For nostalgia, and a sad commentary on the way our media -- because it has become such a big business -- doesn't necessarily make decisions that serve the public, read Erika Niedowski's farewell from Moscow. She sent this piece to colleagues after it didn't make the final edit of the Baltimore Sun earlier this wek. Niedowski was filing the final report from The Baltimore Sun's Moscow bureau, closed after nearly 55 years. She writes:

The Sun, the second American newspaper in Moscow after the New York Times, was in business here for the launch of Sputnik and the Cuban missile crisis; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; Mikhail Gorbachev's ground-breaking perestroika reforms; the collapse of the Soviet Union and the election of Russia's first democratically president, Boris N. Yeltsin; the free-wheeling chaos of Russia's early experiment with capitalism in the 1990s; and the succession of Vladimir Putin and the resurgence of a country awash in oil wealth.

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I don't even remember how I learned about the Miss Landmine website and pageant. The Angolan government is cooperating, and the pageant will be held in Luanda, Angola on 4/4/2008. The site isn't particularly great, but includes info about the candidates, embraces a message of empowerment (replacing "victims" with "survivors") and lists nations that still use/promote landmines.

And the photos of the women, beautifully bedecked and standing proud despite landmine injuries, are amazing and heartrending.

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Things in Afghanistan are...not so good. The Secretary of Defense was up on Capitol Hill the other day slagging on the NATO Force we left in charge of the country so we could spend more time with our one true love, Iraq. The poppy crop was predictably gigantic this year and politically, the declining security situation makes it harder for Hamid Karzai to lead a somewhat splintered nation forward.

Culturally, Afghanistan remains a troubled nation. Earlier this year, release of the film adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's "Kite Runner" was delayed so visas and flights could be arranged to bring its two child stars out of the country safely, since it was feared that Taliban and other culturally sensitive types would seek to punish them for their participation in the film.

The much-discussed feel-good story of our invasion of Afghanistan more than six (!) years ago was the liberation of the women in the country. The Taliban had oppressed women in the country to such a degree that ever step toward liberation -- showing their faces, voting, serving in Parliament -- was heralded as a victory in the war on terror.

That progress hasn't reached all parts of Afghanistan, as the UNICEF photo of the year makes clear.

American freelance photographer Stephanie Sinclair took this picture. From the UNICEF page:

He’s forty, she’s eleven. And they are a couple – the Afghan man Mohammed F.* and the child Ghulam H.*. “We needed the money”, Ghulam’s parents said. Faiz claims he is going to send her to school. But the women of Damarda village in Afghanistan’s Ghor province know better: “Our men don’t want educated women.” They predict that Ghulam will be married within a few weeks after her engagement in 2006, so as to bear children for Faiz.

During her stay in Afghanistan, it consistently struck American photographer Stephanie Sinclair how many young girls are married to much older men. She decided to raise awareness about this topic with her pictures. Particularly as the official minimum age for brides in Afghanistan is sixteen and it is therefore illegal to marry children.

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One of the first things I really absorbed from working at the GII was the power of the frame. Like most people, I had used framing in two ways: often selectively ignoring it because I wanted to throw rhetorical bombs at my opponents as opposed to connect with new publics, and otherwise instinctively obeying the framing doctrine without really thinking too hard about it.

When I began to look at the GII's own early research and those of other framing and messaging wizards like George Lakoff and Susan Bales at Frame Works Institute, I began to better understand how accomplished communicators can navigate frames to achieve their goals.

The first framing lesson that really got me here was that old saw, the earth-from-space. We use a quote from some Arabian Prince/astronaut about how once he could see the Earth from space, without all the political boundaries that keep us fighting, he recognized that the reasons for that fighting didn't really have meaning. The image of the Earth from space is one that cane be carefully employed to make people better understand how we are all interconnected, even though it sounds like hippie trash talk.

To that end, I track on meaningful images that connect us to the world around us. And at the end of the year, I browse the almost limitless selection of Top Ten and Best Of lists, because Americans love lists, and I am nothing if not American.

