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.
From Iqbal Quadir’s opinion piece in the WSJ: Foreign Aid and Bad Government
Barack Obama has talked a lot about changing the way America relates to the world, and few areas are as ripe for reform as our policies on foreign aid. They have contributed to economic stagnation in poor countries and deprived America of large export markets. Entrepreneurship, not aid, is essential to rejuvenate markets in the developing world and, in turn, help America prosper.
During the Cold War, the U.S. instituted a policy of sending money to governments in poor countries to buy their political loyalty. While studies show that sending aid to foreign governments creates allegiance, it does not lead to economic progress. Instead, it makes governments in poor countries dependent on the U.S. rather than their citizens’ taxes.
As the global economy has cratered, and prices for a vast array of commodities have suddenly gone from boom to bust, so too has the global market for recycled paper and plastic retreated with astonishing haste. This is in large part due to China’s drastically diminished appetite for waste materials that can be reprocessed into packaging materials for its massive export machine. A collapse in exports translates into reduced demand for packaging which suddenly means no more hunger for shredded water bottles.
In the rush to build the next generation of hybrid or electric cars, a sobering fact confronts both automakers and governments seeking to lower their reliance on foreign oil: almost half of the world’s lithium, the mineral needed to power the vehicles, is found here in Bolivia — a country that may not be willing to surrender it so easily.
This is a very interesting problem, especially for people concerned about indigenous rights:
For now, the government talks of closely controlling the lithium and keeping foreigners at bay. Adding to the pressure, indigenous groups here in the remote salt desert where the mineral lies are pushing for a share in the eventual bounty.
“We know that Bolivia can become the Saudi Arabia of lithium,” said Francisco Quisbert, 64, the leader of Frutcas, a group of salt gatherers and quinoa farmers on the edge of Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat. “We are poor, but we are not stupid peasants. The lithium may be Bolivia’s, but it is also our property.”
It’s times like these when I wonder when landfill mining will become en vogue.
I was walking down the street in NYC when I came across a sign like this one from Ready.gov saying that “At least one in four businesses never reopen [sic] after a natural disaster”.
This got me thinking not only about business closures due to natural disasters in developing countries, but also about businesses that never get opened in the first place. With this on my mind, I was very disappointed to learn to Google.org is “putting [its] SME initiative on the backburner” in 2009.
We still strongly believe that growing small businesses will help the poor, but one of Google’s ten organizing principles is, “it’s best to do one thing really, really well.” As we evaluated our efforts this past year, it became clear that given Google.org’s unique strengths - including the ability to tap Google engineers to build and link better pathways to information - we could have a greater impact on the lives of the poor by focusing our efforts on Inform and Empower. As a result, we’re putting our SME initiative on the back burner. We’ll continue to support the grants and investments that we’ve already committed under the initiative. We have observed and learned from many others addressing the challenges of financing SMEs — many of whom are seeing significant strong results — and we hope they continue with great success. At this time, however, we will not fund new efforts in the SME space.
Sigh. Well, from the sound of it, at least they will continue to support Believe, Begin, Become.
Snarky note: I find it ironic to hear that one of the Goog’s governing principles is to do one thing and do it well. Hasn’t the search giant just gotten into the cell-phone, cloud computing, and browser business? I’m just saying.
Two liberal think tanks, the Center for American Progress Action Fund (DC) and the New Democracy Fund (NY), proposed that the Obama administration create a White House Office of Social Entrepreneurship.
Here are a few of their suggestions:
Create an annual multimillion-dollar prize for the most creative, high-impact solution to a defined social problem. It could also make “smaller, daily efforts” to boost innovative nonprofit groups, for example by creating a weekly “Changemakers” award.
Explore changes to the tax code that would reward partnerships between nonprofit groups and businesses, and encourage charitable giving that would help successful nonprofit groups grow.
Work with the U.S Agency for International Development to create an Innovation Investment Fund to support new approaches to global development, such as the Acumen Fund, which provides money to entrepreneurial anti-poverty projects.
Coordinate with the Commission on Cross-Sector Solutions to America’s Problems, a new entity that has been proposed by the Serve America Act, a bill to expand the country’s national-service programs. The 21-member commission would suggest ways the federal government can help nonprofit groups work more effectively.
