Author Archive:
Peter Laugharn
Global Philanthropy Forum 2014 (1): Philanthropy, global goals and delivery science
The annual Global Philanthropy Forum (GPF) was held in Redwood City, California, 23-25 April 2014. The GPF brings together several hundred philanthropists, foundation staff and experts with a focus on global development and poverty alleviation. …
Development is the democratization of problem-solving: Patrick Awuah and Ashesi University
I wrote yesterday about Salman Khan and the enthusiasm he is generating for work in education by social entrepreneurs and new philanthropists. Sal Khan is an investment analyst by training with an entrepreneurial engineer’s sense …
Philanthropy for global education comes of age
This is the second of three blogs, all inspired by the recent Skoll Forum and Global Philanthropy Forum, which will focus on the growing importance of global education as a philanthropic issue. My first blog, …
Life After Dead Aid: Helping states improve the delivery of global public goods
Last week at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship I attended a panel entitled ‘Reengineering Aid: What is wrong with the aid industry and how can it be fixed in the 21st century?’ The …
The art and science of seizing opportunities
Foundation leaders are often heard to make comments that ‘foundations can take risks that others cannot’ or that ‘foundations are society’s risk capital’. But is this actually so? To what extent do foundations currently integrate …
What will Jim Yong Kim’s World Bank role mean for philanthropy?
It’s not often that I wake up to hear the name of someone I know well on all the morning news programmes, but it happened last month with President Obama’s nomination of Jim Yong Kim …
From social media to social good: the Facebook IPO and philanthropy
I have been following the story of the Facebook Initial Public Offering (IPO) with interest. The IPO will make several senior staff billionaires, and will turn at least a thousand others into millionaires. How many …
Increasing activity in international basic education
In the early years of this millennium, I was puzzled by the lack of foundation activity in support of global basic education. Other development actors – bilaterals, the UN, national governments and households – were …
Building bridges through philanthropy
This past weekend I attended an event that marked two very different anniversaries in a thought-provoking way. The first anniversary, of course, was the tenth anniversary of the 11 September attacks. The second was the …
We must grasp the opportunity to eradicate AIDS in children
There is some welcome good news these days in the fight against AIDS. The global community has committed itself to end the transmission of HIV at birth by December 2015, and thereby largely end paediatric …
