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kmaherali
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December 6, 2009
Aid Gives Alternative to African Orphanages
By CELIA W. DUGGER

MCHINJI DISTRICT, Malawi — The Home of Hope orphanage provides Chikodano Lupanga, 15, with three nutritious meals a day, new school uniforms, sensible black shoes and a decent education.

Her orphaned cousin Jean, 11, who balked at entering the orphanage and lives with her grown sister, has no shoes, raggedy clothes and an often-empty belly. Repeating third grade for the third time, Jean said she bitterly regretted that she did not grow up in the orphanage where Madonna adopted a boy. Had she stayed, she whispered, “I would have learned to read.”

In a country as desperately poor as Malawi, children placed in institutions are often seen as the lucky ones. But even as orphanages have sprung up across Africa with donations from Western churches and charities, the families who care for the vast majority of the continent’s orphans have gotten no help at all, household surveys show.

Researchers now say a far better way to assist these bereft children is with simple allocations of cash — $4 to $20 a month in an experimental program under way here in Malawi — given directly to the destitute extended families who take them in. That program could provide grants to eight families looking after some two dozen children for the $1,500 a year it costs to sponsor one child at the Home of Hope, estimated Candace M. Miller, a Boston University professor and a lead researcher in the project.

Experts and child advocates maintain that orphanages are expensive and often harm children’s development by separating them from their families. Most of the children living in institutions around the world have a surviving parent or close relative, and they most commonly entered orphanages because of poverty, according to new reports by Unicef and Save the Children.

“Because there’s money in orphanages, people are creating them and getting children in them,” said Dr. Biziwick Mwale, executive director of Malawi’s National AIDS Commission.

The Home of Hope’s founder, the Rev. Thomson Chipeta, 80, said children needed the orphanage because their families were so poor. “If the children can be given the privilege of a home like this one, it’s much better,” he said.

Madonna’s charity, Raising Malawi, pays for most of Home of Hope’s operating budget and also supports community centers where orphans who remain with their families can go for food and services, said the charity’s executive director, Philippe van den Bossche. He said orphanages were not the best solution but were needed when families could not or would not care for children.

In Madonna’s video on AIDS orphans in Malawi, “I Am Because We Are,” she says she was drawn to the country when she was told such children “were everywhere, living on the streets, sleeping under bridges, hiding in abandoned buildings, being abducted, kidnapped, raped.”

But across Africa, demographic data shows that even the poorest extended families usually take in children whose parents have died. And while AIDS has worsened the orphan crisis in Africa, the United Nations recently estimated that of 55.3 million children in sub-Saharan Africa who have lost at least one parent, AIDS accounted for 14.7 million of them.

The Joint Learning Initiative on Children and H.I.V./AIDS, which brought together dozens of international experts to review hundreds of studies, this year strongly endorsed programs that give the poorest families modest financial support, including cash transfer programs like Malawi’s.

More than a billion dollars in foreign aid has been spent over the past five years for orphans and vulnerable children, but some major donors cannot break down how their contributions were spent. Researchers say donors need to weed out ineffective, misconceived programs, scrutinizing those that are managed by international nongovernmental organizations or governments but reliant on volunteers in villages to do the work.

“An enormous amount of money is going into these efforts with very little return,” said Linda Richter, who runs the children’s programs at South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council.

Here in Malawi, hundreds of community groups have won small grants to start small labor-intensive businesses and are expected to donate all the profits to orphans. Pauline Peters, a Harvard University anthropologist, and Susan Watkins, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who have independently done years of field work in Malawian villages, say orphans have received few benefits from the millions spent.

“The donors have fantasies of the way things work — that you can mobilize villagers to care for children who aren’t theirs without paying them to do it,” Professor Watkins said.

In Kandikiti, where Jean Lupanga’s family lives, a group of 20 villagers won a $4,000 grant last year to start a pig farm to help orphans. The group bought nine pure-bred hogs, built them a residence nicer than those of most people and posted volunteers to guard it round the clock. They also bought 10 bicycles, vaccines for the pigs and paid their members to attend training sessions.

More than a year later, they have not sold a single one of the white, floppy-eared, European-bred pigs. In a village where scruffy local pigs trot freely among the huts, the group’s leader fell silent when asked who could afford such expensive pork.

“We’ve never done this before,” said Selina Sakala, 47, chairwoman of Mmasomuyere Orphan Care.

Malawi’s cash transfer experiment, financed by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and supported by Unicef, directly helps destitute families who care for many children or have no able-bodied adult to earn a living. Children whose families got the grants were healthier, better fed and clothed and more likely to be in school than children in families that got none, according to a randomized community trial conducted by Boston University and the University of Malawi and paid for by Unicef and the United States government.

Professor Miller said the program had yielded “fabulous benefits” but cautioned that the country needed better safeguards to prevent corruption and fraud in the future.

Throngs of Malawians gathered one recent day under shade trees to collect the cash. Many grandparents had walked miles on bare feet as cracked and parched as the earth. Officials in plastic chairs checked photo identity cards. Recipients unable to read or write left an inky thumb print, then twisted the precious bills into the hem of a skirt or tucked them in a pocket.

Families who have been collecting the grants for a year or two say they have made a difference. Velenasi Jackson spends the $20 she gets each month on staple foods and clothes for the 10 orphaned grandchildren who share her two-room mud hut in the village of Nyoka. They no longer go whole days with nothing to eat, she said.

“A gift is never too small,” she said.

Here in the Mchinji District, the Home of Hope looks after 653 children, from infants to teenagers. Its founder, Mr. Chipeta, leaning on a hand-carved wooden staff, gestured to each building on a tour of the grounds and proudly named the donor who paid for it. Among them were churches and individuals from the United States, Canada, Britain, the Netherlands, South Korea and Germany.

In a letter Mr. Chipeta gives visitors, he says the home needs their prayers, love and support — with the phrase “See Our Budget” in parentheses.

Chikodano Lupanga has lived at the home since she was 6. Her house mother, Enelesi Chiduka, 59, said she was responsible for looking after 80 girls, making sure they showered twice a day, attended daily prayer sessions and did their chores.

Quiet and serious, Chikodano said her family could never have afforded to send her to high school or to give her a diet that included chicken and fish. “I have lots of friends, and the other needs not met at home are met here — school fees, clothes, shoes,” she said.

Nine years ago, Chikodano’s cousin Alice, now 31, took her and Jean to the Home of Hope. Chikodano went quietly, but Jean, only 2 or 3 years old and deeply attached to her big sister Alice, sobbed inconsolably and remained with Alice. The family has recently started getting the monthly cash grant, but it is too soon for it to have made much impact.

Jean, a shy, expressive girl with a heart-shaped face, lives the arduous life common to poor rural children across Africa. She fetches water, pounds maize and cooks over smoky fires. At last glance, she was scrubbing Alice’s little boy with soapy well water sloshed from a plastic bucket.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/world ... nted=print
kmaherali
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Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

Interesting and striking video on the impact of educating girls

http://www.girleffect.org/
kmaherali
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Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

Investing in Early Childhood Development (ECD)
Posted on 21/04/2009


Why?

Worldwide 200 million children under five years of age are not achieving their development potential due to poverty, poor health and nutrition, and lack of stimulation and learning opportunities. The vast majority of these children are from disadvantaged households and communities in low-income countries.

Early childhood lays critical foundations for a person’s entire life – a finding demonstrated not only by the latest advanced research in neuroscience and genetics but by nutrition and child development studies and programme evaluation data, including data from AKDN’s own programmes. Investments in Early Childhood Development (ECD) offer outstanding returns – both in human and financial terms. Numerous studies have demonstrated the improvements in education, health, social development and economic growth indicators attributable to ECD. World Bank economists[ii] conclude that, “well targeted ECD programmes cost less and produce more dramatic and lasting results than education investments at any other level”. ECD programmes help reduce the social and economic disparities and gender inequalities that divide societies and perpetuate poverty and are preferable to costly remedial action.

What are Early Childhood Development programmes?

Early Childhood Development (ECD) programmes are concerned with ensuring young children have a good start in life. They address health, nutrition and protection from harm. They offer opportunities for enjoyable learning and promote a sense of identity and self-worth. They enable students to communicate effectively and get along with others.

ECD programmes are about influencing people and influencing the contexts in which children are growing up so that the overall development of children is supported. Social, cultural, economic, geographical and political contexts are key. Within the lives of young children, “contexts” translates into the different environments which impact on them, including families, communities, health services, ECD centres, schools, district bodies and national policy. ECD programmes are about influencing these factors and addressing issues which undermine children's development.

ECD programmes are defined internationally as being concerned with children from before birth to the age of eight years. A wide range of initiatives fall under the ECD umbrella – from working with families to changing systems which marginalize, neglect or exclude some children. They are about a range of supports for families, communities and institutions that strengthen the ability to care for and nurture children.

Early Childhood Development programmes are therefore concerned with:

Interactions within the family:Parenting/ caregiving programmes (within maternal and child health, nutrition, or education initiatives) emphasize parents and other family caregivers as the first and most important carers and teachers of children;

ECD centres: Structured programmes aim to provide a safe and secure environment, warm and responsive caregivers, and stimulating learning activities for children. These may be formal or informal centres/spaces in the community, homes, local schools or work sites;

Community planning and mobilisation: Community-level initiatives work to create enabling and safe environments for young children and promote access to food, healthcare, ECD provision, safe water, adequate sanitation, etc.;

Influencing community-based health service provision, disease prevention and health promotion: ECD initiatives in health care promote services that are supportive of the continuum of maternal and child health, nutrition, and overall development (including pre- and post-natal care, immunisation, growth monitoring, mental health, etc.);

Influencing the early years of primary education: These initiatives work with government and non-government primary schools to promote the implementation of child-centred, active-learning methods in early primary grades and support a smooth transition for children as they enter school from home or ECD programme;

Resource and training institutions: Diverse institutions and programmes provide leadership and capacity-building to community/government programmes. They also conduct research, influence policy and provide networking opportunities;

Research: Specific studies, in addition to regular monitoring, enable analyses of the inputs, processes, outcomes and wider impact of different interventions;

Advocacy: Local and macro-level initiatives work towards systemic change by promoting ECD at the government level through efforts such as advocating for specific policies and budget allocations;

Public awareness: Initiatives at many different levels (community to national) use media, well-known figures, study findings etc. to highlight the importance of attention to the early years.

As the bullet points above suggest, early childhood programmes are concerned with many players and all aspects of children’s development.

Keys to Early Childhood Development and Poverty Reduction

Mother and Child Health: A key to healthy early childhood development is a continuum of care for mothers, neonates, infants and young children at a time when they are all particularly vulnerable to a range of risks. In the very early years, health care and a healthy environment play pivotal roles in child survival and development and build the basis for a healthy adult life. Mothers and children need the continuum of care from pre-pregnancy through pregnancy and childbirth and through to the early days and years of life. Safe and healthy environments, including good quality housing, clean water and adequate sanitation facilities, safe neighbourhoods, and protection against violence, are all essential. Good nutrition begins in utero and depends on adequately nourished mothers. The initiation of early and exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of life is as important as ensuring access to healthy diets for infants and young children. These measures can be assured by improving food security and changing prevailing knowledge, attitudes and practice.

Child Development and Well-being: The psycho-social aspects of development also have profound significance, both for individual success, quality of life, and long-term social change. This is particularly important in many of the countries where AKDN works – impoverished areas where people’s child-rearing practices are often dictated by the demands of daily survival. In these situations, people naturally focus on keeping children fed, enhancing their physical skills and teaching social responsibility. They tend to underestimate the significance of their key role in supporting children’s broader learning, language development and sense of themselves.

However, research and practice shows that parenting programmes can help build children’s knowledge, skills and, equally important, confidence and sense of agency. The value of centre-based ECD programmes has also been demonstrated across multiple contexts. These programmes provide an expanded range of experience for young children, helping them develop skills and form attitudes that will enable them to make good use of learning opportunities both within and beyond formal education. ECD programmes emphasise the development of children’s ability to interact effectively with their world. They support the development of confident, life-long learners who are more likely to gain the skills needed to break out of the cycle of poverty and become active, healthy members of society.

A programme for young children, therefore, can be seen as an entry point for responding effectively to many of the factors underlying poverty. The direct benefits for children’s healthy physical, social, emotional and academic development are an important and well-known part of this. In addition, safe and stimulating childcare frees up caregivers to work. Parenting/caregiving programmes can be very effective in giving families an increased sense of control over their lives while providing them with information and building a sense of agency to act on their own behalf and on behalf of their children.

ECD Initiatives in the Aga Khan Development Network

The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) has been supporting ECD initiatives for several decades. Earlier AKDN agencies and institutions were amongst the few international bodies which recognized the critical long-term impact of ECD for both individuals and society.

The different parts of the network work in ECD in a variety of ways reflecting each agency or institution’s own particular mandate. However, they are all guided by the principle that ECD interventions should be appropriate to the cultural context, affordable for families, based on sound and current evidence on child development, genuinely involve families and communities, and be sustainable over the longer-term.

The Aga Khan Education Services (AKES) supports pre-primary classes within AKES primary schools in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, independent nursery schools in East Africa, and community-based day care centres in rural Gujarat in India. More recently, a new Early Learning Centre established in Dubai is set to begin operations in 2009. Additional planning is underway to significantly expand access to ECD in the coming years in Central Asia, Pakistan and India.

The Aga Khan Health Services (AKHS), which works in eight countries in Central and South Asia, East Africa and the Middle-East, focuses particularly on mothers and children under five years of age. Programmes include safe motherhood, child survival and health promotion and disease prevention education activities at the community level. Community-based health care is linked with health service delivery units – from basic health centres up to full-fledged hospitals. Many of these initiatives are undertaken in partnership with the Health Programme of the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF), including, for example, the support to maternal and child health programmes in Afghanistan and Syria.

The AKF Education Programme established its early childhood work in the early 1980s, starting in Kenya, India and Portugal. For many years, the East African Madrasa Early Childhood Programme was AKF’s flagship ECD initiative in Kenya, Tantania and Uganda. However, the ECD portfolio has expanded significantly both within countries and into 12 additional countries, often through partnerships with other AKDN institutions and initiatives.

Through these activities, AKF has piloted and established a range of ECD programme models, including centre-based pre-schools, outreach pre-schools that are linked to central centres, transition programmes with the lower grades of primary schools, a growing cluster of parenting/ caregiving initiatives to strengthen families’ supports for their children, and a few day care models (home-based, centre-based and work-based). An additional area of work has been to establish new ECD training and resource centres -- or strengthen existing ones -- in order to help catalyse and drive ECD programming demand and quality (e.g., Madrasa Resource Centres (MRCs) in East Africa, the Teachers’ Resource Centre in Pakistan, and the planned ECD centres in Lisbon and Cairo).

AKF also responds to, and often creates, opportunities for policy dialogue and influence as countries start to formulate ECD policies and plans (e.g., in Kenya, Zanzibar, Uganda, Syria and Kyrgyzstan). In recent years, AKF has also been collaborating with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) to establish ECD programmes in Cairo (Egypt), and Delhi (India). These efforts are jointly supported by the AKTC Historic Cities Programme and AKF.

ECD initiatives at the Aga Khan University (AKU) in Pakistan and East Africa are more recent additions, but they are critically important to AKDN’s efforts in the area of ECD. This work is led by the two Institutes of Educational Development (IED), the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health (DPCH), and the Human Development Programme (HDP). Specialized courses (certificate and/or diploma-level) for ECD teachers and professionals offered through the IEDs in East Africa and Pakistan and through HDP are beginning to meet some of the human resource development needs for ECD in these regions.

In addition, new research in ECD is being under-taken at AKU in Pakistan, providing critically needed evidence on best practices in ECD. One example is the project, being conducted by the DPCH, which will compare the impact of different interventions (standard M/CH support, M/CH plus child development, and M/CH plus enhanced nutrition supplements) to mothers through the Lady Health Workers in rural Sindh. The study examines the relative (and combined) effects of these interventions on mother and child outcomes, and will follow children up until eight years of age. The potential for the IEDs, HDP, and DPCH to serve as leading resource institutions in their countries (and regions) is considerable. There is a growing need for such hubs for the development of professionals and leaders in the field and where multi-disciplinary research can be undertaken. Such research might include further exploration of the basic science of child development, the testing of hypotheses regarding key factors contributing to child outcomes, as well as rigorous assessments of programme impact.

The Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED) is also looking to do more to meet the ECD needs of young children whose parents work for the various AKFED-related companies in Africa. In Kenya, the Frigoken and Alltex companies together serve around 60 children aged six months to three years for mothers working in the factories. Assessments are planned for additional companies in West Africa in 2009 in order to ascertain the needs and opportunities for linked ECD services. The Aga Khan Agency for Microfinance (AKAM) is also about to pilot some new financial products which will directly benefit young children and their mothers.

AKDN ECD Programme Data

AKDN agencies are beginning to consolidate programme data to understand the array and nature of current investments in ECD and to assess gaps and opportunities. Global coverage data for ECD programmes led or supported by AKDN in 2008 follows:

Education Data: (Education-focused, with health and hygiene elements)

2008 ECD activities EXCLUDING
work at lower Primary ECD efforts INCLUDING work with primary grades 1-3
# children 128,199 402,602
# ECD centres/ classes 2,487 5,060
# parents in parenting/ caregiving programmes
24,431
28,574
# teachers/ ECD workers 4,059 12,834
# communities/districts 1,982 / 190 3,632 / 210



Beyond the basic coverage statistics, AKDN agencies and programmes are increasingly concerned with core education outcome indicators including school enrolment, retention, and achievement. For example, in Uganda, a study led by the Madrasa Regional Researcher found the repetition rate in Grade 1 for children who had participated in an ECD programme was 3.5 percent -- less than half that for those who had not (7.3 percent). In a regional MRC study (Uganda, Kenya, Zanzibar), preschool experience was significantly associated with higher cognitive ability. In Pakistan, AKDN supports a project working to improve access to and the quality of pre-primary and early primary classes in 287 government and community schools. The government’s national figure for drop-out in Grade 1 stands at 23 percent, while for schools supported by this programme, the figure is only 1.5 percent. In both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, children from AKDN-supported pre-schools (including home-based pre-schools) are out-performing children who have not been to pre-school when they go to primary school. Beyond the numbers, parents and teachers in all of the very diverse contexts in which these programmes operate strongly endorse their importance. More studies tracking children through school, and combining both quantitative and qualitative data, are needed.

Health Data:



2008 Health Activities
# children < 5 targeted in community/primary programmes 375,800
# women targeted in community/ primary programmes 627,600
# Community Health Workers 2,215
# Basic health centres (AKHS/ gov. / others) 211
# Comprehensive Health Centres (AKHS/ gov./ others) 48
# Hospitals (AKU/ AKHS/ others) 9
# communities / districts 2,108 / 107


Other core health outcome indicators being tracked within AKDN programmes include rates for infant and child mortality, immunization, skilled attendant delivery (also ante- and post-natal visits), and stunting, as well as percentages of households with safe water and adequate sanitation. There are significant differences between and within regions, countries and districts. Health programme achievements include, for example, increased immunization coverage (e.g., from 62 percent to 98 percent in the programme area of the Community-Led Child Survival programme in Maharashtra, India), increased use of impregnated bed-nets for under-fives and pregnant women (e.g., from 7 percent to 47 percent in the health programme area in Mozambique), and increased use of ante-natal and institutional delivery services across programmes. Monitoring and research studies are critical to demonstrate the outcomes of health programme interventions and their interaction with education-focussed interventions.

Future Plans

AKDN agencies are working to strengthen resource institutions, build local capacity for the sustainability and local appropriateness of ECD programmes, and contribute to the growing field of ECD research and knowledge in their different locations. Moreover, staff involved in ECD across AKDN agencies and institutions are building complementarity and convergence across the different initiatives. The sheer size and dynamism of the different agencies’ and institutions’ programmes makes this complex but it is vital given the potential synergies. Partnerships with others (including a range of academic institutions) involved in the field of ECD) will continue and be further expanded to ensure maximum impact.

In 2009 inventories of services, programmes and resource institutions across and beyond AKDN will be completed. These together with a number of detailed situation analyses will be used to improve planning, address gaps and reach many more young children and their families in areas where AKDN operates. The aim is to improve the reach, quality and effectiveness of ECD programmes across sectors.

For more information, please see:

AKDN education pages
Aga Khan Foundation
Jailoo Kindergarten Programme: More information and Video on BBC World Challenge Site
Madrasa Early Childhood Development Programme: 25th Anniversary Brochure; Video & Podcast


Endnotes


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Grantham-McGregor et al. (2007) Developmental potential in the first 5 years for children in developing countries. The Lancet, 369

[ii] van der Gaag, J.; Tan, J. P. 1998. The Benefits of Early Childhood Development Programmes: An Economic Analysis. Washington, DC, World Bank.


http://www.akdn.org/content/734/Investi ... opment-ECD
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

December 17, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
His Gift Changes Lives
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Here’s a story for the holiday season. A 30-year-old former refugee is putting together a most extraordinary Christmas present — the first high school his community has ever had.

Valentino Deng, 30, is the central figure in the masterful 2006 best seller, “What Is the What,” by Dave Eggers. The book records Valentino’s life after the Sudanese civil war strikes his remote town in South Sudan. His friends were shot around him. He lost contact with his family, and he became one of the “lost boys” of Sudan. Fleeing government soldiers, dodging land mines, eating leaves and animal carcasses, Valentino saw boys around him carried off and devoured by lions.

At one point, Valentino and other refugees were attacked by soldiers beside a crocodile-infested river. He swam to safety through water bloodied as some swimmers were shot and others were snatched by crocodiles.

Valentino learned to read and write at makeshift schools in refugee camps by writing letters in the dust with his finger. Improbably, he turned out to be a brilliant student with a cheerful, upbeat personality. And in 2001, the United States accepted him as a refugee.

Valentino had earned the right to take it easy for the next 600 years; instead, he sets an astonishing example of resilience, compassion and charity. He and Eggers channel every penny made from “What Is the What” to a new foundation dedicated to building a high school in his hometown in Sudan.

That’s what I find so inspiring about Valentino. For a quarter-century, world leaders have averted their eyes from horrors in Sudan — first the north-south civil war that killed two million people (more than died in all the wars in America’s history), then the genocide in Darfur and now the growing risk of another civil war. In that vacuum, moral leadership has come instead from university students and refugees like Valentino.

Now Valentino’s school is beginning to operate in the town of Marial Bai — a modern high school serving students from thousands of square miles. It had a soft opening earlier this year with 100 students, and he is hoping to increase to 450 students in the coming months — but that means dizzying challenges.

“I want to enroll more than 50 percent girls,” Valentino said. “But to do that, I have to house them, because families will not allow a girl to go far away to school without a place to stay.

“For now, I’ve enrolled 14 girls,” he added. “But they go home, and then they have to take care of siblings, collect firewood, fetch water. So I’m worried about how much they can learn.” In addition, a high school girl can fetch a huge bride price — about 100 cows — and Valentino thinks the best way to avoid early marriage and give the girls a chance to study is for them to live in a dormitory on the school grounds.

Decades of civil war have left South Sudan one of the poorest places on Earth, where a woman is more likely to die in childbirth than to be literate. In recent years, only about 500 girls have graduated annually from elementary school in South Sudan — out of a total population of eight million.

Valentino’s every step has been Herculean. Building supplies had to be trucked in from Uganda through a jungle where a brutal militia called the Lord’s Resistance Army murders, rapes and loots. There is no electricity or running water in Marial Bai, so the high school’s computers will have to run on solar power. When a microscope arrived the other day, a science teacher was overcome. He had never actually touched one.

The school has a certain American ethos. Valentino is requiring students to engage in service activities, such as building huts for displaced people. “We focus on leadership,” he explained.

Eight high school teachers from the United States, Canada and New Zealand traveled at their own expense to Valentino’s school last summer to train teachers and work with students. They raved to me about how eager the students are to learn; some students burst into tears when the volunteers had to leave.

“What he’s accomplished in his hometown is astounding,” Eggers said. “A 14-structure educational complex built from scratch in one year. It boggles the mind.

“He’s succeeded where countless NGOs stumble, mainly because he knows the local business climate and can negotiate reasonable local prices for materials,” he added, referring to nongovernmental organizations.

Valentino is still fund-raising and looking for volunteer teachers. He needs $15,000 to finish a dormitory for girls, and much more to dig wells and operate the school for the first three years. (More information about the school is at www.valentinoachakdeng.org.) But he’s relentless.

“I’m the lucky one,” Valentino told me. “I must be the one who will make a difference.”

What a perfect sentiment for these holidays.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/opini ... nted=print
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

December 31, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Sparking a Savings Revolution
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
ESTELí, Nicaragua

There’s an old saying about poverty: Give me a fish, and I’ll eat for a day. Give me a fishing rod, and I’ll eat for a lifetime.

There are many variations in that theme. In Somalia, I heard a darker version: If I buy food, I’ll eat for a day. If I buy a gun, I’ll eat every day.

But these days, there’s evidence that one of the most effective tools to fight global poverty may be neither a fishing rod nor a gun, but a savings accounts. What we need is a savings revolution.

Right now, the world’s poor almost never have access to a bank account. Cash sits around and gets spent — and, frankly, often spent badly.

“We used to buy a three-liter bottle of Coke every day,” recalled Socorro Machado, a 49-year-old homemaker in a village here in northwestern Nicaragua. That was a bit less than a gallon, and the cost of $1.75 consumed a large share of the family’s budget.

Then Catholic Relief Services, an aid organization, arrived in the village with a new program to promote savings. It provided a wooden box with a padlock and organized savings groups of about 20 people who meet once or twice a month, typically bringing 50 cents or $1 to deposit in the box.

Some of the money is lent out to start a small business, but the greatest benefit of these programs seems to be that they provide a spur to save.

“Now we buy a bottle of Coke just once a week, and we put the money in savings,” Ms. Machado said. She saves about $5 a month in her own name and another $5 a month in her son’s name and has plans to buy a computer for him eventually.

Some people in the development world argue that microlending has been oversold, and there has been a bit of a backlash against it lately — including a “no pago” movement here in Nicaragua. This “don’t pay” effort has been orchestrated by the leftist government of President Daniel Ortega.

I don’t agree with the criticisms of microloans, for I’ve seen how tiny loans can truly transform people’s lives by giving them the means to start small businesses. Even so, there’s evidence that the most powerful element of microfinance is microsavings, not microloans.

One of the ugly secrets of global poverty is that a good deal of suffering is caused not only by low incomes but also by bad spending decisions. Research suggests that the world’s poorest families (typically the men in those families) spend about 20 percent of their incomes on a combination of alcohol, cigarettes, prostitution, soft drinks and extravagant festivals.

In one village here in Nicaragua where children were having to drop out of elementary school because they couldn’t afford notebooks, a midwife, Andrea Machado Garcia, estimated to me that if a man earned $150 working in the mountains as a day laborer during the coffee harvest, he might spend $50 on alcohol and women and bring back $100 to support his family.

One challenge is that those men don’t have a good, secure way to save money, and neither do poor people generally. It just sits around, itching to be spent. It’s also vulnerable to theft, covetous family members and demands for loans from relatives.

In West Africa, money collectors called susus operate informal banks but charge an annualized rate of 40 percent on deposits. Yes, you read that right. You pay a 40 percent interest rate on your savings!

In Kenya, two economists conducted an experiment by paying the fees to open bank accounts for small peddlers. They found that the peddlers who took up the accounts, especially women, enjoyed remarkable gains. Within six months, they were investing 40 percent more in their businesses, typically by buying more goods to be resold.

Many aid groups including CARE and Oxfam now offer savings programs in some form, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is studying how best to promote financial services for the poor. A Web site, www.matchsavings.org, lets donors match a poor person’s savings to increase the incentive to build a savings habit.

So it’s time for a global microsavings movement. Poor countries should ease the regulations (such as requirements for banking licenses) that make it hard for nonprofits to operate microsavings programs.

Hugh Aprile, a Catholic Relief Services official here, noted that savings schemes are very cheap to start because no capital is used to provide loans. “It’s people using their own money,” he said, “to build far more than they ever thought they could.”

Maybe it’s hard for us to believe considering how much animus there is toward fat-cat bankers in the United States, but the world’s poor might benefit hugely from the ability to bank their money safely.



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January 17, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Our Basic Human Pleasures: Food, Sex and Giving
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Want to be happier in 2010? Then try this simple experiment, inspired by recent scholarship in psychology and neurology. Which person would you rather be:

Richard is an ambitious 36-year-old white commodities trader in Florida. He’s healthy and drop-dead handsome, lives alone in a house with a pool, and has worked his way through a series of gorgeous women. Richard’s job is stressful, but he spent Christmas in Tahiti. Unencumbered, he also has time to indulge such passions as reading (right now he’s finishing a book called “Half the Sky”), marathon running and writing poetry. In the last few days, he has been composing an elegy about the Haiti earthquake.

Lorna is a 64-year-old black woman in Boston. She’s overweight and unattractive, even after a recent nose job. Lorna is on regular dialysis, but that doesn’t impede her active social life or babysitting her grandchildren. A retired school assistant, she is close to her 67-year-old husband and is much respected in her church for directing the music committee and the semiannual blood drive. Lorna believes in tithing (giving 10 percent of her income to charity or the church) and in the last few days has organized a church drive to raise $10,000 for earthquake relief in Haiti.

I adapted those examples from ones that Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, develops in his fascinating book, “The Happiness Hypothesis.” His point is that while most of us might prefer to trade places with Richard, Lorna is probably happier.

Men are no happier than women, and people in sunny areas no happier than people in chillier climates. The evidence on health is complex, but even chronic health problems (like those requiring dialysis) may have surprisingly little long-term effect on happiness, because we adjust to them. Beautiful people aren’t happier than ugly people, although cosmetic surgery does seem to leave patients feeling brighter. Whites are happier than blacks, but only very slightly. And young people are actually a bit less happy than older folks, at least up to age 65.

