Dear AIDG Supporters,

At approximately 4:55 pm Eastern on Tuesday Port Au Prince experienced a magnitude 7.0 earthquake, with aftershocks of 5.9 and 5.7. There is widespread damage to infrastructure with numerous collapsed buildings. It is anticipated there will be a high casualty rate

Additional photos can be found here: twitter.com/photomorel

Here is what we have learned:

The National Palace has collapsed (eyewitness photo)
The UN headquarters has been seriously damaged (source: UN)
The Hotel Montana has sustained collapse with 200 missing (source: associated press france)
A Hospital has collapsed (source:NYtimes)

We will provide more information by twitter. www.twitter.com/aidg and our blog www.aidg.org/blog as it becomes available.

We are currently developing opportunities for AIDG to aid in reconstruction with the help of partners. We will make another announcement on this shortly.

As you all know we are a small organization. We require some basic additional budget resources immediately to help run an assessment that will determine this longer term response aimed at infrastructure and reconstruction. If possible mail checks to:

AIDG
P.O. Box 104
Weston, MA 02493

We will actually receive these funds faster than online donations. We will be running a larger campaign in concert with our reconstruction announcement.

For those wishing to have an immediate direct impact on populations in Port Au Prince we are recommending supporting the medical response teams of Partners In Health. www.pih.org They are working with a field hospital set up by the UNDP that immediately needs pain meds, bandages and other medical supplies.

We ask you all to hold Haiti in your hearts and prayers as this tragedy unfolds.

Sincerely,

Peter Haas
Executive Director, AIDG

Bookmark blog post on:
Del.icio.us    digg    FURL    reddit    Stumble Upon   

Bill Easterly author of “White Man’s Burden” and ideological nemesis of Jeffrey Sachs gives the top 10 wrong ways to write about poor people.

My favorites.

6. Discuss only income, health, access to clean water, and literacy. Leave it to anthropologists to cover areas like happiness, traditions, ceremonies, festivals, friendships, kinship, love between men and women, or love between parents and children.
.
.
.
8. Don’t show pictures of poor men, who make your audience think of drunkards, wife-beaters, or janjaweed.
9. These topics are only for Marxists: power, class, discrimination, oppression, or history.

Along the same lines, check out actor Djimon Hounsou (Blood Diamond, Constantine, In America, Amistad) reading Binyavanga Wainana’s must-read article How (not) to write about Africa.

Related Posts
So do you think we can end extreme poverty by 2025?
Bentley Leadership Forum Part I: Keynote by Jeff Sachs
Development Porn: NGO Imagery
Link of the Day 060508: David Weinberger and the Ninja Gap

Bookmark blog post on:
Del.icio.us    digg    FURL    reddit    Stumble Upon   

The non-profit TED has selected AIDG’s Executive Director Peter Haas as one of 20 inaugural Senior Fellows. The TED Senior Fellows program is designed to bring together young world-changers and trailblazers from the arts, science, entrepreneurship, the NGO sector and education. As part of its commitment to TED, AIDG will be launching an exciting new initiative in our technology research and development program in 2010 that will transform our ability to do research with local and university partners. We’ll be able to share more details next year.

Two of our favorite bloggers Erik Hersman (Co-founder of Ushahidi.com; blogger, AfriGadget and White African) and Juliana Rotich (Co-founder, Ushahidi.com; blogger, Afromusing and Global Voices) are also 2010 senior Fellows.

Erik Hersman of Afrigadget documents low-tech entrepreneurialism in Africa. Specifically he looks at ingenuity born of necessity, “tech that keeps economies on life support”. Raised in Sudan (until the war got bad), Kenya, and then again Sudan, he’s a bit of a tech anthropologist searching for Africans solutions to African problems.

