TED Moment 2

Though perhaps not the most charismatic or gadget-enhanced lecture on ted.com, this lecture by Paul Awuah is among the most compelling talks I've sen.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

Most people (EWB Canada and me included), agree that addressing gender disparity is vital to effective/sustainable development.
From some quarters inside EWB, I've heard it put as strongly as "the key to development is getting girls (especially rural girls) into and through school up to the 8th grade."

The United Nations has gone as far as to identify gender equity and the empowerment of women as the 3rd of the Millenium Development Goals.

There is also abundant research that suggests that educated women are a crucial socioeconomic driver; women who have completed primary education generally have fewer children, are less likely to die in childbirth, are less likely to stay in abusive relationships and are more likely to access health care and formal employment opportunities (if you watched the Hans Rosling lecture I posted yesterday, you would have seen a really cool graph illustrating some of these trends. There's also good info available from the International Development Research Center (IRDC) on Gender, Development & Policy).


Here's a new version of the old message put in pretty stark terms by the Girl Effect campaign...


(You can find a bit more info about the campaign here,at the official Google blog.)

So...agree or disagree? is it really as 'simple' as that?

(title courtesy of the eloquence of Arundhati Roy and the old friend who introduced me to to her work)

[Edit: Plan U.K (the parent organization of Plan Malawi) is a supporting partner of Girl Effect. Their campaign, Because I am a girl, has an excellent website, including some facts & figures regarding women, girls and poverty.

Not Business as Usual: TED moment 1

For those of you who haven't discovered ted.com, I highly recommend you get around to discovering it. It a collection of recorded "ideas worth sharing" (mostly in English) on a mind-boggling array of topics.

One of the more popular TED moments on poverty & development is Hans Rosling's sharing of insights on poverty. Watch the whole thing. If you can't stream it on your connection, download it or leave a note for me and I'll email you the download. Professor Rosling has done a truly amazing job of taking the dizzying array of statistics we use to measure poverty & development and make them 'real' and easy to see.

A Million Little Things

Today is the official halfway point of pre-departure training. In another couple of weeks, I'll be on my way to Malawi along with the other 4 people headed to join EWB's sector teams in the country. According to my weather wiki, it's 28 degrees and sunny in the capital city of Lilongwe.

I'm supposed to be catching up on my homework today: we have a presentation to give on The Critical Villager: Beyond Community Participation, a book that is described by a past EWB volunteer as "a book which is intermittently in print purely because Parker Mitchell, co-CEO of EWB, orders so many copies." I think the book might actually have some traction outside of EWB, but I digress...

Rather than thinking constructively about my homework, I find myself more interested in reflecting a bit on my experiences so far. I think that sharing some of my observations with you fine people might help me get back on track. So, without further ado...

1. Of course one of my political fantasies comes to pass just in time for me to miss the election night party. Pfft.

2. My friends and family at home are amazing. In particular, amazing by phone, by facebook, by fundraising support, by farewell party (though not necessarily by posting photos of that party...) and by gifts for Africa that have already made my day (including a lot of advice).

3. Case in point: the furnace pilot light for the house wasn't lit when we arrived. We noticed yesterday when room temperature slipped to a chilly 14 degrees. After some tinkering (living with a bunch of engineers has its perks), we got it working and are now enjoying the pleasant sensation of central heating. In the meantime, however, I was lucky enough to have my very own microfibre travel blanket.

4. Many hands really do make light work. During pre-departure training, we've been learning a lot (since Monday morning, we've done training sessions on the history of the development sector, frameworks for understanding behaviour change, agriculture, effective writing, and understanding power & privilege). It's a lot of information to take in, and being able to work/share with the incredible group of people in this sending group has definitely made my life easier.

5. It's really hard to wrap your head around switching continents. I have my e-ticket booked, I'm halfway through a training module designed to get me to prep myself for departure, and I'm in regular contact with my coach (aka my EWB supervisor) overseas, and I'm still not really processing the fact that I'm going to Africa for a year. Go figure.

6. There are a lot of restaurants in Toronto. I know that seems obvious, but so far I've eaten Vietnamese twice, Thai twice, sushi, Indian, Italian twice, Second cup sandwich once, Chinese bakery once, pizza, shawarma, soda jerk diner ham & eggs, Duff's famous wings, Portuguese bakery breakfast, Starbucks snackfood of some kind, and a Portuguese deli sandwich. I've only return visited one restaurant so far and I've grabbed coffee from two different Second Cups, one Starbucks and two independent places. I'd like to do more independent/fair trade coffee places, but they're surprisingly difficult to find unless you know where to look.
And that doesn't even get into the home-cooked meals. Some of the guys here like to cook (and some peoples' moms are taking really good care of us), meaning that feasts of pasta & home-made sauce, French toast, curry, samosas, pakora and TRUFFLES!
Delicious. Not necessarily nutritious, but definitely delicious.

7. Last (and probably least), Canada is a really pretty country in the fall.

Blog Action Day - Poverty Edition

Though most of us have probably gone to bed by now, I and my fellow Canadians spent some of the evening of October 14th (and in my case, the first hours of October 15ht) watching the latest federal election results come in.

As much as it can be hard to keep the bigger picture in mind on nights like tonight, it's important to remember that we elect politicians to take care of some pretty important 'big picture' decisions.

One of those big pictures, in my mind at least, is poverty alleviation (both at home and around the world).

Today is Blog Action Day. It's a chance for bloggers from around the world to spend some time discussing/pontificating/posting pretty pictures on a single issue: poverty.