Lorna has a few advantages over Richard. She has less stress and is respected by her peers — factors that make us feel good. Happiness is tied to volunteering and to giving blood, and people with religious faith tend to be happier than those without. A solid marriage is linked to happiness, as is participation in social networks. And one study found that people who focus on achieving wealth and career advancement are less happy than those who focus on good works, religion or spirituality, or friends and family.

“Human beings are in some ways like bees,” Professor Haidt said. “We evolved to live in intensely social groups, and we don’t do as well when freed from hives.”

Happiness is, of course, a complex concept and difficult to measure, and John Stuart Mill had a point when he suggested: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”

But in any case, nobility can lead to happiness. Professor Haidt notes that one thing that can make a lasting difference to your contentment is to work with others on a cause larger than yourself.

I see that all the time. I interview people who were busy but reluctantly undertook some good cause because (sigh!) it was the right thing to do. Then they found that this “sacrifice” became a huge source of fulfillment and satisfaction.

Brain scans by neuroscientists confirm that altruism carries its own rewards. A team including Dr. Jorge Moll of the National Institutes of Health found that when a research subject was encouraged to think of giving money to a charity, parts of the brain lit up that are normally associated with selfish pleasures like eating or sex.

The implication is that we are hard-wired to be altruistic. To put it another way, it’s difficult for humans to be truly selfless, for generosity feels so good.

“The most selfish thing you can do is to help other people,” says Brian Mullaney, co-founder of Smile Train, which helps tens of thousands of children each year who are born with cleft lips and cleft palates. Mr. Mullaney was a successful advertising executive, driving a Porsche and taking dates to the Four Seasons, when he felt something was missing and began volunteering for good causes. He ended up leaving the business world to help kids smile again — and all that makes him smile, too.

So at a time of vast needs, from Haiti to our own cities, here’s a nice opportunity for symbiosis: so many afflicted people, and so much benefit to us if we try to help them. Let’s remember that while charity has a mixed record helping others, it has an almost perfect record of helping ourselves. Helping others may be as primal a human pleasure as food or sex.



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January 24, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
What Could You Live Without?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

It all began with a stop at a red light.

Kevin Salwen, a writer and entrepreneur in Atlanta, was driving his 14-year-old daughter, Hannah, back from a sleepover in 2006. While waiting at a traffic light, they saw a black Mercedes coupe on one side and a homeless man begging for food on the other.

“Dad, if that man had a less nice car, that man there could have a meal,” Hannah protested. The light changed and they drove on, but Hannah was too young to be reasonable. She pestered her parents about inequity, insisting that she wanted to do something.

“What do you want to do?” her mom responded. “Sell our house?”

Warning! Never suggest a grand gesture to an idealistic teenager. Hannah seized upon the idea of selling the luxurious family home and donating half the proceeds to charity, while using the other half to buy a more modest replacement home.

Eventually, that’s what the family did. The project — crazy, impetuous and utterly inspiring — is chronicled in a book by father and daughter scheduled to be published next month: “The Power of Half.” It’s a book that, frankly, I’d be nervous about leaving around where my own teenage kids might find it. An impressionable child reads this, and the next thing you know your whole family is out on the street.

At a time of enormous needs in Haiti and elsewhere, when so many Americans are trying to help Haitians by sending everything from text messages to shoes, the Salwens offer an example of a family that came together to make a difference — for themselves as much as the people they were trying to help. In a column a week ago, I described neurological evidence from brain scans that altruism lights up parts of the brain normally associated with more primal gratifications such as food and sex. The Salwens’ experience confirms the selfish pleasures of selflessness.

Mr. Salwen and his wife, Joan, had always assumed that their kids would be better off in a bigger house. But after they downsized, there was much less space to retreat to, so the family members spent more time around each other. A smaller house unexpectedly turned out to be a more family-friendly house.

“We essentially traded stuff for togetherness and connectedness,” Mr. Salwen told me, adding, “I can’t figure out why everybody wouldn’t want that deal.”

One reason for that togetherness was the complex process of deciding how to spend the money. The Salwens researched causes and charities, finally settling on the Hunger Project, a New York City-based international development organization that has a good record of tackling global poverty.

The Salwens pledged $800,000 to sponsor health, microfinancing, food and other programs for about 40 villages in Ghana. They traveled to Ghana with a Hunger Project executive, John Coonrod, who is an inspiration in his own right. Over the years, he and his wife donated so much back from their modest aid-worker salaries that they were among the top Hunger Project donors in New York.

The Salwens’ initiative hasn’t gone entirely smoothly. Hannah promptly won over her parents, but her younger brother, Joe, was (reassuringly) a red-blooded American boy to whom it wasn’t intuitively obvious that life would improve by moving into a smaller house and giving money to poor people. Outvoted and outmaneuvered, Joe gamely went along.

The Salwens also are troubled that some people are reacting negatively to their project, seeing them as sanctimonious showoffs. Or that people are protesting giving to Ghana when there are so many needy Americans.

Still, they have inspired some converts. The people who sold the Salwens their new home were so impressed that they committed $100,000 to the project. And one of Hannah’s closest friends, Blaise, pledged half of her baby-sitting savings to an environmental charity.

In writing the book, the Salwens say, the aim wasn’t actually to get people to sell their houses. They realize that few people are quite that nutty. Rather, the aim was to encourage people to step off the treadmill of accumulation, to define themselves by what they give as well as by what they possess.

“No one expects anyone to sell a house,” said Hannah, now a high school junior who hopes to become a nurse. “That’s kind of a ridiculous thing to do. For us, the house was just something we could live without. It was too big for us. Everyone has too much of something, whether it’s time, talent or treasure. Everyone does have their own half, you just have to find it.”

As for Kevin Salwen, he’s delighted by what has unfolded since that encounter at the red light.

“This is the most self-interested thing we have ever done,” he said. “I’m thrilled that we can help others. I’m blown away by how much it has helped us.”

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

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February 4, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
From ‘Oprah’ to Building a Sisterhood in Congo
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
BUKAVU, Congo

Five years ago, Lisa Shannon watched “Oprah” and learned about the savage, forgotten war here in eastern Congo, played out in massacres and mass rape. That show transformed Lisa’s life, costing her a good business, a beloved fiancé, and a comfortable home in Portland, Ore. — but giving her a chance to save lives in Congo.

I found myself stepping with Lisa into a shack here. It was night, there was no electricity, and a tropical rainstorm was turning the shantytown into a field of mud and streams. Lisa had come to visit a woman she calls her sister, Generose Namburho, a 40-year-old nurse.

Generose’s story is numbingly familiar: extremist Hutu militiamen invaded her home one night, killed her husband and prepared to rape her. Then, because she shouted in an attempt to warn her neighbors, they hacked off her leg above the knee with a machete.

As Generose lay bleeding near her husband’s corpse, the soldiers cut up the amputated leg, cooked the pieces on the kitchen fire, and ordered her children to eat their mother’s flesh. One son, a 12-year-old, refused. “If you kill me, kill me,” he told the soldiers, as his mother remembers it. “But I will not eat a part of my mother.”

So they shot him dead. The murder is one of Generose’s last memories before she blacked out, waking up days later in the hospital where she had worked.

That’s where Lisa enters the story. After seeing the Oprah show on the Congo war, Lisa began to read more about it, learning that it is the most lethal conflict since World War II. More than five million had already died as of the last peer-reviewed mortality estimate in 2007.

Everybody told her that the atrocities continued because nobody cared. Lisa, who is now 34, was appalled and decided to show that she cared. She asked friends to sponsor her for a solo 30-mile fund-raising run for Congolese women.

That led her to establish Run for Congo Women, which has held fund-raising runs in 10 American states and three foreign countries. The money goes to support sponsorships of Congolese women through a group called Women for Women International.

But in her passion, Lisa neglected the stock photo business that she and her fiancé ran together. Finally, he signaled to her that she had to choose — and she chose Congo.

One of the Congolese women (“sisters”) whom Lisa sponsored with her fund-raising was Generose. Lisa’s letters and monthly checks of $27 began arriving just in time.

“God sent me Lisa to release me,” Generose told me fervently, as the rain pounded the roof, and she then compared Lisa to an angel and to Jesus Christ.

Scrunching up in embarrassment in the darkened room, Lisa fended off deification. She noted that many impoverished Congolese families have taken in orphans. “They’ve lost everything,” she said, “but they take children in when they can’t even feed their own properly. I’ve been so inspired by them. I’ve tried to restructure my life to emulate them.”

It’s true. While for years world leaders have mostly looked the other way, while our friend Rwanda has helped perpetuate this war, while Congo’s president has refused to arrest a general wanted by the International Criminal Court, while global companies have accepted tin, coltan and other minerals produced by warlords — amid all this irresponsibility, many ordinary Congolese have stepped forward to share the nothing they have with their neighbors.

So Lisa is right that Generose and so many others here are awe-inspiring. Lisa tells her story in a moving book, “A Thousand Sisters,” that is set to be published in April. Congo is now her obsession, and she is volunteering full time on the cause as she lives off the declining royalties from her old stock photos.

She earns psychic pay when she sees a woman here who named her daughter Lisa. After we visited Congolese Lisa, I asked American Lisa about the toll of her Congo obsession — the lost business, man and home they had shared.

“Technically, I had a good life before, but I wasn’t very happy,” she mused. “Now I feel I have much more of a sense of meaning.”

Maybe that’s why I gravitate toward Lisa’s story. In a land where so many “responsible” leaders eschew responsibility, Lisa has gone out of her way to assume responsibility and try to make a difference. Along with an unbelievable cast of plucky Congolese survivors such as Generose, she evokes hope.

On this visit to Congo, Lisa is organizing a Run for Congo Women right here in Bukavu, for Feb. 28, with Congolese rape survivors participating. You can sponsor them at www.runforCongowomen.org. And one of those participating in the run, hobbling along on crutches and her one leg, will be Generose.



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February 28, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Learning From the Sin of Sodom
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

For most of the last century, save-the-worlders were primarily Democrats and liberals. In contrast, many Republicans and religious conservatives denounced government aid programs, with Senator Jesse Helms calling them “money down a rat hole.”

Over the last decade, however, that divide has dissolved, in ways that many Americans haven’t noticed or appreciated. Evangelicals have become the new internationalists, pushing successfully for new American programs against AIDS and malaria, and doing superb work on issues from human trafficking in India to mass rape in Congo.

A pop quiz: What’s the largest U.S.-based international relief and development organization?

It’s not Save the Children, and it’s not CARE — both terrific secular organizations. Rather, it’s World Vision, a Seattle-based Christian organization (with strong evangelical roots) whose budget has roughly tripled over the last decade.

World Vision now has 40,000 staff members in nearly 100 countries. That’s more staff members than CARE, Save the Children and the worldwide operations of the United States Agency for International Development — combined.

A growing number of conservative Christians are explicitly and self-critically acknowledging that to be “pro-life” must mean more than opposing abortion. The head of World Vision in the United States, Richard Stearns, begins his fascinating book, “The Hole in Our Gospel,” with an account of a visit a decade ago to Uganda, where he met a 13-year-old AIDS orphan who was raising his younger brothers by himself.

“What sickened me most was this question: where was the Church?” he writes. “Where were the followers of Jesus Christ in the midst of perhaps the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time? Surely the Church should have been caring for these ‘orphans and widows in their distress.’ (James 1:27). Shouldn’t the pulpits across America have flamed with exhortations to rush to the front lines of compassion?

“How have we missed it so tragically, when even rock stars and Hollywood actors seem to understand?”

Mr. Stearns argues that evangelicals were often so focused on sexual morality and a personal relationship with God that they ignored the needy. He writes laceratingly about “a Church that had the wealth to build great sanctuaries but lacked the will to build schools, hospitals, and clinics.”

In one striking passage, Mr. Stearns quotes the prophet Ezekiel as saying that the great sin of the people of Sodom wasn’t so much that they were promiscuous or gay as that they were “arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” (Ezekiel 16:49.)

Hmm. Imagine if sodomy laws could be used to punish the stingy, unconcerned rich!

The American view of evangelicals is still shaped by preening television blowhards and hypocrites who seem obsessed with gays and fetuses. One study cited in the book found that even among churchgoers ages 16 to 29, the descriptions most associated with Christianity were “antihomosexual,” “judgmental,” “too involved in politics,” and “hypocritical.”

Some conservative Christians reinforced the worst view of themselves by inspiring Ugandan homophobes who backed a bill that would punish gays with life imprisonment or execution. Ditto for the Vatican, whose hostility to condoms contributes to the AIDS epidemic. But there’s more to the picture: I’ve also seen many Catholic nuns and priests heroically caring for AIDS patients — even quietly handing out condoms.

One of the most inspiring figures I’ve met while covering Congo’s brutal civil war is a determined Polish nun in the terrifying hinterland, feeding orphans, standing up to drunken soldiers and comforting survivors — all in a war zone. I came back and decided: I want to grow up and become a Polish nun.

Some Americans assume that religious groups offer aid to entice converts. That’s incorrect. Today, groups like World Vision ban the use of aid to lure anyone into a religious conversation.

Some liberals are pushing to end the longtime practice (it’s a myth that this started with President George W. Bush) of channeling American aid through faith-based organizations. That change would be a catastrophe. In Haiti, more than half of food distributions go through religious groups like World Vision that have indispensible networks on the ground. We mustn’t make Haitians the casualties in our cultural wars.

A root problem is a liberal snobbishness toward faith-based organizations. Those doing the sneering typically give away far less money than evangelicals. They’re also less likely to spend vacations volunteering at, say, a school or a clinic in Rwanda.

If secular liberals can give up some of their snootiness, and if evangelicals can retire some of their sanctimony, then we all might succeed together in making greater progress against common enemies of humanity, like illiteracy, human trafficking and maternal mortality.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

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March 14, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Partying to Change the World
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Maybe the most common question I get from readers is: What can I do?

They’ve read about malaria, or mass rape, or AIDS orphans, and they want to make a difference. Should they call the White House? Write a check? Howl in hopeless despair?

There’s never a perfect answer, but here’s one ingenious approach: Throw a party!

Let’s back up. In 2004, a Colorado woman named Torkin Wakefield, a Peace Corps veteran with a lifetime of experience in aid work, was temporarily living in Uganda. Her daughter, Devin Hibbard, then just out of graduate school, came to visit, and they strolled together through a slum in Kampala, the capital.

They stumbled upon a woman named Millie Akena making jewelry beads out of trash paper outside her mud-walled home. They bought a few necklaces from Millie, for about 75 cents each.

Over the next few days, mother and daughter received many compliments on the necklaces — especially when they explained where the beads came from. Jewelry from garbage!

Hmm. A gleam in their eyes, Torkin and Devin returned to the slum, asked Millie to gather her friends and bought up more than 225 necklaces.

American friends loved the beads. So Torkin and Devin, with their friend Ginny Jordan, formed BeadforLife. It’s a nonprofit seeking to promote entrepreneurship through an international jewelry manufacturing operation.

They returned to Uganda to work with the women on improving jewelry designs and assuring quality. To cut costs, they asked friends traveling back to the United States to smuggle bags of necklaces in their suitcases.

Then they began marketing the jewelry through bead parties in the United States — a bit like Tupperware parties. Typically, one woman invites her friends, and they come to her home to buy necklaces, bracelets and earrings for between $5 and $30. Last year alone, Torkin says, there were 3,000 of these parties, attended by about 100,000 people.

“It’s not a handout; we’re totally opposed to that,” said Devin, who is now based in Uganda for the project. “This is a symbol for us of women really working hard.”

BeadforLife recruits women who are earning $1 a day or less, and who seem particularly hard-working and entrepreneurial. Once enrolled, they get training in how to cut strips of scrap paper, roll them tightly, glue them and seal them — and, presto, a beautiful bead.

The beads are not painted, and their color comes from the paper itself (with writing sometimes faintly visible). Magazine ads and aid group brochures are prized for their rich colors. Torkin remembers wincing when she saw women making beads from brochures explaining how mothers can prevent AIDS transmission to their babies. “I just hope that someone had looked at them before they were cut up,” she said.

Bead makers earn about $200 per month, half of which is deposited in brand-new savings accounts (one huge problem for the world’s poor is that they lack a safe way to save). The women are also encouraged to trade their beads to the program for antimalarial bed nets, condoms, deworming medicine and family planning supplies.

The centerpiece of the 18-month BeadforLife program is training bead makers to start small businesses. They get coaching in business management, and some learn trades like making jam or raising chickens.

The bead makers get about $600 to open their own shops or start some other small business, and after a year and a half they graduate and new bead makers are enrolled. The aim is not to create lifelong jewelry manufacturers, but to turn women into bustling entrepreneurs.

These days, Torkin and Devin are no longer smuggling their merchandise (it turned out that the necklaces weren’t subject to American duty, they say, so subterfuge was unnecessary). Their biggest challenge is how to manage $4 million in annual jewelry sales so that it makes the most difference.

BeadforLife reflects several fascinating trends in the battle against global poverty. One is the increasing interest in using businesses and entrepreneurship to create jobs and a more sustainable economic liftoff. A second is a focus on women, because of evidence that they are more likely than men to invest business profits in their children’s education and health. A third is the growing attempt to engage American supporters by asking them to do something other than just writing checks.

Increasingly, Torkin and Devin have also been using the bead parties to try to educate the jewelry buyers about Africa. To go with the beads, they’ve developed a curriculum on global poverty for American schools. They’ve also been taking Americans to Africa to see the work firsthand.

“At first, we thought BeadforLife was just for Ugandans,” Torkin said. “Then we realized that a lot of this was about helping Americans get involved.”



I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
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Tycoon's pact with God sees millions go to charity
Herald News Services
March 22, 2010

The multimillionaire who founded Britain's Kwik Save supermarket chain has given his business empire to charity to fulfil a "pact with God."

When Albert Gubay was a penniless candy seller in Wales after the Second World War, he vowed to hand over half his fortune to the Church if he ever became rich.

Now, at 82, he has done even more, giving almost his entire $730-million estate to a new charitable foundation, keeping less than $15 million to see out his old age.

Gubay, a Catholic, will continue running his companies until he dies and hopes to push the value of his empire to more than $15 billion.

After his death, the Albert Gubay Charitable Foundation will receive an estimated income of $30 million a year from the businesses.

The Welsh businessman has stipulated that half the income must be invested in the Catholic Church, in line with his "pact." The rest can be distributed at the discretion of the trustees.

Gubay, who lives in Santon on the Isle of Man with his second wife Carmel, described his "50-50" deal with God in a 1997 television documentary made by RTE, the Irish broadcaster.

"Albert is a very frugal man and has dedicated his life to good causes," said John Nugent, chairman of the Albert Gubay Charitable Foundation.

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald

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April 13, 2010
Banks Making Big Profits From Tiny Loans
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

In recent years, the idea of giving small loans to poor people became the darling of the development world, hailed as the long elusive formula to propel even the most destitute into better lives.

Actors like Natalie Portman and Michael Douglas lent their boldface names to the cause. Muhammad Yunus, the economist who pioneered the practice by lending small amounts to basket weavers in Bangladesh, won a Nobel Peace Prize for it in 2006. The idea even got its very own United Nations year in 2005.

But the phenomenon has grown so popular that some of its biggest proponents are now wringing their hands over the direction it has taken. Drawn by the prospect of hefty profits from even the smallest of loans, a raft of banks and financial institutions now dominate the field, with some charging interest rates of 100 percent or more.

“We created microcredit to fight the loan sharks; we didn’t create microcredit to encourage new loan sharks,” Mr. Yunus recently said at a gathering of financial officials at the United Nations. “Microcredit should be seen as an opportunity to help people get out of poverty in a business way, but not as an opportunity to make money out of poor people.”

The fracas over preserving the field’s saintly aura centers on the question of how much interest and profit is acceptable, and what constitutes exploitation. The noisy interest rate fight has even attracted Congressional scrutiny, with the House Financial Services Committee holding hearings this year focused in part on whether some microcredit institutions are scamming the poor.

Rates vary widely across the globe, but the ones that draw the most concern tend to occur in countries like Nigeria and Mexico, where the demand for small loans from a large population cannot be met by existing lenders.
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April 18, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
A Church Mary Can Love
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

I heard a joke the other day about a pious soul who dies, goes to heaven, and gains an audience with the Virgin Mary. The visitor asks Mary why, for all her blessings, she always appears in paintings as a bit sad, a bit wistful: Is everything O.K.?

Mary reassures her visitor: “Oh, everything’s great. No problems. It’s just ... it’s just that we had always wanted a daughter.”

That story comes to mind as the Vatican wrestles with the consequences of a patriarchal premodern mind-set: scandal, cover-up and the clumsiest self-defense since Watergate. That’s what happens with old boys’ clubs.

It wasn’t inevitable that the Catholic Church would grow so addicted to male domination, celibacy and rigid hierarchies. Jesus himself focused on the needy rather than dogma, and went out of his way to engage women and treat them with respect.

The first-century church was inclusive and democratic, even including a proto-feminist wing and texts. The Gospel of Philip, a Gnostic text from the third century, declares of Mary Magdalene: “She is the one the Savior loved more than all the disciples.” Likewise, the Gospel of Mary (from the early second century) suggests that Jesus entrusted Mary Magdalene to instruct the disciples on his religious teachings.

St. Paul refers in Romans 16 to a first-century woman named Junia as prominent among the early apostles, and to a woman named Phoebe who served as a deacon. The Apostle Junia became a Christian before St. Paul did (chauvinist translators have sometimes rendered her name masculine, with no scholarly basis).

Yet over the ensuing centuries, the church reverted to strong patriarchal attitudes, while also becoming increasingly uncomfortable with sexuality. The shift may have come with the move from house churches, where women were naturally accepted, to more public gatherings.

The upshot is that proto-feminist texts were not included when the Bible was compiled (and were mostly lost until modern times). Tertullian, an early Christian leader, denounced women as “the gateway to the devil,” while a contemporary account reports that the great Origen of Alexandria took his piety a step further and castrated himself.

The Catholic Church still seems stuck today in that patriarchal rut. The same faith that was so pioneering that it had Junia as a female apostle way back in the first century can’t even have a woman as the lowliest parish priest. Female deacons, permitted for centuries, are banned today.

That old boys’ club in the Vatican became as self-absorbed as other old boys’ clubs, like Lehman Brothers, with similar results. And that is the reason the Vatican is floundering today.

But there’s more to the picture than that. In my travels around the world, I encounter two Catholic Churches. One is the rigid all-male Vatican hierarchy that seems out of touch when it bans condoms even among married couples where one partner is H.I.V.-positive. To me at least, this church — obsessed with dogma and rules and distracted from social justice — is a modern echo of the Pharisees whom Jesus criticized.

Yet there’s another Catholic Church as well, one I admire intensely. This is the grass-roots Catholic Church that does far more good in the world than it ever gets credit for. This is the church that supports extraordinary aid organizations like Catholic Relief Services and Caritas, saving lives every day, and that operates superb schools that provide needy children an escalator out of poverty.

This is the church of the nuns and priests in Congo, toiling in obscurity to feed and educate children. This is the church of the Brazilian priest fighting AIDS who told me that if he were pope, he would build a condom factory in the Vatican to save lives.

This is the church of the Maryknoll Sisters in Central America and the Cabrini Sisters in Africa. There’s a stereotype of nuns as stodgy Victorian traditionalists. I learned otherwise while hanging on for my life in a passenger seat as an American nun with a lead foot drove her jeep over ruts and through a creek in Swaziland to visit AIDS orphans. After a number of encounters like that, I’ve come to believe that the very coolest people in the world today may be nuns.

So when you read about the scandals, remember that the Vatican is not the same as the Catholic Church. Ordinary lepers, prostitutes and slum-dwellers may never see a cardinal, but they daily encounter a truly noble Catholic Church in the form of priests, nuns and lay workers toiling to make a difference.

It’s high time for the Vatican to take inspiration from that sublime — even divine — side of the Catholic Church, from those church workers whose magnificence lies not in their vestments, but in their selflessness. They’re enough to make the Virgin Mary smile.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/opini ... nted=print

*****
There is a related video linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/opini ... ?th&emc=th

May 2, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Who Can Mock This Church?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
JUBA, Sudan

Maybe the Catholic Church should be turned upside down.

Jesus wasn’t known for pontificating from palaces, covering up scandals, or issuing Paleolithic edicts on social issues. Does anyone think he would have protected clergymen who raped children?

Yet if the top of the church has strayed from its roots, much of its base is still deeply inspiring. I came here to impoverished southern Sudan to write about Sudanese problems, not the Catholic Church’s. Yet once again, I am awed that so many of the selfless people serving the world’s neediest are lowly nuns and priests — notable not for the grandeur of their vestments but for the grandness of their compassion.

As I’ve noted before, there seem to be two Catholic Churches, the old boys’ club of the Vatican and the grass-roots network of humble priests, nuns and laity in places like Sudan. The Vatican certainly supports many charitable efforts, and some bishops and cardinals are exemplary, but overwhelmingly it’s at the grass roots that I find the great soul of the Catholic Church.

The Vatican believes that this newspaper and other news organizations have been unfair and overzealous in excavating the church’s cover-ups of child rape. I see the opposite. No organization has done more to elevate the moral stature of the Catholic Church in the United States than The Boston Globe. Its groundbreaking 2002 coverage of abuse by priests led to reforms and by most accounts a significant reduction in abuse. Catholic kids are safer today not because of the cardinals’ leadership, but because of The Boston Globe’s.

Yet the church leaders are right about one thing: there is often a liberal and secular snobbishness toward the church as a whole — and that is unfair.

It may be easy at a New York cocktail party to sniff derisively at a church whose apex is male chauvinist, homophobic and so out of touch that it bars the use of condoms even to curb AIDS. But what about Father Michael Barton, a Catholic priest from Indianapolis? I met Father Michael in the remote village of Nyamlell, 150 miles from any paved road here in southern Sudan. He runs four schools for children who would otherwise go without an education, and his graduates score at the top of statewide examinations.

Father Michael came to southern Sudan in 1978 and chatters fluently in Dinka and other local languages. To keep his schools alive, he persevered through civil war, imprisonment and beatings, and a smorgasbord of disease. “It’s very normal to have malaria,” he said. “Intestinal parasites — that’s just normal.”

Father Michael may be the worst-dressed priest I’ve ever seen — and the noblest.

Anybody scorn him? Anybody think he’s a self-righteous hypocrite?

On the contrary, he would make a great pope.

In the city of Juba, I met Cathy Arata, a nun from New Jersey who spent years working with battered women in Appalachia. Then she moved to El Salvador during the brutal civil war there, putting her life on the line to protect peasants. Two years ago, she came here on behalf of a terrific Catholic project called Solidarity With Southern Sudan.

Sister Cathy and the others in the project have trained 600 schoolteachers. They are fighting hunger not with handouts but with help for villagers to improve agricultural techniques. They are also establishing a school for health workers, with a special focus on midwifery to reduce deaths in childbirth.

At the hospital attached to that school, the surgeon is a nun from Italy. The other doctor is a 72-year-old nun from Rhode Island. Nuns rock.

Sister Cathy would like to see more decentralization in the church, a greater role for women, and more emphasis on public service. She says she worries sometimes that if Jesus returned he would say, “Oh, they got it all wrong!”

She would make a great pope, too.

There are so many more like them. There’s Father Mario Falconi, an Italian priest who refused to leave Rwanda during the genocide and bravely saved 3,000 people from being massacred. There’s Father Mario Benedetti, a 72-year-old Italian priest based in Congo who fled with his congregation when their town was attacked by a brutal militia. Now Father Mario lives side by side with his Congolese congregants in the squalor of a refugee camp in southern Sudan, struggling to get schooling for their children.

It’s because of brave souls like these that I honor the Catholic Church. I understand why many Americans disdain a church whose leaders are linked to cover-ups and antediluvian stances on women, gays and condoms — but the Catholic Church is far larger than the Vatican.

And unless we’re willing to endure beatings alongside Father Michael, unless we’re willing to stand up to warlords with Sister Cathy, we have no right to disparage them or their true church.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos videos and follow me on Twitter.
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May 9, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Celebrate: Save a Mother
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Happy Mother’s Day! And let me be clear: I’m in favor of flowers, lavish brunches, and every other token of gratitude for mothers and other goddesses.

Let me also add that your mom — yes, I’m speaking to you — is particularly deserving. (As is mine, as is my wife. And my mother-in-law!)

And because so many people feel that way, some $14 billion will be spent in the United States for Mother’s Day this year, according to the National Retail Federation. That includes $2.9 billion in meals, $2.5 billion in jewelry and $1.9 billion in flowers.

To put that sum in context, it’s enough to pay for a primary school education for all 60 million girls around the world who aren’t attending school. That would pretty much end female illiteracy.

These numbers are fuzzy and uncertain, but it appears that there would be enough money left over for programs to reduce deaths in childbirth by about three-quarters, saving perhaps 260,000 women’s lives a year.

There would probably even be enough remaining to treat tens of thousands of young women suffering from one of the most terrible things that can happen to a person, a childbirth injury called an obstetric fistula. Fistulas leave women incontinent and dribbling wastes, turning them into pariahs — and the injuries are usually fixable with a $450 operation.

So let’s celebrate Mother’s Day with all the flowers and brunches we can muster: no reason to feel guilty about a dollop of hedonism to compensate for 365 days of maternal toil. But let’s also think about moving the apostrophe so that it becomes not just Mother’s Day, honoring a single mother, but Mothers’ Day — an occasion to try to help other mothers around the globe as well.

Oddly, for a culture that celebrates motherhood, we’ve never been particularly interested in maternal health. The United States ranks 41st in the world in maternal mortality, according to an Amnesty International report, or 37th according to a major new study in the medical journal The Lancet, using different data sources.

Using either set of statistics, an American woman is at least twice as likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth as a woman in much of Europe.

A friend of mine in New York, a young woman who minds her health and has even worked on maternal health issues, nearly joined the data set last month. She had an ectopic pregnancy that she was unaware of until her fallopian tube ruptured and she almost died.

Maternal mortality is far more common in Africa and Asia. In the West African country of Niger, a woman has about a one-in-seven lifetime risk of dying from pregnancy complications. Women there often aren’t supposed to go to a doctor if the husband hasn’t granted express permission — so if he’s 100 miles away when she has labor complications, she may just die at home.

On the 50th anniversary of the pill, it’s also worth noting that birth control is an excellent way to reduce deaths in childbirth. If there were half as many pregnancies in poor countries, there would be half as many maternal deaths.

It’s certainly not inevitable that women die in childbirth, and some poor countries — like Sri Lanka — have done a remarkable job curbing maternal mortality. But in many places, women’s lives are not a priority.

There’s no silver bullet to end maternal mortality, but we know steps that have made a big difference in some countries. Bipartisan legislation to be introduced this year by Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut aims to have the United States build on these proven methods to tackle obstetric fistulas and maternal health globally.

Just the money that Americans will spend on Mother’s Day greeting cards for today — about $670 million — would save the lives of many thousands of women. Many organizations do wonderful work in this area, from the giants like CARE and Save the Children to the tiny Edna Maternity Hospital in Somaliland. Women Deliver and the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood do important advocacy work. And the Fistula Foundation and Worldwide Fistula Fund help women who have obstetric fistulas. (Details are on my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground.)

So if one way to mark Mothers’ Day is to buy flowers for that special mom, another is to make this a safer planet for moms in general. And since we men are going to be focused on the flowers, maybe mothers themselves can work on making motherhood less lethal.

I had a letter the other day from a woman in Connecticut, Eva Hausman, who was so appalled when she learned about obstetric fistulas that she e-mailed her friends and asked them to contribute at least $20. To date she has raised $9,000 for the Fistula Foundation.

“Most of the contributions were accompanied by thank-you notes,” she told me. When people thank you for allowing them to donate — that’s truly a heartwarming cause, and a beautiful way to celebrate Mothers’ Day.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos videos and follow me on Twitter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/opini ... ?th&emc=th
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May 19, 2010
Poverty and the Pill
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
KINSHASA, Congo

Earthquakes are more dramatic. Tsunamis make better television. AIDS is more visceral.

But here’s a far more widespread challenge, one that’s also more fixable: the unavailability of birth control in many poor countries. I’m on my annual win-a-trip journey across a chunk of Central Africa with a 19-year-old university student, Mitch Smith. He won the right to bounce over impossible roads in the region where it’s easy to see firsthand how breakneck population growth is linked to poverty, instability and conflict.

In almost every village we stop in, we chat with families whose huts overflow with small children — whom the parents can’t always afford to educate, feed or protect from disease.

Here in Kinshasa, we met Emilie Lunda, 25, who had nearly died during childbirth a few days earlier. Doctors saved her life, but her baby died. And she is still recuperating in a hospital and doesn’t know how she will pay the bill.

“I didn’t want to get pregnant,” Emilie told us here in the Congolese capital. “I was afraid of getting pregnant.” But she had never heard of birth control.

In rural parts of Congo Republic, the other Congo to the north, we found that even when people had heard of contraception, they often regarded it as unaffordable.

Most appalling, all the clinics and hospitals we visited in Congo Republic said that they would sell contraceptives only to women who brought their husbands in with them to prove that the husband accepted birth control.

Condoms are somewhat easier to obtain, but many men resist them. More broadly, many men seem to feel that more children are a proud sign of more virility.

So the pill, 50 years old this month in the United States, has yet to reach parts of Africa. And condoms and other forms of birth control and AIDS prevention are still far too difficult to obtain in some areas.

America’s widely respected Guttmacher Institute, which conducts research on reproductive health, says that 215 million women around the world are sexually active and don’t want to become pregnant — but are not using modern forms of contraception.

Making contraception available to all these women worldwide would cost less than $4 billion, Guttmacher said in an important study published last year. That’s about what the United States is spending every two weeks on our military force in Afghanistan.

What’s more, each dollar spent on contraception would actually reduce total medical spending by $1.40 by reducing sums spent on unplanned births and abortions, the study said.

If contraception were broadly available in poor countries, the report said, more than 50 million unwanted pregnancies could be averted annually. One result would be 25 million fewer abortions per year. Another would be saving the lives of as many as 150,000 women who now die annually in childbirth.

Family planning has stalled since the 1980s. Republican administrations cut off all American financing for the United Nations Population Fund, the main international agency supporting family-planning programs. Paradoxically, conservative hostility to some family-planning programs almost certainly resulted in more abortions.

The Obama administration has restored that financing, and it should make a priority of broader access to contraception (and to girls’ education, which may be the most effective contraceptive of all).

In fairness, family planning is harder than it looks. Many impoverished men and women, especially those without education, want babies more than contraceptives. As Mitch and I drove through villages, we asked many women how many babies they would ideally have. Most said five or six, and a few said 10.

Parents want many children partly because they expect some to die. So mosquito nets, vaccinations and other steps to reduce child mortality also help to create an environment where family planning is more readily accepted.

In short, what’s needed is a comprehensive approach to assisting men and women alike with family planning — not just a contraceptive dispensary.

Romerchinelle Mietala, a 17-year-old girl in Mindouli, Congo Republic, has one baby and told us that she doesn’t really want another child for now. But she had never heard of contraceptives and, when we explained, was ambivalent. She worried about her status in the village if she didn’t get pregnant again reasonably soon.

“If a woman doesn’t have a baby every two or three years, people will say she’s sterile,” she said.

Another woman in Mindouli, Christine Kanda, said that she is ready to stop now after eight children — two of which have died. But she doesn’t know if her husband will accompany her to the clinic to sign off, and she doesn’t know how she would pay the $1 a month that the hospital charges.

So she may just keep on producing babies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/opini ... ?th&emc=th
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May 22, 2010
Moonshine or the Kids?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
MONT-BELO, Congo Republic

There’s an ugly secret of global poverty, one rarely acknowledged by aid groups or U.N. reports. It’s a blunt truth that is politically incorrect, heartbreaking, frustrating and ubiquitous:

It’s that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.

That probably sounds sanctimonious, haughty and callous, but it’s been on my mind while traveling through central Africa with a college student on my annual win-a-trip journey. Here in this Congolese village of Mont-Belo, we met a bright fourth grader, Jovali Obamza, who is about to be expelled from school because his family is three months behind in paying fees. (In theory, public school is free in the Congo Republic. In fact, every single school we visited charges fees.)

We asked to see Jovali’s parents. The dad, Georges Obamza, who weaves straw stools that he sells for $1 each, is unmistakably very poor. He said that the family is eight months behind on its $6-a-month rent and is in danger of being evicted, with nowhere to go.

The Obamzas have no mosquito net, even though they have already lost two of their eight children to malaria. They say they just can’t afford the $6 cost of a net. Nor can they afford the $2.50-a-month tuition for each of their three school-age kids.

“It’s hard to get the money to send the kids to school,” Mr. Obamza explained, a bit embarrassed.

But Mr. Obamza and his wife, Valerie, do have cellphones and say they spend a combined $10 a month on call time.

In addition, Mr. Obamza goes drinking several times a week at a village bar, spending about $1 an evening on moonshine. By his calculation, that adds up to about $12 a month — almost as much as the family rent and school fees combined.

I asked Mr. Obamza why he prioritizes alcohol over educating his kids. He looked pained.

Other villagers said that Mr. Obamza drinks less than the average man in the village (women drink far less). Many other men drink every evening, they said, and also spend money on cigarettes.

“If possible, I drink every day,” Fulbert Mfouna, a 43-year-old whose children have also had to drop out or repeat grades for lack of school fees, said forthrightly. His eldest son, Jude, is still in first grade after repeating for five years because of nonpayment of fees. Meanwhile, Mr. Mfouna acknowledged spending $2 a day on alcohol and cigarettes.

Traditionally, a young man here might have paid his wife’s family a “bride price” of a pair of goats. Now the “bride price” starts with oversized jugs of wine and two bottles of whiskey.

Two M.I.T. economists, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, found that the world’s poor typically spend about 2 percent of their income educating their children, and often larger percentages on alcohol and tobacco: 4 percent in rural Papua New Guinea, 6 percent in Indonesia, 8 percent in Mexico. The indigent also spend significant sums on soft drinks, prostitution and extravagant festivals.

Look, I don’t want to be an unctuous party-pooper. But I’ve seen too many children dying of malaria for want of a bed net that the father tells me is unaffordable, even as he spends larger sums on liquor. If we want Mr. Obamza’s children to get an education and sleep under a bed net — well, the simplest option is for their dad to spend fewer evenings in the bar.

Because there’s mounting evidence that mothers are more likely than fathers to spend money educating their kids, one solution is to give women more control over purse strings and more legal title to assets. Some aid groups and U.N. agencies are working on that.

Another approach is microsavings, helping poor people save money when banks aren’t interested in them. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the most powerful part of microfinance isn’t microlending but microsavings.

Microsavings programs, organized by CARE and other organizations, work to turn a consumption culture into a savings culture. The programs often keep household savings in the women’s names, to give mothers more say in spending decisions, and I’ve seen them work in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

Well-meaning humanitarians sometimes burnish suffering to make it seem more virtuous and noble than it often is. If we’re going to make more progress, and get kids like the Obamza children in school and under bed nets, we need to look unflinchingly at uncomfortable truths — and then try to redirect the family money now spent on wine and prostitution.


I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos videos and follow me on Twitter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/opini ... nted=print
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June 16, 2010
Dad Will Really Like This
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
No more neckties!

Sunday is Father’s Day, and we dads will be overwhelmed with neckties and wrench sets. We will feign ecstasy, and our loved ones will pretend to believe our protestations of pleasure.

But for a really nifty Father’s Day gift, how about sponsoring a rat? Specifically, an African giant pouched rat, about 30 inches long including tail. These are he-man rats, the kind that send cats fleeing. What’s more, we’re not talking about just any giant rat, but an educated one with the rodent equivalent of a Ph.D.

A Dutch company, Apopo, has trained these giant rats, which have poor sight but excellent noses, to detect landmines in Africa. The rats are too light to set off the mines, but they can explore a suspected minefield and point with their noses to buried mines. After many months of training, a rat can clear as much land in 20 minutes as a human can in two days.

In addition to earning their stripes as mine detectors, the giant rats are also trained in health work: detecting cases of tuberculosis. Possible TB sufferers provide samples of sputum, which are then handed over to the rats to sniff out. This detection process turns out to be much faster than your typical microscope examination. A technician with a microscope in Tanzania can screen about 40 samples a day, while one giant rat can screen the same amount in seven minutes.

What man wouldn’t pass up a necktie for the chance to be associated with an educated, supermacho giant rat? For just $36, you can buy a year’s supply of bananas to feed one of these rats. Or, for a gift more on the risqué side, $100 will buy a “love nest” for a breeding pair of rats.

Both options are at www.globalgiving.com, a site that allows donors to browse aid projects around the world and make a donation on the spot.

Father’s Day tends to be less a celebration of fatherhood than a triumph of commercialism. The National Retail Federation projects that Americans will spend $9.8 billion on Father’s Day this year. To put that in perspective, that’s more than enough to assure a primary education for every child on the planet who is not getting one right now.

In fact, we could send every child to primary school and have enough left over to get each dad a (cheap) necktie. And if we skipped store-bought cards (almost $750 million annually) and offered handmade versions, the savings alone could make a vast difference to great programs that help young American men escape poverty.

Think of the National Fatherhood Initiative, www.fatherhood.org, which works to support dads and keep them engaged in their children’s lives. There’s some evidence that absent fathers create a vicious cycle: boys grow up without positive male role models, get into trouble and then become absentee fathers themselves.

Another group is the Black Star Project, www.blackstarproject.org, which seeks to get families in low-income communities more involved in the educational lives of kids. Or there’s World of Money, www.worldofmoney.org, which coaches kids in poor communities on financial literacy and business skills.

For gadget lovers, how about a donation in dad’s name to the National Urban Technology Center, www.urbantech.org, which helps low-income youths gain computer skills?

Or for those into automotive accessories or tools and appliances (almost $1 billion a year, by the way), why not rev up instead a motorcycle used to bring medical care to people in remote areas? An aid group called Riders for Health, www.riders.org, provides motorcycles and cars to health workers in Africa, along with rigorous training on maintenance and repair. Health workers end up reaching roughly five times as many patients as they would on foot.

And if you give dad a stake in a motorcycle at a clinic in Zambia, you can be pretty sure he won’t crash it.

Wouldn’t most dads feel more honored by a donation to any of these organizations than by a donation to commercialism?

I think so. My hunch is that family members, manipulated by commercial messages, think that they aren’t showing dad enough love if they don’t buy him something expensive. But give us some credit! The friend who suggested this column, Sam Howe Verhovek, noted the huge sums spent on cuff links and Best Buy gift cards and said: “I don’t know about you, but I don’t really need any of the above. A handwritten, ‘Thanks, Dad!’ note from my kids would mean more than anything Hallmark’s poets could come up with.”

That’s the truth. But if you must pull out the credit card, this is my sincere advice: It’s a rare dad who would choose a store-bought card over a homemade card; or for that matter, a necktie over a gigantic, bomb-sniffing rat.




I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/opini ... ?th&emc=th
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Post by kmaherali »

- Ismaili Billionaire - Azim Premji
Low profile Ismaili...

Interesting interview in 2 parts

http://watch.bnn.ca/#clip297667
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40 U.S. billionaires pledge half their wealth to charity
Agence France-Presse
August 5, 2010

Clockwise from top: investment guru Warren Buffett, Microsoft mogul Bill Gates, CNN founder Ted Turner, director George Lucas, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Photograph by: AFP-Getty Images, Agence France-Presse

http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 1&sponsor=

Forty U.S. billionaires and their families pledged Wednesday to give more than half of their fortune to charity in a drive organized by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The group includes CNN founder Ted Turner, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison and film director George Lucas, as well as Microsoft mogul Gates and investment guru Buffett.

The idea, announced just six weeks ago as "The Giving Pledge," was thought up by Gates and Buffett.

"Forty of the wealthiest families and individuals in the United States have committed to returning the majority of their wealth to charitable causes," said a statement released Wednesday by www.giving-pledge.org."The pledge is a moral commitment to give, not a legal contract."

"We've really just started, but already we've had a terrific response," Buffett, the chief executive of the investment firm Berkshire Hathaway, said.

U.S. billionaires have been out of favour with the public since the 2008 financial collapse. The pledge scheme might burnish their image. But apart from good PR, the scheme raises the prospect of eye-popping amounts of money flowing to charity.

There are about 400 U.S. billionaires. If the entire group were to surrender half of its wealth, that would amount to some $600 billion US, Forbes magazine estimates.

Gates, the second richest man in the world according to the Forbes 2010 billionaires list, has some $53 billion, narrowly losing his long-held No. 1 spot to Mexican telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim, who has $53.5 billion.

