Is aid a blessing or a curse for developing countries? For Imran Khan, a former cricketer turned politician, the answer for his country, Pakistan, is clear. “If we don’t have aid we will be forced to make reforms and stand on our own feet,” he told the BBC recently. This was a message that he […]
The leaders of the G20 major economies are going to have lots to talk about at their summit meeting in Cannes at the end of this week: saving the Euro, preventing a meltdown in the global economy and, at the request of summit host Nicolas Sarkozy, the thoughts of Bill Gates on how to finance […]
If you want a model for how the world can solve its most pressing problems in the 21st Century, it is the posse. As governance systems go, the Wild West approach of rounding up a few available hands and driving the bad guy out of town is certainly messy, but, if our favourite westerns are […]
The aid aristocracy of Britain was out in force on Monday evening for a one-night-only gala performance by Bill and Melinda Gates of a lecture on how aid is making a real difference, called ‘The Living Proof’. Much of the hour and half performance was exactly what you would expect from Gates (well, Bill anyway) – oodles of […]
One of the books that influenced our thinking about Philanthrocapitalism was “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits“, by the management guru C. K. Prahalad, who sadly has just passed away. If you have not read the book yet, you should. Frustrated by the failure of traditional aid to end […]
Philanthropy or capitalism? Nature or nurture? Butter or marmalade on your toast? False dichotomies make fun debating points but shed little light on important questions. So it is with Reuters blogger Felix Salmon’s recent critique of the new Financial Access at Birth (FAB) campaign as top down rather than bottom up. FAB is a simple idea: from 11 […]
“Will the Gates Foundation or Kiva.org have a greater impact on poverty?” That was the question up for debate on our Facebook fansite in a competition for a signed advance copy of the new paperback. Opinions were evenly divided. People like Kiva’s focus on supporting entrepreneurs through microfinance and the way it empowers ordinary donors, but […]
Women, it seems, are more likely than men to give to overseas causes, says a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. According to the paper’s authors, Karen Page Winterich, Vikas Mittal and William T. Ross Jr., men prefer to give to causes closer to home, when offered the choice between donating to victims […]
“It is wonderful to see all these do-gooders in one room,” said Barack Obama, at a White House gathering on June 30th of leaders of America’s best non-profits. The occasion was the long-awaited launch of a $50m Innovation Fund to support the scaling up of the non-profit community’s best ideas for tackling America’s biggest problems […]
British hedge-fund philanthropist Chris Cooper-Hohn and his wife Jamie have just announced another huge gift – of £495m ($812m) – to the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), as Matthew has reported in The Economist. This took the assets of the foundation, which they created in 2003 to receive and give away a slice of the […]