Stories from the field: Annie Schowalter in Kabul, Afghanistan

Annie Schowalter, a graduate student at UCSD, worked at Sustainable Energy Services Afghanistan (SESA) in Kabul, Afghanistan over the summer, supporting a group of women solar engineers in their business development. She shares her unique glimpses of sanctuaries, culture, and life in Kabul that will never make the news:

“Like Alice, I have found a strange wonderland on the other side of a keyhole.

In Kabul, tenacious optimism thrives within the cloistering walls of compounds, under the suffocating constraints of the Burqa, and the oppressive threat of explosive violence.

The tightly controlled security environment of the international community is equally matched for Afghans by incredibly restrictive cultural codes. In this charming country, everyone is under somebody’s lock and key.

As a western woman working for a small Afghan company, I enjoy more freedoms than most. I fall into a “third gender” category that allows me to travel amongst strictly divided male and female societies. Further, my movement is not restricted by my employer to a list of pre-approved locations. I can visit the homes of my Afghan friends, accompany my colleagues to the Bazaar, and visit the corner shop for green tea and herbal fruit shisha with Shuja.

Yet, even with these remarkable abilities I still spend the majority of my days and nights within a series of secure compounds and cars. I don’t speak to unknown Afghans, never walk to a destination (even if it is two blocks away), and I would never venture around town unaccompanied for fear of being kidnapped. Within these bounds, I have been amazed to discover a surprisingly lovely society brimming with a richness of spirit and vitality that feels more valuable that edible nourishment. It is what will bring me back to Kabul despite the threat of violence.

Samiya and I recently accompanied two of SESA’s male engineers on a data collection mission to Turquoise Mountain. Rory Stewart, of The Places In Between fame, has channeled his aristocratic connections and literary success into the creation of this NGO dedicated to conserving parts of Kabul’s old city. His organization is also providing employment to locals by reviving Afghanistan’s traditional craft economy.

Like most locales in Kabul, the entrance to the Turquoise Mountain center is unmarked. For security reasons there is no address and defining exterior features are virtually nonexistent. The weak central government means that even in Kabul infrastructure is lacking and the richest neighborhoods still have horribly rutted streets strewn with trash, raw sewage, inhabited by herds of goats and street kids. Amidst this chaos, going anywhere new in Kabul takes an order of magnitude longer. Animated cell phone conversations between your driver and a local on the other end of the line are essential. Often these exchanges are repeated more than once before you find your destination.

Vietnam: Partnerships in Development

Hanoi, Vietnam: I recently met Trang Nguyen, a 22 year old, born around the time economic reform began here in 1986. After telling her that I had visited and worked with the orphanage where she was brought up, she shared her story and her hopes for the future with me:

Trang was born into a poor rural family in Central Vietnam. At the age of six, she was placed in an orphanage in nearby Danang. The orphanage put her through school, and when her time came to enter the workforce, a partnering international NGO, spearheaded by an Australian, sponsored her to undertake hospitality training in Ha Noi. Now at 22, she has been working at one of Ha Noi’s newest five star hotels for the past year and a half. She makes enough money to send some home to her family who were too poor to raise her. Her mentors over the years have been humanitarian businessmen and she hopes to step in their footsteps. One day, she hopes to have enough money to be able not only to support herself and her family, but give back to the orphanage that raised her and that continues to provide hope for children in central Vietnam.

Subtly woven into her life story are the opportunities that a globalized development network can create, from the orphanage and the hospitality training school, to her career in the hospitality industry in one of the world’s top hotel chains, in Hanoi, catering to an increasing number of foreign businessmen and tourists entering Vietnam. These opportunities would have been unthinkable in the early ‘80s in Vietnam, and I believe they speak to the value of partnerships/cross-sector partnerships, where development is working.

On Aid: Charlie Rose interviews Dambisa Moyo, Jacqueline Novogratz, and Peter Singer

In the video below, Charlie Rose interviews Dambisa Moyo, Jacqueline Novogratz, and Peter Singer on the “idea of aid” and their opinions on what works in aid.

Focusing on the second interview with Jacqueline Novogratz, she is the founder of Acumen Fund and author of the new book “The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World”. The book is a refreshing perspective on international development and an inspiring read. As Jacqueline chronicles the last 25 years of her experiences in development, she lends a unique business-minded perspective and level of accountability to the development work she does. Jacqueline’s story, compassion and dedication are inspiring. Just as inspiring are the stories she tells so well about the incredible people she has met along the way in India, Pakistan, and throughout Africa, as well as her experience working in Rwanda before the genocide and coming back to meet some of her friends who survived.To read more about the book and buy it online, click here to go to Amazon.com.

more about “TED Blog: Jacqueline Novogratz on Cha…“, posted with vodpod

Name change: Tall Orders

Please note our name change to Tall Orders! We are in the process of moving to a new location and will provide an update on this soon.

