Direct microfinance -- which allows individuals to invest in microenterprises around the world -- seems to be catching on as a model of its own. Ebay just launched such a broker service this month: MicroPlace is "powered by eBay’s expertise in connecting people, creating marketplaces and processing online transactions" and aims "to significantly impact global poverty."

Other sites like Kiva and GlobalGiving have pioneered this model for microfinance and micro-philanthropy, respectively; the entry of a big player like Ebay is a significant step toward the mainstream. Ebay's user-pool, resources and reach might enable it to create a genuine marketplace for loans that would help cross mental boundaries between charity "over there" and business "over here."

That said, while MicroPlace has created an attractive site (see especially its helpful "how MicroPlace works" page), I think Kiva still owns the most useful interface -- the breadth of projects and funding options is extraordinary, and the progress bar included in the summary of each is a great way to show investors how (and how much) they are contributing to a larger cause alongside other investors.

There is still a long way to go. It's a testament to the difficulty of finding, vetting and servicing these microloans that MicroPlace, despite its powerful backer, offers a pretty small selection of options. And the investments available on both sites generally offer investors a return of 1.5% to 3.0% a year -- less than they would see in a simple savings account. Much of the return on investment is no doubt absorbed by the time-intensive vetting and servicing process. For the time being, MicroPlace and Kiva will sustain themselves mostly on the power of stories about changed lives and new livelihoods.

But even such small returns send a powerful message. It's no good complaining about the leaky bucket of foreign aid when the bucket comes back full.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Nerds like blogs, tools, maps and such. I'm a nerd. Here are some new and new-to-me resources that have come across my desktop:

World Bank's Google Map/Project Data Mashup: Want to know about the projects the World Bank has in, say, Egypt? Head over to this nifty little tool and you can click on a country, check out some basic economic data, review WB projects and press releases, and even find the address of the Bank office to plan a visit.

Another new resource (though much more of a dry, technical one) is the Public Financial Management blog from the International Monetary Fund. Why is this worth mentioning? Well, it is the IMF's first foray into the blog-world and while the content includes such scintillating pieces as "Corruption and Tax Revenue Generating Capacity Draft Paper," they also hear about new data resources and, for instance, pointed us to the next item on this list.

Check out the World Freedom Atlas, an extremely data-rich graphical statistics modeling tool that allows users to crunch data from dozens of sources onto a world map interface, mouse over individual countries and build a solid understanding of, say, the relationship between the World Bank's governance ratings and Freedom House's press freedom index to see if well-governed countries tend to have more free communications institutions.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Most of us have grown accustomed to the poignant, painful image of a child soldier's "troubled return to civilian life. 'They are walking ghosts,' mourns a recent New York Times editorial, 'damaged, uneducated pariahs.'" Chris Blattman blogs at the Center for Global Development about a study that takes a closer look at the experiences these child soldiers have entering back into daily life. Recent movies, novels and memoirs certainly color our view of child soldiers, writes Blattman, but according to recent research -- and contrary to most depictions -- many former child soldiers "live not as marginal people or criminals but as mothers, fathers and citizens." That image is a far cry from Uzodinma Iweala's (highly acclaimed) novel on the subject, "Beasts of No Nation."

How fortunate for all of us (and especially for the youth in question) that these images contradict the reality of most formerly recruited children. Indeed, an emerging body of research is dispelling many of these child soldering myths. Unfortunately, these same myths continue to dominate and distort policy aimed at preventing child recruitment and reintegrating children associated with armed groups.

Over the past two years I have worked with a psychologist, two human rights researchers, and several NGOs on studies of war affected youth in northern Uganda, the findings of which challenge conventional wisdom and policy...

Material suffering is raised by youth far more often more than nightmares and rejection. Juma, 28 years old, had been abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) for four years as an adolescent. "What hurt me most," he said, "is that they stopped my education." Indeed, losses of education and work experience are the largest and most prevalent impact of child soldiering among males, but largely because of time away rather than violence and brutality.

The trouble with the view of former child soldiers as time bombs and emotional cripples is that it leads us to regard reintegration into civilian life as hopelessly idealistic. Yet the real solutions--access to schooling, a leg up in livelihoods--are ones we know how to provide.

I'm sure Blattman would acknowledge that some child soldiers endure terrible trauma. But he is right -- and fulfilling the valuable role that the Center for Global Development plays on such morally weighty issues as poverty and conflict -- in finding a way to cut through the sensationalism to get at the facts. And like much we hear and see about Africa in the West, large parts of the story are untold.

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Ruth Levine, senior fellow and director of programs at the Center for Global Development, knows quite a lot about global health. She has been instrumental in efforts to set up a worldwide independent evaluation body for aid and health projects, in negotiating the difficulties of drug provision to the developing world and in thinking through solutions to the AIDS epidemic. Levine sees close up -- and writes compellingly about -- the problems that plague global health advocacy. Not least of these, as she writes in Perspectives Magazine, is a strange sort of competition between diseases.

