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We hope you had a restful and joyous New Year! Our project is going well and we’re excited – and to that end, here are some recent stories of Afghanistan, human rights, and markets in the news. Let us know of any interesting or relevant articles or pieces you see in your reading travels!
- Shopkeepers and businesspeople affected by the fire at Kabul’s Mandawi (main commercial district) are exempt from tax for the next 4 years – Wadsam Afghan News Business Portal
- What’s at stake for Afghan women – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon for CNN
- Another Afghan Buddhist archeological site is threatened because it sits on top of a copper mine – NYT
- Afghan government raising tariffs on imported fruit juices in a move to protect local production – Wadsam Afghan News Business Portal
- A beautiful set of photos of Afghan landscapes – Warkadang on Tumblr
- Bleak humanitarian outlook for 2013 in Afghanistan – IRIN
- Afghan refugees living in Kabul battle deadly cold as winter sets in – NYT
- Great photos from a press conference of the Afghanistan Forum for Electoral Reforms – Thru Afghan Eyes
- Insight: Once a symbol of new Afghanistan, can policewomen survive? – Reuters
- Energy Drinks Take Afghanistan By Storm – Radio Free Europe
- Top Human Rights stories on Twitter in 2012 – HRW
- Long road ahead for Afghan women – Heather Barr for HRW
(Photo credit to Frédéric Lagrange: “The grasslands that surround Lake Chaqmaqtin, Afghanistna, sustain herds of goat, sheep, and yak.”)
You can help us get a permanent profile on Global Giving by contributing just $10 - not only will this help us, it will help hundreds of entrepreneurs and enterprises in developing countries like Liberia, Afghanistan, and Haiti access new business and support their families and economies.
You’ve got $10, right? BOOM. Make your Labour Day long weekend full of change for hardworking people around the world.
I love Alanna Shaikh. Do yourself a favor, and check out her blog if you haven’t already.
You know what I would love to do? I’d love to start an effort devoted entirely to solving the easy problems in the world. Not a new NGO; you know how I feel about that, but a division within a major existing group. It would be funded by donations, not government grants, and focus on the low-hanging fruit in relief and development. Heck, we could call it Low Hanging Fruit, and live with the inevitable LHF acronym. We wouldn’t worry about sustainability, but we’d have a big focus on local involvement.
There are a million little ideas we all run into, that don’t fit with any expressed donor priorities, but would so obviously make a useful different in the world. LHF would work on those. We’d document everything to pieces, so it would also serve as research on what works. Every community we worked in would have a paired control community with similar demographics, and as soon as we could demonstrate an intervention was working, we’d extend it into the control group so they could benefit too.
Because the focus would be on simple solutions, I think it would be easy (well, easier) to get the kind of individual donations we’d need to keep our programs going. A hippo roller or better irrigation is an easy sell, and easy to illustrate in photographs.
I’m not arguing that these kinds of quick fixes are the answer to the world’s problems; far from it. International development needs long-term approaches to major structural problems. But sometimes a band-aid help your wound heal faster, and it’s frustrating to see someone hurting when a five cent piece of plastic and gauze could make a difference.
Here’s some of what we’d do:
We love Alanna too!
A fantastic post from CGDev on where all that money donors gave to Haiti ended up. Spoiler alert: we don’t really know where most of it ended up, but only 0.02% of USAID money went to Haitian firms and businesses.
(Want to fix that? Want to know why it’s important to fix that? Talk to us, or watch our video.)
(Source: buildingmarkets.org, via professorbutterscotch)
The artist formerly known as Peace Dividend Trust (yours truly) has a new name! (And, to the disappointment of many of us, it’s not “Russell” or “Cartographers Without Borders.” Which is what I was pulling for.) Why do we have a new name? Because our name sucks.
1) It is hard to spell (our #2 Google search hit is Peace Divided Trust).
2) It gives you no idea what we do.
3) It misleads people into thinking we focus on “peace” not markets and entrepreneurs. And we like “peace,” we do, it’s just not our main currency.
4) Which leads to endless invitations to peace forums. Endless.
5) But the entrepreneur, market, finance types avoid us like the plague.
6) We never set up that trust fund, making the third word an increasingly awkward vestigial appendage.
7) Non-English speakers can never pronounce it.
8) The majority of people outside of political science and economic circles don’t know what a “peace dividend” is.
