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.