Financing development

The Charitable-Industrial Complex
The New York Times, by Peter Buffet
As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. Philanthropic dollars should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems.

Doing a Better Job of Doing Good
The New York Times letters-to-the-editor in response to Buffett’s op-ed.

Your Next Donor Is a Toothbrush
Stanford Social Innovation Review
As more corporations realize the potential of cause-marketing, more charities can create partnerships that result in exposure and revenue.

10 Companies That Gave the Most Cash in 2012
Chronicle of Philanthropy
How much, to whom, and a future giving forecast.

Innovation

How Text Messages and Micro-Insurance Help the Urban Poor Stay Healthy
HuffPost
Slum residents across the Global South lack access to affordable health care services. Despite a pervasive lack of funding, often mediocre infrastructure, and too few trained personnel, slum dwellers have come up with innovative solutions. Using forums, text messages, micro-insurance, and community engagement, they help residents in Mumbai, Nairobi, Jakarta, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City lead healthier lives.

Big Data for Disaster Response: A List of Wrong Assumptions
i-revolution blog
It might be provocative to call into question one of the hottest tech movements in generations, but it’s not really fair. Arguing that big data isn’t all it’s cracked up to be is a strawman, pure and simple—because no one should think it’s magic to begin with.

Slow Ideas
The New Yorker
Some innovations spread fast. How do you speed the ones that don’t? A look at global health.

Social enterprise

Start-up spring
The Economist
Clusters of internet firms are popping up all over the region, and Amman is becoming a hub.

Letter to a Young Social Entrepreneur: the poor are not the raw material for your salvation
Pioneers Post
Commentary from a seasoned social entrepreneur about how the “ego” can cause pitfalls in the social enterprise journey.

Financial inclusion

Microfinance: Why Care About Institution Building?
HuffPost
David Roodman’s book, Due Diligence, shapes today’s public conversation about microfinance. Time magazine, The Washington Post and others, have picked up on the book and its message. With, as his subtitle says, an impertinent but serious, approach, Roodman’s book attempts to answer a basic question: Does microfinance work?

Aid

Pakistan’s New Big Threat Isn’t Terrorism—It’s Water
The Atlantic
Shortages of the precious resource threaten to destabilize the region even further.

Economic development

Changing Frightening Economic Realities Into Opportunities
Fast Company’s Co.Exist
The realities of scarcity–of food, of oil, of water–can be horrifying, but there are ways to turn that scarcity into advantage.

The Great Deceleration
The Economist
The emerging-market slowdown is not the beginning of a bust. But it is a turning-point for the world economy.

Penury portrait
The Economist
The consensus on raising people out of poverty is surprisingly recent

Interest

Steve Jobs: The Least Disruptive Entrepreneur Ever
Read Write blog
What I learned from Ashton Kutcher about Apple’s late founder.

The way we think about charity is dead (video)
TED talk by Dan Pallotta, reposted to the Global Envision News Brief by popular demand. Worth watching!

Three Pakistani farmers sit on the arid landscape left after flood waters from a broken levee dried and left the landscape covered in silt and sand. Photo: Julie Denesha for Mercy Corps