NEWSINTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

One of the opening sessions of PopTech was entitled "How (Not) to Change the World," and featured speakers like Mulago Foundation director Kevin Starr and Water for People founder Ned Breslin discussing the failures of development, and how to do it better. One of the things that I was struck by was how much of the problem was a failure of design, yet at the same time, how few people in the development space would label it as such.

Almost any organization working towards local or international development is in the business of designing products or services that are designed to change or amplify some behavior towards a certain goal. New diagnostics technologies are designed to shift how diseases are discovered and stopped. Sports for youth programs are designed to shift young people's perspective about team work and their ability to achieve. Agriculture support programs are designed to give rural farmers new tools or strategies to increase their crop yields. And the list goes on.

While these are all very different contexts, each of these programs require a design process in which the organization in charge figures out what behavior they're trying to change, which levers for change to focus on, and which resource, cultural or other constraints dictate the boundaries of the designs they can use.

These processes tend to be shared across just about all the domains of social change. Determining a theory of change, or more prosaically a desired shift in behavior. Understanding the array of constraints that face any environment in which a service or product will be deployed. Looking at the models that exist and the opportunities for innovation that could shape the product or service to be designed. While the manifestation may be different, together these questions and considerations comprise a design discipline.

Yet most nonprofits and international development organizations don't think of themselves as designers. And they certainly don't think about themselves as potential clients for design firms. There is an extreme lack of knowledge and recognition of "design" as a field of managerial and creative consulting that could dramatically reshape social impact outcomes.

I think part of this gap is simply the newness of "design" as a management discipline in general. It has really only been in the last couple decades that firms like IDEO have demonstrated that major companies can employ external design services to advance their offerings. This is still diffusing across the commercial world, not to mention the nonprofit world.

But I think part of it is an implicit or explicit feeling of possession on the part of nonprofits that leads them to believe that they should be able to do all of this on their own. After all, its their experience right? Their connections. Their ideas. Their approaches. What this fails to understand is that the function of design services is about helping organizations apply the discipline of thinking through product and service design to those things they already know, have and understand.

There is some hope that lack of understanding of design services for development are changing. Catapult Design, Project M Lab, Project H Design and more are blazing the way. But there's still a long way to go, and I hope the market for these services grows.

The news in social entrepreneurship this week is from all around the world. Sustained questions of how America will enable talented immigrants to build companies and lives on our shores appear in the Economist; a profile of a Middle Eastern venture capitalist making the region safe for startups makes it to TechCrunch, and more in this Weekend Entrepreneur Links.

Importing Job Growth: This piece in the Economist is yet another smart argument against our stupid immigration policies which make it difficult for the world's most talented to come here to work, or even worse stay here after investing four years in a degree program. There are all sorts of sensible ways to fix these problems  -- including programs like the Startup Visa that would carve a portion of an existing class of visa to give founders of venture-backed companies time to build their businesses here. Alas, "sensible" tends not to enter the immigration debate these days.

Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur: Meet the Ron Conway of the Middle East: Ron Conway is a legend in Silicon Valley. He is the godfather of the new class of "superangels" - highly active seed stage investors who are disrupting the traditional model of early stage venture financing. This interview, conducted by Social Gaming Network and seed investor Shervin Pishevar, profiles Fadi Ghandour (pictured above), a Jordanian entrepreneur who is now parlaying his success into investments and mentorship for new ventures in the broader Middle East.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation Commits $500,000 to Astia: A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about women in social and technology entrepreneurship. There is a perennial conversation about why there aren't more women in entrepreneurial fields. Luckily, there are also organizations like Astia who are more interested in providing resources to change the situation rather than just discuss the reasons for the status quo, and funders like the Kauffman Foundation who are willing to give those organizations the support they need.

