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Although people living in poverty are among the most vulnerable to a warming planet, some of the world’s poor could end up winners in the climate change shuffle. As heat and drought drive crop yields down, basic commodity prices will go up. That will harm some—and help others. “There are really very different effects on poverty depending on which poor people you look at,” says David Lobell, an assistant professor of environmental earth system science at Stanford University. “Farmers are getting hit with lower yields, but the prices of the things that they’re selling go up enough that they actually become less poor as a result.” The effects could be large enough to lift many agriculture-specialized households in Asia and Latin America out of poverty. And it could happen quite soon. “It’s not implausible that even in the next 20 years, climate change could drive prices up considerably.” These projections differ from most in that Lobell and colleagues consider a range of possible productivity scenarios instead of just the most likely one. As an agricultural ecologist, Lobell compiled plausible yields for six different crops in the year 2030. He used as the worst case scenario not what happens “if things…

In God’s Economy, Lew Daly has written perhaps the most complete chronicle of the legal and policy foundations of former President George W. Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative. Eschewing polarizing diatribe for rigorous historical scholarship, he provides deep insights into the Catholic and Dutch Reformed philosophies that guided the initiative, and puts forth a plausible framework for future faith-based policy. But like the Faith-Based Initiative itself, God’s Economy is driven by a deep faith in the superior efficacy of religious transformative services—and there is simply very little evidence to justify that faith. There are no scientifically valid studies—none whatsoever—showing that faith-based social service providers are more effective than their secular counterparts. That includes the works of conservative scholar Stephen Monsma, which form the empirical foundation for God’s Economy and have been lauded as a validation of the Faith-Based Initiative. It is Daly’s reliance on such ideologically driven research that ultimately bankrupts God’s Economy, which lacks a realistic grasp of how social services actually operate in America’s approximately 19,000 cities and 3,000 counties. It is an analysis conducted by aerial reconnaissance with little verification from facts on the ground, and as such, it is unlikely to have much of an impact on those…

In 1986, former British motorcycle racer Andrea Coleman was managing public relations for American motorcycle race champion Randy Mamola. Mamola wanted to lend his prestige to help fundraise for a children’s cause in Africa. Andrea and her husband, Barry Coleman, formerly a motorcycling correspondent and feature writer for the British Guardian newspaper, joined Mamola in raising funds through motorcycling events. They donated the money they raised to U.K.-based Save the Children, which used the funds to immunize children in Africa. In 1988, Save the Children invited Mamola and the Colemans to witness how the money they had raised was helping a remote community in Somalia. Barry Coleman and Mamola made the visit and noticed that the majority of health workers’ motorcycles had completely broken down, making it impossible to reach people in many rural villages. In some cases, the motorcycles just needed a new fuel filter. For want of simple maintenance and repairs, the two realized, motorcycles stayed grounded and people sickened and died. Soon after, Save the Children and the World Health Organization (WHO) asked Barry Coleman to visit Gambia in West Africa to assess its fleet of 86 health delivery motorcycles. He found that a single Save the…

Whenever Elizabeth Sheehan drives into Boston, she makes a mental note of how many shipping containers she spots near the harbor. “There’s a wall of them, and some haven’t moved in months,” says the Massachusetts resident. If Sheehan gets her way, many of these surplus metal boxes will soon be transformed into clean, efficient health care centers outfitted to serve the most vulnerable people throughout the Caribbean, Africa, and Southeast Asia. That’s the idea behind Containers to Clinics (C2C). Sheehan, a physician’s assistant with a decade of health care experience in the developing world, founded the nonprofit in hopes of “delivering lifesaving medicine and health care to the last mile.” She has seen what happens when there is no access to basic medical care. “The most vulnerable populations—rural women and children—die in droves,” she says, often from treatable illnesses like diarrhea and pneumonia. The prototype C2C design, developed in collaboration with sustainable building specialists and public health experts, combines two retrofitted containers in an “L” shape. One side contains private, well-lighted examination rooms and basic diagnostic equipment; the other houses a pharmacy and medical laboratory. Solar-powered fans keep the metal boxes from overheating, and a canopy offers shade for waiting…

