Monthly Archives: October 2012

The International Day of the Girl

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The International Day of the Girl (October 11th) is meant, according to the United Nations, “to help galvanize worldwide enthusiasm for goals to better girls’ lives, providing an opportunity for them to show leadership and reach their full potential.”

One of the biggest returns on investment for people and the planet is supporting the health of women and girls.

In short, progress in developing nations is directly linked to women’s empowerment in all forms.

 

Africa Social Venture Crowd Sourcing

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In microfinance, crowd-sourced ventures have aimed at connecting first world capital with developing world opportunity – and with some success.

Mads Kjaer and Tim Vang co-founded MYC4 which works to connect online investors with entrepreneurs in Africa. MYC4 was founded using a Dutch auction method for retailing loans to small and mid-sized businesses in developing countries – a crowd-sourced for-profit micro finance company with an initial presence in Africa.

Since they started five years back, over $20M has been invested in over 10,000 loans. These funds have come from over 19,000 investors/lenders. The biggest challenge facing MYC4 at the moment is lack of adequate liquidity to fund all the loan requests. This year alone, over $1M worth of loan requests has not funded. At the moment, MYC4 requires an increase of investors/lenders with a short term year end funding gap of $1M in new liquidity to fund growth.

Says Mads, “Africa is no longer a basket case but a business case. For decades, highly subsidized credit and grants have not helped African businesses grow but has often created a dependency syndrome.

“What we are learning now is that small businesses that are looking for capital to grow can pay market rates of interest. Their major concern is reliable and continuous access to rightly priced capital. Through the Dutch Action on MYC4, businesses have an upside of receiving cheaper funds than they were initially willing and able to pay. We have seen to type of investors/lenders; social and for profit and the Dutch auction accommodates both.

“The on-going transformation in microfinance means grants and subsidies are a thing of the past and commercial sources of funding will continue to be the major source of funding.”

Read more

 

Modifying websites to accomodate the Mobile Revolution

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The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported on a new study from com.Score that shows that more than 13% of webpage visits this past August were made on a tablet or mobile phone. That means that one in eight page views now comes through mobile platforms.

Doesn’t seem like that much? Well, just consider that mobile viewing has more than doubled from just a year ago. That certainly squares with recent data from Pew Research that half of U.S. adults now connect to the Internet with a smartphone or a tablet and more than 60% of them access news on their smart devices at least weekly.

Nonprofits certainly need to respond to this trend by making their websites more mobile friendly. Some tips from that article include:

• simplifying your website so that it is easier to read on mobile devices and to take actions, such as donating.
• investing in a separate website just for mobile or in technology that automatically reformats your site depending on the device being used to access it.
• prioritizing mobile access of your main website before creating specialized apps.

Jakob Nielsen explores some of the options too, suggesting that mobile sites can’t be cut to the bone or users will be disappointed, but can’t include so much that usability is poor on the smaller phones and tablets.

About.com’s Guide to Web Design suggests “Don’t put your navigation first, even if that’s where it is on your main page. If you make the navigation too small it won’t be usable, and if it’s too large that will be all some mobile users see when they first download the page.”

–Excerpt of article by Joanne Fritz

New York rock concert a record fundraiser

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The last time Central Park’s Great Lawn hosted a Saturday night concert, the year was 1981, and the total raised was $100,000.

A recent Saturday marked the first show since, and the results were 60,000 souls watch a lineup including the Foo Fighters, Neil Young, The Black Keys, Band of Horses and K’naan–and became the largest syndicated charity concert in online and broadcast television history, generating over $500 million in pledges to combat poverty around the world.

In fairness to Simon and Garfunkel, the Global Festival’s pledge total relies on individual philanthropists, governments and NGOs to keep their word and contribute aid. But it’s a staggering sum nonetheless, one that’s nearly enough, says Evans, to eradicate polio once and for all (that would be music to the ears of Neil Young, who suffered from the disease as a child).

“It’s so close,” says Evans. “It literally could be the legacy of this generation to see that polio is wiped off the face of this planet, and that’s what we’re committed to.”

The Global Festival, deliberately scheduled to coincide with the United Nations’ General Assembly, should boost efforts that halved the global poverty rate from 1981-2005, from 52% to 25%–and give a jolt to the international body’s Millennium Development Goals, one of which is to eliminate extreme poverty and hunger by 2015.

Going green in Ghana with sewage power

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How might the world’s poorest continent go green? Kwabena Otu-Danquah’s job is to crack that riddle. The renewable energy czar for Ghana ranks among the handful of bureaucrats across Africa tasked with picking which forms of green energy might prove affordable on a continent where most people don’t pay for the electricity they sometimes receive.

Last year the Ghanaian parliament signed a pledge to derive 10 percent of the country’s electricity from alternative sources come 2020.

Sun? Forget it. Solar costs 40 cents to 50 cents a kilowatt hour, while Ghanaians pay just 5 cents to 10 cents for electricity from conventional sources. Wind? Too slow. Breeze ambles through this tropical doldrum at a leisurely average of five kilometers an hour (3.2 miles per hour).

That’s forced Ghana to consider a more imaginative set of choices. Among them, sewage. Flush with a $1.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, local Waste Enterprisers Ltd. is building Ghana’s first “fecal sludge-fed biodiesel plant.” That’s longhand for cooking human excrement into generator fuel, Chief Operating Officer Tim Wade explains. The transformation would serve a dual purpose. Open sewers sweep 1,000 tons of slurry each day into the ocean off Accra. Outside the upland city of Kumasi, roughly 100 trucks dump tens of thousands of liters of septic tank sewage daily into what used to be a small pond.If all goes according to plan, next month one truck a day from Kumasi will dump its payload into a warm and massive vat that will skim lipids – fat – off the top. “That’s your biodeisel,” he explains.

At $7 a gallon, he can sell the muck to local mining companies, who are keen to buy because they too have been required by parliament to power 10 percent of their private electric plants from green sources. Normal diesel does sells a few bucks cheaper, he admits, “But we’re still optimizing the process.” If he can get costs down, Mr. Wade intends to build four plants in Accra and lecture sub-divisions back home in Colorado on the folly of treating their waste.

The convergence between money and meaning

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For the next generation of philanthropists, I don’t think they’re going to ask themselves whether or not they should work in the private, public, or non-profit sector.  They’re simply going to wake up each day and ask themselves what impact am I going to make today.

The traditional model of a successful career and life was divided into three phases: we learn, earn, and then return.  We went to school, got a job (and kept it for decades), and then at the end of our life we gave back from the fruits of labor.

Now, we can pursue both purpose and profit.  There is a convergence between money and meaning throughout one’s life.  For philanthropy this means that donors no longer are passive supporters, but are more engaged in creating the means of change they seek in the world.  Donor circles, social entrepreneurship, impact investing, corporate social responsibility, crowd-sourcing are examples of this convergence.

The continued convergence of sectors will allow the next generation of philanthropists to focus even more on impact and not artificial distinctions between money and meaning.

–Blog excerpt by Omar Brownson, executive director of the LA River Revitalization Corporation