Though even defining poverty can be a pretty complex task and the causes are equally complex, I think we can agree that it's an important issue to tackle as we go forward (particularly as the current troubles on the world financial scene continue to put pressure on everyone). I encourage you to surf the other Blog Action Day contributors for discussions on definitions. I want to tangent a bit and briefly raise a different part of the picture.

Over the course of the next year, I/the organization I work for has the potential to be directly affected 3 elections (not counting the American election, which arguably affects us all with varying degrees of directness). Canada, Ghana and Malawi will all be dealing with the consequences of national elections in the coming months. I wonder, will these governments be expected to renew commitments to prosperity for their citizens or even for the global community?

Hard times are ahead, and I think it's incumbent upon us all to make sure that it's not just a small minority of concerned citizens "getting involved" to do whatever it is we're going to do to face tough, 'big picture' questions like how to tackle global (and domestic) poverty, but also that our elected representatives continue to be expected to make just decisions even in the face of such challenges.

As Demosthenes, an old Greek favorite of mine, once said:

Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.

Making democratic contributions often feels like a hopelessly small opportunity - be it through voting, writing a letter to your elected representatives, getting involved in your community league, volunteering with a citizen's action group of some kind or even just discussing your thoughts in public - it can eventually make a difference. That's what the system is for - it's our job to undertake the great enterprise of making it work for us.

Human Development - Know it, Love it, Measure it

Awhile ago, I touched on the concept of human development. The time has come for me to touch on the idea properly, and ruminate (in the form of a blog post, as it happens) on some selected complexities.

According to the United Nations (specifically, according to the UNDP Human Development Concept), human development is...

about creating an environment in which people can develop their full potential and lead productive, creative lives in accordance with their needs and interests. People are the real wealth of nations. ... It is thus about much more than economic growth, which is only a means—if a very important one—of enlarging people's choices.

That is the definition that EWB Canada uses to guide the focus of their work; in particular, EWB Canada holds that a fundamentally important part of creating such an environment is the building of human capacity.

Yesterday afternoon, the group that I'm doing pre-departure training with participated in a group workshop aptly titled "what is development?" As part of the exercise, we each had to come up with a personal definition of human development and then work together to point out some common and contradicting themes or keywords in our definitions.

My definition was...

(Human) development in the international context is increasing the human capacity to manage vulnerabilities in order to maximize the ability to attain & maintain a good quality of life (with some subsequent brainstorming on what exactly I meant by "good quality of life").

Here's a fun graphic outlining some of the concepts we touched on while sharing/discussing the different definitions that showed up (kudos to Ryan, one of the people in my sending group, for hooking us up with wordle)



Coming from political science land, it was interesting to me that words like "system," "global reality," "economic," "security," and "justice" didn't come up more often (even from me). Discussions about international development (not quite the same as human development, but in the same semantical galaxy, anyway), that I've had in the past have usually resulted in much more diverse connotations (usually in the form of a more explicit focus on access to markets, prosperity, or good governance as a key condition of successful development). As a group, our unit of analysis was definitely at the individual level - we're all about choices and personal growth on Day 3 of training. Community and national capacity weren't really brought up at all.

We also didn't get much into measuring human development; that was probably because the workshop was supposed to be about what it is more than about how it's quantified, and it's an important question that I think we'll get to later (I think that EWB might see that as more of a skill than a fundamental concept in terms of training).

So what is this human development thing, exactly? How do you do it? How do we know when we're doing a good job of it?
Good questions - and exactly where this gets tricky. While creating an environment where people can live up to their full potential is all well and good on paper, what does that look like, really? Does it mean literacy? Mobility? Who does the creating? For which people?
We certainly didn't come up with a nice, sound-bytey answer, and I don't think that the international community has either.

But even if we don't really know exactly what human development is, we sure can measure it!

The international standard for measuring this vague, complex and often contradictory notion of human development is the Human Development Index (HDI). The HDI is a composite index of normalized indicators (statistics collected, usually at the national level) that are used to calculate whether a country is classified as developed, developing or underdeveloped. The first HDI report was released in 1990, and has had some pretty far-reaching implications for development ever since (it's used regularly by the United Nations & other bodies to assess all kinds of things).

Using statistics like literacy, infant mortality, GDP per capita, life expectancy, etc., the HDI ranks 177 countries by aggregate score. This sending group of EWB-Canada volunteers are going to Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Malawi. According to the 2007/08 HDI Report [.pdf], these three countries rank 135 (up from the last report), 176 (down from the last report), 164 (up from the last report) respectively. Ghana is classified as developing; Burkina Faso & Malawi are categorized as underdeveloped.

It will be interesting to get into some of the strengths & weaknesses of the HDI with this group of volunteers (and share those discussions here) later in the month as well as to see what "underdeveloped" looks like on the ground once I touch down in Lilongwe.

If you're interested in learning a bit more about the HDI (or like pictures better than long reports), here's an interesting map to get you started.

Touchdown in T-Town

So, after a nice early start (6 a.m. takeoff... yay) I arrived in Toronto this morning. A nice, scenic, multiple-transfer public transportation trip got me to the EWB Learning House, where I'll be living for the next month during pre-departure training with the other 9 people in my sending group.

Training has formal programming from 9 to 6 five days a week (with some longer days, some shorter days, some weekend days and a bunch of homework). I'm looking forward to such an intensive opportunity to learn, to prepare (and to blog!).