International Development: Investing in Girls

Aiming to spearhead a movement towards creating opportunities for girls in the developing world, The Girl Effect advocates girls as agents of change and development. According to the organization, few programs to-date have been specifically initiated to create better opportunities for girls across the developing world. This seems a huge oversight: For “millions of girls across the developing world, there are no systems to record their birth, their citizenship, or even their identity” - in essence, the very existence of millions of girls is not officially recognized. The imperative for change here is so clear, as is the importance of more investment and effective programs that focus on enabling and creating opportunities for adolescent girls in developing countries.

It is therefore exciting and encouraging to discover a small but growing movement that is focusing on the potential development impact of girls as change agents in their communities, as well as a number of investors and organizations forging ahead with programs, in particular, a $1 billion collaboration between Peter Buffett (son of Warren Buffett), his wife and the Nike Foundation, to invest in programs benefiting adolescent girls in developing countries.

Anti-poverty program in New York

Christopher Grimes produces an in-depth analysis on the Opportunity NYC program, an anti-poverty program that originates from Mexico and is being piloted in New York, which pays welfare recipients who undertake tasks that may help them to escape poverty. Opportunity NYC is a rather unique example of an anti-poverty program stemming from the developing world being utilized in a developed country.

Do the right things

By Christopher Grimes
Published in The Financial Times: May 24 2008

On a bright, cold March afternoon, the sidewalks of East New York are bustling with mothers leading their children home from school. A pair of New York City beat cops stand outside a dingy pizzeria, giving them a view of the public housing projects across Sutter Avenue. In the distance, a silver train catches the brilliant sunshine as it hurtles away on elevated tracks, bound for Manhattan, 15 stops away.

The sense of orderly urban bustle is reassuring to the first-time visitor to this Brooklyn neighbourhood with an enduring reputation as one of New York’s toughest. Poverty here is deep and difficult to escape. A handful of people, such as Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, have managed to leave its housing projects behind - but many more cannot. The past decade’s dizzying gentrification of many of New York City’s once-rough neighbourhoods - from 125th Street in Harlem to the old piers of Brooklyn’s Red Hook - has passed E.N.Y. by.

And yet over the past year, this place has become the setting for one of the most closely watched anti-poverty programmes in the developed world. The idea, which has the support of New York mayor Michael Bloomberg (but is not yet city policy), is as simple as it is controversial. Nearly 500 families here, and 2,000 more in other poor neighbourhoods in the city, are being paid “conditional cash transfers” for performing tasks that might help them escape poverty. Children are paid for good school attendance and improving test scores. Parents are paid bonuses for working at least 30 hours a week, taking job training courses or taking their children to see the doctor. Payments that encourage people to invest in their future wellbeing have been used successfully in developing countries from Mexico to Turkey. But the method has never been employed to fight entrenched poverty in a rich country. Many doubt that it will work. Keep reading…

Washington Post: “Women Rise in Rwanda’s Economic Revival”

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 16, 2008

“MARABA, Rwanda — Sun-kissed plantations ring this village, renowned in recent years for growing the rich arabica beans brewed and served in some of the world’s finest coffee houses. But the secret to success here has had far less to do with the idyllic climate and volcanic soil than with a group of people who have emerged as Maraba’s — and Rwanda’s — most potent economic force: women.” Read on here…

On Nextbillion.net: “New model for development in action”

Taking BoP Strategies To Scale Pt. 2: Connecting Rural Communities

By Al Hammond on May 7, 2008 - 08:31.

Published in: Nextbillion.net

“This post is the second in a five part series on a radical new approach to scaling BoP business models, what we call a transformative sector strategy. In this segment, I tell the story of a rural connectivity pilot project; an example of this new model for development in action.

A Last Mile Model for Rural Connectivity

Son Tay commune, Quang Ngai Province.
I was sitting across a table in a remote rural outpost of Vietnam, negotiating (via a translator) with the manager of a local radio station about access to his tower. He asked a series of technical questions and seemed satisfied with the answers, but then he wondered aloud: “Can we get Internet access here?” He didn’t just want it for the radio station, it emerged, but for the surrounding small community - even though nobody there yet owned a computer. The manager understood that internet access could help transform their opportunities. And when we agreed to mount a small antenna to serve the community, the tower was ours.

The negotiation was part of a two year long process to pilot a novel approach to rural connectivity. It involved building an advanced, broadband network in three communes (groups of villages) in a very poor province in central Vietnam to provide Internet-based phone service and Internet access. Quang Ngai Province has no Internet access for its million-plus population outside of the provincial capital, and phone ownership is about 3 percent.” Keep reading…

Delight About Donor Disclosure — Now Kick It Up A Notch!

From Global Development: Views from the Center by Nancy Birdsall
Joint post with Kate Vyborny

May 07, 2008

“We have been trying for a while to convince official aid donors to report to recipients more detailed, timely information about their disbursements of aid. You might well ask: how is it that recipients do not know how much money they are getting? Money may be in projects completely separate from the government; or it may go to specific project units within ministry of education or health, for example — even the health or education minister may not know who in his or her ministry has access to what money. This undermines the collective decisionmaking process over how funds are spent that is central in the role of democratic governments. The recipient government should be involved in deciding how the money will be spent — mechanisms like budget support and our proposed “cash on delivery” aid allow this to happen automatically. But at the very least, donors should be keeping tabs and telling the recipient — quite a low bar, especially considering the standards to which donors hold or exhort recipients.

We recently learned that donors and the government of Mozambique have launched a new database, ODAMOZ, through which donors report quarterly all their aid spending in Mozambique. To the donors who are funding this effort, the European Commission, UN, and the Netherlands, bravo!” Keep reading…

International Corporate Volunteering: Finding a balance between corporate benefit and social impact

“In July, a team of 8 to 10 I.B.M. employees will travel to Ghana to help tiny businesses make their operations more professional. Another team will help entrepreneurs seek microloans in Turkey, while yet another will create training programs on information technology in Vietnam.” Volunteering Abroad to Climb at I.B.M., New York Times: March 26, 2008 Read more…

More and more multinational corporations are sending employee volunteers to the four corners of the globe to engage in service projects. Indeed, an estimated 40 percent of major corporations have rolled out international corporate volunteering (ICV) programs. One of the latest to join this trend is I.B.M. with its Corporate Services Corps program, reviewed in the recent New York Times article, Volunteering Abroad to Climb at I.B.M. Other well known multinationals with more established ICV programs include Pfizer (the Pfizer Global Health Fellows Program), General Electric, Timberland and Starbucks.

Through international corporate volunteering programs, multinationals are partnering with non-profits, engaging their highly skilled and talented employees in work on development challenges, transferring business skills to local entrepreneurs, providing life-saving medical services to the poor, and fostering employee consciousness towards global challenges. Among others, these aspects give rise to the enormous potential for international corporate volunteering programs to have a positive social and economic impact in the communities they enter. Yet, corporations rarely measure the local impact of their volunteering projects.

With the significant investment needed to send employee volunteers to work on service projects outside of their comfort zone and/or country, most programs tend to emphasize criteria such as employee development and internal advancement. While these aspects are imperative to the corporate success and value of the programs, little attention is paid to the programs’ potential external beneficiaries, or its social and economic impact. This, indeed, is surprising considering that most multinational corporations prioritize client satisfaction.

ICV programs should measure both client satisfaction, social and economic impact, and the corporate development of employees. Looking ahead, for multinational corporations operating programs in countries with developing markets and consumer bases, the programs set the foundation for future customers. With this in mind, client satisfaction and social and economic impact become a no-brainer!

Some corporations are already actively working on measuring their impact and improving their ICV programs. One such example is the collaboration between Pfizer and The Brookings Institution, who together partnered with FSG Social Impact Advisers to further research and analyze the subject. The resulting paper, Volunteering for Impact: Best Practices in International Corporate Volunteering, “seeks to explore and understand the lessons learned among major corporations, and is intended to be a first step toward creating a more structured and systematic understanding of the landscape of ICV. It provides an analysis of a sample of leading corporate programs, suggests ways in which corporations can more strategically align volunteering programs with their businesses, and provides recommendations for companies to consider for the future.” Their ICV case studies include among others, IBM, Accenture, Timberland, and Ernst&Young. Click here to read further about this collaboration and download the report.

Tanzania: “Cash for safe sex” experiment

World Bank backs anti-Aids experiment
Financial Times
By Andrew Jack in London
Friday Apr 25 2008 16:30

“Thousands of people in Africa will be paid to avoid unsafe sex, under a groundbreaking World Bank-backed experiment aimed at halting the spread of Aids.

The $1.8m trial - to be launched this year - will counsel 3,000 men and women aged 15-30 in southern rural Tanzania over three years, paying them on condition that periodic laboratory test results prove they have not contracted sexually transmitted infections.

The proposed payments of $45 equate to a quarter of annual income for some participants.” Read more…

On small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs): “Root Capital helps grass-roots eco ventures”

By Jim Wyss
Miami Herald: 21 April, 2008

“Based in Cambridge, Mass., Root Capital targets grass-roots ventures, such as organic coffee and cocoa cooperatives, that are too large to benefit from micro-loans but too small to approach traditional banks. Root reaches out to this ”missing middle” by providing loans of between $25,000 and $1 million, along with training and capacity building.

To date, the organization has issued more than 360 loans worth $78 million to 175 businesses in 26 nations. In the process, 39-year-old Foote (whose father, Tad, was president of the University of Miami for two decades through 2001) has racked up a number of accolades. Fast Company gave Root Capital its Social Capitalist Award in both 2007 and 2008, and The World Economic Forum recently named Foote a 2008 Young Global Leader.” Read more…

To explore the subject of SMEs further, The “Missing Middle” in Development is an excellent article on the crucial role of SMEs in the development of emerging markets.

NYT Microcredit Story Raises a Tough Question: Does 100 Percent Interest Help Poor People?

By David Roodman
Global Development: Views from the Center (Center for Global Development)
April 07, 2008

“The New York Times ran a story on Saturday by Elisabeth Malkin, called “Problems for Microfinancing in Mexico,” that illustrates the difficulties of sizing up microcredit. The article surveys the controversy over the initial public offering of shares in Compartamos, a Mexican microfinance bank, which “began as a nongovernmental organization in 1990, started by a Catholic social action group called Gente Nueva, whose inspiration was a visit by Mother Teresa to Mexico.” The spectacular IPO last April raised $450 million for the company, turned the founders into multimillionaires, and generated nine-figure gains for early investors including non-profit Accion International and the World Bank’s private sector lending arm, the IFC. The IPO was a Richter-9 earthquake in the microfinance world, seeding contention between those whose vision for microfinance is of a rapidly growing commercial industry reaching millions more people each year and those dismayed at businessmen making fortunes on the backs of the poor thanks to annual interest rates approaching 100%.” Continue reading…

Patient health is helped to grow: Former Peace Corps volunteer sets up projects in Africa

By Gretchen Lees
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
April 5, 2008

“About six months into his 2005 Peace Corps service in Senegal, San Diego resident Steve Bolinger helped spearhead a gardening program for the infectious disease ward of a local hospital. The goal was to teach patients, many of them HIV positive, the skills to grow their own food and help supplement the hospital food supply. After seeing the impact, Bolinger made plans to replicate the program once out of the Peace Corps. He recruited a friend, Sarah Koch, a rural health extension agent he met in the Peace Corps, who often volunteered at the original garden in Dakar. They launched Development in Gardening after discovering a lack of gardening outreach programs.” Read more…

Find out more on their website Development in Gardening