Buffett, the second-richest American, already announced in 2006 that he wanted gradually to give away all of his fortune estimated this year by Forbes at $47 billion.
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World Giving Index

The “World Giving Index” is the first report of its kind looking at charitable behaviour across the world. Using data from Gallup’s Worldview World Poll CAF looked at three different types of charitable behaviour – giving money, giving time and helping a stranger and used the results to produce the “World Giving Index”.

Australia and New Zealand topped the Index. Malta was found to be the country with the largest percentage of the population (83%) giving money, the people of Turkmenistan are the most generous with their time with 61% having given time to charity and Liberia was top of the list for helping a stranger (76%).

The study also found that being happy is more of an influence on giving money to charity than being wealthy.

http://www.cafonline.org/Default.aspx?page=19428
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September 15, 2010
A Boy and a Bicycle(s)
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Early this year I wrote a column from Zimbabwe that focused on five orphans who moved in together and survive alone in a hut.

The eldest, Abel, a scrawny and malnourished 17-year-old, would rise at 4 o’clock each morning and set off barefoot on a three-hour hike to high school. At nightfall, Abel would return to function as surrogate father: cajoling the younger orphans to finish their homework by firelight, comforting them when sick and spanking them when naughty.

When I asked Abel what he dreamed of, he said “a bicycle” — so that he could cut the six hours he spent walking to and from school and, thus, take better care of the younger orphans. Last week, Abel got his wish. A Chicago-based aid organization, World Bicycle Relief, distributed 200 bicycles to students in Abel’s area who need them to get to school. One went to Abel.

The initiative is a pilot. If it succeeds and finds financing, tens of thousands of other children in Zimbabwe could also get bicycles to help them attend school.

“I’m happy,” Abel told me shyly — his voice beaming through the phone line — when I spoke to him after he got his hands on his bicycle.

Before, he said, he wasn’t sure that he would pass high school graduation exams because he had no time to study. Now he is confident that he will pass.

The bicycle project is the brainchild of a Chicago businessman, Frederick K.W. Day, who read about Abel and decided to make him and his classmates a test of a large-scale bicycles-for-education program in Zimbabwe.

Mr. Day is a senior executive of the SRAM Corporation, the largest bicycle parts company in the United States. He formed World Bicycle Relief in 2005 in the belief that bicycles could help provide cheap transportation for students and health workers in poor countries.

At first, his plan was to ship used bicycles from the United States, but after visits to the field he decided that they would break down. “When we got out there, it was clear that no bike made in the U.S. would survive in that environment,” he said.

After consulting with local people and looking at the spare parts available in remote areas, Mr. Day’s engineering staff designed a 55-pound one-speed bicycle that needed little pampering. One notorious problem with aid groups is that they introduce new technologies that can’t always be sustained; the developing world is full of expensive wells that don’t work because the pumps have broken and there is no one to repair them.

So World Bicycle Relief trains one mechanic — equipped with basic spare parts and tools — for every 50 bicycles distributed, thus nurturing small businesses as well. Abel was one of those trained as a mechanic this time.

In the world of aid, nothing goes quite as planned, and it’s far too early to know whether this program will succeed. World Bicycle Relief tried to get around potential problems by spending months recruiting village elders to oversee the program (it helps that the elders receive bicycles, which they get to keep after two years if they provide solid oversight). Elders will ensure that fathers and older brothers do not confiscate bicycles from girls on the grounds that females are too insignificant to merit something so valuable.

Parents sometimes try to save daughters the risk of walking several hours each way to school by lodging them in town. But the result is sometimes sexual extortion; if a girl wishes to continue her education by staying in cheap lodgings, the price is repeated rape. With bicycles, those girls will now be able to stay at home.

World Bicycle Relief has given out more than 70,000 bicycles so far, nearly 70 percent to women and girls. It expects to hand out 20,000 bicycles this year. And if all goes well, Abel may be the first of tens of thousands of Zimbabwean students to get a bike.

So, for Abel, this is something of a fairy-tale ending. But one of my challenges as a journalist is that many donors want to help any specific individual I write about, while few want to support countless others in the same position.

One obstacle is donor fatigue and weariness with African corruption and repeated aid failures. Those are legitimate concerns. But this column isn’t just a story about a boy and a bike. Rather, it’s an example of an aid intervention that puts a system in place, one that is sustainable and has local buy-in, in hopes of promoting education, jobs and a virtuous cycle out of poverty. It’s a reminder that there are ways to help people help themselves, and that problems can have solutions — but we need to multiply them. Just ask Abel.


I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/opini ... &th&emc=th
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Post by kmaherali »

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/opini ... ?th&emc=th

September 22, 2010
Boast, Build and Sell
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
United Nations

World leaders have flown in first class to the United Nations this week to discuss global poverty over cocktails at the Waldorf Astoria.

The U.N. set eight landmark antipoverty objectives in 2000, so this year’s General Assembly is reviewing how we’re doing after a decade. We’re off-track on most of these Millennium Development Goals, so let me offer three suggestions for how the humanitarian world might do better in framing the fight against poverty:

First, boast more.

Humanitarians have tended to guilt-trip people and governments into generosity by peddling emaciated children with flies on their eyes. But relentless negativity leaves the inaccurate impression that Africa is an abyss of failure and hopelessness. And who wants to invest in a failure?

In fact, here’s the record: antipoverty work saves around 32,000 children’s lives each day. That’s my calculation based on the number of children who died in 1960 (about 20 million) and the number dying now (about 8 million a year).

Twelve million lives saved annually — roughly one every three seconds — is a reminder that global poverty needn’t be a depressing topic but can be a hopeful one. Ancient scourges like Guinea worm, river blindness and polio are on their way out. Modern contraception is more common than a generation ago. The average Indian woman has 2.6 children now, compared with 5.5 in 1970.

That doesn’t mean overselling how easy it is to defeat poverty. In their zeal to raise money, activists sometimes elide the challenges of corruption and dependency — and mind-boggling complexity. Helping people in truth is far harder than it looks.

For example, it’s easy to build a school, but it can be tough to make sure that teachers actually show up afterward; they may live 100 miles away in the capital, receiving their pay for doing nothing. Or kids may be “enrolled” but miss months of school during the harvest. Or they may attend school but lack pencils, paper or books. Or they may be too malnourished or anemic from intestinal worms to learn anything. And Western aid to education sometimes just displaces domestic resources, which are then diverted to buy weapons instead.

In short, building an educational system in which students actually learn is difficult, and it takes more than money poured into broken systems. But it’s also true that literacy rates and school attendance are rising sharply. More than three-quarters of African youngsters are now enrolled in primary school, up from 58 percent in 1999.

My second suggestion is to focus not just on poverty relief but also on wealth creation. The best way to overcome poverty isn’t charity but economic growth, trade rather than aid. That’s why East Asia has raised its living standards so much.

There, too, there’s progress. We’re seeing economic engines revving up from Africa to India. For the last decade, per capita G.D.P. growth in Africa has averaged more than 3 percent per year — faster than in America or Europe.

Wealthy countries could encourage prosperity creation by opening their markets wider to exports from poor countries. The United States has a program, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, or AGOA, that is an important step in that direction and should be expanded.

My third suggestion: punchier marketing. Humanitarians tend to flinch at the idea of marketing, thinking that’s what you do with toothpaste. But it’s all the more important when lives are at stake.

This United Nations summit meeting is marked by the publication of tedious reports on poverty that almost no one will read, when it might gain more support with, say, a music video. After all, one of the most powerful tools to spread the word about educating girls was a “Girl Effect” video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIvmE4_KMNw) designed by the marketing geniuses at Nike. The first Girl Effect video went viral and has been watched by about 10 million people; its successor was released this week.

My hunch is that the most effective way to market antipoverty work in coming years will be by rebranding it, in part, as a security issue. Rich country budgets are so strained that it’s unrealistic to think that governments will approve much new money — or endorse the excellent suggestion of a financial transactions tax to pay for global health programs — just to ease suffering.

But hundreds of billions of dollars will be spent fighting terrorism and bolstering fragile countries like Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan. We should note that schools have a better record of fighting terrorism than missiles do and that wobbly governments can be buttressed not just with helicopter gunships but also with school lunch programs (at 25 cents per kid per day).

International security is where the money is, but fighting poverty is where the success is.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/world ... &th&emc=th

September 23, 2010
Chinese Attitudes on Generosity Are Tested
By MICHAEL WINES

BEIJING — Like most everything else in China’s economy, philanthropy here is in a boom period, fueled by phalanxes of newly minted billionaires and foundations, encouraged by an army of professional advisers on charity and, increasingly, sanctioned by the government.

Which makes the case of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who will come to Beijing next week to share their thoughts on philanthropy with some of China’s wealthiest people, all the more curious.

Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gates, the Rockefeller and Carnegie of this age, announced plans last month to invite about 50 of China’s superrich to discuss their concept of philanthropy, which includes enlisting the world’s wealthiest people to give away at least half their fortunes.

Things appeared to be going swimmingly until early September, when the Chinese news media quoted a Beijing official of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as saying that “a small number of people” had declined to come, and that others had asked whether they would be pushed for donations.

Last week, Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett issued a letter stating that they were not coming to China “to pressure people to give,” but to listen. “China’s circumstances are unique, and so its approach to philanthropy will be as well,” they wrote.

Except for denying a report from Xinhua, the state-run news agency, that only two tycoons had accepted the invitation, the organizers of the event have largely fallen silent.

But the Chinese are unlikely to stop talking soon. In a nation where explosive growth has opened a yawning gap between rich and poor, reports that Chinese billionaires might stiff-arm the invitation have spawned a sort of national Rorschach test of Chinese generosity, not to mention attitudes toward the rich.

“Are Chinese rich scared to be charitable?” asked The Global Times, the Communist Party’s English-language newspaper. Not at all; “This is the Americans’ conspiracy,” wrote one of 2,000 people who posted comments on the controversy on Sina.com, a major Internet portal. Academics grumbled about efforts to impose Western philanthropic values on Chinese tradition.

Actually, however, Chinese philanthropic tradition was being upended well before the Gates-Buffett dinner was even conceived. In barely a decade, the Chinese economy has created at least 117 billionaires, according to a Forbes magazine ranking, and hundreds of thousands of millionaires by the estimate of Hurun Report, a magazine based in Shanghai whose target audience is the rich. Only the United States has more billionaires.

While China’s reported philanthropic donations are now comparatively tiny — about $8 billion last year, the government says, compared with $308 billion in the United States in 2008 — changes in China’s economic structure and in government policies make that figure almost destined to rise quickly. And, in contrast to the past, riches are starting to flow to social and charitable causes.

“The Chinese have been very generous for a long period of time,” Rupert Hoogewerf, who publishes Hurun Report, said by telephone. “The difference has been that they do it between families, and don’t publicize it. What we’re seeing now is a new era of transparency.”

Translucency might be a better term. More than a few fortunes have been built on corruption, and their owners stay in the shadows. The China Reform Foundation, an economic research group based in Beijing, estimated last month that about $870 billion in corrupt “gray money” was being hidden by the wealthiest 10 percent of China’s population.

Huang Guangyu, who built an appliance shop into a fortune valued at $2.7 billion to $6.3 billion, was singled out by Hurun Report in 2007 as especially miserly. Today he is in prison, convicted of stock fraud and insider trading.

A Global Times article this month stated that in the last decade, 17 members of an annual list of China’s 50 richest people had been convicted of economic crimes.

Ordinary Chinese, steeped in petty government corruption, are often bitterly cynical toward the rich.

“Of course they’ll decline the invitation,” one wrote of the invited billionaires on the Sina.com postings board. “None of their money is clean!”

Yet a growing number of China’s corporate titans are open both about their wealth and about giving it away. The leading example is Yu Pengnian, an 88-year-old real estate baron who gave the last of his $1.3 billion fortune in April to a foundation he created to fund scholarships for poor Chinese students. The latest is Chen Guangbiao, 42, a Jiangsu Province recycling-company owner who has taken the Gates-Buffett pledge to give away his $440 million fortune when he dies.

“Wealth is not something that comes to you when you are born,” he said in an interview last week. “It’s like water. If you have only a cup, you keep it to yourself. If you have a barrel, you share it with your family. And if you have a river, you share it with everyone.”

This is a new phenomenon, and not only because the money is new. China’s Communist Party claims to represent the downtrodden, and has been reluctant to turn to the private sector to address problems of poverty and disease.

But since the outpouring of support for victims of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, the government now seems to be edging toward a more accommodating attitude about private philanthropy. It offers corporations a tax break of up to 12 percent for charitable gifts, rising to 30 percent for individuals.

This year, a reregistration drive has certified more than 1,000 nonprofit groups as able to accept tax-deductible donations. Government officials have also said that they plan to enact the nation’s first charity law, with rules that clearly define what a charity is and how it must operate, by late 2011.

But whether revised rules on charities and nonprofit groups generally will broaden or restrict philanthropic work is unclear, said Jia Xijin, who directs the Nongovernmental Organization Research Center at Tsinghua University in Beijing. While the government has slowly given new leeway to some charitable groups, especially those that provide social services, it keeps a tighter rein on groups that advocate policy changes or raise money on their own.

The government’s concern is that “most public fund-raising organizations need some social cause, and if you organize people,” she said, “that means the organization represents some social force.”

For Mr. Chen, the recycling magnate, the best way to encourage philanthropy by the group invited to dine with Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gates is to publicize the names of people who decline to attend.

“I’ll help you bash them in the media,” he said. “We can’t be misers.”


Zhang Jing contributed research.
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Post by kmaherali »

October 2, 2010
At Risk From the Womb
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Some people think we’re shaped primarily by genes. Others believe that the environment we grow up in is most important. But now evidence is mounting that a third factor is also critical: our uterine environment before we’re even born.

Researchers are finding indications that obesity, diabetes and mental illness among adults are all related in part to what happened in the womb decades earlier.

One of the first careful studies in this field found that birth weight (a proxy for nutrition in the womb) helped predict whether an adult would suffer from heart disease half a century later. Scrawny babies were much more likely to suffer heart problems in middle age.

That study, published in 1989, provoked skepticism at first. But now an array of research confirms that the fetal period is a crucial stage of development that affects physiology decades later.

Perhaps the most striking finding is that a stressful uterine environment may be a mechanism that allows poverty to replicate itself generation after generation. Pregnant women in low-income areas tend to be more exposed to anxiety, depression, chemicals and toxins from car exhaust to pesticides, and they’re more likely to drink or smoke and less likely to take vitamin supplements, eat healthy food and get meticulous pre-natal care.

The result is children who start life at a disadvantage — for kids facing stresses before birth appear to have lower educational attainment, lower incomes and worse health throughout their lives. If that’s true, then even early childhood education may be a bit late as a way to break the cycles of poverty.

“Given the odds stacked against poor women and their fetuses, the most effective antipoverty program might be one that starts before birth,” writes Annie Murphy Paul in a terrific and important new book called “Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.”

Another groundbreaking and provocative book this year makes the same case: “More than Genes,” by Dan Agin, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago. Both offer a new window into the unexpected forces that shape us.

One study in this field, by a Columbia University economist, Douglas Almond, looked at children who were born after the great flu pandemic of 1918. The pandemic lasted only about five months and infected about a third of pregnant women in America, so Mr. Almond compared those who had been exposed to it while inside their mothers with others born just before or after.