Space remains a valuable source of potentially humbling frame-enabling images. This year, the BadAstronomy.com blog has collected the Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2007, and they are fabulous. The photo above is number 7 on the list, The Lover's Embrace of Arp 87:

Arp 87 is the name given to the system of two galaxies, NGC 3808A and NGC 3808B. They passed each other just as the age of dinosaurs was starting to get going on Earth, 200 million years ago. The gravity of B (the cigar-shaped galaxy on the left) drew out a long tentacle from the much larger A (the spiral on the right), and it appears as if the passage also wrapped the tendril around B, perhaps more than once. It’s also possible the tendril flared out, separating into streams that only appear to entwine the smaller galaxy.

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Guess what? The media is paying lots of attention to global issues. At last, writes Heather Hurlburt on the Connect US blog, those of us who've been working feverishly to get the public to sit up and take notice of what the U.S. is doing around the world have their wish granted.

Lo and behold, these issues will be a key feature of the debate in this election season, and prominently -- not just on Iraq, but regarding intervention in general, preventing the spread of deadly weapons, force vs. diplomacy, the style with which the U.S. behaves itself in the world, energy policy, the Middle East, etc. Especially if you read speeches and policy papers, the primary season has produced a reasonable amount of rich content. A great moment for advocacy groups to be out there talking to the newly-engaged public, right?

But the public isn't hearing our carefully nuanced language about responsible U.S. engagement. Hurlburt cites a recent survey indicating that when Americans hear the word "engagement," they think "troops." Writes Hurlburt, "The public has just lost, in the past seven years, all concept that we have other ways of interacting with the world. They sure aren't being shown alternatives on TV." She issues a challenge to advocates on foreign policy issues: be direct, be concrete and don't shy away from the fact that these issues are complex. Generalities get misunderstood.

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I just love David Armano's write up of the new NASA website. He says about the nifty visual browsing taxonomy, "In today's ADD-driven world, we need visual cues to help us prioritize things. This is a nice simple way to prioritize content that Nasa feels is important (without being too heavy-handed)."

That the site is a wealth of information about the agency and its fascinating work is a welcome breath of fresh air compared to the boring press-release and company-line site I remember previously.

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Roderick at Marketing Pilgrim catches Andy Beard's excellent list of 10 questions to ask before starting a social media marketing campaign. I like the list because I believe it's important to package and repackage the big findings about planning a campaign and communicate them to people in whatever way possible.

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Passport got to it before I did, but this may be my favorite news photo of 2007:

MARWAN NAAMANI/AFP/Getty Images

This goes right alongside the numerous accounts of Cairo's finest dining establishment right across the courtyard from the Sphinx, a two story KFC/Pizza Hut with table service(!) if you can believe it.

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For business executives, the idea that corporations should concern themselves with social issues like poverty was until recently a touchy subject. Not long ago, talk of social issues in a business context came only from recovering hippies set off by fruit company-sponsored coups in Latin America, dictator-propping oil multinationals in Africa and sweatshop-sourced clothing from Asia. Activists demanded that firms answer for the repercussions of their operations, just as those same voices had demanded change from governments.

Of course, pursuing social responsibility (an ambiguous goal in any case) costs businesses money. Under the presumed rules of corporate social responsibility (CSR), a business must devote labor and capital not only to maximizing profit but to environmental impact and the well-being of people and communities, even those only distantly connected to operations.

But recently both business strategists like McKinsey and Co. and NGOs in the social space have begun calling that view into question. Issues like poverty are not just expensive distractions, not merely damage control. The Center for Global Development just released a guide to help companies, "Joining the Fight Against Global Poverty: A Menu for Corporate Engagement." This is a new approach in which companies proactively define and pursue “social contracts” (McKinsey's term) on issues that touch core business interests. This is worth doing because the business world is becoming more porous -- social issues are at play throughout corporations, industries and sectors -- and business leaders will find more success proactively integrating these issues into their strategic decision-making process rather than responding defensively as risks dictate.

CGD lays out six approaches that companies can take, including standards compliance, charitable giving, resource engagement, commercial leverage, development entrepreneurship, and policy advocacy. It is times like these when CGD is at its best: codifying the concept of CSR, where the lines between corporate posturing and genuinely useful contributions can get murky.