Many social changes hinge on good marketing. But what are social marketers to do when their target audience couldn’t care less about—or even despises—the change they want to make? That’s the situation we encountered in 2003, when we joined the Utah Wind Working Group, a cross-sector volunteer forum organized to inform stakeholder groups about wind energy opportunities for the state of Utah. The Utah Energy Office sponsored our group, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Wind Powering America program. This program supports working groups in states that face roadblocks in developing their wind resources, and it had targeted Utah as a priority. Our job as marketing professors was to lead an outreach campaign that would promote wind power to the people of Utah, as well as to state legislators who were considering a bill that would provide tax incentives for renewable energy. But most Utahns did not want wind power. At that time, the state relied almost entirely on inexpensive local coal for its electricity, and the state’s conservative politicians were not inclined to alter the status quo. Citizens perceived wind power to be an expensive, ineffective experiment that had failed in the 1970s. And state legislators did…

On the morning of Jan. 26, 2001, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck the western Indian state of Gujarat. More than 20,000 people were killed and 160,000 injured, many of them crushed by falling buildings. International aid agencies flocked to the scene and began reconstruction. One year later, civil engineer Elizabeth Hausler traveled to Gujarat on a Fulbright scholarship, hoping to learn how she could use her skills to build homes that withstand tectonic shifts. She found that many survivors didn’t want to live in their new, donor-built earthquake-resistant houses because they were made from odd materials and in strange styles. “One approach I kept seeing over and over was designing a house with the toilet inside,” says Hausler. “People don’t want the toilet in the house, because the houses are so small. So that ends up being wasted space. And they don’t use the toilet, so they don’t have a toilet.” It wasn’t enough for a house to be solid, realized Hausler. It needed to fit. Even when donor-built homes suited people’s needs, they were frequently too expensive. “I didn’t see a single example of a technology introduced by a local or foreign organization that continued to be used without…

Inside the steel and glass office towers of Chile’s capital, Santiago, computers, printers, and faxes hum. Out on the streets, business executives and taxi drivers chat away on some of Chile’s 14 million cellular telephones. Urbanized, well educated, and home to 17 million people, Chile is one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America. And as is the case in the United States, all its electronic gadgets are beginning to lead to a whole lot of electronic waste. The country currently discards 300,000 computers a year, and by 2020 it will be grappling with an annual pile of 1.7 million trashed computers, estimate Daniel Garcés and Uca Silva, researchers at Plataforma RELAC (the Regional Platform on E-waste in Latin America and the Caribbean, a project sponsored by a Chilean NGO). Worldwide, e-waste is the fastest-growing solid waste stream. This widening river of trash poses both human and environmental hazards. Each cathode ray tube in a television or computer monitor, for instance, contains several pounds of lead. Electronics also harbor mercury, cadmium, and other heavy metals. Many consumers and manufacturers dump these materials into landfills, where toxins leach into groundwater and poison people and animals. Even when people attempt to…

In June 1992, the five founders of what became the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) met at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center on Lake Como, Italy. Each woman was a minister of education in her home country (Burkina Faso, Gabon, Ghana, the Seychelles, and Zimbabwe). And each lamented that only half of Africa’s school-age girls enrolled in school. FAWE’s founders understood the obstacles that girls met on the way to the schoolhouse. Many parents simply couldn’t afford school tuition and fees. Others preferred to keep their daughters at home to perform household chores and to take care of younger siblings. Girls who did make it to school encountered such indignities as bathrooms shared with boys, discrimination from teachers, and sexual harassment from both teachers and students. For the few girls who did make it through elementary school, pregnancies often cut short their middle and high school educations. But FAWE’s founders also knew that the rewards were great for girls who did manage to secure an education. Educated girls were—and are—less likely to suffer from violence and harassment. They live longer and contract HIV/AIDS less. They have fewer and healthier children. And they make greater contributions to their country’s economic…

For years before Hurricane Katrina laid waste to the Gulf Coast, scientists, engineers, and journalists warned that New Orleans’ levees might not withstand the inevitable “Big One.” Yet government officials at every level ignored the warnings and cut the programs designed to fortify the city’s defenses. So when disaster finally struck in late August 2005, government agencies were woefully unprepared to deal with the devastation. Into this breach waded nonprofits and businesses. The American Red Cross, for instance, spent more than $2 billion and deployed 220,000 volunteers to assist 1.2 million families, reports a Congressional committee.1 Smaller nonprofits like PRC Compassion also sent their best. This group of ministers distributed more than 62 million pounds of food, clothing, and other aid. Likewise, businesses large and small raised funds and donated profi ts to the relief effort. General Electric, for example, donated $22 million in cash, goods, and services, and raised an additional $50 million for the Red Cross, reports the Philanthropy Journal.2 In total, private donations for Katrina relief came to $3 billion— the most ever donated for a single event in the United States—with corporate donations making up about one-third of that sum. Yet the private sector’s unprecedented outpouring…

Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof’s book Half the Sky is an absorbing narrative of stories that are rarely heard: a New Jersey teenager is raising awareness about the status of girls in poor countries, an Afghan schoolteacher is leading a learning insurgency, and a former first lady of Somalia’s hospital is saving the lives of mothers in Somaliland. These and other vignettes bring to life the struggles and courage of unforgettable women who are, as the book’s subtitle suggests, turning oppression into opportunity. Half the Sky begins by outlining the most egregious ways in which human rights are violated: trafficking and slavery, prostitution, rape and honor killings, and maternal mortality. The authors do not flinch from describing experiences that are horrifying testimony to the deeply rooted gender inequality that persists around the globe. The book also explores the reasons for such discriminatory practices—including attitudes toward religion and traditional cultural beliefs—effectively stoking the reader’s growing sense of moral outrage. We learn, for example, that the world’s leaders are effectively ignoring the 500,000 women who die each year either giving birth or trying to cope with unplanned births, by relegating maternal mortality to a “women’s issue.” After convincing the reader that this…

Back in 1999, playwright Lisa Kron applied for a grant from a new arts organization called Creative Capital. She had no idea what she was getting herself into. When Kron learned that she would be receiving a few thousand dollars, her initial reaction was, “Great!” And then Creative Capital staff kept asking her, “When are you coming in to talk with us?” Kron demurred, saying: “I’m fine. Really.” Privately, she fretted about wasting her time “on help I didn’t need,” she says. When she heard that the organization was planning a retreat for its artists, all Kron could think was, “Leave me alone.” The plot changed when Kron discovered that there was more money in the pipeline—up to $50,000, available at milestones in the life of her project. This unusual cash flow wasn’t the whole story. As her three-year fellowship unfolded, Creative Capital offered Kron a range of career-boosting benefits, including help with marketing her work and practical advice about budgeting. Kron went on to earn a Tony Award nomination for Well, the autobiographical play produced while she was a grantee, and today credits Creative Capital with taking the “beggar mentality” out of arts philanthropy. Instead of offering her a…

During the early 1980s, I worked in a community center that looked after the welfare of an inner-city neighborhood in Mumbai. My clients were the poorest of the poor: pavement dwellers who lived on the sidewalks. We offered these families health services, enrolled their kids in school, and organized childcare for them. But every 15 days, public officials came and broke up their makeshift homes because it was illegal to squat on sidewalks. All we could do was give our clients a safe place to hide their belongings until the officials passed. Being young and hot-blooded, a small group of us took the local government to court. At that time, India had a chief justice of the supreme court who regarded even a postcard from a poor person as a legitimate opening to a public interest suit. And so the suit commenced with relative ease. Our small group was very excited that we might actually change the policies that kept pavement dwellers impoverished. To my surprise, however, my employer severely reprimanded me for this action and stripped away many of my discretionary powers. This organization, the Nagpada Neighborhood House, was one of the oldest and most prestigious nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)…

Recessions are not sprints; they are endurance events. To find out how nonprofits are faring during the toughest recession in more than 30 years, we have been surveying 100 nonprofit executives across the United States at six-month intervals since late 2008. As of October 2009, some 80 percent of our respondents had experienced funding cuts, and a full 93 percent said that they were feeling the effects of the downturn. Yet many of our respondents are also adopting healthy habits that not only will help them survive the present recession, but also may help them thrive when better times return. Below we summarize the seven healthy habits of nonprofits that endure. Act quickly, yet thoughtfully Anxiety tends to provoke one of two responses: unthinking activity or deer-in-the-headlights paralysis. Both are understandable; neither is helpful. Instead, nonprofits must be both thoughtful in their decision making and fleet-footed in their implementation. And that means planning for the worst, starting now. For example, take the Women’s Lunch Place, a Boston-based nonprofit that gives poor and homeless women and children a daytime refuge. By the fall of 2008, the organization had seen its funding reduced by $400,000 and wasn’t sure what its future held.…