Vestergaard-Frandsen: A private company devoted to saving lives

A Company Prospers by Saving Poor People’s Lives

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published in the New York Times: February 2, 2009

It all started with mosquito nets. Or, no, with guinea worm filters. Or, before that, with a million yards of wool in the mountains of Sweden. Or, taken back another generation, to uniforms for hotel and supermarket workers. There are plenty of charitable foundations and public agencies devoted to helping the world’s poor, many with instantly recognizable names like Unicef or the Gates Foundation. But private companies with that as their sole focus are rare. Even the best-known is not remotely a household name: Vestergaard-Frandsen.

Its products are in use in refugee camps and disaster areas all over the third world: PermaNet, a mosquito net impregnated with insecticide; ZeroFly, a tent tarp that kills flies; and the LifeStraw, a filter worn around the neck that makes filthy water safe to drink. Some are not only life-saving but even beautiful. The turquoise and navy blue LifeStraw is in museum design collections.

“Vestergaard is just different from other companies we work with,” said Kevin Starace, malaria adviser for the United Nations Foundation. “They think of the end user as a consumer rather than as a patient or a victim.” For example, he said, they have added a cellphone pocket to their bed nets, and make window curtains that kill bugs.

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Read more about this company and the work they are doing to help the world’s poor in the NYT’s article here

Foreign Policy: Ushahidi makes cell-phone users part of early warning systems for brewing violence

Net Effect: Neighborhood Watch
By Elizabeth Dickinson
Published in: Foreign Policy, January/February 2009

“For years, creating an effective means of alerting the world to brewing conflicts has been the dream of humanitarians.
When a rush of violence broke out last January after Kenya’s presidential election, many wondered why it was so unexpected. Electoral rigging set off the attacks, but surely tensions simmered before. Could Kenya have seen the outburst coming and perhaps done something to prevent it?

Prediction, at least, was possible—and Web-based nonprofit Ushahidi (Swahili for “testimony”) did just that. Funded by grants and individual donations, Ushahidi had already developed software that allowed any mobile-phone user in Kenya to report incidents of community tension. “[T]here were a lot of rumors going around way before the violence,” says Ushahidi’s founder, Ory Okolloh.

Okolloh’s group operates one of a growing number of conflict early warning systems that are springing up online. They work because they are simple and fast. An Ushahidi user, for example, sends details of turmoil by text or posts directly to ushahidi.com. Once a local NGO verifies the account, the incident gets entered into the Ushahidi database and plotted on a map, tagged with a description of the event and with space for pictures and video. In Kenya, reports of violence were texted back to local leaders, who could mediate community conflict. International observers could monitor the reports, too.

For years, creating an effective means of alerting the world to brewing conflicts has been the dream of humanitarians. The African Union has been intent on creating its own system since the early 1990s. But none of the ideas was Internet-based. As the South Africa-based Institute for Security Studies put it, Web-based approaches “would have been patently inappropriate for an organization that only recently achieved a moderate level of external e-mail connectivity.”

With Ushahidi, information is available within minutes, and Okolloh says censorship isn’t a problem because governments “are more interested in what’s in newspapers than what’s online.” Kenya was the first testing ground, and now Ushahidi is jumping into other conflict countries as well. As of November, the group was already receiving an average of four reports a day from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This growing breadth could make Ushahidi something like the Wikipedia of conflicts, wrote Harvard researchers Joshua Goldstein and Juliana Rotich in a recent paper. “They are tools that allow cooperation on a massive scale.” Ushahidi hopes to become a history worth contributing to. “

mPedigree: Using cellphones to tackle fake drugs in Africa

The World Health Organization believes that 25% of the medicines sold around the developing world are inauthentic copies containing little or no active ingredients. Medication like this increases the resistance of pathogens to first-line medication and in many cases causes fatality.

But what if a mother caring for her sick child who needs a prescription drug in rural Ghana, could determine by a quick SMS/text-message via her cellphone that the prescription drug she intends to purchase is safe for her child and not a fake?

mPedigree, a Ghanaian start-up, is working to make this a reality throughout Africa. I recently met one of the founders, Bright Simons, a dynamic, young social entrepreneur from Ghana, who is on a mission to find partners and investors and spread the word about mPedigree. If mPedigree is able to forge the public-private partnerships necessary between governments, the pharmaceutical industries, and telecom giants, this technology may well become a revolutionary force in bringing access to safe drugs to people across the developing world.

