NEWSBUSINESS AND HUMAN RIGHTS

It's not every day that the tech world is abuzz with social change, but there is a bit of a debate of late as to the value of crowdsourcing in helping to solve global challenges.

Crowdsourcing is when a group, rather than an individual, uses the Internet to collectively solve a problem or task at hand (check this video for an intro).

Change.org bloggers have discussed the many opportunities crowdsourcing presents before, for example here, here and here.

But what are some examples of cases in which this exercise in virtual collaboration has successfully made an impact on global development?

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.

Poverty's got a new enemy: Apps. We sort of knew that would happen. The aid these gadgets provide during catastrophes has been widely known. The donations made through apps alone are just one of many examples. To up the ante, the World Bank is sponsoring a competition to develop new and more sophisticated applications in hopes to boost the institution's clout over poverty.

In a rather unusual, documentary-style video, World Bank President Robert Zoellick challenged  experts to come up with software applications, data visualization tools or other mediums that analyze and help grapple the world’s pressing problems. The competition's name is “Apps for Development” and its programs can be web-based, for mobile, desktop or other uses. There are only two requirement: that it uses the World Bank Data Catalog and that it acknowledges one of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MGDs).

This isn’t the first time technology has lend international aid groups a hand. Experts have devised several applications meant to raise awareness — and money — for these important issues. CharityFinder is one of these helpful apps. Through an 1800-database of non-profit causes, user can locate and donate to their favorite charity. Another application, Compassion, lets users profile a child they’d like to sponsor in Africa, South America, Asia or the Caribbean.

Development work takes as given that its ultimate aims are achievable.

I was recently in London, and one of the joys of that city is the second floor of Foyles bookshop, dedicated to history, international relations, economics and development. Browsing through the books there, I came across an arresting title: The Myth of Development. Written by the Peruvian Oswaldo de Rivero, it poses a startling question: what if the whole concept of development is flawed? What if the countries we refer to as ‘developing’ are not developing and will never develop?

The first part of this question is nothing new: I myself prefer the term ‘less developed country’ (LDC) to ‘developing country’ because the latter implies a progress that may not always be evident. What de Rivero postulates is that this might not be a temporary state, but that these economies will never develop.

His basic argument is that development as we know it is not inevitable or simply a matter of policy. Rather, a number of economies in different stages encountered conditions that, coupled with the right policies and some natural endowment, experienced massive material expansions that provided the basis of their modern economies. These circumstances sometimes involved violence and coercion: the slave trade, colonialism and so on. The world economy has also developed as these economies have reached ‘developed’ status; it in turn has reached a sort of maturity in which the developed and less developed countries interact according to specific power relations and rules that derive from these.

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.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee will vote today about whether or not to bring HR 4645 to a full house vote – bringing us one step closer to finally ending the 51-year ban on travel to Cuba. The bill, entitled “Travel Restriction Reform and Export Enhancement Act,” would not only allow US citizens to once again travel to the island nation, but it would also loosen the payment restrictions on agricultural deals, making it easier for Cubans to import American food.

Though it’s part of the title, the emphasis of this pending legislation isn’t on agriculture exports. Fewer people seem to be concerned about the bill's effect on Cuban farmers than they are about the possibility of smoking legendary cigars on white sand beaches. While tourism revenues will undoubtedly help the impoverished country, will a flood GMO corn and hormone-pumped chicken do the same?

For all the brutalities of the Castro’s communist dictatorship, Cubans have managed to feed themselves better than most third world countries – in some part, due to their isolation. When the Soviet Union collapsed at the beginning of the 1990s, so did Cuba’s industrial agriculture system. Gone were the days of Soviet-subsidized oil, machine parts, and petro-chemical fertilizers. Unable to buy cheap agricultural inputs or products from the U.S. due to the trade embargo, Cubans turned to organic and urban agriculture. Currently, the country has one of the best systems of urban and organic farming in the world.

They don’t beg for pity. At home they’re boss. They wield a hammer by day and at night cradle their children. These are the women of northern Sri Lanka. Some 15 months after the conflict between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan authorities stopped, these women have become sort of superheroes. With their husbands lost in the fighting, war widows are taking charge of their families and their neighborhoods, too.

The idea of a female-headed household is hardly implausible. In many South American countries women have organized to gain independence in their male-dominated clans. In Sri Lanka, what's impressive is the speed with which these households grow (some 40,000 in the north, according to the Center for Women and Development).

What forced these women to fend for their families is necessity. A fierce civil war that began in the 1970s claimed the lives of thousands of citizens. Many males died, disappeared or are still in the custody of authorities. What might have been an effective strategy to dismantle the opposition has left homes without their traditional breadwinners.

Enter war widows. They tend to their homes, feed the children and work in hard labor jobs by day. The numbers are increasing: 89,000 of them in the east and north according to official figures.

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.

According to Dr. Hamadoun Toure, secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), broadband internet is the key to all sorts of development problems. In fact, he goes as far as to tell the BBC that access to information via the internet "should be a universal human right."

Internet a human right? I've never heard that one before. When stacked next to universal education, freedom of speech, food security and the like, surfing the web doesn't seem to measure up. But as Dr. Toure points out, internet access can help facilitate all these things.

For example, e-health and e-education programs can bring remote villagers state-of-the-art tools and up-to-date information at their finger tips. Small businesses can expand their markets and increase advertising. Marginalized and oppressed peoples can build advocacy and solidarity networks. And Dr. Toure is not just tooting his own horn on this issue. Even 10 years ago world development experts included expanding access to communication technologies as a target to achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

Should the livelihoods of a few be compromised in the name of progress? For Zambians this is more than a rhetorical question.

This week the IRINNEWS reported that miners in the Luapula Province in northern Zambia were purportedly evicting farmers. According to villagers, miners violently forced them out of the lands where they grow small-scale crops. The land that these farmers claim has belonged to their families for generations is located in mineral-rich regions, attractive to foreign investment.

But Zambia officials see it another way and argue those lands lack proper titles and have been illegally appropriated by locals.

And this is where it gets sticky.