A View From The Cave

Google Hangout Discusses Poverty Porn

2013-06-18T13:12:00.001-04:00

A discussion on poverty porn hosted by Kurante just ended. Kurante hosted the coversation on Google+ featuring Ethan Zuckerman, Charlie Beckett, Linda Raftree, Teddy Ruge and Lina Srivastava. With Lindsay Poirier serving as moderator. Watch the video below for the conversation (warning it cuts off at the end due to time) and the accompanying conversation on Twitter.

Politics and design thinking: more in common than you think

2013-06-18T09:19:00.004-04:00

By Dave Algoso

Last week, USIP’s Andrew Blum wrote a great piece (on Tom Murphy’s A View From The Cave) about the limitations of design thinking when it comes to politics. Blum makes the solid point that design thinking works best when a certain amount of consensus exists around the problem that’s being addressed. For political issues, which are all about contested power and disagreements over values, such consensus is elusive.

Design thinking has found its entry points into political issues with narrow targeting. Blum’s example is the Atrocity Prevention Challenge. It focuses on information-gathering as a way to prevent violence, while essentially ignoring (or making unstated assumptions about) how the gathered information actually translates to violence prevention. The narrow targeting is necessary to apply design methods, but it constrains the overall impact that can be made.

However, I think there’s hope. Design thinking can take many forms. Like any discipline, it includes a range of methods and frameworks that can be applied to a variety of problems. Because politics itself lies at the intersection of so many aspects of human activity, political analysis must pull from a wide variety of disciplines. Design thinking has the potential to contribute to that.

There are several natural overlaps between design thinking and political analysis. I see these overlaps in my day job at Reboot, where we apply principles from design (as well as other fields) to inherently political issues like governance, accountability, and institutional development.

Chief among these overlaps is a human-centered approach. Design calls them “users”, while political terms vary based on where you’re sitting — “targets” or “constituents” perhaps. Regardless, both fields recognize individuals as the primary decision-making unit. If you want to design a better smartphone, you need to truly understand how users will interface with it throughout their day. Likewise, if you want to sway political decision-makers, you need to understand the various pressures and incentives competing for their attention and action.Empathy is critical in both cases.

Another area of overlap lies in multi-disciplinary understandings of context. Understanding how a user might interact with a product or service requires a mix of disciplines — psychology, linguistics, aesthetics, anthropology, and even biology, depending on what’s being designed. Political analysis requires an understanding of similar disciplines, with an even heavier reliance on economics, governance, conflict, rhetoric, and often ethnography. Both require analytical processes to capture insights from across multiple disciplines, synthesis to understand how they relate, and horizontal thinking to consider unexpected outcomes.

Finally, the iterative and adaptive nature of both fields is obvious. You see this built into design with practices like prototyping, and you hear it in phrases like “fail fast.” In political action, adaptation is equally critical. Think about pilot-tests for new initiatives, trial balloonsfloated to gauge support, or the recently coined “problem-driven iterative adaption” approach.

Abstracting a level: the link between these two fields is that both grapple with complexity in a pragmatic way. When they’re at their best — avoiding the lofty idealism of political rhetoric or the techno-utopianism of designers — both fields find ways to act and create progress in a confusing world. They both avoid the detached analysis-paralysis of academia and the temptation to build grand theories from simplistic assumptions (I’m looking at you, rational-choice theory). Politics and design both live in the messy middle.

These similarities suggest that the methods of one could be useful to the other. Design thinking can supplement political thinking on problems such as public service delivery or institutional governance. Blum is right that design thinking, as it’s currently applied to narrowly circumscribed topics, does a disservice to political issues. But I think we can broaden the scope a little bit.

This originally appeared on Dave's Blog Find What Works.

Controversy over Obama's Africa Trip Cost

2013-06-18T08:17:00.004-04:00

It costs a lot for President Obama to travel. He requires plenty of support and security for good reason. The President will make his way back to sub-Saharan Africa to visit Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania later this month. Given the logistical and security challenges in the countries, it is going to cost even more, reports the Washington Post.