Giving Pledges by Rich Disclosed: The Shanghai Daily reported last week that, in advance of a visit by Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, more than 100 Chinese multimillionaires had committed to giving away a significant portion of their wealth -- or in some cases, all of it -- to charity. Chen Guangbiao, worth about $440m, has been a leader in organizing his countrymen to the pledge, committing his entire fortune to charity before he dies.

Photo credit: Joi

Nine years ago today, the United States of America was fundamentally and irrevocably changed. When the towers fell, they brought with it not only the lives of thousands of innocents, but the unspoken barrier that many of our citizens thought separated America from the chaos and turmoil of the world.

In the almost decade since, the world has shifted, as well. Two American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are the most notable example, but the geopolitical readjustment has impacted people far beyond that, from Muslim refugees now stuck with less chance than ever before of asylum offers in countries allied with the US, to your average global traveler who faces more restrictions and suspicion than ever before.

The first decade after September 11th has been, unfortunately, characterized by war. One in direct response to the attacks, and one that had been waiting impatiently in the on-deck circle of neoconservatives for the right opportunity. Yet war and violence are a strange phenomena. They bring out the worst in people, yes, but very often also the best. Violence strips us so bare -- to our fragile, mortal core -- that it can create a rare and unique sense of common condition.

While it would be easy to view the September 11th story as violence that begat violence, there is another story, as well. For a huge number of people, 9/11 was the catalyst that shifted the way they thought about the world -- and more importantly, the need for them to be involved in making that world a better place. For members of the Millennial generation, the attack -- and even more, its response -- were a massive prod to think differently about how we were going to assert our voice and ideas.

Much of this activity was not simply tangentially inspired by 9/11, but had a direct overlap with the issues of religious intolerance and war churned up by the attack. An example is the Interfaith Youth Core, an organization started by Eboo Patel and a number of other Chicago-based interfaith advocates. While their push for religious pluralism started a number of years before the bombings, the attacks created a cultural context in which their programs -- which bring together young people of varied faith backgrounds to participate in common service and learn from one another -- became even more important.

Other innovators have focused on another consequence of the last decade: the increased number of veterans, many of whom are dealing with the physical and emotional scars of multiple tours of duty. The Mission Continues is an organization founded by a team of brilliant veterans who saw men and women who had performed heroically come back to a society not properly prepared to use their talents. The Mission Continues helps wounded veterans build careers of service.

The historian in me thinks that the first decade after September 11th will be remembered as a dark time, filled with violence and turmoil. The optimist in me thinks that the next decade will be remembered as a time of increasing promise, when we began to shake off the collective instinct towards retribution and rebuild towards a sane and just 21st century.

And when I survey the incredible, massive, incalculable shift in sentiment and feeling of purpose among young people today, the rationalist in me thinks that the decade after that will be remembered as the decade where we finally lived up to not just the technological but ethical promise of an interconnected world.

Photo credit: leppre

The annual Social Capital Markets conference takes on the ambitious task of bringing together a sector that exists in many different variants in an array of industries. This year, they're trying to help people find their place in the conference by organizing content into expert-curated thematic tracks ranging from Tactical Philanthropy to Food Systems.

This approach is another piece of evidence for the argument I made in a post yesterday, which is that "social entrepreneurship" is maturing as a series of related by distinct industry and field verticals. Although not all of the SoCap tracks are industries as they're normally defined, they're all coherent fields with their own best practices, experts and knowledge systems that successful entrepreneurs within those fields must know to thrive.

Track: Tactical Philanthropy
Curated by: Sean Stannard-Stockton
Overview: This track is meant to recognize the important place of nonprofits and philanthropic capital in the larger social change marketplace. The content will revolve around topics like "Decriminalizing Fundraising" and going beyond metrics in assessing the success of nonprofits. Speakers will include notables like "Uncharitable" author Dan Pallotta and the CEO of Charity Navigator, Ken Berger.

Track: Mobile Technology
Curated by: Alison Bloch, mHealth Alliance
Overview: The track explores the implications and opportunities created by the massive explosion in connection via mobile devices around the developing world. The track will profile some of the existing leaders in the space, as well as identify emerging investment opportunities for the interested. Speakers include representatives from design firms like IDEO and frog design, as well as leading mobile startups like Ushahidi.

