Steven Chapman at Population Services International (PSI) has written a thoughtful piece on PSI’s approach to sustainability. He comments: More than 10 years ago, PSI published its first position statement on sustainability – distancing itself from the almost exclusive focus on financial sustainability used by other social marketing organizations. Instead, we emphasized producing health and quality-of-life benefits at […]
The lead-up to the G8 and G20 meetings in Toronto week before last witnessed a slew of commentary, most detailing the demise of the G8 and the rise of its larger sibling, the G20. While this is not a new theme, it is a consistent one (Jeff Sachs asked the question on everyone’s mind in […]
Check out the pocket card on investing in women from the Women Deliver conference, which advocates for a $12 billion increase in funding for family planning and maternal and newborn care, projected to increase social and economic productivity by $15 billion, currently lost to maternal and newborn death.
Last year, in June, a study was released in South Africa which found that more than one in four men in South Africa admitted to raping a woman. During the World Cup, 30,000 women have been given condoms, or tampon-like devices, which have “teeth”, or hooks inside that attach to a man’s penis during penetration. Once […]
For those wanting better insight into the inner-workings of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, I highly recommend the lengthy and meaty transcript from the Council on Foreign Relations conversation with Michael Kazatchkine (the Global Fund’s Executive Director) earlier this month. Of note: …everything that we would fund is evidence-based, so all of […]
In October 2008 I attended the International Anti-Corruption Conference. On a bus from the hotel to a reception, I sat next to someone named Julian Assange. At the time, I did not know who he was. He told me he worked for a group called Wikileaks, which was not a wiki but rather a website […]
Every year Transparency International ranks nearly all countries in the world in its Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). In 2009 the United States ranked a respectable 19 out of 180. But within the United States there is considerable variation. Anyone who follows national news might make their own U.S. Corruption Perceptions Index, with the sheer size […]
I admit, I’m completely caught up in World Cup fever. It’s obvious from my decline in postings since the games opened two weeks ago. Most evenings I’m glued to the television screen and most mornings I awake to the sound of vuvuzelas on the streets at 6am. So, in the mayhem, I somehow missed the encouraging […]
One of the particularly entertaining keynotes at the Social Impact Exchange conference was given by Dan Heath, co-author of Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. He spoke about “finding the bright spots” or looking for what is working instead of what is not working. One of his examples was “positive deviance“, a theory for social […]
I spent the last three days in New York City attending the Social Impact Exchange’s inaugural conference on scaling. The theme was “Taking social innovation to scale” and boasted an impressive line-up of speakers and participants, including Robert Steel, Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, Judith Rodin, Nancy Roob, and David Gergen. Over the next few days, I’ll be […]
A few months back, I noted the shocking statistics on tuberculosis, highlighting that one-third of the world’s population are infected and 1.7 million people die from the disease each year. This month’s tuberculosis (TB) conference, held in Durban, South Africa, highlighted the need for integration of TB and HIV care. I met Prof Harry Hausler, the chair […]
The NYTimes has written a vivid account of how the US approach to tuberculosis care has changed as the disease has virtually been eradicated. They describe the last TB sanitorium, which still exists in Florida “where strangers live together for months with boredom, pills, pain, contemplation and the same ancient disease that killed George Orwell, Franz Kafka […]
Mobile phones have already transformed life in developing countries. They have brought phone service to remote areas that had little hope of ever seeing landlines. They have also had major economic benefits for so-called micro-entrepreneurs, helping them with everything from establishing mobile barbershops to determining the best time to bring goods to market. And now […]
Foreign Policy’s, The Cable, has some clues on the USAID revamp, released in an email to USAID employees yesterday. They write: USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah is moving ahead with his promise to give the agency back its capability to think strategically by building an official policy planning staff. “This new bureau, bolstered by the agency’s […]
Women Deliver, held this week in Washington, DC, has opened with a bang – a $1.5 billion pledge over 5 years from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation focusing on maternal and child health. The NY Times writes: “Ms. Gates said much of the next $1.5 billion would go to programs in India, Ethiopia and […]