Global health advocacy has an oddly competitive tone. Those who argue for investments in life-saving interventions often cite estimates of lives saved or diseases averted as if they were part of a high-scoring football match.

More money for immunization, the argument goes, would yield 3 million children’s lives a year. More for diarrheal disease control would yield another 2 million. AIDS claims 3 million lives a year, and tuberculosis takes 2 million. New “causes” are rarely welcomed in an already crowded field of injunctions to buy more medicines, train more health workers, spend more money. New priorities find they must use the same metrics of importance and urgency—a count of deaths or some measure of the burden of illness—if they are to get the attention and resources they seek.

The problem, as you may have guessed, with this approach is that when one disease receives a surge in attention, advocates tend to neglect the others. If the overall goal is greater health and well-being, trading one ailment for another isn't a very cheerful outcome. And of course, there is overall health infrastructure to think about too.

These are problems you've probably considered before. But since we're all about solutions at the GII, I'm most intrigued by Levine's four recommendations:

Address underlying system weaknesses. Identify the gaps in a country’s ability to carry out essential public health functions, including disease surveillance, health education, monitoring and evaluation, workforce development, enforcement of public health laws and regulations, public health research, and health policy development. Recognize that key shortcomings in these functions must be addressed to respond to virtually any major health problem that merits public policy attention, whether at the international or the national level.

Invest in systemic improvements. Use new resources to strengthen and build upon existing systems, including information and monitoring systems, supply chains, delivery of services, and others. Design any new program within a long-term framework for strengthening of health system capacity and with short- to medium-term operational plans. The long-term framework can include centrally managed programs—some public health interventions are best organized through such approaches—but these should contribute to the development of essential public health functions, not operate in parallel or for specific, short-term gains.

Measure both operational achievements and health impact. Monitor changes in a country’s capacity to carry out essential public health functions, but also measure changes in health conditions. Include routine monitoring of population health status as part of established information systems, as well as through focused, rigorous impact evaluations of particular programs.

Declare a truce in disease-versus-disease advocacy. Mobilize resources using any and all arguments that work. These may include current health impacts as well as potential ones, ethical imperatives and costs to the health system, worker productivity, or other economic outcomes. In some cases, the most effective approach may indeed be disease-specific advocacy, but this should be paired with strong arguments against earmarking funds so narrowly that larger, system-wide objectives cannot also be addressed.

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Google and other search engines have long worked to pull information scattered over the Internet together in a useful place when you need it. But of course, this doesn't do anything to guarantee the quality of information -- and it doesn't help you much if lots of other people aren't interested in the same thing you're looking for (Google's search system is based on linked pages).

The other way to go about it is to compile related information together, in the same place. PolicyArchive is in the process of doing this; it aims to be more or less a one-stop site that compiles public policy research from a wide range of sources (who must, themselves, opt in to upload their research).

The Center for Governmental Studies (CGS) and the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) Library are building PolicyArchive, a comprehensive, searchable, open access, online archive of public policy research. PolicyArchive will create a permanent, digital repository that will preserve public policy research in a comprehensive range of areas, and make it available to researchers around the globe.

PolicyArchive will create an online resource for public policy publications, free to all research seekers and available for upload to all policy research publishers. PolicyArchive will contain summaries and full texts of policy research - academic, foundation-funded, government - in a range of subject areas.

Let's hope that PolicyArchive can institute some incentives to push a wide range of organizations to post their research. As of now, there are reportedly about ten thousand pieces of research in the PolicyArchive database. As this resource grows, it could be an important piece of connective tissue between foundations, government institutions and nonprofits -- all drawing from the same well.

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I enjoy reading Jeff Brooks' thoughts about how nonprofits work and how they talk about themselves; he's good at questioning assumptions. For instance: this blog post on branding. Everyone knows that strong brands are supposed to attract attention, build loyalty and give an instant sense of what an organization is about. But they can also shut you in, says Brooks.

Your brand is what you do and who you are. What you look like is the smallest part of that. Most branding guidebooks pay lip-service to this fact, but none of them do anything about it. And that’s no surprise, because they can’t. A brand is bigger than a set of rules you can put down in a spiral-bound book.

If you have a great brand—one that aligns with the beliefs, hopes, and self-image of your donors—you can laugh at the puny efforts of the brand police to achieve consistency.

Brooks is right of course. An organization that is slavishly consistent to a narrow set of branding rules will come off as pretty boring and one-dimensional. I'll bet this fact has something to do with why corporate advertising has gotten a kick in the pants toward zany in the past few years -- consumers got tired of brands devoid of anything real or surprising.