With the World Cup over, all that's really left to do is resume the drudgery of waking up every day to try to make the world a better place. Bo-ring. If we have to do it though, may as well be as informed as possible. Start with these important reads from the last week.

How Experience in Foreign Cultures Facilitates Creativity: Most of the folks I know who have spent significant time of broad probably would have argued this point before they had any data to back it up, but it's very cool to see some significant research suggesting that being exposed to foreign cultures has significant, measurable positive impacts on people's ability to think creatively and solve problems. Importantly, however, the study also shows that the attitude you have going in -- the desire to actually engage with that foreign culture -- is key to actually getting these benefits.

Revitalizing the American Dream: Inc magazine put together this awesome list of tips for revitalizing the American Dream, and it's all about making it easier for people to start, join, and succeed in startups. This means teaching entrepreneurship across disciplines (not just in B-School), changing our general approach and disposition towards immigration (and immigrant entrepreneurs), and even some legal ideas like to stop enforcing "noncompete" agreements that force former employees of companies not to work for (or start) competing companies after leaving. Total must read.

Microfinance Group Unitus Shuts Down, Eyes ‘Reinvention': This is one of those confounding stories that could be incredibly significant or totally irrelevant, depending on what's behind it. Basically, one of microfinance's leading institutions has shut its doors and laid off its staff, saying that it's exploring a reinvention, without saying much of anything about what that is. If this is due to a lack of confidence in microfinance, it's significant. If it's a real-life example of a nonprofit actually "putting itself out of business" because it feels it has accomplished what it set out to do, it's significant. If, more likely, the root of this is just difference in opinion about future direction within the leadership, it's just internal politics and doesn't much matter. A story worth watching, though, for sure.

Start-Up Chile: Putting some of the ideas from the Inc story above into practice, this new program from the government of Chile is offering $40,000 in startup grants for companies that are willing to relocate to Chile for a time. The goal is to welcome the global entrepreneurship community to the country and hope that some people decide to invest in Chile as a primary or secondary home for their companies. Few strings attached money is definitely a good way to grab an entrepreneurs' attention.

Photo credit: Gonzalo Baeza Hernández

It's hard to follow Middle Eastern politics for very long without becoming frustrated and pessimistic at the seeming intractability of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Yet for those willing to look a little closer, there are citizens on both sides who refuse to let the conflict define them. The forthcoming Startup Weekend Tel Aviv is Exhibit A in the real life bridge building that can happen far beyond the negotiation table.

Startup Weekends are two or three day get togethers in which hackers, product and marketing people come together to form startup ideas and smash out prototypes. The event was started by current TechStars community manager Andrew Hyde in 2007, and is one of the most beloved institutions in the growing "Lean Startup" movement that focuses on getting products in the hands of users more quickly, and learning how to be mobile, change-oriented companies.

Startup Weekend Tel Aviv started when convener Amir Harel tweeted asking why their wasn't a Startup Weekend in Israel yet. The directors responded and basically said: "How bout you do?" After pulling off their first successful event in Tel Aviv in late 2009, Harel and his co-conveners began to ask how they could use the event to further social change objectives as well.

According to an exclusive interview with the Startup Digest, they thought about a number of approaches before settling on their plan: "We thought about organizing a women’s Startup Weekend and a few other ideas, but since Startup Weekend is such an amazing platform to bridge gaps, we decided to focus on the greatest one — the one between Palestinians and Israelis."

The event will happen between July 14th and July 16th, and will be cosponsored by the Peres Center for Peace, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization working for greater economic, business, and social collaboration between Israelis and Palestinians.

Maybe the most impressive piece of this whole thing for me is that the organizers are actually organizing for 20-30 of the 130 or so participants to be residents of the Palestinian Territories. It's no mean feat of organization to get approval for that sort of challenge. And while it would have been the easy way to just have Israeli-citizen Palestinians, this shows a real commitment to the larger collaborative goals.