Military cargo planes will airlift in 56 support vehicles, including 14 limousines and three trucks loaded with sheets of bulletproof glass to cover the windows of the hotels where the first family will stay. Fighter jets will fly in shifts, giving 24-hour coverage over the president’s airspace, so they can intervene quickly if an errant plane gets too close.

The trip in total will cost in the range of $60 million to $100 million. The cost will be a tad cheaper after a planned safari in Mikumi National park that required additional Secret Service agents was canceled.

“After I read that story in the paper, I thought to myself: ‘It’s mind-boggling to think of taking a trip like this when we’re having to make the cuts in federal spending that we’re now having to make,’” said former head of the White House Travel Office Billy Dale to conservative outlet Newsmax.

Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes defended criticisms of the trip saying that Africa is an important region for the US.

continue reading on Humanosphere...

Keeps Getting Worse in Syria as Refugees Increase and Money Runs Out

2013-06-14T15:53:00.002-04:00

At its current pace, there will be 3.65 million Syrian refugees by the end of the year. That means an estimated 2 million people will flee from the violence in Syria to a neighboring country in the span of six months.

Another 4.25 million Syrians are displaced within the country and the UN estimates that 6.8 million Syrians need humanitarian assistance. That is more than one out of every four Syrians.

A request for $1.41 billion for the first half of the year received only 70% (corrected) of the funding. Despite the shortfall, 2.4 million people have been reached by feeding programs, one million children have been vaccinated against polio and measles and safe drinking water has been provided for 9 million people.

The continued fighting, increased displacements and worsening situation add up to a greater humanitarian need. An appeal for an additional $4.4 billion for the rest of the year reflects the challenges ahead.

“After more than two years of brutal conflict, almost a third of Syrians need urgent humanitarian help and protection, but the needs are growing more quickly than we can meet them,” said Emergency Relief Coordinator, Valerie Amos. “Today we launched the biggest humanitarian appeal ever and we are asking our donors to continue to give generously.”

Continue reading on Humanosphere →

Design Thinking and the Politics of Atrocity Prevention

2013-06-13T09:09:00.001-04:00

By Andrew Blum, Vice President, Program Management and Evaluation. United States Institute of Peace. Views expressed are my own, not that of my organization.

I have followed the Atrocity Prevention Challenge for awhile. So when I heard on Twitter that the challenge moved into the “evaluation” phase I spent some time reading through the ideas of the 17 organizations chosen as finalists. The winners of the Challenge were announced on June 5.

I came away underwhelmed. Of course there were some good ideas, but nothing I saw had the potential to be transformative.

So what happened? After all, the Challenge was organized by a veritable super group of organizations: Humanity United, USAID, and OpenIDEO. Humanity United and USAID have done very good work on conflict management and atrocity prevention, and IDEO is a leader in the design field.

The answer I think lies in the structure of the challenge, which is organized under the top-line question: How might we gather information from hard-to-access areas to prevent mass violence against civilians?

The little two-letter word in that question is doing an awful lot of work, and signals the core premise of the Challenge, that if we get the gathering of information correct, then atrocities will be prevented. This is a mistake we’ve been making for a long time. The mostly implicit idea behind the “first generation” of early warning/early response initiatives was that if we build really good predictive models of conflict (and maybe include enough advanced statistical techniques) those predictions would be compelling enough to create a response.

It didn't happen.

Merchants have joined the peace networks. Disputes at the market can be swiftly defused. [credit: USAID/Sudan]

It’s hard not to see the innovative information-gathering and visualization tools of current efforts as just the latest effort to make the presentations of information compelling enough on its own to create a response.

We should know better by now. So again, what happened?

I would argue that part of problem is the limits of “design thinking” in its current form. This approach, championed by IDEO, began in the world of things, and the world of software - in the design of shopping carts and user interfaces. More recently it has more adopted by non-profits and “social innovators”. Design thinking is not one thing, but at its core is the idea of re-engineering things and processes in an on-going, iterated way in order to solve problems that impact people (design thinking is often called human-centered design). In the Art of Innovation, for instance, Tom Kelley, one of IDEO’s founders, talks about keeping a “bug list”.

