NEWSBYJINA MOORE

The big news at the United Nations today is US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to the UN Security Council.

But the real story, which the mainstream media is likely to miss, is that Clinton is there today to mark the tenth anniversary of what’s known in the shorthand as “1325”, a Security Council resolution passed in 2000 that demanded a greater role for women in post-conflict peacebuilding.

Resolution 1325 was a watershed. It urged the greater involvement of women at the United Nations and in the domestic processes of member states, and highlighted the need for better gender balance on UN operations, including peacekeeping.

That might sound like empty diplo-speak, but one of the problems of responding to rape in the early days of the Darfur crisis was that most of the African Union peacekeepers were men.  Women survivors simply couldn't talk to the troops.

Monrovia, Liberia - In post-conflict Liberia, everything’s a challenge.

The roads are a mess. Running water and electricity are unreliable and there’s little in the way of economic opportunity. That’s you’re usual list of post-conflict conundrums, but Liberia is beset by another problem of epidemic proportions: rape.

There were approximately 200 rapes reported in Monrovia last year, according to local law officials. Those cases will end up in 'Court E,' a unique experiment in post-conflict gender justice. The court's prosecutor runs a special unit on sexual and gender based violence (SGBV), which supports rape survivors and their families by facilitating access to medical services and offering psychological support for the survivor and her family. The unit also helps the survivor prepare for her day in court.

Taken in the grand scheme of need, $1,000 to give someone a college or university degree is a drop in the bucket.

But it's an important drop and late last month a fascinating organization using microfinance for higher education announced an ambitious new initiative at the nerd rockfest that is the Clinton Global Initiative.

Vittana is earmarking $1,000 for 10,000 African students to finish the 'last mile' of their education, that final year standing between them and the degrees that qualify them for marketable jobs. It’s the next step in the non-profit’s experimental Kiva-style lending system in which individuals can directly lend $25 or more to would-be college graduates. The graduates are then expected to pay the loan back to Vittana, which passes on the repayment to the original, individual lender.

For the socially responsible, diamonds have long been out.  Some of us were ahead of the curve; some of us didn’t swear off our desire for an impressive rock until we were charmed into submission by Leonardo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond.  But eventually, we all got the memo.

Now, The Clarity Project is offering diamonds a second chance.  The “boutique company,” as they describe themselves, works with artisanal miners in Sierra Leone to mine the gems fairly, and then it invests its profits back in the mining community.  They explain their work process at length on their website.  Recently, I did a long Q&A with co-founder Jesse Finfrock, and an especially interesting point emerged.

I had long assumed that companies charge me a little more to cleanse my conscience.  When I buy eco-friendly laundry detergent, it’s a lot more expensive than that bright blue crap.  Same for recycled toilet paper, for fair trade home décor … you get the idea.

So I assumed would-be fiancées would pay a premium to brandish guilt-free bling.  I thought I might convince Frinfrock to tell me, roughly, how much more the Clarity Project charges to be so fair and friendly.

The answer?  Not so much.  In fact, Frinfrock said there's an opposite expectation -- that by cutting out the middle man, his prices should be cheaper.

Recently, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof pushed the boundaries of our national conversation by daring to suggest that not all Muslims think and act alike.  He’s worth quoting at length:

“Many Americans honestly believe that Muslims are prone to violence, but humans are too complicated and diverse to lump into groups that we form invidious conclusions about. We’ve mostly learned that about blacks, Jews and other groups that suffered historic discrimination, but it’s still O.K. to make sweeping statements about 'Muslims' as an undifferentiated mass…. Muslims are one of the last minorities in the United States that it is still possible to demean openly, and I apologize for the slurs."

Kristof is right to call out the American public, and the American media, for its monolithic portrayal of Muslims and Arabs.  So monolithic is that image, in fact, that this simple and really not all that surprising fact bears repeating:  Not all Arabs are Muslims, and the majority of American Muslims are not Arab.

Finding stories that treat Muslims and Arabs as people, rather than objects, can be a tall order in the current media market.  I suggest starting with author Alia Malek’s book, A Country Called Amreeka, which uses profiles to tell a hundred years’ of history of Arabs in America, or The Mosque in Morgantown, a documentary about one woman’s challenge to her West Virginia community's narrow interpretation of Islam.

Sure, to a certain extent, delays after disaster are typical. Nothing ever happens as fast as we’d like it to. But this is different. The Associated Press asked how much of the $1.5 billion the U.S. State Department pledged to help rebuild Haiti has reached the island in the wake of last February’s devastating earthquake.