CGD is not the only one trying to make sense of the blurry lines between business and charity in the developing world. This week AEI put out a handy primer on "Entrepreneurial Philanthropy in the Developing World." The piece gives an overview of the thinking behind entrepreneurial approaches to philanthropy and digs a bit into the respective business models of key players like the Acumen Fund, Endeavor, Technoserve, etc. Authors Mauro De Lorenzo and Apoorva Shah also examine which foundations are doing what in this area.

These models are still in the early stages -- the AEI piece is largely trying to define what constitutes "entrepreneurial philanthropy." The next step will be for the CGDs of the world to help us measure it.

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Speaking of small players doing big things, The Center for Global Development singled Global Witness out for its prestigious 2007 Commitment to Development Award. "The Commitment to Development 'Ideas in Action' Award honors individuals or organizations for 'raising public awareness and changing the attitudes and policies of the rich world toward developing countries.'"

Global Witness has done that by focusing its efforts on specific abuses in specific places. The entire organization has a staff of only 35, but they've learned to leverage their strengths:

Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development, said Global Witness, founded in 1992 by environmental activists Patrick Alley, Charmian Gooch and Simon Taylor, has repeatedly exposed "the corrupt exploitation of natural resources and the international trade system" as well as human rights and environmental abuses.

Its first investigation of illegal timber sales by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia shut down that trade in 1995. A headline-making Global Witness report in 1998 showed how rebels in Angola were financing a deadly civil war by selling diamonds. That work, along with a January 2000 report by Partnership Africa Canada, another crusading NGO, on the role of diamonds in the civil war in Sierra Leone, figured prominently in the establishment of the Kimberley Process to certify diamonds that are not mined from conflict zones.

Global Witness, which now has a staff of 35 and a £3 million budget, produces reports and videos exposing corruption and environmental wrong-doing, especially in countries awash in oil revenues, from Turkmenistan to Equatorial Guinea. It was a founder of the Publish What You Pay campaign, which seeks transparency about how resource-rich governments spend their share of mineral revenues. Funders include a dozen foundations as well as the development agencies of Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. It recently helped put a timber and arms trafficker in jail in Holland.

Congrats to CGD for looking beyond the big players to small but significant contributors like Global Witness.

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The BBC ran a story on Monday detailing creative ways that women living in the Sahel near the River Niger are stopping the advance of the Sahara desert. These women are reversing the deforestation that worsens the effects of climate change by planting and nurturing eucalyptus trees and creating rice fields. BBC reporter Celeste Hicks comments that, "All this goes some way to showing that an area which is always precariously balanced on the edge of self-sufficiency can continue to support a population if scarce resources are well managed."

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I'm a fan of Regret the Error, a blog about corrections in newspapers.

This year's collection of the year in errors gives an interesting taste of the foibles the news media brings to reporting especially international stories, For instance this photo from CNN's the Situation Room with the words "Where's Obama" superimposed over a shot of Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri. Or this beauty from a newspaper in Ontario:

In an article in Monday’s newspaper, there may have been a misperception about why a Woodstock man is going to Afghanistan on a voluntary mission. Kevin DeClark is going to Afghanistan to gain life experience to become a police officer when he returns, not to shoot guns and blow things up.
The Sentinel-Review apologizes for any embarrassment this may have caused.

Los Angeles Times:
Mexico City newspaper: An article in Wednesday’s Calendar section about an English-language newspaper in Mexico City referred to the many U.S. ex-patriots who live there. It should have said expatriates.

The New York Times:
A caption on Saturday with a picture showing a Pakistani man on his bicycle carrying a painting of his son, who he says was abducted by Pakistani intelligence agents in 2001, misspelled the name of the Pakistani capital. It is Islamabad, not Islambad.

The New York Times:
A picture caption on Wednesday with an article about a meeting between the leaders of North Korea and South Korea misspelled the name of the North Korean capital, where the meeting was held. It is Pyongyang, not Pongyang.

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The HELP Commission, given the unenviable task of figuring out how to reform U.S. foreign assistance programs, has been at work for almost two years. Just this week, the commission released its report at last. I had the chance to hear a number of the commissioners discuss their conclusions at Brookings on Monday. The commission's recommendations are ambitious, and there was much back-and-forth about which were achievable.

