Monthly Archives: February 2019

Charitable giving in the U.S

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A study published on Monday by the Fundraising Effectiveness Project reported that charitable giving contributions in the USA only increased 1.6% last year despite a strong economy.

The report also highlights the 4.5% decrease in total donors from 2017, indicating a shrinking pool of individuals involved in philanthropy.

Donations under $1,000 from smaller and middle class donors fell by more than 4%, while gifts from major donors increased 2.6%, the Washington Post reported.

The Council of Foundations and other groups within the charitable sector have warned lawmakers about the impact that the 2017 tax overhaul could have on charitable giving. Under the new tax law, millions of Americans no longer qualify to take the charitable tax deduction, which is a giving incentive.

[Council of Foundations]

Iraq facing “aid deserts” as more areas become No-Go Zones

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Global organization Mercy Corps warns that extremist activity is increasing in Iraq, which is threatening to create no-go areas, and creating the risk that these areas could become “aid deserts.” The rise in insurgency threatens humanitarian operations in parts of Iraq as access and safety are increasingly precarious.

According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, there have been almost 2000 security incidents involving extremist groups since January 1, 2018; and despite ISIS having been pushed out of Mosul, ISIS elements have regrouped in the provinces of Kirkuk, Diyala, Salahaddin, and parts of Anbar.

“What we are reading in the media and what we are seeing on the ground in Iraq simply doesn’t add up,” says Tanya Evans, Iraq Country Director for Mercy Corps. “If anything, extremist groups are growing in confidence. As the reconstruction efforts continue to stall, groups like ISIS are filling the cracks. In some of the worst-affected areas, we face daily challenges in reaching vulnerable populations. If aid workers can’t reach communities, we face the very real danger of creating aid deserts in areas where the humanitarian needs are overwhelming.”

Mercy Corps has operated continuously in Iraq since 2003, providing assistance to 5 million Iraqis affected by war, violence and displacement in all 18 governorates. Currently the organization is addressing the needs of people affected by conflict, providing lifesaving supplies and working with communities to recover and rebuild.

[Mercy Corps]

How old is the typical American donor?

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How old is the typical U.S. donor?

[  ] 35 years of age
[  ] 50 years of age
[  ] 75 years of age

Donors aged 65 and older comprise (by far) the largest slice of the American charity pie.

Those under age 35 make up the smallest slice of the same pie. 

In 2017, one of America’s top 10 brand-name charities, a group serving the homeless and addicted, analyzed its vast donor database by age. Its largest group of “active” (i.e., repeat) donors was 87 years old on average. Its largest group of first-time (i.e., new) donors was age 70 on average. 

Even in Australia, a philanthropic market that vigorously courts younger donors, older donors end up ruling the roost. Sean Triner, co-founder of Pareto, that country’s largest direct mail and phone fundraising agency, ran the numbers. He simply concluded: “Older donors are better.” Why? They tend to stick longer and hence give more in total. 

Are younger people less generous? Not at all. But they lack one essential: money to give away.          

Young adults are building lives. They’re buying stuff. They’re forming and furnishing households. They are as caring and concerned and compassionate as anyone else. But unless they were born with the proverbial silver spoon, they probably don’t have all that much disposable income to throw around (especially if they choose to have children, an expensive proposition in America).           

And then things change.           

“At age 55,” Jeff Brooks observed, “people start to become reliably charitable. They’re starting to have some extra money.” There is some surplus in their wallets: the kids are launched, the house is almost paid for. “Then households begin giving to charity,” said Jeff. “And their giving ramps up until age 65, where it levels off.

[GuideStar blog]

The climate crisis has arrived –start imagining your future

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Evidence of the devastating impacts of anthropogenic climate change are stacking up, and it is becoming horrifyingly real. There can be no doubt that the climate crisis has arrived. The climate disaster future is increasingly becoming the present.

The billion-dollar question, of course, is whether these most recent disasters can be used to motivate real change. No doubt it is important to keep this kind of commentary up. It is key that we consider how to give the climate crisis traction in a culture so accomplished at distancing us from uncomfortable realities.

But let’s be honest. No one really knows what works. We have never been here before.

Are you shocked, horrified, scared, bored, tired? What do you do with the terror? Do you compartmentalize it somewhere “safe”? Perhaps like me, you know you care. You attach importance to climate change, you want to act correctly, avoid risking other lives, damaging homes and habitats. Perhaps you know you are scared too – scared of contemplating what we have already lost or of what will happen as the crisis gets closer still.

Halting the climate crisis is still predominately framed as a matter for individual choice and change – use less plastic, cycle to work, fly less. But the behavioral response required is way more complicated than that.

When it comes to the climate crisis, the personal is political. I am talking about a politics that grows from opposition and critique of our current systems. This is evident in young people organizing school strikes and protesters willing to get arrested for their direct action. Some conservation scientists, at least, see recent cultural change as a hopeful sign of a growing sense of care and responsibility.

[The Conversation]

UN and Syrian Red Crescent delivering humanitarian aid to 40,000 displaced Syrians

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The United Nations and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) are carrying out their largest ever humanitarian convoy to provide life-saving humanitarian assistance to more than 40,000 displaced people at the remote Rukban ‘makeshift’ settlement in south-eastern Syria, on the border with Jordan. The convoy arrived today, and the operation is expected to last approximately one week.

The joint UN and SARC inter-agency convoy consists of 118 trucks with humanitarian assistance and will deliver food, health and nutritional supplies, core relief items, WASH materials, education items and children’s recreational kits to people at the site, the vast majority of whom are vulnerable women and children. Vaccines for some 10,000 children under five-years-of-age will also be part of the convoy as a well as a needs assessments will be carried out.

“This large-scale delivery of essential humanitarian supplies to the extremely vulnerable in Rukban could not have happened a moment too soon. The humanitarian situation there has been deteriorating due to harsh winter conditions and the lack of access to basic assistance and services. There have been reports of at least eight young children’s deaths in recent weeks”, said the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator a.i. Mr. Sajjad Malik.

“While this delivery of assistance will provide much-needed support to people at Rukban, it is only a temporary measure. A long-term, safe, voluntary and dignified solution for tens of thousands of people, many of whom have been staying at the Rukban settlement for more than two years in desperate conditions, is urgently needed,” stressed Mr. Malik.

[UN]

2018 was fourth hottest year on record

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Last year was the fourth warmest on record and the outlook is for more sizzling heat approaching levels that most governments view as dangerous for the Earth, a U.N. report showed on Wednesday.

Average global surface temperatures were 1.0 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times in 2018, the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said, based on data from U.S., British, Japanese and European weather agencies. “The 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

“The impacts of long-term global warming are already being felt – in coastal flooding, heat waves, intense precipitation and ecosystem change,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Weather extremes in 2018 included wildfires in California and Greece, drought in South Africa and floods in Kerala, India.

Last year, the United States alone suffered 14 weather and climate disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion each, led by hurricanes and wildfires, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.

[Reuters]

Forecast: Earth’s warmest period on record

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The forecast for the global average surface temperature for the five-year period to 2023 is predicted to be near or above 1.0 °C above pre-industrial levels, according to the Met Office (the UK’s national weather service). If the observations for the next five years track the forecast that would make the decade from 2014 to 2023 the warmest run of years since records began.

Records for annual global average temperature extend back to 1850.

Professor Adam Scaife, Head of Long-Range Prediction at the Met Office said: “2015 was the first year that global annual average surface temperatures reached 1.0 °C above pre-industrial levels and the following three years have all remained close to this level. The global average temperature between now and 2023 is predicted to remain high, potentially making the decade from 2014 the warmest in more than 150 years of records.”

Forecast patterns suggest enhanced warming is likely over much of the globe, especially over land and at high northern latitudes, particularly the Arctic region.

Professor Tim Osborn, director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which co-produces the HadCRUT4 global temperature figures with the Met Office Hadley Centre, said: “The warmth of 2018 is in line with the long-term warming trend driven by the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases.”

[EurekAlert!]

Venezuela’s Maduro shuns humanitarian aid while asking for sanctions relief

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Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro has an offer for the U.S.: If you want to bring humanitarian aid into the country, you must lift economic sanctions first.

The autocratic leader, who blames U.S. imposed sanctions for shortages of food and medicine that existed long before, said he will not allow the delivery of humanitarian aid expected to reach Venezuelan borders. The shipments are being orchestrated by Juan Guaido, who is challenging Maduro as the legitimate head of the nation, and an international coalition including the U.S. and Canada.

“You want to help Venezuela? Then let the blockade end,” Maduro said on state TV late Monday night. “We are not beggars. You want to come humiliate Venezuela and I will not let our people be humiliated.”

The looming showdown over aid represents a “lose-lose gambit” for Maduro as he will either have to allow the goods to enter the country, bolstering Guaido, or force the military to block the delivery, which would likely lead to more blow back in the streets, Eurasia Group Analyst Risa Grais-Targow said in a note on Monday.

Maduro, who has largely allowed Guaido to roam the streets with no restrictions to take part in press conferences, speak with foreign leaders and hold daytime rallies, sent a not-so-subtle warning to the 35-year-old lawmaker seeking to unseat him: “Until when is he going to continue his virtual mandate? Until 2025 or until he ends up in jail by mandate of the Supreme Court?”

[Bloomberg]

We are entering an age of mass displacement

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More than 68 million people are currently exiled from their homes by violence, more than at any other point in recorded history. By 2050, according to a recent study by the World Bank, at least another 140 million people will be forced to relocate because of the effects of climate change. Accelerating inequality, meanwhile, continues to drive inhabitants of poor regions to wealthier ones. While the most recent exodus of refugees from wars in the Middle East into Europe has peaked, such colossal population transfers will soon become routine.

In the midst of this unprecedented wave of dislocation, thousands of migrants disappear every year. These disappearances are a function, largely, of the imperatives of secret travel. Lacking official permission to cross borders, “irregular migrants” are compelled to move covertly, avoiding the gaze of the state. In transit, they enter what the anthropologist Susan Bibler Coutin has called “spaces of nonexistence.” Barred from formal routes, some of them are pushed onto more hazardous paths—traversing deserts on foot or navigating rough seas with inflatable rafts. Others assume false identities, using forged or borrowed documents. In either case, aspects of the migrant’s identity are erased or deformed.

This invisibility cuts both ways. Even as it allows an endangered group to remain undetected, it renders them susceptible to new kinds of abuse. De facto stateless, they lack a government’s protection from exploitation by smugglers and unscrupulous authorities alike. Seeking safe harbor, many instead end up incarcerated, hospitalized, ransomed, stranded, or sold into servitude. In Europe, there is no comprehensive system in place to trace the missing or identify the dead. Already living in the shadows, migrants who go missing become, in the words of Jenny Edkins, a politics professor at the University of Manchester, “double disappeared.”

Taken as a whole, their plight constitutes an immense, mostly hidden catastrophe. The families of these migrants are left to mount searches—alone and with minimal resources—of staggering scope and complexity. They must attempt to defy the entropy of a progressively more disordered world—seeking, against long odds, to sew together what has been ripped apart.

[Harpers]

Digital Technology to Empower Women

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If you own a bank account, chances are you are better off than a third of women worldwide. If that bank account comes with a nice app on your phone, you’re probably economically better off than 60 percent of women worldwide. And, as research suggests, you likely have more autonomy and agency.

Women’s economic empowerment is a holy grail for both policymakers and women’s advocates but is recognizably difficult to attain. Data from India, Indonesia, and Tanzania offer preliminary evidence that the smart offering of digital products to women, both mobile financial services (especially savings) and digital IDs, can be transformative. This offers cautious optimism that the ongoing revolution in digital technologies can help change entrenched social norms that keep millions of women in subordinate positions in the family.

Digital money makes it cheaper to provide financial services, and digital ID expands access to these services. When well-designed digital products target women as individuals (separate from husbands and family) and provide them with privacy to make financial decisions, they boost women’s economic independence and say in household decision-making, as evidence points out.

In both Indonesia and Tanzania, women microentrepreneurs who were encouraged to open mobile-savings accounts reported having greater household decision-making power compared to women who were not offered mobile savings. The empowerment effect in Indonesia was present for women who received financial literacy training and worked with branchless bank agents who received high financial incentives to sign up new customers (and were told that it was good to target women).

In Rajasthan state in northern India, a government mandate to designate women as heads of households to receive direct benefit transfers contributed to a major push towards their financial inclusion. Two-thirds of the women heads of households did not have a bank account before this initiative started in 2014.

Digital technologies can expedite financial inclusion policy goals—especially for women. But technology alone cannot close the gender gap. There must be continuous policy commitment to equality for equality’s sake and an aligned effort to leverage fintech for all.

[Center for Global Development]