This is not a problem we've encountered very often among clients with whom we've worked -- many nonprofits are probably short on brand definition. But I'm sure it's an issue for some. For a follow-up, I hope Brooks will give us an example.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today the Brookings Institution celebrated the new Mo Ibrahim Prize for good governance in Africa. Ibrahim has hit on a fascinating incentive for African leaders who consistently work to improve governance -- and voluntarily step down from power (leaders in office are not eligible).

It's hard to argue with the press release: "Joaquim Chissano [former president of Mozambique] wins the largest prize in the world." A brief description from Brookings:

Recognizing that improving governance takes political leadership, Mo Ibrahim, the founder of Celtel, created the Prize for Achievement in African Leadership to be awarded to a former African head of state or government who has demonstrated excellence in African leadership. Consisting of a $5 million award to be paid out over 10 years and a $200,000 annual stipend after that, the prize has grabbed the attention of the governance community for its vision and initiative. The winner will be chosen based on a new African governance quality index designed by Robert Rotberg of Harvard University.

Doubtless, many African leaders could take in more than this sum by situating contracts and government revenues to their advantage. But Ibrahim promises both the aplomb of the international community and a tidy sum for doing the right thing and leaving it well enough alone once a positive impact has been made. As commentators at Brookings noted, equally important will be the linear data that accrues from the index as the prize is reassessed every year.

And let's hope that the Mo Ibrahim Foundation can avoid "World Bank disease" -- awarding only prizes that are well-deserved. A year or two without prizes might be just as powerful an instrument for good governance.

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Massive deployment of DDT may not be the only hope for exterminating malaria after all. The Economist reports on several different efforts well underway to develop malaria vaccines.

Remarkably, researchers at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute are harvesting an early version of their malaria vaccine right out of mosquitoes:

The team is breeding millions of Anopheles mosquitoes (pictured above) and infecting them with malaria-causing parasites.

Not any old parasites, either. Those he uses have had some of their genes knocked out to stop them breeding in humans. Their destiny, like that of the “attenuated” viral strains grown in eggs, is to form part of a vaccine.

This (and other vaccine developments like it) would be a huge step, making malaria-preventive efforts an even more compelling investment in Africans' health and well-being.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Grim pictures and descriptions from yesterday's horrific bombing in Karachi, Pakistan made me particularly mindful of how unusual and hard-won is the peaceful culture of political dissent that I've come to expect -- even amidst sharp political differences -- in the U.S.

Al Gore can come and go as he pleases. Not so with former prime minister Benazir Bhutto. Yesterday's bombing was a statement against a specific political figure with a specific political platform. This is, to my mind, quite different than the vague ideological and political grievances that bubble up and result in the unanticipated terrorist attacks we've seen in New York, London and Madrid. The Karachi bombing was a political rejoinder the way one candidate cuts in on another in a televised debate or airs a new series of attack ads.

I suppose my point is this: attack ads and petty debates (even hanging chads) seem a blessing to me right now. Would that Pakistan could access these wonders of political civility.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On the subject of rhetorical commitments to human rights (see below), and with thanks to David, we tender this clip recycled from the archives of The Onion appropriately enough on the occasion of His Holiness the Dalai Lama's visit to the US Congress.

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This just in from The Guardian:

Attorney General-designate Michael Mukasey said Wednesday the president doesn't have the authority to use torture techniques against terrorism suspects, a stance not taken by predecessor Alberto Gonzales and considered key to the nominee's confirmation.

Mukasey repudiated a 2002 memo by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee that said the president has the power to issue orders that violate the Geneva Conventions as well as international and U.S. laws prohibiting torture. The memo was later disavowed and overridden by an executive order governing interrogation and treatment of terrorism suspects, which allowed harsh questioning but included a vaguely worded ban on cruel and inhuman treatment.

"The Bybee memo, to paraphrase a French diplomat, was worse than a sin, it was a mistake. It was unnecessary,'' Mukasey, 66, told the Senate Judiciary Committee under questioning by Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.

As GII's director, David Devlin-Foltz, commented on hearing this news: "Disavowal is an excellent first step. Now if we can only stop torturing too." True enough: the public relations/public diplomacy value of this statement will quickly invert itself well into the negative range if/when it comes out that, as was the case with wiretaps, the administration continues undeterred regardless of what the Department of Justice says.

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I admit it; I attended today's luncheon conversation with pundits Cal Thomas and Bob Beckel -- speaking about their new book, "Common Ground: How to Stop the Partisan War that is Destroying America" -- a real cynic. I was not cynical about the need to find and emphasize common ground in American politics; I was cynical about whether an emphasis on common ground will get anyone elected. I left the book talk very encouraged and on my way to being convinced.