The answer? Not one penny.

A quick caveat: It’s not that no American money has made it to Haiti. The U.S. has spent $1.1 billion in relief funds to help mitigate the effects of the disaster, according to the AP. But that’s different than reconstruction funds.

One of the problems that plagues aid relief is the short term versus the long term. Money for emergency intervention is often easier to get than money for long-term rebuilding – although the slow response to apocryphal flooding in Pakistan suggests even that rule doesn’t always hold.

That’s part of the reason, presumably, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged $1.5 billion to Haiti in March. But none of that has moved – and that means a lot of other things aren’t moving, either.

If you’ve spent much time in Africa, you’ve probably made friends with malaria. The sweats-and-chills kick in, and you haul yourself to a clinic. They prick your finger, confirm the disease, and you go to the pharmacy to buy a treatment (or, at this point, you send a friend, who can actually stand up).

But do you actually read the box? If you did, a new study suggests, and if you’re lucid enough, you might wonder why the box and instructions are all in French in, say, Angolophone Kenya.

No one in the midst of malaria cares where the medicine came from – assuming, of course, you can afford it. But a study published last week in Research and Reports in Tropical Medicine says that the volume of donated malaria meds stolen and sold commercially may be a public health problem.

The study has found that up to 30 percent of malaria treatment medication donated last year to 10 African cities was stolen and sold instead. (The Associated Press, where I learned about the study, helpfully acknowledges that the research was paid for by a U.S. group that has no ties to drug makers, and that its lead researcher works at the American Enterprise Institute. Infer what you will.) Good thing that’s where all our PEPFAR money is going now.

A friend of mine was recently turned down for a job because he wasn't familiar enough with PowerPoint. Not the software itself, he was told, but the "PowerPoint way of thinking."

I didn't know there was such a thing, or how marketable it apparently is, until I read Martin Kimani's essay. The PowerPoint way of thinking is under elegant and deserved attack in his piece, "The Revolution Will Not Come by PowerPoint." It's a must-read for anyone interested in Africa or aid, and especially both. For those of us who went to grad school to get a grip on STATA and learn how to do a log frame, Kimani's observations are a breath of fresh air.

They're also a threat to the way the entire aid complex works -- or they should be.

He quietly catalogs some of the errors in the countless presentations across the continent, and beyond. Confusing correlations and causation. Exaggerating the meaning of the mean. Ignoring history, circumstance, and context.

It’s easy — too easy — to write about failures in aid, intervention and other encounters between well-intentioned outsiders and the places they go.  So I want to take a moment to acknowledge a program that actually seems to be working: a UN Development Program initiative to provide youth in Guinea Bissau with micro credit.

“Youth” is development-speak for a ‘vulnerable group’ between the ages of 18 and 35. UNDP has trained 250 young people in running businesses and linked them up with a bank willing to give them small loans, at 10% interest. UNDP’s name — and the insurance taken on the loan — helped mitigate the bank's potential risk of taking on these youth, and the bank returned the favor of all these new customers by knocking 2% off market interest rates.  The money came through the UN Peacebuilding Fund, which is part of the peacebuilding architecture I’m investigating for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

The loans were not automatic; they were only given for an approved business plan. I met seven credit-holders in Bissau, and they were an impressive bunch.  Some will use the loan to scale up a business they’ve already got going; others will start something new. And these aren’t “Buy your phone credit here” petty businesses. One man runs a construction supply company; another is a junior partner in an ironworks shop. One woman crotchets beautiful jewelry, clothes and even sandals; another woman will buy a loom and take up weaving — which is typically considered a man’s profession here.

You hear a lot about bribes and extortion in Africa, but in my own experiences reporting in Africa, I find those words are too strong for what I've witnessed. True, I’m not trying to open a business or build a hotel, or something.  I'm just a reporter, wandering around some post-conflict countries for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Which is to say, I’m not the target market for large-scale corruption.

What I see is more like this: A security official — I presume from the beret that he’s in the army, but the only way I can tell he’s wearing a uniform is that his shirt and his pants are both khaki — looks over my ticket and passport, nods, and hands them back to me. Then he starts asking me something in rapid Portuguese, which I don’t understand.

“He’s asking for breakfast,” his civilian colleague tells me in French.

“But I didn’t have breakfast,” I say.

“No, he wants breakfast.”

“Oh! I don’t have any breakfast. But I would like some breakfast. Do you have breakfast?" I’m smiling and looking earnest. Everyone is laughing at me.