But, as is our wont at CPSS, I couldn't help look at this from an evaluator's perspective. What did the HELP legislation create the commission to accomplish? Did it meet those goals? Let's go back to the tapes:

The HELP Commission shall develop and deliver actionable proposals to the President, Secretary of State and Congress to enhance and leverage the efficiency and effectiveness of U.S. foreign assistance programs to reduce poverty through sustained economic growth and self-sufficiency. The Commission will communicate the need for change and will make bold recommendations for mechanisms, structures and incentives which will create definable, achievable and measurable outcomes that empower recipients and meet U.S. national security and foreign policy goals and objectives.

I was afraid that such a long process, amidst so much structural turmoil between the State Department and USAID, would result in few useful, actionable recommendations. Not so. Take a look at the table of contents in the report. Take a moment and think: what are your main concerns with the way U.S. foreign assistance is formulated and delivered? Fragmented agencies and approaches? Incoherent trade v. aid policies? DoD encroachment? A dreadfully outdated Foreign Assistance Act? The Congressional budgetary process? Earmarks? Presidential special initiatives? Procurement and tied aid? Too few channels for initiative and local entrepreneurship? No graduation strategy? Anemic staff and curtailed authority at USAID? Short-term political objectives at State? Preventive v. palliative programs? It's all there. The answers are not perfect and some may have only a slim chance of fruition, but this is a remarkably thorough and bold treatment of what is wrong with U.S. foreign aid.

The headline-grabbing recommendations will center, no doubt, on the structural aspects of the report. Commissioners lay out three possibilities: the status quo "F" process; restructuring State, USAID and other agencies into a "super State Department" called the International Affairs Department; or creating a cabinet level position for a director of foreign assistance. Commissioners differed on this issue (and others) to the degree that three of them created a dissenting addendum(pdf) to the HELP Commission report. Commissioner Jeffrey Sachs did not sign the report at all.

Obviously, the HELP report will be of most use to the next administration, since the current one has made its flawed play at this. As former Congressman and longtime champion of aid reform Jim Kolbe commented Monday, it's not clear how soon any future president can spend much time on this when Iraq, Afghanistan, health care and entitlement programs will demand immediate attention. It will require a president who is committed to the issue of global development and willing to expend political capital to see our process improved. This was always the case. But I feel much better that he or she will have the HELP report on hand when the time comes.

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With a hat-tip to Edith Asibey of Asibey Consulting, here's an interesting Chronicle of Philanthropy online chat with Holden Karnofsky of the nonprofit evaluator Give Well and the "world's first transparent grant maker" Clear Fund. Karnofsky is a fierce devotee of evaluation and the meaningful assessment of effectiveness. As the Chronicle explains:

The Clear Fund, now in the process of awarding about $140,000 in grants, asks its grant applicants to provide hard evidence that they are effective. It publishes its assessment of that evidence on the GiveWell Web site, whether it decides the group is worthy of support or not.

Holden's thoughts are available daily at The Give Well blog. He's got all sorts of interesting pearls of wisdom throughout the Chronicle chat, including:

• Guys, are we all together on this? The "straw ratio" (percentage of revenue spent on programs as opposed to administration) is meaningless? Charity Navigator is a farce? Are we all sick of the way the media repeats these same lies over and over again? What can we do about it? How can we break the spell that's been cast on all these reporters? Serious question. This is one of the few times I would consider joining some club or signing some petition or being in some "movement" or "protest." Ideas?


• I don't think reducing administrative and fundraising costs should be a priority. At all. Increasing overhead so you can study the problems charities are working on, and how well-suited their strategies are to address these problems, has far more potential to improve results than reducing overhead so we can spend a few extra bucks on strategies that haven't been critically evaluated.

Sounds completely true to me ... yet doesn't diminish the need for evaluation, because without it, you learn NOTHING. The fact is that intuition is nothing like a reasonable substitute for observation - the whole history of science is the history of that fact hitting us repeatedly in the face. This is a really good and tough question. By its nature, the question of whether to measure has to be answered without the facts at hand, meaning through intuition, analogy, etc., which is somewhat ironic and frustrating.