Why? Thomas and Beckel aren't pie-in-the-sky, non-aligned outsiders with a crazy dream to clean up politics. Thomas is a conservative Republican, Beckel a liberal Democrat. They spent decades yelling at each other (and people like the other) on talk shows, playing up wedge issues as political consultants, crafting attack ads and doing everything possible to mobilize a small, vocal base and marginalize everyone else. They know how "polarizers" (their word) work from long experience. They're friends with Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi. And they lay out specific electoral strategies for how Congressional and presidential candidates can (and, they argue, will) win election by doing things differently.

I also appreciate that Thomas and Beckel don't claim that cheap political tricks to gin up the base don't work. Tom Delay, Ann Coulter and Michael Moore are facts of life. Rather, they claim that candidates can make such tactics too costly. It's fascinating to hear them talk through the relationships between political reporters, pollsters, consultants and campaign staff -- and to envision how a candidate would skirt his way through this maze without indulging these players in the normal fashion.

Thomas and Beckel take TV networks, political consultants, debate organizers, and many other "professional politicizers" to task for sinking a huge stake into political polarization. Sadly, I fear their accusations are truer than even they probably know: visit publisher Harper Collins' page detailing "Common Ground." Yes, that's an advertisement for Ann Coulter's email list sitting just to the right. Polarization pays.

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We heard positive noises from people in the know about who would make for a good World Bank president back when Robert Zoellick was a candidate for the job. Now it appears he is following through, pleasing both Sebastian Mallaby and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Center for Global Development president (and former director at the World Bank) Nancy Birdsall agrees that Zoellick is doing well. Of course, he could do better. Birdsall wants the World Bank not just to be content doing the things it does now a bit better, but also to fill new roles that, with some creative leadership, might give the institution new life. Birdsall argues for that the Bank should create international instruments for dealing with climate change and reform its own governance structures. This will be difficult, however, if Birdall's summary of why Zoellick has proved popular so far is correct:

Bank staff are delighted with his policy pragmatism and World Bank boosterism—the view that the bank can be all things to all shareholders and stakeholders, continuing to do everything it has always done—but more so and better so.

The only time I've ever seen Zoellick speak in person was on the subject of his negotiations in Sudan. Negotiating such issues for the World Bank must be roughly on par in terms of difficulty level. I hope Zoellick can find a fine balance; doing more and better at the same things the bank has done in the past is probably not enough to keep it relevant.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The U.S. may rank last on environmental leadership among the 21 rich countries that the CDI measures (see post below), but it is China that will be gain a worldwide reputation for insufferable pollution if it doesn't clean things up in Beijing very quickly. Not that China isn't trying. Wired Magazine ran a fascinating piece on the creative ways an authoritarian government goes about quick clean-up -- without much success to date.

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Every year I near the point of throwing my hands up in the air in confusion over who is really making a difference in the development field. Which countries are truly doing something positive for poorer neighbors? Is one stand-out program at the UK's DFID getting canceled out by an unrelated trade policy I haven't heard about? Are innovative attempts at aid like the Millennium Challenge Corporation and PEPFAR making up for U.S. foot-dragging on environmental issues? It's terribly complex to measure the overall development landscape.

Fortunately, about this time every fall the Center for Global Development releases its annual update to the Commitment to Development Index, which helps me put together the many pieces I've worked on or written about over the past year. Inevitably, when the update arrives I've nearly forgotten that such a resource exists -- and I'm thankful all over again that someone is taking account of the big picture.

This year, the CDI focuses on environmental impact -- where, incidentally, the U.S. ranks last. (Evidence that the Center for Global Development is in league with the Nobel Commission? You be the judge.) It's worth noting though, that despite clear deficiencies on environmental policy, the U.S. does number (#7 to be precise) among the most improved. That's what I like best about the CDI: issue spotlight or no, it's about overall impact.

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Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank thrives on the sheer weirdness that political reporting can entail in Washington; his columns seek such situations out. Today's column pokes fun at Evangelical preoccupations with the UN, grounded in the sort of pop-theology that goes hand-in hand with obsessive attention to Israel -- they both purportedly indicate the world's progress toward various apocalyptic scenarios discussed mostly by those who read and take seriously the Left Behind books.

Milbank finds delicious irony in the fact that the National Association of Evangelicals (and, in particular, its Richard Cizik whose chutzpah I admire more by the day) saw fit to invite UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as the NAE dinner's keynote speaker last night. This position, clarifies Milbank, is reserved for a person of unspeakable evil in the minds of a certain segment of Evangelicaldom:

"My joke is, some people will say the evangelical Christians have invited the Antichrist to the Last Supper," Cizik said, enjoying a chuckle before the Author of All Evil arrived.

Lest anybody miss the humor, Cizik paused. "Let's clarify the record," he said. "We're inviting a Christian man."

