betterplace Workshop in Mali

Youchaou’s school in Mali, Westafrika, is one of my favourites (well, I also have a few others, but this one is really good). And this, not only because my family and I visited the project last January and spent a great day and evening with Youchaou, Jürgen and the street children he supports with a daily meal in his courtyard. My enthusiasm has more to do with the approach itself – a local initiative strategically supported by outsiders in a respectful and cooperative way. Imagine my reaction when I received this photo:

It shows participants of a workshop in Bamako, Malis capital, learning how to use betterplace, so that the stakeholders of the project can blog about it directly. This is the idea of the Web of Trust: give as many people as possible a voice in order to increase – or shatter – trust for a social initiative.

I hope many people will support the scholarships for needy children.

Making development more efficient

Foreign aid, despite its do-good image, is an industry. Every year, governments and charities spend $200 billion on projects in developing countries. Yet contrary to the world of corporations and financial markets the sector is intransparent and lacks information. But this is gradually changing – and the internet plays a decisive role in this transformation. Look for example at Developmentex, a website set up a few years ago by Raj Kumar, than student at the Kennedy School of Government. 

Online information shifts the balance of power

In an article in the Washington Post Sebastian Mallaby writes: 

Consider the process of procurement. Development projects involve contracts in the millions of dollars for construction, engineering, information technology and so on. If you’re running one of these projects, you can place ads in the newspapers asking for, say, water engineers. But most of your potential suppliers probably won’t notice. As a result, there will be few bids for your tender, and you will pay an unnecessarily high price, just as bond buyers did in the pre-Bloomberg era.

Now comes Kumar’s Web site, which creates a clearinghouse for information on 30,000 development projects. With that much business in one place, suppliers congregate like bees, especially since the site is searchable. By typing in a key word, a water-engineering firm can find 1,675 water-engineering opportunities. Suddenly, buyers of water-engineering services have multiple suppliers to choose from. Costs fall by perhaps one-fifth, judging by experiments in competitive procurement in Brazil and in the Phillipines.

Also, when hiring professionals the website comes in handy: 

… the managers of development projects can advertise for people in the newspapers, but this is a haphazard method: By the nature of their work, the professionals you want are scattered. Kumar’s Web site provides employers with one-stop access to 62,000 aid workers. You want an Arabic-speaking water engineer with a master’s degree and a minimum of three years’ experience? A few clicks will introduce you to 141 of them. You want to avoid overpriced expatriates? For your project in Egypt, the site offers more than a dozen Egyptian water specialists.

Websites such as this contribute to a shift of power. Whereas until now the power, i.e. know how, is with the huge bureaucracies, soon much of this know how will be in online professional networks.

The power of friends telling friends telling…

It’s about more than about giving money — it’s about creating connections. By encouraging individual participation and involvement, we will create international communities of common interest. This is the essence of social networking.

This is exactly what betterplace.org is about. It’s good to know we are in good company. Thanks to my colleague Hannelore for pointing me to this interesting article!

Tom Hadfield had sold soccer.net for 40 million US dollars at the age of 17. Eight years and a trip to Zambia later he’s now taking on the fight against malaria. With MalariaEngage.org the “web guru” (as he’s labeled in the Reuters article by John Joseph) aims to support local researchers working on ways to treat or prevent malaria – and who are facing a terrible lack of resources. The fact “that thousands of people are dying every day from a preventable disease” prompted Hadfield to start MalariaEngage. By joining forces with Peter A. Singer and Abdallah S. Daar, both health professors at the University of Toronto, the social entrepreneur’s initiative has surely gathered momentum. In the article, Singer is quoted as saying: “We feel young African scientists have very good ideas that end up in the dustbin. This is about helping committed young researchers with good ideas to help themselves create a better future.”

This is a great approach to make the world a better place. We share Hadfield’s hope that social networking will be used by more and more people to get engaged in social change.

Like him, we believe in the positive power of the internet – and “in the power of friends telling friends telling friends.” Good luck, Tom!

betterplace and social design

What is social design?

We cannot not change the world – the socialdesignsite shows design ideas and initiatives for the other 90 %. Design is not just about beautiful products, or architecture, it’s about creating culture and space for a better living. It’s about the “social implications”. Take the hippo water roler, for example:

The Hippo Water Roller is a barrel-shaped container designed to transport 90 liters (20 gallons) of water. It was designed for communities, particularly in Africa, where providing a household with water requires walking up to two-three hours to the nearest source and back every day. Traditionally the women and children of the communities carry out the task of getting the water. They are able to carry as much as 20 liters (5 gallons) in tanks on their heads.

We at betterplace are known to be fans of the World Toilet Organisation, another great (design) initiative with a real social impact.

betterplace is proud to be featured in the socialdesignsite’s introductory movie to social design. It was shown on the PRaDSA workshop Designing for the 21st Century: Using Web 2.0 Technologies (and Social Networking Tools) for Social Action in London. Right now Suk-Han, Joana, and their team, are on their way to conferences in New York and Torino, Italy. Thank you for taking us along.

Watch the movie here and understand why we cannot not change the world!

Paul Farmers Call for Inclusive Social Entrepreneurship

Being an anthropologist concerned with poverty alleviation myself, the name Paul Farmer, has a forceful ring. Farmer, a medical doctor and anthropologist, author of books such as Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor (2005), is also the co-founder of Partners in Health. Since its first hospital in Haiti, which provides free treatment to poor patients suffering from tuberculosis and AIDS, PiH has developed into a worldwide health organization.

 

I heard Farmer speak at a conference of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago a few years ago and was very impressed with his uncompromising views on poverty and human dignity. Thus, when Social Edge featured Dr. Farmer’s closing speech at this years Skoll Forum, I read it immediately.

 

In it Farmer pointed to a blind spot in the enthusiasm about social entrepreneurship, when he critiqued the preoccupation (even fetishization) of the movement with scale.

 

After seeing earlier waves of development practice fail, social entrepreneurs – many of whom are financed by a new breed of ex-entrepreneurs immersed in the culture of capitalism – apply business thinking to poverty reduction. Foundations and funds such as Ashoka and Acumen Fund are interested to support initiatives, which are transferable from one place to the other and are scalable. And they are doing admirable work.

 

Yet, as Paul Farmer reminds us, scaling and business solutions might only work for a certain number of issues and people. But what about those poor people, who are not cost-effective customers? Will they be left unserved by the new social entrepreneur movement? When the poor are re-cast as customers, will we loose sight of the fact, that certain goods and services should be rights, not commodities?

 

Farmer asks: “Does anyone really believe that a mother loves her newborn more if she had to pay for some sort of user fee for prenatal or obstetrics care?” and calls for us to include the poor people in the social entrepreneur movement and allow them to be social entrepreneurs.

 

He has a very valid point: its great to be able to scale services and commodities and thus reach out to a large number of poop people, but we should equally support small-scale initiatives, closely in touch with local communities, who might not be potential customers, but who nevertheless have the right to a dignified life.

 

As Mike Lee comments: “Farmer … was asking us not to forget that all acts of compassion (even the smallest), and all efforts to alleviate suffering (even those difficult to scale) are worthwhile and valuable, even sacred.”

They come in the name of helping

Last night I saw “They come in the name of helping”, a film (coming to me via Global Giving. The film originally appeared in Peter Deitzs blog about micro-philanthropy, which features individuals, organisations and platforms using Web 2.0 applications to enable micro-donations and social change) by 22 year old Political Science student Peter Brock. Shot in Sierra Leone, the second poorest country in the world, it portrays young students voicing their views about development aid.

It took quite some time to load, but the authentic voices are worth the wait.

Tales from Mali

One of the people behind The Mali Initiative, Jürgen Nagler describes in an interesting blogpost some of his recent experiences with the aid system in Mali. In January my family and I had the chance to visit their pilot school in Bamako and are happy to support their work on betterplace. Jürgens tales from the fourth-poorest nation echo William Easterly’s theses about the failure of the Western aid system.  

There is, for example, a project supported by the World Bank, which diverts water from Kalabancoro (the suburb of Bamako, in which the school we visited is located) to other more central suburbs: now the latter have water, but Kalabancoro is drying out and its inhabitants need to bring water in containers from a distant well.  

Money is flowing from the large Western aid organisations to large Southern governments – only to disappear in the Bermuda triangle between ministers, regions and communes without ever trickling down to the intended recipients – the poor.  

Corruption is everywhere. On our trip we witnessed many times how taxi drivers stop for policemen and at road check points only to be allowed to continue with their trip after handing over a few well-used CFA notes. In an article in the German weekly DIE ZEIT, a village elder bitterly complains to the journalist:

If we had our way, we would kill these civil servants! They feed on our blood! The foreign donors should give the money to us directly, not to the government and not to the bureaucracies. Whatever they give them, they might as well not give at all. The bureaucrats only want to develop themselves, not the country.   

Aid disappears, but because donors and recipients thrive on the existing system and manage to support their own interests, they have little reason to reform it. Using manipulated statistics, they manage to hide many obvious defaults:

Thus when Nagler spoke to mayors and teachers in the rural communities where the Initiative plans to establish new class rooms, he was told that 99% of all primary students pass the test for secondary school. Nagler and his collegues were impressed – until they found out that only 5% of these students spoke French. Yet French is the language of instruction at secondary schools and the test had been rigged in order to satisfy the expectations of aid agencies and their backers.

Roots~Where do flowers come from?

A reader of the betterplace blog in German commented on From Kenya with love – and left the link to this great film. Thank you!

Saving Children’s Lives

 Every year 10 million children die before their fifth birthday, 99% of them in the developing world. 

Is it inevitable that poor countries should have high child mortality rates? Are governments in developing countries powerless to improve the survival prospects of their children? These are questions asked by a report from Save the Children in a report published today designed to re-alight the flagging momentum for the U.N. Millenium Development Goals.

The study compares economic performance with child mortality and concludes that a number of countries have not translated wealth into improvements across society. Thus Bangaldesh, low on the development index, scores far better as a result of sound health policies than oil rich Angola, which distributes wealth very unevenly and consequently has the second-highest mortality rate in the world (260 deaths per 1,000 live births.).

Some of the poorest countries in the world – Nepal, Malawi, Tanzania and Bangladesh – are among the top ten performers in cutting child mortality, whereas India, the fastest growing economy in South Asia, has some of the worst rates in the word.

From Kenya with Love

Today development-conscious people should make sure that the Valentine-flowers they get for their loved one(s) are from Kenya. At least that’s what Hilary Benn, British International Development Secretary, recommended yesterday:

“This Valentine’s day, you can be a romantic, reduce your environmental impact and help make poverty history.” (The environmental isn’t obvious considering that the flowers are brought in by plane, yet a recent study conducted at the University of Cranfield concluded that the ecobalance of flowers “made in Kenya” is positive as they are grown in nature, whereas their European counterparts use power-intensive greenhouses.) 

Despite the terrible unrests in Kenya following the election, there are enough flowers around: four million stems landed in Amsterdam to be distributed all over Europe today. Flowers are, after tourism, the main source of foreign currency in the East African country and the industry employs around 70.000 workers, mostly women. 95% of the flowers are exported, but the local demand for tulips and roses is rising as new consumption patterns are spreading with globalisation.