Impact Research

Social experiments to fight poverty

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 02:12:00 +0000

Alleviating poverty is more guesswork than science, and lack of data on aid's impact raises questions about how to provide it. But Esther Duflo, founder and director of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT, says it's possible to know which development efforts help and which hurt -- by testing solutions with randomized trials.

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Optimistic Outlook for African Economies

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 14:46:00 +0000

Africa is often depicted as a place of war, disease and poverty, but a new report paints a much more optimistic portrait of a continent with growing national economies and an expanding consumer class that offers foreign investors the highest rates of return in the developing world.

In a report released Thursday, McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, presented a bullish message to companies, arguing that "global businesses cannot afford to ignore the potential."

“The growth we’ve seen in Africa recently is much more widespread than is generally recognized,” said Arend van Wamelen, an author of the report based in Johannesburg for McKinsey, which advises domestic and international companies investing in Africa. “There are a lot of underlying good things going on in the economies.”

The report, titled “Lions on the Move,” includes an array of arresting facts from the firm’s business and economics research arm, the McKinsey Global Institute. Since 2000, 316 million people on the continent have signed up for cellphone service, more than the entire population of the United States; Africa’s billion people spent $860 billion in 2008, more than India’s population of 1.2 billion.

"If Africa can provide its young people with the education and skills they need, this large work force could account for a significant share of both global consumption and production," the report states.

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What Don't Make Sense In Trade Don't Make Sense in Aid

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:26:00 +0000

Easterly offers 5 commonsense rules of thumb for smart Aid. One of the trickiest to navigate is "ANY aid project should be designed to maximize use of abundant resources and minimize use of scarce resources," which includes foreign expertise. It is important not to create outside dependence in order to build sustainable projects.

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Sachs on Connectivity

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 18:05:00 +0000

Sachs says we can still meet the MDG's by 2015 and eliminate extreme depravation by 2025 through connecting to the grid and the internet.

See the short video from Ericsson's 2020 >

For more on Sach's and the Millenium Villages where connectivity is already being applied, see http://www.millenniumvillages.org

Romanticizing Rural Africa

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:04:00 +0000

By romanticizing peasant life in rural Africa rather than pushing for industrialization, are we condemning the continent to persistent poverty? This question is examined by Paul Collier, the author of "The Bottom Billion," Professor of Economics at Oxford, and Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. He make the controversial case for commercialization of farming and GMO's, urbanization, and diverting more aid for industrial infrastructure.

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One Tablet per Child?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 21:03:00 +0000

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is developing a concept for a $75 touch-screen tablet computer that it hopes will further decrease power consumption and pioneer the first flexible LCD display.

As laptop prices continue to fall, the economical argument for using monitors with virtual machines grows weaker.

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Could this laser zap malaria?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 11 May 2010 16:56:00 +0000

Nathan Myhrvold and team's latest inventions, including rapid malaria detection and long-term vaccine storage, remind us that the world needs wild creativity to tackle big problems like malaria. And just as that idea sinks in, he rolls out a live demo of a new, mosquito-zapping gizmo you have to see to believe.

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"Google" By Phone in Rural Africa

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 15:48:00 +0000

Now rural Africans with cell phones can dial in to get answers via a new non-profit.

Dean Kamen Still Trying To Find Funding For Slingshot

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:25:00 +0000

The water distiller still costs $100,000 but with mass manufacturing could get down to $1000 to $2000. It requires minimal electricity (could easily be powered with his stirling engine that runs on any fuel) and can purify ANY water from toxic waste to ocean water.

Unfortunately he hasn't had much luck with financing:
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