Can entrepreneurial collaboration bring peace in the Middle East? Not on it's own. But it's a bold and important step that exposes the undercurrent of hope and conviction among many of the average citizens of both countries. I hope it convinces others to follow in their footsteps.

Follow them on Twitter at @SWIsrael

Photo credit: goldberg

I've kept a quote book for over a decade (I have several volumes now) and I love them. So, as a follow-up to my last education-funding post, I had to share some with you. Maybe you can add them to your own volumes.

Founder of Vittana Kushal Chakrabarti has some poignant appeals for investing in higher education in developing countries. "Students have done everything they’ve been told to do, got good grades, and worked hard to get into college. There are no student loans in developing countries. It doesn’t matter if you’re admitted to top schools if you don’t have the money. We’re working toward a common goal in providing 12 years of education,” Kushal says, “but we’re dropping them off at the last one mile. What if you put in a few hundred dollars and could tip that?”

Kushal sees his program and those like it as the next step in education investment. He says, “Education is not just about literacy; it is about being able to make a living. We know education is the one thing that breaks the cycle of poverty. Consider a family where your mom is stitching doctor’s pants versus a family where your mom is a nurse. You see life in a completely different way.”

Ashni Mohnot, Founder of Enzi, believes that when we invest in student's education, we are investing in the future of the world and we have the power to shape that future. She hopes that people will eventually use 401ks to invest in human talent like they would invest in stocks. "Let's allow ordinary people to shape the world they want to live in--to create more engineers or teachers," she says. "It's a completely new and almost crazy way to value human talent and invest in it, quite directly."

The idea behind both of these programs--to bring greater opportunity for students in developing countries--is summed up well by Ashni: "If you're smart, people will invest in you regardless of your background."

That's the kind of world I want to live in.

Photo Credit: Carol Mitchell

People working there will tell you that we're entering a new era of African talent, and it's being largely facilitated by the explosion in affordable mobile technology and computing power. Yesterday the State Department announced "Apps 4 Africa," a collaboration with Kenya's iHub incubator, Appfrica, and SODNET to get East African web developers designing applications to help their communities and countries.

Of all the social entrepreneur subcommunities, it's hard to find one as consistently creative, dynamic, and successfully collaborative as the group focused on unleashing African technology talent. While many of the organizations and individuals in the community have been involved much longer, as a whole it burst into many people's view a few years ago with the launch of Ushahidi.

Ushahidi began as a call by Keynan blogger Ory Okolloh to the East African tech community to help figure out a way to better track and create a collective memory of the violence that spread in the wake of the 2008 disputed elections. Since then, it has create an open platform that has been used to track violence, elections, and disaster response. Recently, many of the folks behind the platform have helped launch the iHub, an incubator and coworking space for Kenyan tech talent in downtown Nairobi.

Not long after that, Appfrica launched. Appfrica includes a media property that is one of the best sources for African tech news and commentary and Appfrica Labs, which is part web development client firm and part incubator for new home built applications. They've done an array of awesome things, including their ongoing work with Ushahidi to create a machine intelligence tool for separating valuable, usable information out of the general social media stream in the wake of a disaster.

The State Department, again displaying the collaborative jones we've written about being impressed with before, is helping coordinate and add weight and heft to the competition. The team at State behind this project include some of the folks who worked with Ushahidi and other civil technology organizations to establish tools for relief in Haiti after the January earthquake.

The App 4 Africa contest will bring together the African tech community with local civil society. Local organizations will suggest challenge areas ranging from better development information to governance reporting issues to whatever they can dream up, which will seed the field of applications that developers will be asked to build.

Citizens can submit ideas through a variety of social media means, and the contest is open to any developers from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda. International folks can participate as mentors if they have valuable skills to contribute.