Judging from media accounts, U.S. nonprofits are facing unprecedented, if not catastrophic, financial distress because of endowment losses. Hiring is being frozen, facility maintenance is being deferred, programs are being dropped, performance seasons are being shortened, and construction projects are being cut back or even halted. As the president of Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust, put it when defending her decision to sharply reduce expenditures following a 30 percent drop in the value of the school’s endowment, “Tinkering around the edges will not be enough.” Harvard isn’t the only institution making dramatic cuts in response to a falling endowment. The J. Paul Getty Trust, which runs the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, slashed 14 percent of its workforce and delayed exhibitions and acquisitions after its endowment fell from $6.4 billion to $4.2 billion. Yale University cut capital expenditures by $2 billion and staff salaries and benefits by 7.5 percent after its endowment fell from about $23 billion to about $16 billion. And the Shriners Hospitals for Children considered closing 6 of its 22 children’s hospitals after its endowment fell from $8.3 billion to $5.0 billion. The Shriners tabled that motion, but are considering billing insurance and Medicaid for…

Why do some nations, such as the United States and Sweden, have booming nonprofit sectors, whereas other economically similar countries, such as Japan and Italy, do not? A new study uncovers a surprising answer: It’s the women. The more empowered a country’s women, the more vibrant its nonprofit sector. “Other research shows that women tend to be more altruistic, more prosocial, and less corrupt [than men],” explains study author Nuno S. Themudo, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. “Yet in many parts of the world, women cannot actively participate in civil society.” In countries where women can take their talents into the public sphere, he observes, the nonprofit sector employs more people, retains more members, and attracts more volunteers. For his research, Themudo uses the United Nations Development Programme’s Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), which reflects how many parliamentary, management, and professional positions the women of a country hold, as well as the percentage of income they earn. Then with data for 40 countries from the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project, he finds that the higher a country’s gem score, the greater its percentage of working-age full-time employees in the nonprofit…

Police and military checkpoints are a familiar sight on many roadways in poor countries. Although some of the officers are legitimately keeping the peace, others are out to line their pockets with baksheesh. Despite their apparent banditry, though, these extortionists respond to market forces in much the same way as do lawful businesspeople, finds a new study from Indonesia. “My research question was, Are corrupt officials just like any other economic actor?” says Benjamin A. Olken, an associate professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the study’s lead author. “If they are, then we have a wealth of economic tools to help us analyze how bribes are going to behave. And we also have to think about the market structure of bribe-takers before designing reforms.” Olken found that the corrupted officials on Aceh and North Sumatra’s highways indeed act like uncoordinated business monopolies–a situation that is bad for consumers because it raises the price of each bribe. It would be better to consolidate bribe-takers under the umbrella of a single monopolist who sets prices and coordinates activities. For instance, the “one-stop shop” reforms of many governments—which allow citizens to get, say, six permits from one office, rather…

During our time on this planet, we humans haven’t lent a hand to just anyone. Instead, we have usually saved our solicitousness for our own kind. And although over millennia the boundaries separating “us” from “them” have widened—from only kith and kin to entire neighborhoods and nations—the tendency has stayed the same: We help our own. Yet a surprising new experiment shows just how easily this human bias can be transformed into altruism. “The connections between affiliation to the group and prosocial behavior are so fundamental that, even in infancy, a mere hint of affiliation is sufficient to increase helping,” write coauthors Harriet Over, a doctoral student in psychology at Cardiff University in Wales, and Malinda Carpenter, a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. For the study, a research assistant first showed each 18- month-old infant one of four possible sets of eight photographs. The photographs in all four sets featured a common household object (e.g., a teapot, book, or shoe) in the foreground. But each set had a different cue—a prime—in its background: two dolls facing each other (the affiliation prime), two dolls facing apart, one doll alone, or an inanimate object.…

To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy: Every polluting city pollutes in its own way. Yet until recently, just how and whence Los Angeles, Bangkok, and eight other global cities exhaled their climatec-hanging vapors was a topic shrouded in mystery. Now, a 10- city comparison of greenhouse gas emissions per capita is showing metropolises “exactly where their emissions are coming from,” says Christopher Kennedy, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Toronto and the study’s lead author. The research “could also help cities learn from each other,” he adds. Aside from the usual finding that North American cities are the heaviest breathers, Kennedy and his team reveal that each urban area has a distinct emissions profi e. (See these profiles on the graph below.) Mile-high Denver and temperate Toronto burn lots of fossil fuels to generate electricity for their businesses and industries, as well as to stay warm during their frostier months. At the same time, hydropower keeps Geneva’s electricity- related emissions low. Yet cold winters drive up Geneva’s heating oil-induced effluvia, as they do for New York and Prague. But New York spares the air many of its transportation-related fumes with high population density and good public transit, as…