerotholi, 49, and his grandson Mojalefa, 9, had come that morning, having hiked through the mountains for another month’s supply of antiretroviral medicines. Mojalefa’s parents had died of AIDS — and he and his grandparents have the disease.
The man and the boy took their almost empty bottles of pills from their backpacks. Dr. Young and Mrs. Mosehle quietly calculated, by how many were left, whether they were taking them properly. The pair’s adherence was nearly perfect.
“Inside you feel stronger?” Dr. Young asked the grandfather.
“Bit by bit,” he replied.
Mrs. Mosehle said the soft-spoken American doctor treated her like an equal and had taught her much. “He is a brother,” she said.
But she did not yet know that his three-year stint in Lesotho would end in June. When told, she could not speak for some minutes, pressing her fingers to her eyes to hold back the tears.
“We knew that he would go back home,” she said, “but our hearts are not ready.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/world ... &emc=tha22
Doctors Go Far Afield to Battle Epidemics
By CELIA W. DUGGER
MASHAI, Lesotho — At a clinic in the mountains, reached only by crossing a churning river in a rowboat, Dr. Paul Young, a pediatrician raised in the housing projects of Savannah, Ga., soothed a fussy baby. She stared at him, fascinated, as he made soft popping sounds with his lips and listened to her heart through a stethoscope.
“I used to be afraid to look at the babies’ test results,” he said after examining a bunch of children, who were born healthy despite having H.I.V.-positive mothers. “But now, most of them are negative.”
Dr. Young, 33, and the nurses he trained here have persuaded many pregnant women to get tested and take the drugs that prevent them from passing the disease to their newborns. It is all part of a charitable effort he joined in 2008 for $40,000 a year and the chance to work in this AIDS-afflicted country, which has just one pediatrician in its entire government health system.
“If this was the last thing I did, if this was the only job I ever had in life, I would have served my purpose,” he said.
Dr. Young represents the surging interest of young Americans in combating the deadly epidemics ravaging the world’s poorest countries, fueled in part by the billions of dollars that the American government, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other organizations have poured into international health in recent years.
Across sub-Saharan Africa, an extreme shortage of health workers remains a critical barrier to fighting illness. The region bears a quarter of the world’s burden of disease, but has only 3 percent of its health care workers, according to the World Health Organization.
Public health experts say efforts like the one involving Dr. Young have proved particularly useful on a continent that sorely needs pediatricians, surgeons and other specialists to train African doctors and nurses in the field.
And demand for such opportunities is rising. More than 70 universities in the United States and Canada now offer formal academic programs in global health, most of them developed in just the past five years, according to the Consortium of Universities for Global Health.
“Today’s students really want to make a difference in the world,” said Michael H. Merson, director of Duke University’s Global Health Institute. “They have a passion for sacrifice and service. It reminds me of the ’60s.”
The children of powerful politicians are part of this new generation of global health enthusiasts. Vanessa Kerry, 34, a Harvard-trained doctor and the daughter of Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, is advocating a Peace Corps-like federal program that would send American doctors and nurses to work and train health workers in developing countries.
And Barbara Bush, 29, a daughter of former President George W. Bush, co-founded the nonprofit Global Health Corps, which this year sent 36 college graduates from eight countries to work with nonprofit groups, mostly in Rwanda, Burundi, Malawi and Uganda. More than 1,000 people applied for the yearlong fellowships.
The Pediatric AIDS Corps that sent Dr. Young here, largely financed by the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation and the Baylor College of Medicine, never advertised for applicants after the first class of doctors was recruited in 2005. Word of mouth produced far more highly qualified physicians from universities all over the United States than the project could ever hire.
In addition to the salary, the program paid down as much as $40,000 of the doctors’ educational debt for each year of service — making it possible for Dr. Young to join, though he owed $170,000 after his undergraduate and medical studies. His mother was an assembly-line worker, and in hard times the family relied on Medicaid. Dr. Young himself never had a steady pediatrician as a child.