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Nuclear terrorism is the scariest security threat there is: it involves all of the destructive power of nuclear-armed states with none of the checks. Deterrence has seen us through in the past, but the concept, it is argued, is moot for a small group with a suicide mission mentality. Worst case scenarios abound as experts try to forecast how such a situation would play out.

Michael Levi's new book, On Nuclear Terrorism, is meant to help us "kick the habit" of forecasting doomsday scenarios and demanding perfect defenses. Writing on TPM Cafe, Levi argues that "No Defense Is Perfect," but luckily there are so many places for a nuclear terrorist to fail along the way that we have many more opportunities for disrupting such plots than we might think.

In 1984, the IRA came within a whisker of killing Margaret Thatcher in her hotel room at Brighton's Grand Hotel. The day after, it issued a statement: "Today we were unlucky, but remember; we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always." That maxim has become popular amongst our political leaders in recent years.

If you look inside nuclear terrorism, though, the exact opposite becomes true. Move from stage to stage of a nuclear plot and you will discover a host of ways that a terrorist group might fail. That turns the old saw on its head. We only have to be lucky once for a plot to fail. To succeed, a terrorist group must be lucky always.

Levi takes this threat seriously, but he doesn't want the issue to succumb to the crushing weight of impossible odds that can plague scary global issues. He breaks the problem down into more manageable pieces, which is usually the first step toward constructive action.

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It's been a while since this blog has run an update on global issues poll numbers. We've done a lot of reporting on this in the past, but where are the numbers are going as we head into an election year?

The latest meta-poll on American engagement writ large, from the UN Foundation and the Better World Campaign, confirms that the poll numbers we've been looking at since the U.S. began its campaign in Iraq and following 9/11 do seem to form distinct trends settling in for the foreseeable future. Americans are still reluctant to do too much on our own without buy-in and support from other countries, they're worried about our declining reputation around the world and they are afraid that U.S. dependence on foreign oil, in particular, weakens our position in many ways.

The events in Iraq and since 9/11 have shifted some voting blocs as well.

The research also shows how changing American attitudes are realigning old assumptions about certain voting blocs: young people, disillusioned by the war in Iraq, are “new isolationists” while a key segment of GOP primary voters are increasingly open to the idea of international cooperation. Overall, a sharp generational difference has opened in the United States, with older Americans more inclined to support U.S. involvement in international affairs.

Of course, the question of priority always lurks beneath the surface of polls like this: sure, these issues affect voting patterns, but how much when they bump up against the mainstays of campaign discourse? That remains the question.

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I was chatting with my sister this morning (on Google Talk) and we were talking about going to get Christmas trees (we both live in the DC area). When we were kids, we reminisced about going to a tree farm near our hometown in Western Pennsylvania and cutting down our own tree and buying it from this kindly old man. As the conversation progressed, I was using Google on my end trying to track down the name and location of the farm, fueled by curiosity as to whether the place had succumbed to development or worse. We both remembered the couple who owned the tree farm as being fantastically old when we were buying trees there fifteen years ago.

I believed the farm was in Murrysville. My sister believed the couple's last name was "Mance." (How she remembered this is a complete mystery to me.) I recreated from memory the driving route from my childhood home to the tree farm using the satellite view of Google Maps. Initially, I made a "wrong turn" and was led to believe that the farm had been converted into housing with a lake (ugh).

More Googling pointed to a reference in a local high school booster's online newsletter of sales of discount coupons for the tree farm as a fundraiser. No date was in evidence, though, and things hang around the internet for years. Next a Google-assisted search of nearby newspapers yielded a story from last December of the tree farm's then 90 year-old owner Nick Mance still running the place. He was listed as a widower. My sister found the wife's obituary; she died in 2004.

Still, my reconstruction of the route to the farm pointed to 2006 being the last year the tree farm was in operation. The guy was 90 years old.

But then more Googling yielded a tiny scrap of information. This Christmas time tree farm story included a reference to the street the farm was on, School road." My aerial-view reconstruction of the route was off! School Road was one cross-street away! Mance's farm was still there. A Google maps search of the new street put us undeniably in front of a satellite shot of the farm as we remembered it: an ordinary house with a larger-than-average macadam driveway falling off to a sweeping 15-acre valley of Christmas trees.

