The Aid Trap: Hard truths about ending poverty by R Glenn Hubbard and William Duggan

Since the success of the Marshall Plan in reviving the economies of western Europe after the Second World War, it has been assumed that large-scale aid programmes will kickstart economic development in poor countries. For 40 years, aid was an important weapon of the Cold War, where allegiances could be bought and sold on the basis of aid packages. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the aid industry changed tack and used morality to market itself. Books like The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs and the bully pulpits of rock stars hammered the message home. Click here to read ...

GlobalGiving Act of Kindness competition

Online giving portal GlobalGiving.co.uk is launching an 'Acts of Kindness' competition, a travel writing competition which aims to highlight ways in which people can give something back to the places they visit. Entrants have to write a paragraph about an act of kindness they have experienced while travelling in a developing country. The prize is a trip for two to visit a GlobalGiving project of the winner’s choice. The competition is open to residents of the UK and the Republic of Ireland aged 18 or over. The closing date is 22 July. Click here to read ...

Indonesian radio station gets KBF International Development Prize

KBR68H Radio agency in Indonesia has been awarded the 2008-09 King Baudouin Foundation International Development Prize for ‘its contribution to sustainable development based on strengthening democracy, tolerance and citizen participation, and for promoting professional ethics in the media world’. Based in Jakarta, it provides eight hours a day of independent information and educational programmes to 630 radio stations all over Indonesia and to ten countries in Asia. Click here to read ...

Foundation partnership boost to think-tanks in developing countries

The Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Canada’s International Development Research Centre announced in May a $90 million effort to bolster think-tanks in poor countries. The so-called think-tank initiative aims to provide governments and philanthropies with research and policy recommendations that are based on the needs of poor countries. Gates and Hewlett are each giving $40 million, while the IDRC is providing the other $10 million. Click here to read ...

Private giving boosting funding for global health, but inequitably distributed

Funding has soared for global health, largely because of unprecedented levels of private giving, of which the Gates Foundation is one but not the only example, says a new study. However, the study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) also finds that the funding is unevenly distributed and that 12 of the 30 countries with the highest incidence of disease are not receiving as much as healthier, and sometimes wealthier, countries. Click here to read ...

Gates grants to support Grameen Foundation in Ghana and Uganda

Grameen Foundation has received two grants worth over $4.7 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support technology initiatives aimed at improving healthcare delivery in Ghana and providing information to poor farmers in Uganda. The former will support the development of mobile applications to enable healthcare workers to enhance the quality of healthcare delivery and increase the range of services available. Among other things, the grant will allow nurses to collect and transmit data more efficiently by mobile phone, which in turn will allow them to spend more time providing primary care services to patients, as well as giving the country’s health service more up-to-date and accurate information. Click here to read ...

‘Financial tsunami’ could mean extra 90 million people in poverty by end of 2010

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Extensive Gates partnerships to help small African farmers

The Gates Foundation today announced two significant partnerships and $48 million in grants to benefit small cocoa and cashew farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. The two grants - $23 million to the World Cocoa Foundation and $25 million to the German development organization Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH – were awarded in conjunction with $42 million in cash and in-kind contributions from private industry. The grants are part of the Foundation's Agricultural Development initiative, which is working with a wide range of partners in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia to strengthen the entire agricultural value chain, and complement financial support and in-kind contributions from the private sector, NGOs and local governments. Click here to read ...

Foundations launch mHealth partnership

The UN, Rockefeller and Vodafone Foundations launched a new partnership in February to help maximize the impact of mobile health (that is, the impact of mobile technology on health), especially in the developing world. The Mobile Health (mHealth) Alliance will encourage the development of scalable, sustainable, and open-standard health solutions that can be made widely available while supporting projects and research focused on increasing opportunities for mobile health.

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http://foundationcenter.org/pnd/news/story.jhtml;jsessionid=TPEUCK30GR1JLLAQBQ4CGW15AAAACI2F?id=244000012 Click here to read ...

HHMI launches partnership with South African university to fight epidemics and train scientists

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