Category: International Cooperation

Wealthy focus more on giving globally and quickly

Posted on by

Forbes Insights and Credit Suisse conducted a study of some of the world’s wealthiest to gain deeper insight into their motivations, strategies and financial philosophies. The research shed light on the total lifecycle of philanthropy — from the moment an individual first decides to use his or her fortune to do good to the legacy he or she plans to leave behind — and the spirit of giving they hope will live on in their descendants.

Those who participated in the study bring the same tenacious, pragmatic approach to giving away their wealth as they brought to amassing it in the first place. This makes sense; when you get right down to it, business and giving are not really all that different. Both require a results-driven approach, a strong strategic vision, the ability to surround oneself with the right team for the job and the understanding that the biggest risks most often result in the biggest rewards. Fifty-three percent found applying their business experience to their philanthropy an effective and successful approach to giving – a sentiment that only increases with wealth.

More of the wealthy respondents partner with businesses (40%) for their philanthropic endeavors than with government agencies (22%) or other non-profits (28%). Eight in 10 of the wealthiest preferred to give to early- or growth-stage endeavors, rather than the more established organizations. Why allow yourself to get snagged in the stickiness of so much red tape when you can use other channels to move more quickly?

But what surprised us most in our Forbes Insights study was not just the scope and scale of the wealth they plan to disburse, but how quickly they plan to do so.

And more than half – 54% — of respondents to the study planned to leave more than a quarter of their assets to charity. Close to half of those with more than $20 million in investable assets plan to leave half or more of their wealth to charity; nearly 1 in 5 of those with over $50 million in investable assets plan to give it all away. A massive level of giving, to be sure – but those with the greatest amounts to give planned to give it away the fastest.

 

Grameen Bank taken over by Bangladesh government

Posted on by

Mads Kjaer of MYC4 commenting on the Grameen Bank being taken over by the Bangladeshi government, and ousted Nobel laureate and micro finance pioneer Muhammed Yunus:

Microfinance of 20 years ago is completely different from what we have today. Actually, what Yunus started was micro-credit and now we have microfinance (that offers a whole range of other financial products & services). Microfinance has grown to such a level that it cannot go unnoticed by governments. And that’s why in the last decade, there has been a wave of regulation and licensing of MFIs and the industry has evolved from donor and government programs to commercial ventures primarily driven by the private sector.

Microfinance Institutions are currently holding a lot of financial resources in both credit and savings and if not properly managed and controlled, they can be cause a risk to the financial sector. Microfinance has therefore evolved as an industry and moving forward we should see professionalism  and proper ownership and governance structures in place.

The case of Yunus could have had a political angle to it but the fact the government could not give him exemption to remain a director being over-age, is a manifestation that microfinance has outgrown its “founding fathers” and emerging as a professional industry.

History often repeats itself; in our western culture we seem to forget that we also used to have thousands of small savings-credit and cooperative institutions/banks that over time were merged, acquired, and grew to large financial institutions of today like Chase.

The International Day of the Girl

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

 

New York rock concert a record fundraiser

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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 nonprofit charity: water

Posted on by

Nonprofit charity: water recently launched its innovative, annual September Campaign, seeking to raise $1.7 million in order to bring clean, safe water to nearly 26,000 people in Rwanda.

Under the leadership of founder Scott Harrison, the organization is reinventing the nonprofit model by marketing itself like a tech company, guaranteeing 100 percent of donations to funding its water projects and taking full advantage of social media. For those and other reasons, it has become one of the hottest and most innovative nonprofits around.

Click below to learn more:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLTP7oKl8qFml6oqxcW801K8rcEWQ0-mxK&v=msm106Gnjug&feature=player_embedded#

Intimate moments from 2012 Clinton Global Initiative

Posted on by

Bill Clinton’s annual Clinton Global Initiative attracted a cast of political, celebrity, and nonprofit all-stars, bringing a flood of new commitments to push for real, fast change. Call-outs to some of the lesser celebrities:

John Calipari 
(Kentucky basketball coach)  –  John Calipari likes to see action on and off the court. “I don’t like getting involved where there’s no scoreboard,” he said. At the “Turning Inspiration Into Action” breakout meeting, he talked about seeing the first photos emerging from the Haiti earthquake in 2010 and leaping into action with his team, raising $1 million in one day soon after. It wasn’t something to mull over, he stressed. “People were dying. What we had to do was act now. I went to Haiti, and, I’ll be honest with you, we kept people alive.”

Loretta Claiborne (six-time gold medalist at the Special Olympics)  – 
“I had a mother, and she was told to institutionalize me. To put me in an institution, and that would be the end of it,” Loretta Claiborne, a six-time gold medalist at the Special Olympics, told the audience at CGI’s opening plenary. “Still today, around the globe, people with intellectual disabilities such as I are still being housed in warehouses and institutions.” Claiborne, who was born partially blind and experienced delays in walking and speech development, made a touching speech leading to the announcement of a $12 million donation by philanthropist Tom Golisano to expand the Special Olympics’ health services.

The Awards Ceremony – Sometimes politicians, CEOs, and otherwise stiff-lipped professionals need to let loose too. At the Global awards ceremony, musical artists set the crowd on fire, especially Benin singer Angelique Kidjo. Belting out rhythmic African songs, Kidjo climbed down from the stage to get the audience singing. Sister Rosemary, a Ugandan nun at President Clinton’s table, waved her hands over her head, as Clinton sang along. At one point Kidjo passed the microphone to Mexican billionaire businessman Carlos Slim, who gave the ceremony a taste of his vocal cords. Not bad.

Treasury and IRS rule changes reduce barriers to global grant making

Posted on by

The U.S. Department of the Treasury and the IRS have recommended a significant change in the process for determining whether a foreign nongovernmental organization (NGO) meets U.S. standards for charitable giving.

In “Reliance Standards for Making Good Faith Determinations,” a document just published in the Federal Register, Treasury and the IRS have proposed regulations that lessen the administrative and financial burdens for U.S. grantmakers to engage in international philanthropy. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the guidance in an address at the Clinton Global Initiative, during which she unveiled the Global Philanthropy Working Group.

The process of evaluating whether a non-U.S. NGO is equivalent to a U.S. public charity has been subject to rules that have not changed for 20 years. Secretary Clinton noted in her remarks this morning that the change clears the way for the establishment of organizations that can serve as repositories for equivalency determinations, though the proposed regulations do not specifically address this matter.

“Secretary Clinton’s announcement and the IRS guidance support a shared cross-sector vision of ways to reduce redundancy and lower costs and are a welcome signal from the government to grantmakers and their grantees,” said Rebecca Masisak, co-CEO of TechSoup Global.

Kelly Shipp Simone, deputy general counsel of the Council on Foundations, said, “While this guidance is key to reducing the burdens of private foundations in making international grants, we expect it will also serve as a guide to public charities seeking to make similar grants. The net result will be to reduce the burden on potential grantees as well.”

Bill Clinton gathers global leaders to address world problems

Posted on by
2

At the newly-opened Clinton Global Initiative, among other things former President Bill Clinton challenged Wal-Mart to open a store in Libya and help create jobs in the world’s most troubled areas.

The annual forum brings together leaders in politics, business and philanthropy for three days of brainstorming about the most pressing global problems. Newly elected Libyan President Mohamed Magariafis is listed among about 1,000 forum participants, as is Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, along with 50 other current or former heads of state.

The theme of the 2012 meeting is “Designing for Impact.” Its stated purpose is to consider how the Clinton Global Initiative community “can utilize our abundance of global capacity to invent better tools, build more effective interventions, and work creatively and collaboratively to design a future worth pursuing.”

The U.N. secretary-general said the “top priority” is sustainable development – especially for basic needs such as energy, food and water in poor parts of the world. “I’m going to sound an alarm to all the leaders,” he said. “We are living in an era of insecurity, injustice, inequality and intolerance, and what should we do?”