Well, it’s one of the most effective health preventions you can make. And the World Bank and the World Health Organization has calculated that if you invest $1 in sanitation, then you reap $7 in health costs diverted and in labor days that are gained. Your workers are not off sick from diarrhea. So, it’s extremely cost effective. It’s actually a bargain.
the western world luxuriates in flush toilets; in toilets that play music or can check blood pressure, where the flush is a thoughtless thing, and anything that can go down a sewer - nappies, motorbikes, goldfish - does. In these times, Japanese women routinely use a device called a Flush Princess to mask the sound of their bodily functions; while in China millions of people happily use public toilets with no doors. The Big Necessity - as one Mumbai toilet builder called the toilet - is the account of my travels through the profoundly intriguing but stupidly neglected world of the disposal of human waste, which houses characters like Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organization; Wang Ming Ying, who is attempting to alleviate environmental devastation and deforestation in China by persuading rural Chinese to install biogas digesters, which produce cooking gas from human feces; Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, whose NGO Sulabh has built half a million toilets in India, as well as the world’s only museum of toilets; and the flushers of London and New York’s sewers, who scoff at roaches but hate rats nearly as much as they hate congealed cooking fat and tri-ply toilet paper.
WILL ALLEN already had the makings of an agricultural dream packed into two scruffy acres in one of Milwaukee’s most economically distressed neighborhoods.
His Growing Power organization has six greenhouses and eight hoophouses for greens, herbs and vegetables; pens for goats, ducks and turkeys; a chicken coop and beehives; and a system for raising tilapia and perch. There’s an advanced composting operation — a virtual worm farm — and a lab that is working on ways to turn food waste into fertilizer and methane gas for energy.
With a staff of about three dozen full-time workers and 2,000 residents pitching in as volunteers, his operation raises about $500,000 worth of affordable produce, meat and fish for one of what he calls the “food deserts” of American cities, where the only access to food is corner grocery stories filled with beer, cigarettes and processed foods.
One question/answer particularly caught my former epidemiologist eye:
Q. How far can conclusions derived from randomized controlled trials be stretched when it comes to policy prescription to tackle poverty? If we find out that a certain intervention is having a positive impact on the fight against poverty, then how appropriate would it be to prioritize the intervention at a macro level and deduce national economic policy based on the result of the intervention? Besides local political and economic institutions, what other factors should we be careful of when scaling up policies which are rigorously and successfully tested at a micro level?
Chandan Sapkota
United States
When we run an experiment and we get the results, we know the effect of this program had in this particular place. This is much better than the information we have in general to decide on policy (nothing…), but is it good enough to act on and to move on to recommend a more general policy? There are several obstacles.
First, the results may not replicate across contexts; I discuss that in the next answer.
Second, a program may be implemented in very different ways in a large scale. For example, it may be done well by a non-governmental organization, but corruption problems may creep in when it is implemented by a government. These implementation issues will have to be ironed out. This is important, and scaling up challenges have to be considered, but it does not take away from the finding that we now know what the potential of the program would be if it were correctly implemented. If we find an effective program, this suggests that it is worth investing some effort in figuring out how to correctly implement it on a large scale. This can also be experimented with, by the way: some of the very exciting work in development economics these days is precisely about how to effectively implement programs (see for example Ben Olken’s work, which I discussed in response to another question).
Third, there may be market equilibrium effects. For example, if I find that by randomly offering secondary school scholarship to some kids, I increase their wage, compared to those who did not receive the scholarships, this may not tell me what the effect of doing this nationwide would be: if everybody received a secondary education, the returns to secondary school may go up or down, compared to a situation where few people received a secondary school education. There are two ways to deal with these: in some cases, it may be possible to organize experiments at the “market” level (though I think it would be hard in the example I just described). In others, we have to use a priori economic reasoning to think whether market equilibrium effects are going to be important or not. In many cases, we have no reason to think they would be large enough to undo the effect of the policy.
A few weeks ago, Roudeline Augustin (one of our team in Haiti) wrote about gas shortages/price spikes in Cap Haitien due to road/bridge damage after successive hurricanes. Well Cap isn’t the only place feeling the pinch.
As a gasoline shortage in the South drags through its second week, drivers have gone from being mildly annoyed to deeply frustrated, with lines hours long at service stations in Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee.
Southern drivers could continue to face long lines, high prices and widespread station closings until mid-October, the AAA automobile club said Monday, although the problem may begin to improve this week.
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.
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The problem began when Hurricanes Gustav and Ike battered Gulf Coast refineries, reducing the national refinery capacity by as much as 20 percent. It worsened as nervous drivers stockpiled gasoline.
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