DefeatPoverty.com

A better way of tracking economic growth?

Dave — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 23:02:17 +0000

Kaushik Basu of Cornell University and author of Prelude to Political Economy: A Study of the Social and Political Foundations of Economics, researched and found that governments rarely listen to economic advisors unless they are telling them what they want to hear. Basu recently became the chief economic advisor to India’s finance ministry and so now [...]

Portfolios of the Poor book review

Dave — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 01:20:46 +0000

Recommended Reading Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day by Collins, Morduch, Rutherford & Ruthven This recently published book has got a lot of buzz amongst the microfinance industry as providing new insights into the actual financial activities of < $2/day (key UN definition of very poor) families. The book includes the [...]

The man who brought light to thousands

Dave — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:34:25 +0000

Walt Ratterman died during the earthquake in Haiti. “He has personally brought light to thousands of people around the world.” Read about his work and see pictures

Haiti doesn’t need more donations

Dave — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:14:57 +0000

With well over $1B donated so far to Haiti relief, the issue is not more donations, but effective deployment of existing donations. If the Indian Ocean tsunami of Dec 2004 is any lesson, nine months after well-meaning intentions, just 39% of the money promised had been spent. It was just not possible to spend the [...]

Top DefeatPoverty.com reads in 2009

Dave — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 21:41:06 +0000

Here’s what readers were most interested in reading on DefeatPoverty.com in 2009: 1. The Caste System in India Lives 2. Globalization Good or Bad? 3. Social Business Model 4. Does Microfinance Impact Poverty? 5. Microfinance in the USA 6. For Profit Microfinance 7. Critiquing Microfinance 8. Is the World Getting Better? 9. Slavery by Phule 10. Microfranchising And the top 5 most read new posts in [...]

1,000,000 books for Myanmar libraries

Dave — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 06:09:15 +0000

Last summer, I officially joined as a founding board member of a new start-up non-profit called Nargis Library Recovery (NRL). This NGO was started last year in response to the devastating 2008 Nargis cyclone (hurricane) which wiped out large portions of the Irrawaddy Delta leaving an estimated 135,000 people dead, 800,000 homeless, destroying much [...]

A Smarter Approach to Global Warming

Dave — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 17:53:34 +0000

I thought that the change I voted for was going to prioritize a more rational and facts-based approach to addressing the major issues of our times. I thought that we actually were going to start to abandon our top-down, failed-from-the-start approaches to helping the poorest and to start “exploring” new approaches that might actually work. Bjorn [...]

Slavery book review

Dave — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 01:20:22 +0000

Slavery by Mahatma Phule Slavery was written around 1900 as an expose on the caste system in India. As a reformer and social activist, Phule (along with his wife) advocated for women’s education and sought to bring light on the devastating “slavery of the mind” which enabled the upper caste peoples (particularly the Brahmin caste) to [...]

Out of Poverty book review

Dave — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:15:34 +0000

RECOMMENDED READING Out of Poverty: What works when traditional approaches fail by Paul Polak Polak, a psychiatrist by training, shifted his full-time efforts to working on poverty over 25 years ago. He founded International Development Enterprise to focus on helping small, developing country farmers earn more income. IDE has already helped millions of very small farmers earn their [...]

What poor people really want

Dave — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:59:46 +0000

Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus (see my previous post on Priorities for helping the world’s poor), posted an OpEd in today’s WSJ entitled “The View from Vanuatu on Climate Change“. Vanuatu politicians have been some of the most vocal proponents of carbon cuts to prevent global warming destructive impacts on his country. Rather than theorizing [...]