Milbank quickly notes that Cizik hasn't shrunk from criticism before -- he's a firm believer that many Evangelical Christians are willing to contribute to solutions on global issues that the UN deals with, like climate change. But leadership has been lacking, and he intends to do something about that.

Of course, I'm often surprised where leadership comes from within my Evangelical community. My wife just returned from a visit to Kansas City where a friend of hers works on staff at a conservative local church. The church just finished a complete overhaul of its building and facilities so as to comply with LEED green building standards.

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[This week we feature another friend of the GII, Don Kraus, as a guest-blogger.]

By Don Kraus

Here’s a riddle: What is it that gets environmental organizations playing nicely around the table with petroleum trade associations and marine industries? How about peace groups and the Pentagon? Give up? The answer has created the strangest bedfellow coalition ever to come together – the coalition to promote U.S. ratification of the Law of the Sea convention.

I’ve participated in many broad coalition efforts – including paying back dues to the U.N., the International Criminal Court U.S. signature campaign, and getting rid of John Bolton as U.N. ambassador. Nothing comes close to the breadth and depth of this group of NGOs and business groups that are working in parallel with many government agencies to ratify the Law of the Sea. The common goal is to get the U.S. to officially agree to the established rules for over two-thirds of the Earth’s surface.

The reasons coalition members support the treaty are as diverse their interests are. What is surprising is our agreement on the core message regarding ratification. Environmental organizations, scientific societies, peace groups, legal experts, all ocean industries, the military, and even the White House, agree that U.S. ratification will advance our goals and restore the United States’ international leadership role.

The basic points agreed to by the coalition and sent out by Citizens for Global Solutions in our messaging memo, The Minute, are:

• Security. Joining the convention will ensure that other countries recognize the navigational and overflight rights that our armed forces depend on. These rights will help to keep us safe, defend our interests at sea, and enhance collaboration with our allies.
• Economic Opportunity. Our absence from the convention handicaps our ability to exploit (or conserve) precious marine resources and protect our investments. The U.S. is already far behind in the race to stake claims in the resource-rich Arctic seabed. Joining would expand our control over an area larger than the continental U.S. and give our businesses access to resources in the deep seabed, where no nation can set the rules by itself.
• Responsible Stewardship. Joining the convention would put us in a position to further global efforts to protect marine life, conduct research, and prevent marine pollution. U.S. laws are already strong in these areas; if we join, we can urge other countries to fulfill their obligations to keep the seas clean and safe for future generations.

Deputy Secretary of State Negroponte in testimony before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee (SFRC) said,

… joining will serve the national security interests of the United States, secure U.S. sovereign rights over extensive marine areas, promote U.S. interests in the environmental health of the oceans, and give the United States a seat at the table when the rights essential to our interests are debated and interpreted.

The treaty’s opponents are feeling cornered. Their messages are about loss of sovereignty, loss of security, global taxes and an underhanded plot hatched by one-worlders. This ad played on MSNBC sums it up pretty well. But just because their arguments are not serious, doesn’t mean that they are. Frank Gaffney, John Bolton and others are ginning up an advocacy effort that will make it much more difficult for swing Republicans to vote for the treaty, even if President Bush has supported it. Their goal is simple, keep it from getting to the Senate floor and say whatever it takes to get the job done. Or, in the words one of the treaty's opponents, Jeremy Rabkin:

The Senate won't ratify the convention if it is controversial, and I'm doing everything I can to make a controversy.

For a good look at how both sets of messages have been deployed see the blog-debate between my colleague Raj Purohit and Doug Bandow of the American Conservative Defense Alliance at Across the Aisle. But this fight is not about the message. What it comes down to is progressive and conservative internationalists swinging U.S. foreign policy back towards multilateralism. It’s about the Bush administration doing the right thing, now that is has tried all of the other options. And it’s about ultra-nationalist conservatives attempting to stick their finger in the dam to hold back the rising tide of a 21st century global reality.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ironically, it's hard to imagine that this would have happened without the 9-11 attacks and the resulting efforts to understand and connect with our Muslim neighbors. This from The Asma Society's Islamic Culture and Arts newsletter:

This weekend, the color green will illuminate the Manhattan skyline. On the evenings of October 12­­-14, the Empire State Building—located in the heart of New York City’s most famed tourist district and recently named “America’s Favorite Building”—will be lit in green to commemorate the Muslim holiday of Eid-ul-Fitr.

We deeply appreciate this recognition of the American Muslim community by one of the United States’ most cherished landmarks and famous tourist destinations. This welcome gesture clearly demonstrates that the principles of understanding, mutual respect, and faith can remain vibrant aspects of our world. In celebrating together with the Muslims of New York City and the United States, the Empire State Building once again shows itself to be a powerful symbol in America’s most culturally vibrant city.