A list of things in the world that we may take for granted, but that don’t work right, or that create problems and extra effort expended. At the top of my list right now is the fact that parallel parkers in DC can cause traffic to back up for minutes at a time. So the design question is, could we re-engineer the parallel parking system (streets, cars, spaces) to solve this “bug”?

Design thinking excels when there is some consensus on the problem at hand. People don’t like to be stuck in traffic as the result of parallel parkers. If the goal is clear, design thinkers are really good at working on identifying new pathways to get there, and finding creative ways of removing hurdles along those pathways. But what if there is a lack of consensus on the problem?

What if there were two different groups in DC. One of whom hated sitting in traffic, one of whom saw sitting in traffic as fundamental to their identify? In other words, what if the problem was political.

Without going too far into the thickets of political philosophy, I think we can agree that political problems are those defined by issues of identity, power, and legitimate authority, and how they interact. How do we organize ourselves into formal and informal political communities with a common identity? How do we grant legitimate authority? How is power gathered and wielded to confront illegitimate authority?

Students visiting the temple at Naqa to teach the them about their common identity and culture [credit: USAID/Sudan]

Atrocity prevention from the local to the international level is an intensely and inherently political process. Those working on atrocity prevention must find creative ways to confront illegitimate authority, disrupt the configuration of identities that contribute to violence, and craft new means to provide legitimate authority for those with the power to prevent atrocities.

What the Challenge did is identify a narrow slice of the atrocity prevention challenge, the gathering of information, that is highly-amenable to a design thinking approach. What if we have information in one place that we want to get to another place? What are the systems and processes we would need to engineer to move that information? Admittedly, the information itself is politically-loaded, but within this frame, the groups who don’t want the information to get out become simply a bug to engineer solutions around.

To be concrete, I want to compare the atrocity prevention problem, as identified by the Challenge, with a different project that both Humanity United and my organization, the United States Institute of Peace, have supported in Sudan. A UK-based organization, Peace Direct, helped establish the Collaborative for Peace in Sudan, which among other things, is working to create peace zones in South Kordofan. These are communities that refuse to participate in the war in South Kordofan and whose members work with all sides of the conflict to maintain peace in their area.

These efforts are similar to the long-running “peace communities” effort in Colombia. Think about the nature of these efforts. The peace committees in South Kordofan are constantly confronting dangerous sources of power, finding new means to establish authority within the areas they work, working to craft new identity groupings that mitigate instead of exacerbate violence and so on.

Collaborative for Peace in Sudan peace building seminar

The point here is not that these efforts are local, it is that they are political. Similar political processes need to take place within the UN or the United States Department of Defense before an international response to prevent atrocity can take place.

It’s not good enough to argue that this is simply a division of labor – let’s innovate on how we gather information and let others figure out the messy political realities of the response. This is not a two-step process.

The information gathered has to be gathered, aggregated, communicated, and leveraged with the responses in mind. Returning to the South Kordofan example, it may be the case, for instance, that because much of the politics in the area relies on the interaction between nomads and settled communities, the rainfall pattern is the key piece of information to feed into the process of establishing safe zones. Looked at this way, even the core assumption of the Challenge, that we should be gathering information on atrocities in order to prevent atrocities, is one that may need to be questioned.

I am not privy to how the Challenge was designed. But from the outside looking in, it seems as if the approach, design thinking, helped shape how the problem was defined, instead of vice-versa.

If documentation of atrocities is our goal, and it’s a worthy goal in its own right, then the approach would fine. If we want to prevent atrocities, however, we have to design solutions that can confront the exceedingly complex politics involved. Perhaps ironically, this would constitute a true innovation in the field.

Reviewing J's Missionary, Mercenary, Mystic, Misfit

2013-06-10T14:13:00.003-04:00

Attempts to fictionalize humanitarian work have managed to fail on the level of garnering public interest and on the accuracy of living as an expat aid worker.

The Grey's Anatomy-goes-to-South-America failure better known as Off the Map lasted all of 13 episodes. The few aid workers that tuned in gleefully tweeted criticisms of the melodramatic plot and portrayal of aid work.

Anonymous aid worker J emerges as a person with long humanitarian experience using fiction to capture the frustrations and politics that make up aid work while telling a gripping story.

Missionary, Mercenary, Mystic, Misfit picks up with aid worker heroine Mary-Anne who left Haiti behind for her next assignment at the Dolo Ado refugee camp in Ethiopia. Her partner, Jean-Philippe, the object of her torrid affair in Haiti which drove the plot for the prior Disastrous Passion, is traveling around East Africa on a separate assignment.

The pair that fell so deeply in love in Haiti are under stress due to the physical distance and the pressures of the work on their lives. An experienced and older Oxfam aid worker named Jon Langstrom joins the cast as the new leading man and the potential love interest for Mary-Anne who finds herself pulled to this man who seemingly has his life together.

J's previous life was spent as a popular aid blogger at Tales From the Hood. In the year and a half since J hung up his blogging shoes, he launched a social media site for aid workers called Aid Source, co-produced the popular and irreverent Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like andwrote two humanitarian fiction novels.

continue reading on Humanosphere...

Putting Babies in a Box is a Good Idea

2013-06-06T08:00:00.000-04:00

It’s a safe bet. Sending cardboard boxes to poor countries will be the next big global child health initiative.

The BBC reports today on the history and current use of boxes as newborn beds in Finland. The program started as a form of support for low-income families. In 1949 the government decided to offer mothers money or the box ‘o goods as long as they make a visit to a doctor or pre-natal clinic by the 4th month of pregnancy.

The use of cardboard boxes as child beds in Finland has persisted in popularity for nearly 75 years thanks to this government providing families with these boxed-up maternity packages. The parents are given the option to take 140 euros in cash or a box filled with baby needs. The package includes goodies such outdoor gear for the cold Finnish winters, bedding and diapers. 95% of families choose the box. Then they use it as a crib.

Yes, the cardboard device that brought endless entertainment to cats and imaginative children alike, is also a great bed. And experts claim it reduces infant mortality.

Continue reading on Humanosphere...

US Senate Falls Short of White House Food Aid Reform Plan

2013-06-05T15:00:00.000-04:00

The Obama administration has an ambitious plan to reform the delivery of international food aid.

It’s ambitious not in concept. Everybody else does food aid this way: Buying food overseas in or near the emergency in order to speed up response times, support local economies and save money. No, it’s widely regarded as very sensible. The reason it’s ambitious is because Congress doesn’t want to do it.

In the latest move of political inertia, the US Senate on Monday voted to spend a tiny bit more on local food procurement, about $20 million. This amendment to the Farm Bill passed by the Senate represents a paltry sum in comparison to what the White House proposed.

Of the $1.8 billion budgeted for food aid spending, $60 million would be used for local purchases in the Senate budget. The amendment that passed with a voice vote increased the allocation from $40 million. A sum that pales in comparison to what the White House budget requested. The White House overhaul would put $1.4 billion towards emergency food aid, with only 55% sourced through the US. That means hundreds of millions of dollars could have been used to distribute food vouchers and purchase food in non-US markets.

Continue reading on Humanosphere...

Amid Moyo-Gates Debate is a Consensus on Moyo's Economics

2013-06-05T11:58:00.001-04:00

You will remember from the other day, that Bill Gates is not a fan of Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo (see below video). Responding to a question about Moyo’s book Dead Aid, which criticizes Western aid interventions in Africa, Gates claimed the book is ‘promoting evil.’

Well, it turns out that Moyo is not happy with what Gates has to say about her book. Moyo issued a pithy response to what she described as a personal attack by Gates.

“To say that my book ‘promotes evil’ or to allude to my corrupt value system is both inappropriate and disrespectful,” writes Moyo in a blog post this morning.