Ms. Paul quotes Mr. Almond as concluding, “People who were in utero during the pandemic did worse, on average, on just about every socioeconomic outcome recorded.” They were 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school, 15 percent more likely to be poor, and 20 percent more likely to have heart disease in old age.

Stress in mothers seems to have particularly strong effects on their offspring, perhaps through release of cortisol, a hormone released when a person is anxious. Studies show that children who were in utero during the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of 1967 were more likely to have schizophrenia diagnosed as adults. And The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that Chinese born during the terrible famine from 1959 to 1961 were twice as likely to develop schizophrenia as those born at other times.

As for obesity, Ms. Paul describes several British scientists who fed pregnant rats junk food: doughnuts, marshmallows, potato chips and chocolate chip muffins. The offspring of those rats turned out to have a sweet tooth as well: they were more likely to choose junk food when it was offered and ended up 25 percent fatter than rats whose mothers were fed regular rodent chow.

This field of “fetal origins” is still in its infancy, but one implication is that we should be much more careful about exposing pregnant women to toxins, and much quicker to regulate chemicals that are now widely used even though they’ve never even been tested for safety. Professor Agin is particularly eloquent about the potential perils of lead, dioxins, PCBs, radiation and pesticides.

One study looked at Swedish children who were fetuses during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. The radiation exposure was very slight and did not seem to affect their physical health. But their cognitive abilities, especially in math, seemed affected, and they were one-third more likely to fail middle school.

The uncertainty in this field is enormous, but we have learned that a uterus is not a diving bell that insulates its occupant from the world’s perils. Chemicals like thalidomide and DES proved tragic for those exposed to them while in their mothers’ wombs. And it’s now high time to take a closer look at unregulated chemicals that envelop us — and may be shaping our progeny for decades to come.


I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/opini ... &th&emc=th
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Post by kmaherali »

There is a related multi-media linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/magaz ... gewanted=1

Venture Philanthropy | Rwanda • Congo • Nepal
D.I.Y. Foreign-Aid Revolution

This is a lengthy article but excerpt below is worthy of notice and attention.

"That’s Scharpf’s choice. Now 33, Scharpf was interning in the summer of 2005 for the World Bank in Mozambique, helping local entrepreneurs, when she encountered a business impediment that she had never heard of. It was unmentionable, and thus unmentioned. It was menstruation.

A female boss griped to Scharpf about absenteeism caused by women reluctant to come to work during their menstrual periods. “It was because pads were too expensive,” Scharpf recalls. “I was trying to figure out why I had never heard of this before. This was causing productivity rates to go down.”

Scharpf began asking around, and everybody told her — in whispers — that, yes, of course menstruation was keeping women and girls from jobs. Back at Harvard, where she was pursuing joint degrees at the business school and the John F. Kennedy School of Government, she began asking friends from Bangladesh, Nicaragua and other countries if they were aware of this problem. Of course, they said. “This spoke to me,” Scharpf recalled. “Hasn’t every girl or woman experienced the inconvenience, the disadvantage and the embarrassment in her life, when her period strikes at the ‘wrong’ time? I think half the world can relate to that. What really struck me was that this was a global issue that seemingly had significant costs. From back-of-the-envelope calculations, it had huge costs. And it could have a simple solution.” She paused and smiled tightly. “I was a little naïve there.”

Scharpf is a mild-mannered policy wonk, but the more she thought about it, the more indignant she became. Girls were missing school because they couldn’t afford sanitary pads? Women couldn’t go to work for lack of pads? And all this was taboo to discuss? Scharpf began to scheme. "

*****
There is also a related video in the article linked at:

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/1 ... n&emc=tyb1

October 20, 2010, 9:00 am
How to Change the World
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF

I have an essay in the New York Times Sunday Magazine about do-it-yourself foreign aid, but I know that it won’t fully answer the question that many readers will have: What can I do? Originally we had a sidebar addressing that question to go with the article, but it had to be cut for space reasons – and so I’ve found a home for it here on my blog.

So for those who want to do more, here are my suggestions.


First, dip your toe in the waters to get a sense of the work that is being done and to find what resonates most with you. One way to submerge your toe is to make microloans through online organizations like Kiva or Vittana. Kiva matches a donor’s loans to needy entrepreneurs around the world (who eventually pay the loans back), while Vittana offers a similar service, but for education loans.

Another approach is to browse a comprehensive site like Global Giving, where organizations around the world have posted their wish lists. On Global Giving, my family has donated, for example, to an aid group in Bombay, India, that keeps at-risk girls from being trafficked into brothels. For Father’s Day last year, I suggested that instead of giving Dad another necktie, people sponsor a “HeroRat” through GlobalGiving. HeroRats are trained rats that sniff out landmines or TB cases, and what father wouldn’t want to be associated with a super-macho super-achieving super-altruistic oversized rat? The column raised more than $150,000, and last I heard the rats had detected 594 landmines in Mozambique.

Another easy first step is to sponsor someone abroad through a program that lets you contribute a certain amount each month to that person and exchange letters. It’s also a way to introduce your kids to global issues, as you show photos of the person you’ve sponsored. Through Plan USA, my family is sponsoring a child in the Dominican Republic.

Meanwhile, keep an eye out for a cause and organization that particularly speaks to you, that exhilarates you. Then dive in and focus your efforts on that organization. You’ll be more engaged if you concentrate your time and resources rather than spread them thin.

Also, don’t limit your involvement to writing checks. People are also needed to sign petitions and write indignant letters to members of Congress. CARE has an action network that offers advocacy ideas. Or you can volunteer at a soup kitchen or mentor a child, or find other ways to help. A stay-at-home mom in Colorado, Jenny Murphy, heard about Lisa Shannon (whose work with Run for Congo Women I describe in the magazine article) but isn’t a runner and wasn’t in a position to go off to Congo. But she browsed the Internet and through Facebook connected with a remarkable man in Congo running schools there. Now she is passionately engaged in an organization, Strong Roots, that supports those schools and works on conservation issues around Kahuzi-Biega National Park in Eastern Congo. That’s a reflection of what technology makes possible: a Mom in Colorado giving people hope in eastern Congo.

Try to visit a project that you’ve supported. For example, I’ve visited children that I’ve sponsored through Plan USA, in the Dominican Republic, Philippines and Sudan, and each time I’ve found it a fascinating and triumphal experience. Our whole family also traveled to Cambodia to attend the ribbon-cutting for a new junior high school there that we built in a rural area through American Assistance for Cambodia. We still pay for the school’s English teacher and Internet access; now we can email the teacher and students and enjoy the warm and fuzzy feeling that goes with having made a difference. That kind of experience underscores that while assistance has a mixed record helping others, it has an almost perfect record helping ourselves.

This doesn’t work for everybody, but think about volunteering for a stint abroad. You could teach English to children of brothel workers in Calcutta through the amazing New Light shelter there (where one child of a street prostitute was just accepted by a medical school!). Or you could volunteer at Kashf, a microfinance organization in Pakistan that does amazing work lifting women out of poverty.

Or there are many other organizations that will take volunteers to teach English or do other work, and it truly can be a life-changing experience. This is something that my wife, Sheryl WuDunn, and I talk about in our book “Half the Sky,” and in the back of the book we list a number of organizations that accept volunteers. We also list some of them at Half the Sky under the “get involved” tab. If you know of a good place to volunteer, or have questions, go to the “forum” tab and post a comment or question. It’s meant to be a place to trade information.

I also recommend the books by David Bornstein on social entrepreneurship. His best known is “How to Change the World,” which has become the bible of would be change-makers. He has also teamed up with Tina Rosenberg, a contributing writer for the Times Sunday magazine, ” to co-write a new blog called Fixes. It focuses on solutions to the world’s problems, instead of, well, its problems.

There’s just no limit to the ways to get involved in these issues. I just came across a group, Bald Solidarity, which is getting people to shave their heads in solidarity with women who are stripped of their rights.

If head-shaving isn’t in your future, here are some lesser-known secular organizations focused on women that I believe are making a difference, but remember that this is only a tiny sampling and only of small organizations that you might not have heard of already. There are many other groups doing great work. Please post your own ideas about how to make a difference below, and in particular list specific organizations and ways to help. The more specific and practical, the more useful it will be to other readers.

So without further ado, here are some worthy organizations:

Camfed sponsors girls for education in Africa. It pays fees, helps them manage menstruation and other challenges, and encourages them to “give back” once they have completed their education.

Afghan Institute of Learning supports girls’ education in Afghanistan and border areas of Pakistan. It is run by an Afghan woman, Sakena Yacoobi, who manages to run schools that the Taliban doesn’t burn down.

Tostan has been extraordinarily successful in overcoming female genital cutting in West Africa, and in training women and men alike and creating opportunities for them. It is based in Senegal.

Vital Voices is a Washington-based organization that supports women change-makers around the world, and is particularly staunch against trafficking.

The Fistula Foundation focuses on maternal health and surgery to repair obstetric fistulas, which are horrendous childbirth injuries that leave women incontinent.

BRAC is a Bangladeshi-based organization that focuses on education and empowerment of the very poor. It is one of the most admired development organizations from within the global south, and it is now expanding to Africa and other areas.

Pro Mujer focuses on helping women with reproductive health and small businesses in Latin America.

The Women’s Refugee Commission is an offshoot of the International Rescue Committee that focuses on women refugees, who are among the most vulnerable people on earth.

New Light India runs a shelter for trafficked women in a Calcutta red light district.

International Women’s Health Coalition is a New York-based group that works for women’s health worldwide.

Deworm the World promotes deworming programs. Worms seem to affect girls in particular by leading to anemia, and girls are already at risk of anemia from menstruation.

Global Fund for Women makes grants to innovative women’s programs in developing countries around the world.

Beyond the 11th was founded by two American widows of 9/11, and supports economic empowerment efforts for Afghan women.

Sustainable Health Enterprises, also known as SHE (and featured in my magazine story), is committed to lowering the high cost of sanitary pads in many African countries through advocacy work and by producing–and training women to distribute–lower cost products made from local materials.

The BlinkNow Foundation, created by 23 year-old Maggie Doyne, another subject of my magazine piece, was created to help children receive shelter and education in war-torn countries dealing with extreme poverty. This is what Ms. Doyne accomplished in a remote corner of Nepal, and she hopes to replicate her model in other parts of the world.

Run for Congo Women, also featured in my article, organizes runs and walks all over the word–even in Congo–to raise awareness and funds for Women for Women International’s Congo program, which supports female survivors of the ongoing war there.

So now: your turn! What are your favorite organizations and ways to make a difference?
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Post by kmaherali »

Let's remember Afghan women's successes


By Kathleen Parker, For The Calgary Herald
November 7, 2010curriebarracks



Helen Reddy's iconic "I am woman, hear me roar" is more likely to cause a cringe than goose bumps these days -- more a comical anthem to bra-burning histrionics than the soundtrack to a serious movement aimed at greater equality.

But when those same sentiments are voiced by a young Afghan woman named Fatima, who has created her own construction business amid war, corruption and a culture that barely tolerates women, one is more inclined toward the goose bump.

"Every morning, I stand in front of the mirror and say, 'I am a woman and I am powerful,' " she told a luncheon gathering here. Hosted by Daily Beast founder Tina Brown, the luncheon was in honour of four Afghan women who are graduates of Goldman Sachs' 10,000 Women business program.

Fatima's mirror-mirror mantra is one of the things she learned from her teacher: "I realized there is no difference between me and my brother."

Sitting at one of several tables set for lunch, admiring these women and hearing their stories, one couldn't help thinking how surreal their first trip to the U.S. must have been for them. Their heads covered and their faces revealing no trace of makeup, they were soft-spoken yet commanding. These women are extraordinary successes given their circumstances, including the necessity of using only their first names to protect their identities. Not everyone in Afghanistan is proud of their accomplishments. Security is still an enormous challenge. Fatima and others often have to employ men to do the "outdoor" work of making sales contacts, or keep a man nearby when they venture out.

Masooda, another graduate of the program who has a jam and pickling business, said her employees are home-based and illiterate. She employs 23 people, 20 of whom are women.

Fatima began her business when she was 15. Now 23, she employs 76 engineers and construction workers, to help rebuild her country's infrastructure. Though she began long before Goldman Sachs appeared on the scene, she had no business or marketing skills.

Begun in 2008, the program is a five-year initiative to promote social change through the economic empowerment of women. It has reached 2,000 women in more than 20 countries, including Afghanistan, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Rwanda and the U.S.

The idea is that creating a women's labour force is key to long-term economic growth. This would seem to be common sense rather than advanced economic theory, but such brilliance is scant in underdeveloped, war-ravaged countries or where women are often treated as subhuman.

Research for the program showed that investing in women would profit the human race through a multiplier effect. Not only would education lead to more employees for business and increased revenues, but more prosperous women would lead to better-educated, healthier families, followed by more prosperous communities and nations.

Hardly the stuff of stunning revelation. But whatever it takes. If the plus column of a spreadsheet means that women aren't shot in the public square, that will have been a good day's work.

Part of Goldman Sachs' mission is to create global business school partnerships to improve business education. More than 30 leading business schools are participating. Listening to Fatima, Masooda, Malalai and a second Fatima, I was struck by their humility and courage. I have met numerous Afghan women over the past year or so through various organizations working to help them, and each time they say the same thing: Don't feel sorry for us. But please, don't forget us.

How could we?

Kathleen Parker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist with Washington Post.

http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... iebarracks
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Post by kmaherali »

November 13, 2010
Here’s a Woman Fighting Terrorism. With Microloans.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

LAHORE, Pakistan

An old friend of mine here fights terrorists, but not the way you’re thinking. She could barely defeat a truculent child in hand-to-hand combat, and if she ever picked up an AK-47 — well, you’d pray it was unloaded.

Roshaneh Zafar is an American- educated banker who fights extremism with microfinance. She has dedicated her life to empowering some of Pakistan’s most impoverished women and giving them the tools to run businesses of their own. The United States should learn from warriors like her.

Bullets and drones may kill terrorists, but Roshaneh creates jobs and educational opportunities for hundreds of thousands of people — draining the swamps that breed terrorists.

“Charity is limited, but capitalism isn’t,” Roshaneh said. “If you want to change the world, you need market-based solutions.” That’s the point of microfinance — typically, lending very poor people small amounts of money so that they can buy a rickshaw or raw materials and start a tiny business.

Roshaneh grew up in elite circles here in Lahore and studied business at the Wharton School and economics at Yale. After a stint at the World Bank, she returned to Pakistan in 1996 to start her microfinance organization. She called it the Kashf Foundation.

Everybody thought Roshaneh was nuts. And at first nothing went right. The poor refused to borrow. Or if they borrowed, they didn’t repay their loans.

But Roshaneh persisted, and today Kashf has 152 branches around the country. It has dispersed more than $200 million to more than 300,000 families. Now Roshaneh is moving into microsavings, to help the poor build assets, as well as programs to train the poor to run businesses more efficiently. She is even thinking of expanding into schools for the poor.

Microfinance is sometimes oversold as a silver bullet — which it’s not. Careful follow-up studies suggest that gains from microloans are often quite modest.

Some borrowers squander money or start businesses that fail. Some micro-lenders tarnish the field because they’re incompetent, and others because they rake in profits with sky-high loan rates. Microfinance has also generally been less successful in Africa than in South Asia.

Yet done right, microfinance can make a significant difference. An outside evaluation found that after four years, Kashf borrowers are more likely than many others to enjoy improved economic conditions — and that’s what I’ve seen over the years as I’ve visited Kashf borrowers.

On this trip, I met a woman named Parveen Baji, who says she never attended a day of school and until recently was completely illiterate. She had 14 children, but five died.

Ms. Parveen’s husband, who also never attended school, regularly beat her and spent the family savings on narcotics, she says. The family’s only possessions were four cots on which they slept, crammed three or four to a cot, in a rented apartment.

“One night all my children were hungry,” she remembered. “I sent my daughter to ask for food from a neighbor. And the neighbor said, ‘you’ve become a beggar,’ and refused.”

Then Ms. Parveen got a $70 loan from Kashf and started a jewelry and cosmetics business, buying in bulk and selling to local shops. Ms. Parveen couldn’t read the labels, but she memorized which bottle was which. As her business thrived, she began to struggle to learn reading and arithmetic — and proved herself an ace student. I fired math problems at her, and she dazzled me with her quick responses.

Ms. Parveen began to start new businesses, even building a laundry that she put her husband in charge of to keep him busy. He no longer beats her, she says, and when I interviewed him separately he seemed a little awed by her.

Eventually, Ms. Parveen started a restaurant and catering business that now has eight employees, including some of her daughters. She bought a home and has put some of her children through high school — and a son, the brightest student, through college. She has just paid $5,800 for a permit for him to move to London to take a health sector job.

Ms. Parveen tried to look modest as she told me this, but she failed. She was beaming and shaking her head in wonder as she watched her son speak English with me, dazzled at the thought that she was dispatching her university-educated son to Europe. “Microfinance has changed my life,” she said simply.

That’s an unusual success story. But the larger message is universal: helping people start businesses, create jobs and support education is a potent way to undermine extremism.

We Americans overinvest in firepower to defeat extremism and underinvest in development, and so we could learn something useful from Roshaneh. The toolkit to fight terrorism includes not only missiles but also microfinance and economic opportunity.

The antonym of “militant” is often “job.”

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/opini ... s&emc=a212
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November 20, 2010
When Donations Go Astray
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

This holiday season, Americans will dig into their pockets for good causes. But these gifts will sometimes benefit charlatans or extremists, or simply be wasted.

Partly that’s because religious giving — and a good deal of casual secular giving — isn’t vetted as carefully as it should be. Researchers find that religious people on average donate more of their incomes than the nonreligious, and Christians, Jews and Muslims alike write checks to charities that they assume share their values. Dangerous assumption.

Some well-meaning Christians will support Feed the Children, a major Oklahoma-based Christian charity that describes its mission as providing food and medicine to needy children at home and abroad. By some accounts it is the seventh-largest charity in America.

But the American Institute of Philanthropy, a watchdog group that also runs Charitywatch.org, lists Feed the Children as “the most outrageous charity in America.” The institute says that Feed the Children spends just 21 percent of its cash budget on programs for the needy — but spends about $55 to raise each $100 in cash contributions.

Feed the Children also has been the subject of troubling litigation and investigations. The Oklahoman newspaper says that in 2007 the charity spent $1.2 million on a house used by the founder’s daughter, a charity executive until she was fired this year. It also said that Feed the Children once lent $950,000 to a framing business headed by the founder’s son, and that the charity has sued the son for allegedly helping strip a warehouse of $5 million in materials. The son has denied the allegations in the suit.

In addition, the institute says that Feed the Children inflates the value of food and medicine to make it seem as if it does far more than it actually does.

Tony Sellars, a spokesman for Feed the Children, shrugged off the accusations as a disagreement about methodology and said that the lawsuits were being resolved. “We’ve helped 200,000 families in America this year alone,” he said. “The opinions we value are those of the people we’re helping.”

Meanwhile, American Jews sometimes support nonprofits that actually make peace for Israel less likely. A few days ago, the Hebron Fund had a gala fund- raiser in Manhattan, and some of those who attended probably thought that they were supporting Jews trying to live peacefully. In fact, the Hebron settlement is notorious for extremism and violence against Palestinians. (The settlers disagree, saying that the problems arise because Palestinians want to kill them.)

Similarly, some Muslims support Islamic charities in Gaza — some of which are manipulated by Hamas. The money ends up bolstering Hamas, oppressing Palestinians, and undermining Palestinian hopes for peace.

One of the most admirable Muslim practices is zakat, or alms-giving, whereby the wealthy often give 2.5 percent of their assets to the poor each year. But prosperous Muslims often donate in a very unbusinesslike way; if the money were used to support schools or proven poverty-alleviation programs, it could have far greater impact.

There are many reputable religious charities. For Christians, there are groups like Medical Teams International, World Vision and Catholic Relief Services. Jews can look to American Jewish World Service or Rabbis for Human Rights. Muslims can consider Islamic Relief Worldwide or smaller groups like the Afghan Institute of Learning.

And of course there are many large secular organizations with strong track records, like CARE, Save the Children, Mercy Corps and Heifer International.

Philanthropy has made huge strides in the last couple of decades, with far more emphasis on cost-effective interventions that are scalable to bring about change. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has helped lead the way, and Web sites like Givewell.org guide small-time donors. CharityNavigator.org ranks organizations partly by administrative expenses, which are less important than a charity’s impact on the needy, but it is trying to develop more useful information about impact.

Today, however, much giving remains impulsive and inefficient. When people get a call out of the blue asking them to donate to firefighters, they may imagine the caller is a volunteer; instead, he’s probably a paid fund-raiser, who will take much of what you give.

“Chuggers” — short for charity muggers — who stop people on the street likewise often work for fund-raising companies that swallow much of any donation. When people receive address labels or a key chain from a charity, they’re more likely to write a check — but that’s a terribly inefficient way to raise money.

Look, I’m nervous about this column, because I don’t want to discourage giving. But donations could accomplish far more if people thought through their philanthropy, did more research, and made fewer, bigger contributions instead of many small ones that are expensive to handle.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/opini ... s&emc=a212
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Wipro chairman Azim Premji pledges $2bn to Education foundation

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/indi ... 025608.cms

http://www.bismillahnews.in/?page_id=22

BANGALORE: In the largest act of philanthropy by an Indian, Wipro chairman Azim Premji will give about Rs 8,846 crore ($2 billion) to improve school education in India. Other donations to charitable institutions by any person or corporation in India pale in comparison to this massive endowment. It effectively silences critics who say Indian billionaires are measly donors compared to foreign counterparts, and that they focus on big-name western universities rather than addressing India’s problems.

Premji, India’s third richest man with a net worth of $18 billion, will transfer 213 million equity shares of
Wipro Ltd, held by a few entities controlled by him, to the Azim Premji Trust. It will fund educational activities of the Azim Premji Foundation (APF) which works mainly with schools in rural India. He had previously transferred over Rs 700 crore to the APF.

Premji said more may come in future. “I’m completely committed to supporting the larger ambition of creating the required social change.”

The money will be transferred to the trust by next Tuesday and Wipro’s former strategy chief K R Lakshminarayana will be its chief endowment officer. A $2-billion endowment even at a conservative return of 8%-12% should generate annual returns of $160-250 million (Rs 750-1,150 crore), which will be used to run APF initiatives, including the Bangalore-based Azim Premji University.

“We believe that good education is crucial to building a just, equitable, humane and sustainable society. We want to contribute significantly towards improvement of education in India, and through that towards building a better society,” he said.

“All our efforts, including the university we are setting up, are focused on the under-privileged and disadvantaged sections of our society. Our experience of the past 10 years has motivated us to significantly scale up our initiatives, across multiple relevant dimensions.”

So far, the nine-year-old APF has worked extensively in six districts — two in Uttarakhand, two in Rajasthan and two in Karnataka.

Dileep Ranjekar, co-CEO of APF called this the beginning of APF’s second life. “The current phase we’re launching is based on 10 years of experience wherein we realized what needs to be done to scale this in a concrete manner.” His co-CEO Anurag Behar said, “The aim is to increase the deep focus to 50 more districts across India.”

Such a huge financial commitment has been made mainly because a university cannot be run without a large endowment. For example, if AP University were to follow the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) model which meets just 14%-15% of its costs from student fees, the AP University will need to meet 85% of costs from non-fee based resources.

“The foundation’s significant increase in scale and its clear focus on social purposes will require a substantial long-term financial commitment, which is the purpose this endowment will serve,” Premji said.

The university, offering post-graduate courses in education and development, will start with 200 students in 2011 and scale to 2,000 in 4-5 years.

The foundation will also create district-level institutions with 50-70 people in each and these state and district resource centres will support improvement in education, especially in disadvantaged areas.

The APF said it will continue to partner state governments (including continuing with its existing programmes), institutions, NGOs and individuals.

Will others follow suit?
Will Premji inspire rich Indians to part with their wealth? That’s a billion-dollar question but the American example may have the answer. Microsoft chairman
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathway are persuading wealthy Americans to give at least 50% of their wealth to charity. They’re even asking people to take a pledge they will do so, and with considerable success.

In India, the tech sector has led the way in giving away some of its wealth. All Infosys co-founders have charitable arms mainly in education but also in water management, health, etc.

Read more:
Azim Premji pledges $2bn to foundation - The Times of Indiahttp://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Azim-Premji-pledges-2bn-to-foundation/articleshow/7025608.cms#ixzz16uytEzAY

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Azim Premji Profile

http://www.iloveindia.com/indian-heroes ... remji.html

Born: July 24, 1945
Achievements: Chairman of Wipro Technologies; Richest Indian for the past several years; Honored with Padma Bhushan in 2005.

Azim Premji is Chairman of Wipro Technologies, one of the largest software companies in India. He is an icon among Indian businessmen and his success story is a source of inspiration to a number of budding entrepreneurs.

Born on July 24, 1945, Azim Hashim Premji was studying Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, USA when due to the sudden demise of his father, he was called upon to handle the family business. Azim Premji took over the reins of family business in 1966 at the age of 21.

At the first annual general meeting of the company attended by Azeem Premji, a shareholder doubted Premji’s ability to handle business at such a young age and publicly advised him to sell his shareholding and give it to a more mature management. This spurred Azim Premji and made him all the more determined to make Wipro a success story. And the rest is history.

When Azim Premji occupied the hot seat, Wipro dealt in hydrogenated cooking fats and later diversified to bakery fats, ethnic ingredient based toiletries, hair care soaps, baby toiletries, lighting products and hydraulic cylinders. Thereafter Premji made a focused shift from soaps to software.

Under Azim Premji’s leadership Wipro has metamorphosed from a Rs.70 million company in hydrogenated cooking fats to a pioneer in providing integrated business, technology and process solutions on a global delivery platform. Today, Wipro Technologies is the largest independent R&D service provider in the world.

Azim Premji has several achievements to his credit. In 2000, Asiaweek magazine, voted Premji among the 20 most powerful men in the world. Azim Premji was among the 50 richest people in the world from 2001 to 2003 listed by Forbes. In April 2004, Times Magazine, rated him among the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. He is also the richest Indian for the past several years. In 2005,Government of India honored Azim Premji with Padma Bhushan.

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Gulshan, left, and Pyarali Nanji have donated to several Canadian hospitals in gratitude to Canada for giving them refuge in 1972 when they were forced by Idi Amin to leave Uganda.

http://www.healthzone.ca/health/newsfea ... -of-refuge

Toronto philanthropist couple gives back after gift of refuge
November 26, 2010

Valerie Hauch
STAFF REPORTER

Were it not for former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau airlifting thousands of South Asians out of Uganda in 1972 — after then-dictator Idi Amin called them “bloodsuckers” and gave 60,000 of them 90 days to leave — Pyarali and Gulshan Nanji and their four children would likely never have settled in Canada.

Since arriving in Canada along with the 7,000 South Asian Ugandans who fled Amin and eventually found refuge here, the Ismaili couple has given generous donations to hospitals in Montreal, where they first settled, and in Toronto.

On Dec. 2, North York General Hospital officially reopens its renovated Medical Imaging Centre, largely funded by the Nanjis who are among the largest private donors in the hospital’s history. They live near the hospital.

In recognition of the Nanjis’ donation, the hospital is naming a section of the facility — which treats more than 200,000 patients annually — the Gulshan and Pyarali G. Nanji Ultrasound, CT and Radiography Centre.

A previous donation by the Nanjis made possible the opening of the Gulshan and Pyarali G. Nanji Orthopaedic and Plastics Centre in 2006 and they have also contributed to adolescent mental health treatment at the hospital.

Although the Nanjis won’t specify the dollar amount of their donations, their support “totals in the multi-millions,” says Harold Heft, executive vice-president of philanthropy and communications of the North York General Hospital Foundation.

The Nanjis have also previously contributed to Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, and in recognition of their generosity a 2007-2008 report on donors stated that the first floor of the M-Wing was being renamed the Pyarali and Gulshan Nanji Ambulatory Centre.

St. Mary’s Hospital in Montreal was the first benefactor of the Nanjis’ generosity.

“My wife had rheumatoid arthritis,” Pyarali Nanji told the Star, and he was very pleased with the care she got. “I said to her, this hospital, we have to pay back.”

Giving back to Canada was something he vowed he would do once the family was settled in Montreal. Back in 1972, his children, then aged 12, 16, 18 and 21, were put on the first Canadian mercy flight out of Uganda. His wife followed two weeks later on another flight out, but Nanji, who had been born in Uganda and is of Indian descent, had to stay behind to try and see if he could salvage something from his luggage and wire and nails businesses.

“It was very scary. My wife had to leave, it was very tough on her. She said, ‘Should I leave you alone here, maybe never to see you again?’ I said, ‘They (the children) need you there (in Canada).’ ”

Shortly after, Nanji was able to get into Nairobi, then went to England and from there was reunited with his family in Montreal — a day “of the biggest joy.”

“I said, if ever, ever I am successful in this country . . . what the Canadian government has done was unbelievable. They give my children shelter, food, education. And the best part is security.”

From a modest start with buying some real estate in Montreal to today as president and CEO of Markham-based Belle-Pak Packaging Inc. (called one of Canada’s 50 best-managed companies), Nanji, together with his wife, has achieved the business success that has made their philanthropy possible.

He chooses to give to hospitals for a reason: “Hospitals I admire because . . . there’s no religion, no discrimination. There is no rich or poor. If I am sick, I have to stay in queue and wait until it’s my turn.

“This is an area where everybody is treated the same . . . I see government alone cannot do everything” when it comes to hospitals, says Nanji. “It’s our duty as citizens to be a part of it.”

North York General Hospital’s Dr. Elizabeth Lamere, who works in diagnostic imaging, says the Nanjis’ most recent donations that have funded the renovation of the Medical Imaging Centre have made a world of difference in “upgrading and modernizing an integral part of the hospital.”
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