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I can get pretty excited about the possibilities when business leaders bring their management savvy, business models, networks, technical know-how, and investment to the nonprofit sphere. I see the things that make successful businesses work -- pragmatic planning and responsiveness to actual needs and desires (as opposed to perceived ones) are two good examples-- and I see how those things could enable nonprofits to be more effective and sustainable.

But the truth is, there are important differences in the nonprofit sector. I'm not the first to want to whip scraggly nonprofits into shape by applying techniques from the business world. As an insightful article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review reminds us, there exists a long and mixed history of these attempts, and the happy endings usually involve a healthy dose of learning on the part of former business executives as well as the other way around.

The article pinpoints five areas where business-minded executives often trip up when they get into nonprofit work -- which they initially expect will be a lightweight version of the business-world experience they're used to. But the tasks nonprofits face -- changing behavioral and structural systems -- are often simply harder to achieve than the goals one sets in business; this from the two McKinsey consultants who author the article.

To find out what exactly business executives don’t understand about nonprofit leadership, we conducted a virtual conversation among 11 nonprofit executives who have also held senior positions in the for-profit world – that is, crossover leaders. Although some of our interviewees noted that the gap in understanding between nonprofit and for-profit leaders is narrowing, on the whole they agreed that most business leaders sorely underestimate how tough nonprofit leadership can be.

Our interviewees identified five challenges that most business leaders fail to appreciate. First, nonprofit CEOs wield less authority and control than their for-profit counterparts. At the same time, they must answer to a wider range of stakeholders. Nonprofits also lack straightforward performance measures – there are no analogs to profit in social change – and yet they are under greater scrutiny from politicians and the press. Finally, compared to the corporate world, the nonprofit sector is underfunded, understaffed, under-resourced, and undertrained. Below we discuss each of the five commonly underappreciated challenges of nonprofit leadership, as well as how our crossover leaders deal with them.

We at the GII run up against item four quite a bit as we work with clients whose experience in the business world inclines them to ask for straightforward way to measure and evaluate what they're getting out of their advocacy investment. This is an important and admirable impulse. But the plain answer that the authors give -- there is no analog to profit for impact measurement -- is the right one. Once nonprofit leaders acknowledge this, they can move on to designing measures that will help to evaluate and improve their work, rather than looking high and low for the silver bullet.

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Jon Stewart conducts a fascinating investigation into President Bush's rhetorical style in this Daily Show clip. Stewart is dead on when he describes what's so strange about the President's speaking style: it comes across that, instead of saying lines in a speech, President Bush reads the stage direction. He describes the desired effect of the speech instead of actually delivering a speech that elicits that response. This approach would seem Orwellian ("I am a strong leader"; "I'm here to touch souls today") except that it comes off sounding so silly.

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• ValleyWag has a perfectly serviceable piece about the life of a buzzword for internet technology. Tons of this bleeds over into our business, and I have personally had to suppress the gag reflex watching someone across a conference table make exaggerated finger quotes when talking about a tipping point. The lead is unforgettable:

  A buzzword is no black swan, but when one breaks out of the long tail into the short head and hits the tipping point it still makes me question the wisdom of the crowds. But because the world is flat, I've listed a freakonomical list of the lifespan of a buzzword. Purple cow.

  It's a shame he couldn't work Made to Stick into that montage.
• A client of ours is setting about the modest task of overhauling the very idea of public diplomacy to more comprehensively cover components such as human interaction and student and professional exchange programs. With this in mind I noted a personal exchange success story in Foreign Policy's Passport blog. George Washington University professor Marc Lynch wrote an open letter in the magazine to the leadership of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood urging them to seize a unique opportunity for dialogue with the US government. Then something surprising happened:

  Last week, Lynch flew to Cairo, where he spoke with "most of the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood which isn't currently in prison" and a number of other bloggers, analysts, journalists, and others. "Most of the leaders had read the memo, and came into the meetings with some detailed criticisms and complaints," Lynch writes.

  The Brotherhood didn't embrace Lynch's hope that they would sit down with the West and start a constructive dialogue of reconciliation, though pressing political factors and a crackdown on dissent in Egypt probably figure into that decision, as FP mentions. Nevertheless, this human connection is an impressive thing to witness.
• MSNBC has a nifty little matrix that allows you to check out video clips and brief summaries of candidate policy positions and rank the candidate against your own beliefs. I was initially skeptical, but found it easy to use and surprisingly interesting to review. Their content isn't perfect. There are some candidates whose positions are only a fine shade of meaning away from the others; a standardized language that allows those subtle differences to become more clear would help. Screenshot below. Via Fimoculous.

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If you want some sobering numbers about philanthropy, check out Susan Herr's note about new research, funded by Google, pointing to the fact that less than one-third of the quarter-trillion dollars donated by Americans every year goes to less-advantaged populations. Note also that the percentage of Americans making less than $1 million and giving money to the poor is larger than the percentage of people who make more than $1 million and who give to the poor.

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I don't really know what goes on in the head of editorial page editors and the like when they seek out intentionally unconstructive contrarian views with which to fill their newspapers. I'm all for narrative diversity, but that doesn't mean I want to read editorials about the sun revolving around the Earth. Anyhow, reading the Washington Post ed page has been an especially bile-churning exercise in self-punishment lately (and I'm not the only one who thinks so). So was the case this weekend with the Post's inexplicable high-profile placement of environmental uber-skeptic Bjorn Lomborg's Chill Out piece in Sunday's Outlook section.

There are lots of critiques of Lomborg's less-than-scientific approach, so I will leave you to spin through them at your leisure.

To me, it's the fact that Lomborg's piece is featured -- without a dissenting voice -- in such a prominent place in the Post that says so much. It seems that merely because Lomborg acknowledges warming is caused by people -- and despite the fact that he doesn't seem to care -- he is allowed to make almost any claim imaginable. Many of the claims he does make are in dispute. But his central argument reminds me of ones we hear from foreign aid skeptics: There are a lot of problems, and all your ideas for solving them are rubbish. Foreign aid skeptics like Bill Easterly don't debate the existence of children dying of malaria, AIDS or TB. It's just that he deems the whole system designed to get medicine to the child wildly inefficient, full of waste and fraud and throwing the whole thing out is the only way to fix it. This bombastic approach works for global warming skeptics as well. Sure, we're warming the globe. But spending a billions to reduce emissions won't work. Stop trying, and instead celebrate the small victories, such as fewer death from cold (seriously).

Lomborg's alternative argument goes like this: reducing the main cause of warming within the confines of our current system will be too expensive; instead, spend all that money on finding new technology to entirely change the way we consume energy and emit pollution. Basically, make a new system, don't clean and fix the old one.

The problem with both of these skeptical approaches is that the world doesn't work in the binary system. Tossing out the current foreign aid system so you build a new one you love means schools get closed, kids die of diarrhea, AIDS treatments don't get administered, food doesn't get distributed, chaos and need mingle unnecessarily. Easterly and others like him know this won't be allowed to happen, and they can happily continue lobbing bombs at foreign aid while it does what it does: sloppily, inefficiently, but undeniably help some people.

However, Lomborg and other climate skeptics perhaps don't realize the power they hold. I favor innovation -- I would go so far as to agree that a completely new way of using energy will be the key to solving our long-term climate problems. But I can't look into the eyes of my child and say, "Here's hoping the scientists find a way to save this planet for you, because I think coal-burning energy plants shouldn't have to obey the Clean Air Act since it will cost so much." Lomborg's excuse-making makes it easy for policy-makers and polluters to wash their hands of the pressing problem of climate change and instead pin their hopes on a breakthrough that may come too late to save the world we've come to know.

Incidentally, we wrote a week or so ago about Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger and their new book about the future of environmentalism and everything else. Joseph Romm at Gristmill makes a convincing argument that Shellenberger and Nordhaus are having the same negative effect as Lomborg on the medium-term hopes of blunting the impact of human-made warming.
Flickr photo by Dreth57 used under Creative Commons permission.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a study about my kind last week. The headline reads, "Young White Evangelicals: Less Republican, Still Conservative." My reaction: finally the pollsters notice me!

Since 2005 the group’s Republican affiliation has dropped significantly – by 15 percentage points. However, the shift away from the GOP has not resulted in substantial Democratic gains; instead it has produced a small increase in the number of Democrats (five-point increase) and a ten-point increase in the number of independents and politically unaffiliated Americans.

This drift toward the political (if not ideological) center is something I have experienced and something I've noticed among my white Evangelical friends. I had wondered if this was a micro-effect, the result of moving to Washington and finding our views tempered by the inescapable barrage of information -- much of it unflattering -- about the GOP's legacy during this administration.

I'm pleased (naturally) to hear that the effect is broader than this. I can think of a lot of reasons why thoughtful conservatives would find themselves dissatisfied with the GOP on both fiscal and social grounds. I do wonder how long the disgruntled feeling will last and whether there will be enough of it to spur potential independent candidates like Michael Bloomberg to make a play at such voters -- or whether either party can respond to woo us.

For my part, I don't feel any overweening dissatisfaction with politics; there are lots of inspiring individuals (see Sen. Chuck Hagel, Newark Mayor Corey Booker, Mayor Bloomberg). It's just that the Republican Party is stuck, for the time being, in the Bush legacy. Until it finds its way out again, I suspect we will have to make do with mavericks.

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Business publications have been touting Rwanda quite a lot these days (see my previous post). After reading Rwandan President Paul Kagame's op-ed in Business Day, the country looks even more promising.