9) Among those who do, many link it to the end of the Cold War and the movement opposed to the US military industrial complex.
10) The guys behind this site think we are supporting the US military industrial complex and won’t sell us the www.peacedividend.org domain.
11) There is no easy translation of Peace Dividend Trust into French, Creole, Tetum, Pashtun, or Dari.
12) And reducing it to an acronym only drops us into a very crowded alphabet soup.
13) I could go on, trust me.
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, unless that rose is named Peace Dividend Trust.“
Our new name?
Building Markets. (Which has, funnily enough, been the name of our blog for quite some time.)
Because that’s what we do. Feedback welcome ;) The domain for this tumblr will change later today, but we’re still the same folks doing the same good work to build post-conflict markets and support developing entrepreneurs.
03-29-12: PDT Global is dead. Long live Building Markets!
FYI
(Source: buildingmarkets.org, via buildingmarkets)
The artist formerly known as Peace Dividend Trust (yours truly) has a new name! (And, to the disappointment of many of us, it’s not “Russell” or “Cartographers Without Borders.” Which is what I was pulling for.) Why do we have a new name? Because our name sucks.
1) It is hard to spell (our #2 Google search hit is Peace Divided Trust).
2) It gives you no idea what we do.
3) It misleads people into thinking we focus on “peace” not markets and entrepreneurs. And we like “peace,” we do, it’s just not our main currency.
4) Which leads to endless invitations to peace forums. Endless.
5) But the entrepreneur, market, finance types avoid us like the plague.
6) We never set up that trust fund, making the third word an increasingly awkward vestigial appendage.
7) Non-English speakers can never pronounce it.
8) The majority of people outside of political science and economic circles don’t know what a “peace dividend” is.
9) Among those who do, many link it to the end of the Cold War and the movement opposed to the US military industrial complex.
10) The guys behind this site think we are supporting the US military industrial complex and won’t sell us the www.peacedividend.org domain.
11) There is no easy translation of Peace Dividend Trust into French, Creole, Tetum, Pashtun, or Dari.
12) And reducing it to an acronym only drops us into a very crowded alphabet soup.
13) I could go on, trust me.
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, unless that rose is named Peace Dividend Trust.“
Our new name?
Building Markets. (Which has, funnily enough, been the name of our blog for quite some time.)
Because that’s what we do. Feedback welcome ;) The domain for this tumblr will change later today, but we’re still the same folks doing the same good work to build post-conflict markets and support developing entrepreneurs.
03-29-12: PDT Global is dead. Long live Building Markets!
(Source: buildingmarkets.org, via buildingmarkets)
The artist formerly known as Peace Dividend Trust (yours truly) has a new name! (And, to the disappointment of many of us, it’s not “Russell” or “Cartographers Without Borders.” Which is what I was pulling for.) Why do we have a new name? Because our name sucks.
1) It is hard to spell (our #2 Google search hit is Peace Divided Trust).
2) It gives you no idea what we do.
3) It misleads people into thinking we focus on “peace” not markets and entrepreneurs. And we like “peace,” we do, it’s just not our main currency.
4) Which leads to endless invitations to peace forums. Endless.
5) But the entrepreneur, market, finance types avoid us like the plague.
6) We never set up that trust fund, making the third word an increasingly awkward vestigial appendage.
7) Non-English speakers can never pronounce it.
8) The majority of people outside of political science and economic circles don’t know what a “peace dividend” is.
9) Among those who do, many link it to the end of the Cold War and the movement opposed to the US military industrial complex.
10) The guys behind this site think we are supporting the US military industrial complex and won’t sell us the www.peacedividend.org domain.
11) There is no easy translation of Peace Dividend Trust into French, Creole, Tetum, Pashtun, or Dari.
12) And reducing it to an acronym only drops us into a very crowded alphabet soup.
13) I could go on, trust me.
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, unless that rose is named Peace Dividend Trust.“
Our new name?
Building Markets. (Which has, funnily enough, been the name of our blog for quite some time.)
Because that’s what we do. Feedback welcome ;) The domain for this tumblr will change later today, but we’re still the same folks doing the same good work to build post-conflict markets and support developing entrepreneurs.
03-29-12: PDT Global is dead. Long live Building Markets!
(Source: buildingmarkets.org)