: Dr. Dambisa Moyo

The short blog post makes two points to refute the remarks made by Gates. First, Moyo says that the book serves as a debating point on aid. She says that both she and Gates agree on the goal to improve the livlihoods of Africans in a sustainable way. Her goal was to raise concerns about the limitations of aid.

The second point made by Moyo addresses Gates’ claim that she does not know much about aid. Moyo is quick to point out her experience in the classroom, a PhD, and out, World Bank Consultant. She concludes that her experience being raised in Zambia provides her with a unique first-hand insight into poverty in Africa and the impacts of aid. It is the very same selling point that Moyo used in promoting her book.

“To cast aside the arguments I raised in Dead Aid at a time when we have witnessed the transformative economic success of countries like China, Brazil and India, belittles my experiences, and those of hundreds of millions of Africans, and others around the world who suffer the consequences of the aid system every day,” says Moyo.

continue reading on Humanosphere...

Also see Ed Carr's recent blog post on the Gates-Moyo flap.

Megyn Kelly for the Win

2013-05-31T17:50:00.001-04:00

I can hate on Fox News with the best of 'em, but Megyn Kelly keeps showing a willingness to not deal with hack punditry. The latest example is her grilling of Lou Dobbs and Eric Erickson for their absurd ideas on gender roles in the American family following a new studying showing that the number of female breadwinners is on the rise in the US.

To get a sense of how things go, Kelly opens her segment asking Erickson, “What makes you dominant and me submissive and who died and made you scientist in chief?” It is a reminder that it is very easy to hate on hack work done by a cable news network seeking to pander to a single group and forget that there are actually people doing what some might remember as journalism.

The segment is long, but Kelly taking apart the two men and the flippant responses from both panel members while Kelly stays in control of the conversation is as good of evidence as any that she is certainly not playing a complementary role to the supposedly dominant men.

Here is the original segment from Lou Dobbs Tonight that has caused a stir:

A Well Researched Book on the LRA

2013-05-29T10:56:00.002-04:00

The Lord’s Resistance Army deserves to be read widely. It is accessible to nonspecialists, undergraduates, and policy practitioners, and it contains clear policy prescriptions on a wide variety of subjects including transitional justice, peace-building, and the rehabilitation of child soldiers. The contributors base their analyses on empirical evidence rather than the hyperbole and hysteria that have characterized so much of the LRA debate. By viewing the LRA crisis as a broad regional issue with complex political, economic, and social dimensions, this volume offers a challenging but realistic path to sustainable peace.

That is Laura Seay reviewing The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality by Tim Allen and Koen Vlassenroot, for the African Studies Review. Seay makes the case for reading the book as a sort of antidote to the simplistic mass advocacy campaigns such as Kony 2012.

Read the review here.

Hugh Laurie Discovers Solution to Poverty!

2013-05-28T11:01:00.000-04:00

Well. He sort of has the answer...

HT Bill Easterly

The Use of Pundits

2013-05-27T10:54:00.004-04:00

via SMBC Comics

USAID Finally has a Water and Development Strategy

2013-05-24T10:20:00.002-04:00

After fifty years in the game, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) unveiled its first ever water and development strategy.

Some say it’s about time.

“For many years in development work, water, sanitation and hygiene have been a bit forgotten,” said Alanna Imbach, media officer with WaterAid America, to the Inter Press Service. ”Instead, significant focus has been placed on education, maternal health and nutrition, overlooking the fact that water and sanitation are foundational building blocks for all of those other elements.”

Though the announcement is appreciated by other NGO leaders, like Water for People CEO Ned Breslin.

“What’s great about this strategy is that it opens up space for creative programming in water development,” said Breslin to IPS. “It’s a huge step forward.”

The five-year water and development strategy is a sign from USAID that it sees water and sanitation as cross-cutting development issues. It is estimated that more than one in ten people (780 million) lack access to safe drinking water. On top of that 2.5 billion people lack access to sanitation.