After all, the fact remains that no matter how ripe with possibility certain sectors in an emerging market might be, investments and businesses are only as secure as the government makes them. Investors have played this game in Africa and Latin America for generations: an underdeveloped market begs for new entrants with new offerings, so investors start businesses only to find themselves in a tightrope routine of bribes, threats and expropriation with government officials who don't expect (or allow) businesses to behave properly.

That is why the first part of Kagame's op-ed -- in which he describes why Africa has had such a hard time putting the $300b it has received in aid to good use (useful, but we've heard it before) -- isn't nearly as exciting as the latter: his vision for Rwanda.

We must develop and communicate a vision. This does not come from one person. Rather, it must be nurtured over time in a way so that all citizens can contribute to its creation and ownership. Such a vision is not about reaching an abstract set of development targets focused on poverty alleviation. It is instead a positive and substantive strategy for growth and development.

Our vision in Rwanda is to become a regional service hub for transport and communications. It is a place where energy costs are sharply reduced by the use of cutting-edge technology and realised through regional co-operation. A country where visitors can not only experience our magnificent wildlife and famous gorillas but also take a journey on our “coffee trail”, a route of plantations dotted amid spectacular mountain scenery. This is a vision where the traumatic divisions of the past are healing in the melting pot of commercial activity and burgeoning employment. It is, in every sense, a vision of “Team Rwanda”...

These actions will only bear fruit when Africa substitutes external conditionality — that is, doing what the donors tell us to do — with internal policy clarity — that is, knowing ourselves what we need to do and articulating this vision clearly to our development partners.

We need to learn to “just say no” whenever donor priorities do not align with domestic priorities. We need to use aid and debt relief as a catalyst for growth.

This is the sort of vision that cannot be dreamed up by the World Bank or anyone else; it must come from local leaders. The Millennium Challenge Account exists to prod countries with the possibility of crafting such a vision to do so. But Kagame takes his vision to another level, advocating that African governments refuse aid when it compromises the pursuit of their goals.

Even a genuinely visionary leader like Kagame will have a tough time, of course. Rwanda has tremendous infrastructure challenges to overcome before it can become the lively "regional hub for transport and communications." But with obvious interest from businesspeople the world over and Kagame's leadership, these are not insurmountable barriers by any means.

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I didn't think much of the State Department's new blog, the regrettably named Dipnote, when I read about it at first. (I'm still not completely convinced.) Perhaps it was posts like this one that made me skeptical:

Today was another full day of meetings with my counterparts from a number of countries, including Italy, Israel, and Libya. Meanwhile, the Secretary was meeting with the Foreign Ministers of the other permanent members of the Security Council (China, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom), plus Germany and the European Union (referred to as the P5 plus two), to talk about a third sanctions resolution on Iran. Iran continues to defy the international community in its refusal to suspend its nuclear proliferation-related activities, and all participants agreed that a third resolution must be adopted if Iran continues to fail to meet certain conditions.

The permanent five members of the Security Council, plus Germany, will work on the text of a third sanctions resolution across the coming weeks. If reports due in November from Dr. Javier Solana, who acts as the representative of the P5 plus one to the Iranian government, and from Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, show that Iran is both unwilling to agree to the terms of negotiation that have been on the table since spring of 2006 (negotiations will begin once Iran verifiably suspends its proliferation-related activities) and unwilling to completely disclose its past nuclear activities to the IAEA, then the resolution will be put to a vote in the Security Council.

And I thought, "well, if that's what they want to do, there's nothing to stop them." And I didn't add Dipnote to my RSS Reader.

I want to give it a second chance. Foreign Policy made me give Dipnote a second chance when they posted a laudatory piece (in response to being added to the Dipnote Blogroll) about the blog permitting comments. I think allowing ordinary folks to comment on the blog is a great first step, and I'm waiting for the next one: Actually letting writers open up and talk about their work. Slap a big, formal "The opinions below are those of the author alone and do not reflect the opinion of the US Department of State or any other part of the US Government" label on the blog and let them write.

I don't care how happy Steve Royster is that the passport backlog is almost gone. I'd like to know how this happened, because none of the excuses we've heard have been sufficient. Royster happily notes that State issued 50% more passports this fiscal year than the year before. Nevertheless, the paralyzing demand for passports could have been predicted if anyone at DoS had read, I don't know, this chart from the Commerce Department's Office of Travel and Tourism Industries.

See, blogging is fun. It's about reaching out of boring silos and finding new connections and challenging conventional wisdom. It's not about good PR.

The FP item I linked above that brought me back to Dipnote today refers to a pair of State Department Arabic Language bloggers who are getting involved in online conversations across the Arab World. The bloggers -- really just professional commenters/forum-dwellers -- seem to be offering a thoughtful challenge to the prevailing malignant groupthink of a lot of Arabic blogs. It's a shame they don't write for Dipnote.

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