Read about mPedigree’s approach and Bright’s efforts in this interview with him in June 2008:
MPedigree: Combating Counterfeit Drugs

All About the ‘Chocolate Lady’: A Young South African Entrepreneur

One of the main purposes of this blog is to introduce inspirational social entrepreneurs and innovative organizations to a wider audience outside of their home countries.

In Cape Town at the end of November last year, I met Nontwenhle Mchunu, a formidable, yet cautious young woman from a small town in Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa. She is on a mission to create Africa’s first prestigous, world-class chocolate brand, using only ingredients from African soil that have been sustainably produced.

She is well on her way already: in 2008 she won the South African Businesswomen’s Association Regional Business Achiever Awards in the social entrepreneur category for her newly established company, Ezulwini Chocolat; she has trained at one of Europe’s top culinary institutes, Leatherhead International, and in Switzerland where she learned from the world’s leading fine-chocolate makers.

Her ambition is to build a successful chocolate business in the townships of South Africa to create jobs (where unemployment runs as high as 40%), expand access to vocational education for many youth through her business, and use only cocoa and ingredients from sustainable African sources.

Mchunu, or “Chocolate Lady”, has a passion for both sustainable change and chocolate, and South African supermarket chains and hotels, like Pick-n-Pay and Protea Hotels, have already begun to retail her products. With her lofty expectations, entrepreneurial drive, and plans to become South Africa’s leading Chocolatier, I expect we will see her chocolate around the world in the not too distant future.

I met Mchunu at the Evian Group at IMD’s capacity building workshop in Cape Town that was focused on inclusive growth in Africa. Read more about Mchunu and the workshop here:

Evian Group at IMD workshop focuses on inclusive growth

Nextbillion.net: The New Appeal of Metrics and Evaluation

Net Impact: The New Appeal of Metrics and Evaluation
By Kelly McCarthy
Published: www.nextbillion.net, November 18, 2008 

“There was a lot of buzz about “impact” last weekend at the  Net Impact Conference. However, this year it wasn’t just talk about creating impact, but most importantly how we consider, measure and prove it.  Perhaps the word was being used too liberally lately thus loosing a bit of its meaning.  

However, as I listened to many organizations whose work intends to generate positive environmental and social impact, it became apparent that a shift is occurring.  Rather than talking simply about impact in anecdotes and what was better than before, foundations, funds, design-for-impact, not-for-profit (and not-for-loss) organizations alike were talking about a “social capital market,as. Jason Saul, CEO of Mission Measurement, summed it up during one of the panels. 

Following are some of the thoughts that came to mind from the perspective of metrics and evaluation while attending some of the sessions at the conference.

In a session titled Hype vs. Reality, panelists dug into the nitty-gritty of how we measure, monitor, and evaluate our work.  “Everyone does knowledge management and monitoring and evaluation poorly,” said Elizabeth Nitze, VP of Ashoka.  “After so much time we in the enterprise development sector are looking around wondering, what the heck happened?  What are the best-practices?  There are none.” There was a unanimous nod of heads from fellow panelists and audience members around the room.  However, in a sector that believes in the positive potential impacts of social entrepreneurs, there is light at the end of the tunnel.  

Indeed, the conversation turned optimistic as panelists Brian Milder (from Root Captial) and Elizabeth Wallace Elders (from globalislocal) joined Nitze in a discussion about the mash-up of innovative minds at Google.org, Salesforce, and Acumen Fund leading the effort to develop what is currently being called the Portfolio Data Management System (PDMS).  Officially announced at theClinton Global Initiative, the PDMS is a web-based tool designed to track, share, and compare portfolio performance data with the ultimate intention of helping the enterprise development community better manage, communicate, and maximize our collective impact.

This is all well and good, but does it pass the “so what” test?  And will other efforts similar to the PDMS actually help improve how we talk about and demonstrate impact?” Read more here.

 

IHT: NetHope bringing technology to humanitarian efforts

Today’s IHT has a fascinating article about an organization called NetHope that is working on the utilization of technology to improve the implementation of humanitarian aid around the world.

NetHope bringing technology to humanitarian efforts
By Julie Bick
Published in: International Herald Tribune, November 11, 2008

“Rui Lopes’s first impression of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, after the 2004 tsunami was chaos. Bone-jarringly rough roads led to a hastily assembled field office, where Lopes, the senior technical director of Save the Children, learned that the communications infrastructure, along with just about everything else, had been destroyed.

Aside from a few satellite phones and even fewer working mobile phones, the area was isolated as relief workers scrambled to assess the security situation and address the vast humanitarian needs.” Read the full article here…