The contest runs through August 31st. Check out the Apps 4 Africa website to learn more.

Photo credit: Barcamp Nairobi at iHub by whiteafrican

When I talked to the founders of Vittana (Kushal Chakrabarti), Enzi (Ashni Mohnot), and CO-Fund (Cody Simmons), I started each conversation the same way: “I’m still sending a hefty check to Sallie Mae after ten years and I hate it!” But what if the only option to finance my college education was cash or a loan shark? And I lived in a developing country with a family struggling to pay for food?

A recent study published by UNESCO and the International Institute for Education Planning recommended that "Innovative financing solutions and efficiency gains are required to improve affordable access to post‐primary levels." These folks are working on testing some models for innovation.

Vittana’s model is based on peer-peer, no-interest, individual loans, that are pooled together to fund individual students. The system makes it easy for anyone (even someone like me with outstanding loans) to pitch in as little as $25 to help send a student to college in a developing country. The lending/repayment process is simple: find a student you want to support by reading through their profiles, make a loan that is combined with other individual lenders, and wait 6-12 months while the student completes their education. Within 6-18 months after graduation, the student repays Vittana and then Vittana repays the individual lenders the same amount they loaned. So far, they have a 97% repayment rate.

Enzi (a 2010 Echoing Green Fellow) operates on the same principles of funding students in developing countries but the method is different; it is “equity-based education funding.” The loan an individual investor makes has no fixed amount of return on the investment; it’s based on the graduate’s income, with a maximum cap, for a fixed period of time. This model is not a loan, but an investment in human talent. Rather than investing in one student, Angel Investors have a group of students, in a similar way you might invest in several stocks rather than putting all your money in one company to mitigate your financial risk.

While Vittana and Enzi are currently focused on funding students in or from developing countries in Masters Programs, CO-Fund’s students are undergraduate students in in the US. It’s also unique in that it’s an organization for students by students. Like Vittana and Enzi, CO-Fund seeks individuals to fund student loans but the repayment model is different. Students who receive loans commit, through a “pay-it-forward pledge” to one of four options: 1) Work for CO-Fund or one of their partners for a year; 2) Donate one fifth of their loan amount to another student in the CO-Fund program; 3) Complete 100 hours of community service; or 4) Complete a graduate program.

I’m really interested in tracking the successes and challenges Kushal, Ashni, and Cody face as they pioneer  innovative solutions to students in need. The next time I make my Sallie Mae payment, I might even adopt the CO-Fund spirit and pitch in a few extra dollars to pay it forward to a student in need. How about you? I'll even make it simple:

• Find a student and make a loan through Vittana
• Become and Angel Investor with Enzi
• Find and fund a CO-Fund Fellow

Photo Credit: m00by

Countries famously compare different statistics to understand how they stack up against one another in their economic capacity. A new initiative being pushed by the authors of "Philanthrocapitalism" Matthew Bishop and Michael Green is meant to help countries understand how they compare in their capacity to create social value.

The "Social Competitiveness Index" project was born under the auspices of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Philanthropy and Social Investment, and is working with folks like "Blended Value" author Jed Emerson and the Avina Foundation to make the idea a reality.

The project was inspired by the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report, which focuses not on indicators of current economic strength but on understanding how current assets and practices will shape future opportunities. Similarly, the Social Competitiveness Index (SCI) would be looking for indications not just of who is the most innovative now, but who is creating the institutions and norms most likely to produce social innovation moving forward.

• The group working on the project is working off of the hypothesis that the elements they need to track include three necessary capacities of government, private institutions, and nonprofits:
• To create new technologies or models for enabling social change: requiring innovation, a protective legal framework, and an ability to test ideas
• An ability to test ideas (and filter the bad): vibrancy in terms of assessment approaches, academic knowledge creation, and open government data
• Funding to scale ideas that work

They're at the very beginning stages and asking for feedback. Here are the first few questions that jump out at me, and I'd love for readers to contribute any more they might have: