The forgotten girls: By 2020, there will be 50m child brides under the age of 15 - World Politics - World. Today, days before the first internationally recognised Day of the Girl, experts warn that child marriage is, without exception, the biggest challenge to girls' development.
The number of girls married before the age of 15 is expected to double over the next decade, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has warned. By 2020, there will be around 50 million wives under the age of 15. This will pass 100 million by 2030, if current trends continue. Dr. Judith Rodin: Investing for Impact. Venture capitalists in Silicon Valley know a good opportunity when they see one.
And this week, investors and entrepreneurs flocked to San Francisco's fourth annual Social Capital Markets (SOCAP) conference to explore how the invisible hand can lend a helping hand. In the world of finance, ROI -- "return on investment" -- rules the day. But there is a new kind of investor nowadays seeking a different kind of return. We call them impact investors, and they seek to put markets to work for millions of people around the globe -- from the Tenderloin to the slums of Mumbai -- who struggle with hunger, homelessness, disease, and environmental degradation. Until recently there were not many opportunities for socially conscious investors -- either institutional or individual -- to pursue financial returns and the greater good with the same investment. As SOCAP participants know all too well, for-profit capital markets hold more than $100 trillion in opportunity. Aid, politics and development: the 21st century challenges.
The way people understand and think about development is in a state of constant churn and upheaval.
Some ideas are genuinely new, prompted by new technologies and groundbreaking political movements. Old ideas, previously discarded for reasons both bad and good,are resurfacing, often to be acclaimed as radically new. New concepts are borrowed from other disciplines, such as medicine and physics, or from rich-world debates. Here are a few examples from recent months.
First, the notion of resource constraints is back, as we see violent spikes in food prices cause disastrous setbacks in global progress on ending hunger. After the Millennium Development Goals by Dani Rodrik. Exit from comment view mode.
Click to hide this space CAMBRIDGE – In 2000, 189 countries collectively adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which evolved into a set of concrete targets called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Should britain stop giving foreign aid. Development must be less about growth, more about wellbeing. People and their wellbeing need to be at the centre of development, with less emphasis on economic growth, according to a new report, but this requires philanthropic and development organisations to challenge current thinking.
"Development is political," said the final report of the Bellagio Initiative, a six-month exploration into the future of philanthropy and international development. "Not everyone can be a winner at the same time, but if no one among the winners is prepared to give up just a little in order to reach politically sustainable solutions, then we will all lose out. The real wellbeing challenge is not just to find ways to live well, but for us to find ways to live well together. " Care work was cited as an example of an area that would receive greater attention under the new approach. RRI Home Page. The Parable of the Blobs and Squares. How Matters / Why Organizations Matter. Taken from: The Barefoot Collective. (2009).
The Barefoot Guide to Working with Organizations and Social Change. Cape Town: Community Development Resource Association. Retrieved March 18, 2009, from www.barefootguide.org Organizations matter. Tales From the Hood. Euro Cup 2012: FIFA is Corrupt, But Here Are 5 Things Soccer Teaches Us About Good Governance. If there were a prize for the global organizations most tainted with corruption, the International Federation of Football (Soccer) Association (FIFA) would be a strong contender.
Do small countries do it better? In development circles, people talk about “countries that are too big to fail and too small to succeed”.
The jury may be out on the former but a new book by Shahid Yusuf and Kaoru Nabeshima, “Some Small Countries Do It Better” dispels the notion that countries can be too small to succeed. Three small countries studied in the book - SIFIRE (SIngapore, FInland, IREland) – not only grew at high rates but were able to sustain them. The book – which concludes with a section on implications for African countries – contends that growth recipes for SIFIRE were not tightly bound to the East Asian model of extremely high rates of savings and investment (although arguably, Singapore was in many ways the epitome of that model, thanks to its mandatory savings scheme which led to gross national savings in the neighborhood of 50 percent for decades).
"Aid Works" by Jeffrey D. Sachs. Exit from comment view mode.
Click to hide this space NEW YORK – The critics of foreign aid are wrong. A growing flood of data shows that death rates in many poor countries are falling sharply, and that aid-supported programs for health-care delivery have played a key role. Aid works; it saves lives. Let’s turn back the clock a dozen years. These interconnected crises prompted action. Likewise, the World Health Organization issued a major call to scale up development assistance for health. At the second of these summits, then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for the creation of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria.