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  • Global Ideas News Brief: Big data for climate resilience + Costs of sanitation

    September 29, 2013 Editor 0

    Economist
    Eradicating extreme poverty is no longer a pipe dream. But first governments must agree on their approach. Cutting poverty is not just about boosting incomes. Deprivation takes many forms, including the lack of schools, clean water, medicines and family planning.

    Vision Statement: Seven Reasons Why Africa’s Time Is Now (infographic)
    Harvard Business Review
    Africa’s economy is growing faster than the economies of all other continents. About a third of the 54 African countries are seeing annual GDP growth of more than 6%. But this isn’t just about diamonds and oil: Only 24% of the growth from 2000 to 2008 was attributable to natural resources. What’s making this diverse and complex continent boom? Here are some surprising facts about Africa’s $2 trillion economy.

    232 Million People Left Their Countries for New Ones—Where Did They Go?
    The Atlantic
    More than 3 percent of people on earth have migrated, but surprisingly, they didn’t all go to rich countries.

    This Infographic Explains How Much Poor Sanitation Costs The World: $260 Billion A Year
    Fast Company’s Co.Exist blog
    The global lack of toilets isn’t just a question of niceties. The disease it causes are deadly and costly.

    Energy poverty + climate

    The Next Wireless Revolution, in Electricity
    NYT Fixes column
    Tech innovators don’t see the rural poor as a viable market. They don’t put money into inventing better and cheaper ways for very poor people to light their homes, cook or run appliances off the grid. But because of the things the rich desire, these things have become reality.”

    Mother Nature and the Middle Class
    NYT, Freidman
    What Mother Nature and these newly empowered citizens have in common is that they can both set off a wave — a tsunami — that can overwhelm their systems at any moment, and you’ll never see it coming.

    Huge Aquifers Are Discovered in North Kenya
    NYT
    The United Nations and Kenyan officials announced the discovery of a potentially enormous underground supply of water, a find they said could improve the lives of generations of people in impoverished northern Kenya, if not the entire nation.

    Mobile + financial inclusion

    Mobile phones have been a gift for development, says Jeffrey Sachs
    The Guardian
    Better access to technology can help achieve millennium goals, says economist, as UN calls for affordable broadband worldwide.

    How Cell Phones Are Transforming Health Care in Africa
    MIT Technology Review
    Mobile communications can help bridge a huge knowledge gap and reimagine healthcare across Africa.

    Microloans typically used to alleviate poverty abroad surging in Silicon Valley
    Washington Post
    When these Silicon Valley small businesses needed an influx of cash, and fast, they didn’t find help at a bank. They turned instead to a type of financing more commonly associated with buying a sewing machine for a Guatemalan tailor or a tractor for an African farmer.

    The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
    NextBillion blog, by Ignacio Mas
    Mobile money as a retail payment system

    Big data

    A New Underclass: The People Who Big Data Leaves Behind
    Fast Company’s Co.Exist blog
    As more and more business decisions are being made by looking at the data collected from our lives, what happens to the people who are generating no data at all?

    (Appropriate) Big Data for Climate Resilience?
    Stanford Social Innovation Review
    Three huge opportunities and three risks.

    Business

    Government Alone Can’t Solve Society’s Biggest Problems
    Harvard Business Review blog
    Rising obesity. Human Trafficking. Re-skilling the workforce. A lack of quality education and safe water for the poor in the developing world. Whose job is it to solve these problems?

    Social entrepreneurship

    How the ‘Failure’ Culture of Startups Is Killing Innovation
    Wired
    Far from being the measure of disgrace it once was, failure now seems to be a sort of badge of honor. But underlying many popular Silicon Valley failure clichés is entrepreneurs’ belief that “starting companies these days is akin to doing research in the past” — as if we don’t need research when the opportunity to fail is so readily available.

    Financing development

    A spoonful of sugar
    Economist
    Endowing charities can make privatisation more palatable.

    Big Bang Philanthropy
    Stanford Social Innovation Review
    How one group of funders gets the most for the poverty-fighting buck.

    Why I Think Nonprofits Should Act More Like Businesses (video + article)
    HuffingtonPost, TED video by Dan Pallotta
    How would you react if you knew someone was getting wealthy in charity? How would you feel if you saw your favorite charity run a $3 million ad on the Superbowl using charitable donations to fund it? What would you think if a charity lost a million dollars on a brand new fundraising idea that flopped?

    The Inadequacy of Donating Medical Devices to Africa
    The Atlantic
    Without spare parts or trained technicians, they stop working almost immediately.

    Innovation

    If the Goal is Scale, Promote Theft
    Stanford Social Innovation Review
    Too many smart people are trying to come up with too many new solutions; fostering plagiarism of successful models is the fastest track to systems change.

    Poverty-Focused Innovation
    Next Billion blog
    Alex Counts, CEO of Grameen Foundation, on how to foster financial innovation by creating agency for the poor

    Telling our story

    Jeff Skoll On How He Uses The Power Of Storytelling To Push For Change
    Fast Company’s Co.Exist blog
    For his whole philanthropic career, the eBay co-founder has harnessed compelling narrative to help inform and inspire a better future.

    Cut to the Chase: How Stories Engage
    Stanford Social Innovation Review
    Three ways organizations can use story as a platform for social innovation.

    Aid

    The boy who stood up to Syrian injustice
    NYT, Kristoff

    Interest

    In a Faded Literary Capital, Efforts at a Revival
    NYT
    Most Sudanese are more concerned with bread than books, and for good reason. Years of war, drought and economic privation have left deep marks. A once prestigious education system has crumbled, and the number of bookstores in Khartoum has fallen with it.

    NOW SERVING
    The New Yorker (subscription)
    Terrorists keep targeting a Mogadishu chef’s restaurants, but he won’t shut down.

    A boy pulls water in Kenya. Huge new aquifers could help North Kenyans for generations to come. Photo: Mercy Corps.

     

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    Categories: Development

    Tags: Development, poverty, social innovation

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