From wikipedia

Ushahidi (Kiswahili for “testimony” or “witness”) was a website created in the aftermath of Kenya’s disputed 2007 presidential election that collected eyewitness reports of violence sent in by email and text-message and placed them on a Google map. It is also the name of the open source software developed for that site, which has since been improved, released freely, and used for a number of similar projects.
.
.
.
The software has since been used to track violence in Congo and pharmacy stockouts in Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, and Malawi, and monitor elections in Mexico and India, among other projects. It was also used by Al Jazeera to collect eyewitness reports during the 2008-2009 Gaza War.

In addition to Pete, Eric and Juliana, here are the 17 other fellows:

Taghi Amirani (Iran/UK) - Documentary filmmaker, Amirani Films

Rachel Armstrong (UK) - Teaching fellow, The Bartlett School of Architecture; physician; science-fiction author

Frederick Balagadde (Uganda/US) - Research scientist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; co-inventor of the microchemostat, a medical diagnostic chip

April Karen Baptiste (Trinidad) - Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Colgate University

Faisal Chohan (Pakistan) - CEO, Cogilent Solutions; founder, Brightspyre, Pakistan’s largest online job portal

Colleen Flanigan (US) - Fine artist; stop-motion armaturist, coral reef restoration expert

Gabriella Gómez-Mont (Mexico) - Founder, Tóxico Cultura, a Mexico City-based artistic think tank

Jonathan Gosier (US/Uganda) - Founder, Appfrica, a business incubator in Kampala

Adrian Hong (US/North Korea/South Korea) - Director, The Pegasus Project; former director, Liberty in North Korea

Juliette LaMontagne (US) - Education consultant; innovation facilitator

Alexander MacDonald (US) - Economist, NASA Ames Research Center

Juliana Machado-Ferreira (Brazil) - Biologist, SOS FAUNA; PhD candidate, Sao Paulo University

VK Madhavan (India) - Executive Director, Central Himalayan Rural Action Group (Chirag)

Naomi Natale (Italy/US) - Founder, One Million Bones, a large-scale social activism art installation

Bola Olabisi (Nigeria/UK) - Founder, Global Women Inventors and Innovators Network (GWIIN)

Alexander Petroff (US/Democratic Republic of the Congo) - Founder, Working Villages International

Mohammad Tauheed (Bangladesh) - Architect; founder, ArchSociety

Related Posts
Quote of the Day: Where the world sees trash, Africa recycles - Erik Hersman of Afrigadget
Video: RISEPAK, a Web 2.0 tool for disaster response [Harvard Social Enterprise Conference]
Neil Gershenfeld at PopTech and AIDG’s Dream of a Guatemalan Fab Lab

Bookmark blog post on:
Del.icio.us    digg    FURL    reddit    Stumble Upon   

AIDG would also like to announce that in response to the current dire situation at Lake Atitlan, we will be making a special investment in another GuateVerde team that is helping address the issue and support the communities most effected. Lake Atitlan, one of the most popular tourist destinations in Guatemala, has suffered from a harmful cyanobacterial bloom in the second half of 2009. The blue-green algae has spread across the surface of the lake covering it in a thick green scum. Local news reports cite sewage, agricultural runoff, and erosion related to deforestation as causes of the bloom.

Duration: 2 min 44 sec

The lake as it should be. Photo by Deborah Coleman

The lake now. Source: Prensa Libre

Flowercin/Altec, a team based out of Solola, will be working with the local municipality at the Lake to collect organic material (trash) and convert it into nutrient-rich and affordable organic fertilizer. Flowecin’s business was previously recognized in Technoserve’s Idea Tu Empresa competition in 2007.

We at AIDG love Lake Atitlan and hope that through Flowercin/Altec we can help in the effort to improve the conditions of the lake and all who rely on its health.

Related Posts
The GuateVerde 2009 Business Plan Competition Winner Is… Quetsol
Top 10 Rivers At Risk
Restoring Wetlands with Explosives [Video]
Link of the Day 052208: 1000s of toads flee polluted river in China [Daily Mail]

Bookmark blog post on:
Del.icio.us    digg    FURL    reddit    Stumble Upon   

Duration: 17 min 02 sec

The activist, academic and co-founder of Global Voices shares a story about building cultural bridges, xenophilia and a little video game called War of Warcraft.

