Posts tagged Aid
When a poor man asks you for aid, do not use his faults as an excuse for not helping him. For then God will look at your offences, and he is sure to find many.
Dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth
We created Acumen Fund to find the enterprises, leaders and ideas that would create more dignity and more choice, unleashing more of the human energy behind all lasting solutions – that of the people who face poverty and yearn to solve their own problems.
This is from a blog post by Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of the Acumen Fund, reflecting upon their ten year anniversary.
I thoroughly enjoyed Jacqueline’s book ‘The Blue Sweater’ documenting her work and I am a big fan of the work the Acumen Fund is doing.
If you’re looking for a great organisation working with those in poverty to support, the Acumen Fund is well worth checking out.
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What will the UK international aid be spent on?
The UK government has released details of what it plans to accomplish with its international aid spending:
The set of plans show exactly how Britain’s aid programmes will deliver results and measure progress up to 2015, including:
- In Bangladesh, lifting 5 million people out of extreme poverty
- In Ethiopia, providing basic healthcare for 7.5 million people
- In Pakistan, getting more than 4 million more children into school
- In Democratic Republic of Congo, protecting 15 million people from malaria
- In Uganda, getting access to contraception for 1.35 million more women
- In Zambia, supporting more than 3 million people to vote in the next elections
- In Sierra Leone, ensuring 1 million people get access to drinking water
Let’s just hope that there are enough frameworks in place to ensure that all the money is spent well and that it gets into the right people’s hands.
Learning from economists about the best ways to break cycles of poverty
Nicholas D Kristof for the New York Times:
Now we reach a central question for our age: How can we most effectively break cycles of poverty? For decades, we had answers that were mostly anecdotal or hot air. But, increasingly, we are now seeing economists provide answers that are rigorously field-tested, akin to the way drugs are tested in randomized controlled trials, yielding results that are particularly credible and persuasive.
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Randomized trials are the hottest thing in the fight against poverty, and two excellent new books have just come out by leaders in the field. One is “Poor Economics,” by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, and the other is “More Than Good Intentions,” by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel.
For years, we’ve seen a sterile debate about whether humanitarian aid works. (Sometimes yes, sometimes no.) These terrific books move the debate to the crucial question: What kind of aid works best?
The whole article is well worth a read. And I’ll definitely be taking a look at the referenced books too.