The coup de grace? Google added "Street View" to Pittsburgh and its environs earlier this year. I was able to virtually sit in the passenger seat of my mom's '86 Thunderbird as we drove up to Mance's Tree Farm:

A better view:

Google has assimilated my childhood. Resistance was futile.

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Someone recently reminded me, when I mentioned that I was going to deliver a training somewhere, that I used to declare that I would never do a training. There were a bunch of reasons why, but needless to say, I've shifted my position and do trainings, presentations and the like quite often.

So I don't want to paint myself into a similar corner with this statement, but it's hard for me to resist one of my favorite bugbears: I hate mission statements. I just think they are an artificial construct, an obstacle lots of organizations throw down on their path to getting things done. I don't believe organizations should just wildly plunge ahead without a plan, but I don't know why we became so obsessed with the relationship between plans, goals, and missions. Almost every mission statement I've read is either so simplistic as to be useless or so overly detailed it's irrelevant before the ink dries on the annual report whose inside cover it invariable graces.

As with most things one doesn't like, I look for less mission statement everywhere. Therefore I greet with enthusiasm Nancy Schwartz's catch of the mission statement of the New Museum in New York City:

Less is more.

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Two compelling, eye-catching social advertising tools profiled by Osocio, the successor to Houtlust which wrote about these issues at another inscrutable address until earlier this year when the site went quiet.

The first one is "Free Rice" from the UN World Food Programme. As Liz Losh explains, the site is a game site that allows users to play a somewhat challenging vocabulary game while earning rice for a hungry family. It also highlights sponsors of the World Food Program. Liz notes that the current gaming trend points toward creative time-killing while engaging in some self-improvement (check out Big Brain Academy for the super-popular Nintendo Wii). Liz also says:

Other cause marketers, such as The Breast Cancer Site, are using the promise of delivering “eyeballs” to online advertisers as a way to get traffic and raise money for charitable programs. Some might question the way this strategy replaces active participation with passive reception and might argue that using brand names and logos from commercial sponsors makes corporate capitalism too prominent and undermines the UN’s central message about social justice.

The game is addictive. I went through enough questions to bank 1180 grains of rice. However, flipping back to complete this post, I can't tell you who the corporate sponsors on the page were. Nothing. Looking back, the single banner ad on the site is at the bottom, and was mostly invisible to me without scrolling. The sponsors include eToys, Western Union and Office Depot.

The second item I came across that's worth a second look at Osocio was this nifty little item. It looks like a Google Earth/Google Maps view of somewhere, but when you take the ad's advice and move the slider to zoom out, you read "We're sorry, but only 7% of the Atlantic Forest is left in Brazil." Brilliant! And depressing.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There's a fascinating interview of Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, on YouTube. Michael Fairbanks of OTF Group, a consultancy, wants to know how Kagame thinks about Rwanda's approach to development since the country has not had the kind of access to foreign aid that other African countries have. In the course of the interview, Kagame says some shocking things, coming from an African president:

• How can we Rwandans feel comfortable knowing that taxpayers in other countries are responsible for our development? Rwandans cannot be comfortable with that. Nobody owes Rwandans anything.
• Entrepreneurship is the cornerstone of development in Rwanda because each of us has different talents to do different things. We need to use our talents.
• It makes me feel wonderful that young, aspiring people don't want to work in the Rwandan government like they used to. They want to start businesses in the private sector. This is a huge step for us.
• Rwanda is maybe the only African country that spends more on education than the military because this is how we will prosper economically. When we are strong economically, our military will be strong. This is why I changed the military academy into a business academy.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Via FP's Passport, I learned about WWF UK's new campaign "Deeper Luxury." As FP mentions, the campaign focuses on grading luxury brands and chastising them for being bad on the environmental and other social issues, from emissions to human rights. The campaign also has a component focusing on the celebrities who endorse these products. The WWF press release goes pretty far down this road. Anthony Kleanthous, a senior WWF policy advisor notes:

The world of celebrity leads by example and generates an aspirational desire for branded products. These stars have the responsibility to make sure that the brands they are endorsing are not damaging the planet. Let's face it, who wants to pay extra for a dirty brand?

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