With a laugh, he said that his friends back home asked him if he had running water or used an outhouse in Africa. “We’re not roughing it here by any means,” he tells them. He drives a 10-year-old Opel Corsa, but lives in a pleasant town house in the sleepy capital, Maseru, with wireless Internet and a housekeeper who comes twice a week. For the first time in his life, he has gone skiing — in Lesotho’s breathtaking mountains.
But it is the work that gives the job its meaning, the doctors say. Lineo Thahane attended Princeton University and got her medical degree at Washington University in St. Louis. It was a 2003 rotation in Lesotho’s main public hospital during her residency — when children were still dying of AIDS for lack of antiretroviral treatment — that made her want to return to Africa. Her parents were both from Lesotho, but she was born and raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
Dr. Thahane, 35, joined the first crop of Pediatric AIDS Corps doctors in Lesotho, and now helps her mother, Dr. Edith Mohapi, 64, who for 20 years managed pediatric outpatient services at Arlington Hospital in Virginia, to run Baylor’s pediatric H.I.V. programs in Lesotho.
“I felt, ‘This is where the need is,’ ” Dr. Thahane said.
Over the past five years, the corps has had 50 to 60 doctors working in Lesotho, Swaziland, Malawi and Botswana. The hospitals and clinics they supervise now care for more than 50,000 H.I.V.-positive children, Baylor estimates.
The project’s impact should also last beyond its financing, which ends in June. The 128 doctors who served in the corps in the past five years trained about 3,000 African professionals, who will carry on. And in July, Baylor will start another project with 32 pediatricians to work on a broader array of diseases.
Dr. Grace Phiri, an overworked Malawian who has been the only pediatrician in Lesotho’s government service for most of the past 17 years, said the arrival of 10 AIDS Corps doctors in 2006 — just as AIDS drugs for children were becoming more widely available — drastically improved the survival chances of H.I.V.-positive children.
Until 2005, not a single child with AIDS was on publicly financed antiretroviral therapy in Lesotho.
“Every morning, I had to check on who is alive and who is not alive,” she recalled. “So many passed away. Most of those dying were under the age of 2. It went on for years. You see, in the ’90s we didn’t even have enough kits for H.I.V. testing.”
Dr. Phiri, who spent every weekend on call for years, said the help from the corps doctors on the ward had lightened her load and improved care. She dreads their departure. “They have shared the weekends and covered me when I’m on holiday,” she said. “I’ve learned a lot from them.”
More than 6,500 children in Lesotho, a country with a population of two million people and the world’s third-highest rate of H.I.V. infection, now receive the lifesaving medications. While that is progress, it is still only about a quarter of those in need of treatment, according to Unaids, the United Nations AIDS agency.
Dr. Mphu Ramatlapeng, Lesotho’s minister of health, said the country could not have reached as many children without the corps.
“These were serious professionals willing to dirty their hands,” she said.
Dr. Young set off one recent morning for a village clinic he visits one day a month. He drove into the lush green mountains, past men draped in traditional blankets, through hamlets of mud huts crowned with conical thatched roofs, over crystalline streams flowing down from the peaks.
“They know me here in the mountains,” he said.
When he arrived at the clinic, families were already waiting on wooden benches to see him. Relebohile Mosehle, 27, an energetic nursing assistant he has trained, sat at his side in a small examination room. She lives at the clinic, which has neither running water nor electricity. She and a Kenyan nurse are the backbone of medical care in this area.
Tsiu Lerotholi, 49, and his grandson Mojalefa, 9, had come that morning, having hiked through the mountains for another month’s supply of antiretroviral medicines. Mojalefa’s parents had died of AIDS — and he and his grandparents have the disease.
The man and the boy took their almost empty bottles of pills from their backpacks. Dr. Young and Mrs. Mosehle quietly calculated, by how many were left, whether they were taking them properly. The pair’s adherence was nearly perfect.
“Inside you feel stronger?” Dr. Young asked the grandfather.
“Bit by bit,” he replied.
Mrs. Mosehle said the soft-spoken American doctor treated her like an equal and had taught her much. “He is a brother,” she said.