My Tweets from his talk

• @EthanZ is talking about the importance of bridge figures when u encounter a new culture 2 help u embrace ur xenophilia #bif5
• @EthanZ shows CNN photo of Chinese army crackdown on riots in Llasa. The version used crops out the rioters throwing rocks at Army vehicle
• From @EthanZ’s talk: http://globalvoicesonline.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-cnn http://joi.ito.com/ #bif5
• RT @HelenWalters [P]ower of relationships in WOW. @ethanz tells of @joiito advising guild member on joining US army in real world. #bif5
• RT @ jpamental: @EthanZ: we’re ALWAYS communicating 2 a global audience, who are listening to us & how we talk about their culture. #BIF5

Related Posts
Link of the Day 060508: David Weinberger and the Ninja Gap
Quote of the Day: Where the world sees trash, Africa recycles - Erik Hersman of Afrigadget
Video: Birima & Africa Works [Youssou N’Dour & Benneton]
Development Porn: NGO Imagery

Bookmark blog post on:
Del.icio.us    digg    FURL    reddit    Stumble Upon   

Former Prime Minister Pierre-Louise at the IDB investor meeting in Port Au Prince earlier this month with Former President Bill Clinton, President Rene Preval and Inter-American Development Bank President Luis Alberto Moreno. Photo by Peter Haas AIDG

Haiti’s Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis was dismissed by the Haitian senate in late night voting. President Rene Preval has nomminated Jean Max Bellerive, the country’s planning and co-operation minister, to be her replacement.

Quotes on the dismissal:

From the Miami Herald:

” Pierre-Louis, in office for a year, said she has spent much of her tenure getting international support for Haiti after four back-to-back storms devastated the country last year, and it is too soon to see the results of her work.

Senators were not swayed.

But unlike the last censure of a Haitian prime minister — Jacques-Edouard Alexis in April 2008 following days of food riots — this one wasn’t as swift or orderly.

At times, chaos reigned: Lawmakers screamed and talked over one another in front a national television audience.

The Senate president often rang a small silver bell in a futile attempt to create order as the session stretched into Friday morning without a vote. The vote finally occured at about 12:15 a.m., long after Pierre-Louis’ Senate supporters had left, believing they had succeeded in preventing a vote.

“There is an error in the summons and everyone knows it,'’ said Sen. Youri Latortue, a Pierre-Louis supporter who last year successfully led the movement to oust Alexis.

But those lined up against Pierre-Louis weren’t moved by the constitutional arguments, nor her letter to the Senate president questioning the validity of the censure and informing him that she did not plan to attend the session.”

From Al Jazeera:

“The move to fire Pierre Louis comes days after Bill Clinton, the UN’s special envoy to Haiti and a former US president, told an investor conference in Port-au-Prince that Haiti’s political risk was lower than it had been in his lifetime.”

Related Posts

Videos From the IDB Meeting in Port Au Prince
A Roundup of Tweets from the IDB Business Meeting in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti
$1.2 billion in debts canceled to help Haiti

Bookmark blog post on:
Del.icio.us    digg    FURL    reddit    Stumble Upon   

From Dominican Today:

An Environment Ministry study in Baoruco and Independencia provinces (southwest) identified 23 communities where 200 people make 37,000 sacks of charcoal per month, a clandestine market worth RD$89.2 million (US$2.5 million) yearly.
.
.
.
[The Cross-border Environmental Program report] details a simple yet effective chain to make, traffic and illegally market charcoal in Haiti and notes that the 200 producers are mostly of Haitian origin, helped by 12 Dominican truck drivers, to produce every month around 37,000 sacks, sold to less than five Haitian retailers, who gather on the west side of the lake, for subsequent transport and sale in Port au Prince.

“This production equals 445,788 sacks annually (27,300 tons) which is sold at RD$200 (US$5.55) per sack, generating an annual market of RD$89.2 million, US$2.5 million).” the study headed by the consultant Humberto Checo said.

Related Posts

Wood Charcoal in Haiti [Video, French]
Rough Guide: How to make sugar-cane charcoal [Pictorial Overview]
Link of the Day 010708: A Global Trek to Poor Nations, From Poorer Ones [NYTimes]
Bentley Leadership Forum Part III: Keynote by Jeff Swartz [A bit on Timberland in the DR]

Bookmark blog post on:
Del.icio.us    digg    FURL    reddit    Stumble Upon   

From the Washington Post:

An ideal groom in this dusty farming village is a vegetarian, does not drink, has good prospects for a stable job and promises his bride-to-be an amenity in high demand: a toilet.

In rural India, many young women are refusing to marry unless the suitor furnishes their future home with a bathroom, freeing them from the inconvenience and embarrassment of using community toilets or squatting in fields.

About 665 million people in India — about half the population — lack access to latrines. But since a “No Toilet, No Bride” campaign started about two years ago, 1.4 million toilets have been built here in the northern state of Haryana, some with government funds, according to the state’s health department.

Related Posts

Link of the Day 111808: Getting serious about human waste [NPR]
State-of-the-Art Facilities: 1941 [Shorpy, 100 year old Photo Blog]
Poo Productions, Mozambican Music, and Environmental Heroes - Massukos
Ecosan (a.k.a. dry latrines) from around the world

Bookmark blog post on:
Del.icio.us    digg    FURL    reddit    Stumble Upon   

Pete Haas just made an interesting post on starting a small international NGO over at the TED Fellows Blog. Here is a snipit:

Entrepreneurs or Idiots?
Don’t let the social overtake the enterprise.

“Fortunately if you are starting a new program abroad you don’t need to be an idiot like I was. Here are ten “rules” of starting an international service organization that would have helped me if I had known them a few years ago, and maybe can help you. To anybody running an organization they may seem obvious but it is amazing how many early stage entrepreneurs ignore them while focussed on the mission of trying to just get the school built, the pollution reduced, the farm running, etc. With these rules maybe you can start an enterprise that is as much enterprise as social.

Rule number 1: Don’t start a new organization

There are literally millions of established organizations globally that are in need of support. Before you start something new ask yourself: “What can I do to help something that is already here become more effective?” There are several programs I know of now that if I had learned about them earlier and applied to a management position it could have likely saved me a few years of getting my program running.

Rule number 2: Clearly define what you do and stick with it

So in the face of massive unmet need there is always the temptation to run the feeding-housing-water-sanitation-ecotourism-renewable energy-child education-dolphin saving program. But unless you are say putting up a millennium village presenting this type of program to funders can be a tough sell. To draw an example from my experience at AIDG donors may not see the clear link between a program in say ecotourism and a program in say light industrial fabrication. Don’t be a swiss army knife. Do one or two things well . . . ”

Read The Full Post at the TED Fellows Blog

Bookmark blog post on:
Del.icio.us    digg    FURL    reddit    Stumble Upon   

At Clinton Global Initiative last month, we recieved an invitation to attend the Inter American Development Bank meeting on investment in Haiti. Here are a few clips from the event in Port au Prince. Overall the meeting held a high level of optimism for development both of job growth and infrastructure within Haiti. Let us hope, as UN special envoy Clinton says in the following clips, that we can move beyond just having discussions and into partnerships that hold tangible results for the Haitian people.

President Clinton Keynote:

President Clinton Closing:

Duration: 2min 3 secs

President Preval Closing Part 1:

Duration: 6min 6sec

President Preval Closing Part 2:

Duration: 6 min 22secs

Related Posts

Day 3 CGI: AIDG honored by Bill Clinton for our work in Haiti [Video]
Day 1 CGI 2009: Omidyar Network pledges $30m to support SGBs; Water.org to serve 50K people in Haiti [Video]

Bookmark blog post on:
Del.icio.us    digg    FURL    reddit    Stumble Upon