“This new U.S. Water and Development Strategy will help lift poor people around the world out of conflict and poverty. It is smart, strategic and builds on our past successes using new breakthroughs in science and technology,” said Senator Dick Durbin who joined other members of congress and USAID Administrator Raj Shah for the release.

continue reading on Humanosphere...

So About All Those Taxes on the Rich...

2013-05-23T12:32:00.001-04:00

American rich don't like their taxes (honestly, who does?), but businesses are skating on by with increased profits and decreased tax-receipts. Tax havens may have something to do with it, as seen in the Apple hubbub recently. As the federal budget is discussed, maybe this graph will help things out (nah, it won't).

The Kid who Went Down Fighting

2013-05-21T15:30:00.000-04:00

"I want to be remembered as the kid who went down fighting and didn't really lose."

You may or may not have heard of Zach Sobiech. The 18 year old died from cancer yesterday and the above video is a short view into his amazing life. It seems like Zach was the very embodiment of when Dylan Thomas wrote:

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

It's worth your 20 minutes.

US Food Aid Reform Train is Slowing Down

2013-05-21T12:32:00.000-04:00

Food aid reforms came under the spotlight last month when the Obama Administration announced its Fiscal Year 2014 budget.

The changes are important to humanitarian response. Oxfam America estimates that reforms to food aid procurement laws could speed up crisis response by 14 weeks and reach an additional 17.1 million people. For a crisis like the 2010 drought in the Horn of Africa, that improved response time could have saved thousands of lives.

“The current approach to food aid can become, at times, an impediment to its very own mission,” said USAID Administrator Raj Shah.

Humanitarian groups were mostly supportive in response and contractors were unhappy that changes would affect their business. What looked like positive momentum for reform is starting to slow down as both houses of Congress take a look at the Farm Bill and food aid reform both in and out of the United States.

“The agriculture industry in the Midwest sees this as a threat to exports, which is ridiculous,” said former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios to Businessweek, a supporter of food aid reform during his tenure with the Bush Administration.

The red pen continues to make it through the US federal budget debate and the Farm Bill will see a few billion trimmed from its roughly $100 billion annual budget. The Republican dominated House and the Democrat led Senate do not see eye to eye on all of the cuts and changes, but they are on the same page when it comes to subsidies, says the Washington Post.

Both bills would eliminate the roughly $5 billion in annual subsidies known as “direct payments,” which automatically support certain types of farmers regardless of their crop prices or yield. The Senate version would terminate the program immediately, while the House measure would wean cotton farmers off it during the next two years.

The two measures would also increase subsidies for federally subsidized crop insurance and create a new program to cover small losses on planted crops such as corn and soybeans.

continue reading on Humanosphere...

Mitchell Argues for Patience and Cooperation with Rwanda

2013-05-17T11:30:00.000-04:00

Former UK development chief Andrew Mitchell makes the case for providing aid to Rwanda in an interview with the Guardian. You may remember the controversy following his decision to resume aid to Rwanda just before leaving his post.

"The closeness of the relationship gives us a chance to talk about issues of concern, what really is effective on behalf of the people of Rwanda. If you look at issues of press freedom and political freedom, we are always seeking to nudge the government in the right direction. There is evidence of progress on both counts and that is in the best interest of the Rwandan people and of our relationship with them," he says.

"You have to exercise a degree of strategic patience and not expect the perfect society to be created overnight. It does take time. What's most important is the direction they're going and, with both Ethiopia and Rwanda, there are grounds for optimism."

Read the full article here, where you can also see a video interview with Mitchell.

Nick Kristof on the Slow Death of International Journalism

2013-05-17T09:00:00.000-04:00

New York Times journalist Nick Kristof is pessimistic when it comes to the state of international reporting in the US. He told me about his concerns in an email exchange a few months back, but extends his thoughts further in the latest CGD Global Prosperity Wonkcast.

“I am deeply concerned about the collapse in coverage of global news,” Nick tells me. “It’s particularly striking in the case of television but also in newspapers and news magazines. The [New York] Times is a bit of an exception because we see ourselves as having a comparative advantage of continuing to cover the world, as other people drop that coverage.”

“Your average news consumer is much less exposed to international stories, and those that they are exposed to are particular, segment stories: the selection of a new Pope, the crisis in the Korean peninsula. It tends not to be development stories and I think this is going to be a real blind spot in the US and also, to some degree, globally.”

Given the fact that I am making a slow move into a small segment (development) of a shrinking section (international) of a dying industry (journalism), I hope that he is wrong. Though it is hard to refute the points he makes.

Listen to the podcast here.

Bugs: The Surprising Super Food

2013-05-16T10:51:00.001-04:00

Jokes naturally followed the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation’s new report extolling the virtues of eating bugs.

The most popular tweet was a variant on “Let them eat cake.” Others pointed to the scene in the Disney movie the Lion King where Timon and Pumba introduce bugs to Simba. They assure Simba that bugs are “slimy, yet satisfying.”

It’s all in good fun and probably got more people to pay closer attention to an issue (hunger) in a report that would have otherwise only been discussed within development wonk circles.

Setting aside jokes and a gross-out-factor, bugs turn out to be a pretty awesome food. They pack some real protein punch and are better for the environment as compared to cows, pigs and chickens.

The Economist shows how:

“Forests contribute to the livelihoods of more than a billion people, including many of the world’s neediest. Forests provide food, fuel for cooking, fodder for animals and income to buy food,” said FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva upon the release of the report. “Wild animals and insects are often the main protein source for people in forest areas, while leaves, seeds, mushrooms, honey and fruits provide minerals and vitamins, thus ensuring a nutritious diet.”

continue reading on Humanosphere...

Awkward Video of the Day: Tina Delivers a Goat

2013-05-16T08:48:00.002-04:00

HT Linda

Is Social Media Poverty Porn's Kryptonite?

2013-05-15T11:10:00.004-04:00

New York City - Criticism of pornography centers on the morality of its depictions and the exploitation of people involved.

News reports and fundraising campaigns about poverty run into similar traps when stories strip people of their dignity and, in a similar sense, objectify them. Activists decry this as poverty porn.

Today, at the New York University Woolworth building, filmmakers, NGO staff, foundation representatives and UN agency workers came together to discuss the problem of poverty porn and the potential power of social media to prevent it. The discussion was conducted privately (in accord with so-called Chatham House rules) in order to protect the identity of the participants and encourage a more honest conversation.

Part of the problem here is poverty porn makes money.

Marketing and communications teams for NGOs rigorously test messages to determine the best way to raise money. It’s clear that people connect more to the story of an individual, usually a child, as opposed to a family, community or group of people. Poverty porn is borne out of a well-intended attempt to raise money for poverty alleviation programs.

Some say the ends justify the means when it comes to fundraising for programs.

“The use of poverty porn is a desperate attempt by charities to stay relevant,” said one of the participants.

continue reading on Humanosphere...

Also, see this collection of tweets from the event by Linda Raftree.

Visualizing Africa's Mineral Wealth

2013-05-15T09:37:00.003-04:00

HT Ken Opalo - Read his analysis of the 2013 Resource Governance Index on his blog.

India's Plateauing Working Age Population

2013-05-10T18:28:00.000-04:00

One graph might show how development in India, China and SSA will look very different over the coming decades.

Is Kristof Behind Greater Attention to Women's Issues?

2013-05-10T12:00:00.000-04:00

A profile of Nick Kristof in Syracuse University's Daily Orange covers his career as he is set to take the stage for the University's commencement. This section caught my attention:

For example, the increased recognition of the challenges faced by women in developing countries can be attributed, in part, to Kristof’s work, said Catherine Bertini, former executive director of the World Food Programme and former United Nations under-secretary-general for management.

“I’ve seen more community reaction and support for women and girls in part because of the stories and the issues that they learned about from reading Kristof,” said Bertini, who is also a professor of practice in public administration and international affairs at SU.

There is not real use in trying to determine if it is true or not, just interesting to see it written.