But she did not yet know that his three-year stint in Lesotho would end in June. When told, she could not speak for some minutes, pressing her fingers to her eyes to hold back the tears.
“We knew that he would go back home,” she said, “but our hearts are not ready.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/world ... &emc=tha22
The 2011 TIME 100
Meet the most influential people in the world. They are artists and activists, reformers and researchers, heads of state and captains of industry. Their ideas spark dialogue and dissent and sometimes even revolution. Welcome to this year's TIME 100
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packa ... 01,00.html
Azim Premji
Philanthropist
If anyone personifies India's economic transformation, it is Azim Premji, chairman of the information-technology powerhouse Wipro Ltd.
A pioneer of India's IT-outsourcing industry, Premji helped unleash a generation of skilled technical professionals who make up India's growing middle class.
Inspired by his belief that a strong educational system is essential to sustaining the economic growth needed to pull millions of Indian citizens out of poverty, Premji, 65, is deeply involved in efforts to provide universal primary education in India. The Azim Premji Foundation supports programs that reach more than 2.5 million children.
But it may be his pioneering leadership in India's nascent field of philanthropy that will be Premji's lasting legacy. His recent $2 billion donation to his foundation was the largest charitable contribution in the history of modern India.
Ultimately, how he approaches philanthropy could prove to be just as important as how much he gives. His philanthropic work has been characterized by collaboration and transparency. He is setting a remarkable example for those who have benefited so enormously from India's economic expansion and are looking for ways to give back.
Gates is a co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the chairman of Microsoft
Meet the most influential people in the world. They are artists and activists, reformers and researchers, heads of state and captains of industry. Their ideas spark dialogue and dissent and sometimes even revolution. Welcome to this year's TIME 100
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packa ... 01,00.html
Azim Premji
Philanthropist
If anyone personifies India's economic transformation, it is Azim Premji, chairman of the information-technology powerhouse Wipro Ltd.
A pioneer of India's IT-outsourcing industry, Premji helped unleash a generation of skilled technical professionals who make up India's growing middle class.
Inspired by his belief that a strong educational system is essential to sustaining the economic growth needed to pull millions of Indian citizens out of poverty, Premji, 65, is deeply involved in efforts to provide universal primary education in India. The Azim Premji Foundation supports programs that reach more than 2.5 million children.
But it may be his pioneering leadership in India's nascent field of philanthropy that will be Premji's lasting legacy. His recent $2 billion donation to his foundation was the largest charitable contribution in the history of modern India.
Ultimately, how he approaches philanthropy could prove to be just as important as how much he gives. His philanthropic work has been characterized by collaboration and transparency. He is setting a remarkable example for those who have benefited so enormously from India's economic expansion and are looking for ways to give back.
Gates is a co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the chairman of Microsoft
On World Malaria Day, renewing our commitment to maternal health and fighting malaria
By Mobina S.B. Jaffer, Special to The Sun April 23, 2011
http://www.vancouversun.com/health/Worl ... story.html
More Images »
B.C. Senator Mobina S.B. Jaffer visits Kampala, Uganda, in March of 2011.
Photograph by: Handout, Special to The Sun
It has long been known that the burden of malaria on the developing world is crushing. An entirely preventable disease affects 350-500 million people each year, kills upwards of one million and claims the life of an African child every 30 seconds. This is simply unacceptable.
What is even more unfortunate is that this disease preys on the most vulnerable population namely pregnant women and children.
It is estimated that 50 million women become pregnant in malaria-endemic areas annually, half of them in sub-Saharan Africa alone. The toll this disease takes on mothers and their children is not negligible as studies indicate that malaria indirectly causes at least 25,000 maternal health deaths and between 75,000 and 200,000 newborn deaths each and every year.
I am a child of Africa. I have drank water from the river Nile and I have swam in Lake Victoria. I have witnessed firsthand the devastating effects of malaria.
This is why throughout my career in the Senate I have been devoted to finding ways to help eradicate this disease. Most recently, I was in Uganda where I visited a maternal health clinic in Kawempe, which is located in Kampala, Uganda.
During this visit I was informed that this clinic is often over capacity forcing three or four women to share a single bed. In addition to space constraints, HIV positive patients are treated alongside non-HIV patients in an effort to avoid stigmatization. As a result several women are infected during their time at the clinic.
While I was in Kawempe I also received confirmation that maternal health and malaria do indeed go hand in hand. After speaking with several nurses and patients I learned that although these women were no longer as vulnerable to childbirth complications such as fistula, they still continued to battle entirely preventable diseases such as malaria.
Maternal health clinics like the one I visited in Kawempe allow pregnant women to receive the medical attention required to ensure that both pregnant women and their newborn are protected. They act as great resource to the community.
However, it is important to remain mindful of the fact that these very women are still susceptible to diseases such as malaria.
Maternal health clinics need to have the resources necessary to ensure that their patients are protected from diseases such as malaria. This can be done by distributing insecticide treated mosquito nets, providing rapid diagnostic tests in remote under-serviced areas, ensuring that intermittent presumptive malaria drugs are administered to pregnant women and that anti-malarial drugs are readily available and affordable.
Although non-profit organizations such as Buy-A-Net and Roll Back Malaria have made great strides towards combating this epidemic there is still great progress to be made.
Canada recently pledged $1.1 billion toward a maternal health initiative in an effort to ensure that pregnant women and children are protected.
However after working on the ground and visiting maternal health clinics like the one in Kawempe I strongly believe maternal health and malaria should be addressed simultaneously as the two go hand-in-hand.
As a Senator who represents that province of British Columbia I am extremely proud of the student body at UNBC just recently won the national Spread the Net Challenge and I would like to congratulate them for raising over $18,000.
This money will be used to send mosquito nets to Africa. By making such a generous contribution these students have made a great impact on the lives of thousands of families in Africa.
As we commemorate World Malaria Day on the 25th of April I strongly urge you to follow in the footsteps of the students of UNBC and donate $10 towards purchasing a net that can save a life.
Mobina S.B. Jaffer is the senator for British Columbia.
By Mobina S.B. Jaffer, Special to The Sun April 23, 2011
http://www.vancouversun.com/health/Worl ... story.html
More Images »
B.C. Senator Mobina S.B. Jaffer visits Kampala, Uganda, in March of 2011.
Photograph by: Handout, Special to The Sun
It has long been known that the burden of malaria on the developing world is crushing. An entirely preventable disease affects 350-500 million people each year, kills upwards of one million and claims the life of an African child every 30 seconds. This is simply unacceptable.
What is even more unfortunate is that this disease preys on the most vulnerable population namely pregnant women and children.
It is estimated that 50 million women become pregnant in malaria-endemic areas annually, half of them in sub-Saharan Africa alone. The toll this disease takes on mothers and their children is not negligible as studies indicate that malaria indirectly causes at least 25,000 maternal health deaths and between 75,000 and 200,000 newborn deaths each and every year.
I am a child of Africa. I have drank water from the river Nile and I have swam in Lake Victoria. I have witnessed firsthand the devastating effects of malaria.
This is why throughout my career in the Senate I have been devoted to finding ways to help eradicate this disease. Most recently, I was in Uganda where I visited a maternal health clinic in Kawempe, which is located in Kampala, Uganda.
During this visit I was informed that this clinic is often over capacity forcing three or four women to share a single bed. In addition to space constraints, HIV positive patients are treated alongside non-HIV patients in an effort to avoid stigmatization. As a result several women are infected during their time at the clinic.
While I was in Kawempe I also received confirmation that maternal health and malaria do indeed go hand in hand. After speaking with several nurses and patients I learned that although these women were no longer as vulnerable to childbirth complications such as fistula, they still continued to battle entirely preventable diseases such as malaria.
Maternal health clinics like the one I visited in Kawempe allow pregnant women to receive the medical attention required to ensure that both pregnant women and their newborn are protected. They act as great resource to the community.
However, it is important to remain mindful of the fact that these very women are still susceptible to diseases such as malaria.
Maternal health clinics need to have the resources necessary to ensure that their patients are protected from diseases such as malaria. This can be done by distributing insecticide treated mosquito nets, providing rapid diagnostic tests in remote under-serviced areas, ensuring that intermittent presumptive malaria drugs are administered to pregnant women and that anti-malarial drugs are readily available and affordable.
Although non-profit organizations such as Buy-A-Net and Roll Back Malaria have made great strides towards combating this epidemic there is still great progress to be made.
Canada recently pledged $1.1 billion toward a maternal health initiative in an effort to ensure that pregnant women and children are protected.
However after working on the ground and visiting maternal health clinics like the one in Kawempe I strongly believe maternal health and malaria should be addressed simultaneously as the two go hand-in-hand.
As a Senator who represents that province of British Columbia I am extremely proud of the student body at UNBC just recently won the national Spread the Net Challenge and I would like to congratulate them for raising over $18,000.
This money will be used to send mosquito nets to Africa. By making such a generous contribution these students have made a great impact on the lives of thousands of families in Africa.
As we commemorate World Malaria Day on the 25th of April I strongly urge you to follow in the footsteps of the students of UNBC and donate $10 towards purchasing a net that can save a life.
Mobina S.B. Jaffer is the senator for British Columbia.
May 7, 2011
Mothers We Could Save
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
BALIGUBADLE, Somaliland
Here’s a Mother’s Day thought: There’s a way to save many of the world’s 350,000 women who die in childbirth each year. But it’s very controversial, for it’s called family planning.
Republicans in Congress have gone on the warpath this budget season against family planning programs at home and abroad. To illustrate the stakes, let me share a Mother’s Day story about a pregnant 30-year-old Somali woman named Hinda Hassan.
Ms. Hassan lived in a village near this remote town of Baligubadle in Somaliland (a self-ruling enclave carved from Somalia). She never used family planning, for none is available within several days’ walk. When her eighth child was still an infant, she became pregnant again.
“I was happy when she became pregnant,” said her husband, Muhammad Isse, who tends a herd of 13 camels with his family. “I was very happy, because I had faith in God.”
When Ms. Hassan went into labor, she was looked after by two traditional birth attendants, both of them unschooled, untrained and unequipped. “We try to wash our hands with soap and water,” one of them, Amina Ahmed, told me. “But sometimes we don’t have soap. And if there is no water, we rub our hands in the sand to clean them.”
Ms. Hassan’s labor did not go well. After 11 hours, her husband paid a man with a pickup truck $50 to drive her three hours to the clinic here in Baligubadle. The clinic couldn’t help Ms. Hassan and sent her on another two-and-a-half-hour bone-rattling drive in the back of the pickup to the Somaliland capital of Hargeisa. Shortly after Ms. Hassan arrived at the Edna Adan Maternity Hospital (mentioned in my last column), she died.
Her death was infuriatingly unnecessary — and I felt doubly saddened when I met some of her eight orphans.
There are any number of ways that Ms. Hassan’s life could have been saved. She had an off-the-charts hemoglobin level of just 4, reflecting a stunning level of anemia. A trained midwife could have given her a deworming pill and iron supplements early in the pregnancy, addressing that anemia and strengthening her. Later, Ms. Hassan developed a complication called eclampsia that would have been detected if she had had pre-natal care.
Yet maybe the simplest way to save her life would have been contraception. If Somali women had half as many pregnancies (they now average six births), there would be only half as many maternal deaths. But modern contraception doesn’t exist in this part of Somaliland.
“The only method of family planning we have is breast-feeding,” said Nimo Abdi, the midwife at the clinic here, noting that breast-feeding reduces the likelihood of a new pregnancy. Ms. Abdi thinks that some local people would accept modern contraceptives if they were available.
“If I had injectables and condoms, people would accept them,” she said. “They would want them.”
I wonder if that isn’t a bit optimistic; in a place like this, family planning requires much more than just handing out contraceptives. Ms. Hassan’s husband told me that he had never heard of contraception, and he sounded wary of the idea.
Many people in poor countries want large families, partly to ensure that some will survive despite high death rates. Or a woman may distrust contraceptives or fear her husband’s reaction if she is caught using them.
By United Nations estimates, 215 million women worldwide have an “unmet need” for family planning, meaning they don’t want to become pregnant but are not using effective contraception. The Guttmacher Institute, a widely respected research organization, estimates that if all the unmet need for contraception were met, the result would be 94,000 fewer women dying of pregnancy complications each year, and almost 25 million fewer abortions each year.
Greater access to birth control would also help check the world population, which the United Nations warned a few days ago is rising more quickly than expected. The U.N. now projects the total population in 2100 will be 10.1 billion.
Yet this year, Republicans in Congress have been trying to slash investments in family planning. A budget compromise last month cut international family planning spending by 5 percent, but some Republicans are expected to seek much bigger cuts in future years.
If they succeed, the consequences will be felt in places like this remote Somali town. Women won’t get access to contraceptives, and the parade of unwanted pregnancies, abortions, fistulas, and mothers dying in childbirth will continue.
Ah, but there was one Republican-sponsored initiative for family planning in Congress this year. It provided contraception without conditions — for wild horses in the American West. It passed on a voice vote.
Maybe on Mother’s Day, we could acknowledge that family planning is just as essential for humans as for horses.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/opini ... emc=tha212
Mothers We Could Save
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
BALIGUBADLE, Somaliland
Here’s a Mother’s Day thought: There’s a way to save many of the world’s 350,000 women who die in childbirth each year. But it’s very controversial, for it’s called family planning.
Republicans in Congress have gone on the warpath this budget season against family planning programs at home and abroad. To illustrate the stakes, let me share a Mother’s Day story about a pregnant 30-year-old Somali woman named Hinda Hassan.
Ms. Hassan lived in a village near this remote town of Baligubadle in Somaliland (a self-ruling enclave carved from Somalia). She never used family planning, for none is available within several days’ walk. When her eighth child was still an infant, she became pregnant again.
“I was happy when she became pregnant,” said her husband, Muhammad Isse, who tends a herd of 13 camels with his family. “I was very happy, because I had faith in God.”
When Ms. Hassan went into labor, she was looked after by two traditional birth attendants, both of them unschooled, untrained and unequipped. “We try to wash our hands with soap and water,” one of them, Amina Ahmed, told me. “But sometimes we don’t have soap. And if there is no water, we rub our hands in the sand to clean them.”
Ms. Hassan’s labor did not go well. After 11 hours, her husband paid a man with a pickup truck $50 to drive her three hours to the clinic here in Baligubadle. The clinic couldn’t help Ms. Hassan and sent her on another two-and-a-half-hour bone-rattling drive in the back of the pickup to the Somaliland capital of Hargeisa. Shortly after Ms. Hassan arrived at the Edna Adan Maternity Hospital (mentioned in my last column), she died.
Her death was infuriatingly unnecessary — and I felt doubly saddened when I met some of her eight orphans.
There are any number of ways that Ms. Hassan’s life could have been saved. She had an off-the-charts hemoglobin level of just 4, reflecting a stunning level of anemia. A trained midwife could have given her a deworming pill and iron supplements early in the pregnancy, addressing that anemia and strengthening her. Later, Ms. Hassan developed a complication called eclampsia that would have been detected if she had had pre-natal care.
Yet maybe the simplest way to save her life would have been contraception. If Somali women had half as many pregnancies (they now average six births), there would be only half as many maternal deaths. But modern contraception doesn’t exist in this part of Somaliland.
“The only method of family planning we have is breast-feeding,” said Nimo Abdi, the midwife at the clinic here, noting that breast-feeding reduces the likelihood of a new pregnancy. Ms. Abdi thinks that some local people would accept modern contraceptives if they were available.
“If I had injectables and condoms, people would accept them,” she said. “They would want them.”
I wonder if that isn’t a bit optimistic; in a place like this, family planning requires much more than just handing out contraceptives. Ms. Hassan’s husband told me that he had never heard of contraception, and he sounded wary of the idea.
Many people in poor countries want large families, partly to ensure that some will survive despite high death rates. Or a woman may distrust contraceptives or fear her husband’s reaction if she is caught using them.
By United Nations estimates, 215 million women worldwide have an “unmet need” for family planning, meaning they don’t want to become pregnant but are not using effective contraception. The Guttmacher Institute, a widely respected research organization, estimates that if all the unmet need for contraception were met, the result would be 94,000 fewer women dying of pregnancy complications each year, and almost 25 million fewer abortions each year.
Greater access to birth control would also help check the world population, which the United Nations warned a few days ago is rising more quickly than expected. The U.N. now projects the total population in 2100 will be 10.1 billion.
Yet this year, Republicans in Congress have been trying to slash investments in family planning. A budget compromise last month cut international family planning spending by 5 percent, but some Republicans are expected to seek much bigger cuts in future years.
If they succeed, the consequences will be felt in places like this remote Somali town. Women won’t get access to contraceptives, and the parade of unwanted pregnancies, abortions, fistulas, and mothers dying in childbirth will continue.
Ah, but there was one Republican-sponsored initiative for family planning in Congress this year. It provided contraception without conditions — for wild horses in the American West. It passed on a voice vote.
Maybe on Mother’s Day, we could acknowledge that family planning is just as essential for humans as for horses.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/opini ... emc=tha212
Donating - Interesting, ever wonder where that donation money goes?
Keep these facts in mind when "donating". As you open your pockets
for yet another natural disaster, We have listed them from the highest
(worse use of funds) to the lowest (least wasteful offender).
The worst offender was yet again for the 11th year in a row is, UNICEF
CEO, receives $1,200,000 per year, (plus use of a Rolls Royce for his exclusive use where ever he goes, and an expense account that is rumored to be well over $150,000.) Only pennies from the actual donations goes to the UNICEF cause (less than $0.14 per dollar of income).
The second worst offender this year is Marsha J. Evans, President and CEO of the American Red Cross... for her salary for the year ending in 2009 was $651,957 plus expenses. Enjoys 6 weeks - fully paid holidays including all related expenses during the holiday trip for her and her husband and kids. including 100% fully paid health & dental plan for her and her family, for life. This means out of every dollar they bring in, about $0.39 goes to related charity causes.
The third worst offender was again for the 7th time, Brian Gallagher,
President of the United Way receives a $375,000 base salary (U. S. funds), plus numerous expense benefits it's hard to keep track as to what it is all worth, including a fully paid lifetime membership for 2 golf courses (1 in Canada, and 1 in the U. S. A.), 2 luxury vehicles, a yacht club membership, 3 major company gold credit cards for his personal expenses... and so on. This equates to about $0.51 per dollar of income goes to charity causes.
Fourth worst offender who was also again in the fourth spot, for every year since this information has been made available from the start (1998) is amazingly yet again, World Vision President (Canada) receives $300,000 base salary, (plus supplied - a home valued in the $700,000 - $800,000 dollar value range, completely furnished, completely paid all housing expenses, including taxes, water/sewer, telephone/fax, HD/high speed cable, weekly maid service and pool/yard maintenance, fully paid private schooling for his children, upscale automobile and an $55,000 personal expense account for clothing/food, with a $125,000 business expense account).
Get this, because it is a "religious based" charity, it pays, little to no taxes, can receives government assistance and does not have to declare were the money goes.
Only about $0.52 of earned income per dollar is available for charity causes.
Of the sixty some odd "charities" we looked at, the lowest paid
(President/C. EO/Commissioner) was heading up a charity group
in Canada. We found, believe it or not, it was.......
Ready for this..
I think you might be surprised...
It is, none other than...
The Salvation Army's Commissioner Todd Bassett receives a salary of only $13,000 per year (plus housing) for managing this $2 Billion dollar organization. Which means about $0.93 per dollar earned, is readily available and goes back out to local charity causes... truly amazing.. and well done
"Sally Anne"
Last but not the least: Two charitable foundations, one source.
Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) Project:World Patrnership Walk & Aga Khan Development Network
(AKDN) Project: Focus Humanitarian Assistance (disaster relief across the globe).
Not one cent is spent on administration (run by volunteers and paid
workers from private funds NOT donated funds).
100% of the funds raised, go directly to help alleviate global poverty in the poorest regions of the world and international development projects like: revitalizing rural economies, ensuring clean water and sanitation, strengthening community-based organizations, and educating new generations of girls and women.
No further comment is necessary...."Think Twice" before you give to your Charity of choice as to which one really does the best for the most - or the least for the most, for that matter. Remember charity starts at home.
Look after the people of your country.
99% of people won't have the guts to forward this.
Keep these facts in mind when "donating". As you open your pockets
for yet another natural disaster, We have listed them from the highest
(worse use of funds) to the lowest (least wasteful offender).
The worst offender was yet again for the 11th year in a row is, UNICEF
CEO, receives $1,200,000 per year, (plus use of a Rolls Royce for his exclusive use where ever he goes, and an expense account that is rumored to be well over $150,000.) Only pennies from the actual donations goes to the UNICEF cause (less than $0.14 per dollar of income).
The second worst offender this year is Marsha J. Evans, President and CEO of the American Red Cross... for her salary for the year ending in 2009 was $651,957 plus expenses. Enjoys 6 weeks - fully paid holidays including all related expenses during the holiday trip for her and her husband and kids. including 100% fully paid health & dental plan for her and her family, for life. This means out of every dollar they bring in, about $0.39 goes to related charity causes.
The third worst offender was again for the 7th time, Brian Gallagher,
President of the United Way receives a $375,000 base salary (U. S. funds), plus numerous expense benefits it's hard to keep track as to what it is all worth, including a fully paid lifetime membership for 2 golf courses (1 in Canada, and 1 in the U. S. A.), 2 luxury vehicles, a yacht club membership, 3 major company gold credit cards for his personal expenses... and so on. This equates to about $0.51 per dollar of income goes to charity causes.
Fourth worst offender who was also again in the fourth spot, for every year since this information has been made available from the start (1998) is amazingly yet again, World Vision President (Canada) receives $300,000 base salary, (plus supplied - a home valued in the $700,000 - $800,000 dollar value range, completely furnished, completely paid all housing expenses, including taxes, water/sewer, telephone/fax, HD/high speed cable, weekly maid service and pool/yard maintenance, fully paid private schooling for his children, upscale automobile and an $55,000 personal expense account for clothing/food, with a $125,000 business expense account).
Get this, because it is a "religious based" charity, it pays, little to no taxes, can receives government assistance and does not have to declare were the money goes.
Only about $0.52 of earned income per dollar is available for charity causes.
Of the sixty some odd "charities" we looked at, the lowest paid
(President/C. EO/Commissioner) was heading up a charity group
in Canada. We found, believe it or not, it was.......
Ready for this..
I think you might be surprised...
It is, none other than...
The Salvation Army's Commissioner Todd Bassett receives a salary of only $13,000 per year (plus housing) for managing this $2 Billion dollar organization. Which means about $0.93 per dollar earned, is readily available and goes back out to local charity causes... truly amazing.. and well done
"Sally Anne"
Last but not the least: Two charitable foundations, one source.
Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) Project:World Patrnership Walk & Aga Khan Development Network
(AKDN) Project: Focus Humanitarian Assistance (disaster relief across the globe).
Not one cent is spent on administration (run by volunteers and paid
workers from private funds NOT donated funds).
100% of the funds raised, go directly to help alleviate global poverty in the poorest regions of the world and international development projects like: revitalizing rural economies, ensuring clean water and sanitation, strengthening community-based organizations, and educating new generations of girls and women.
No further comment is necessary...."Think Twice" before you give to your Charity of choice as to which one really does the best for the most - or the least for the most, for that matter. Remember charity starts at home.
Look after the people of your country.
99% of people won't have the guts to forward this.