Kumarian Press Blog

Toronto Preps for Tectonic Shifts This Month

2012-02-06T07:21:00.000-08:00

Dear Canadian KP Readers,

Tectonic Shifts, the new January release by Mark Schuller and Pablo Morales, has been given national attention by both the press and local bookstores across the United States. Now, the authors prep to make the book's Canadian debut at the following events this February:

Event # 1:

Roger Annis of the Canada Haiti Action Network is planning to attend three major events in Toronto to promote Tectonic Shifts. His event listings include: Seminars at both the University of Toronto and York University as well as the Public Forum at Steelworkers Hall. These events will take place on February 15th,16th and 17th.

Event #2:

Toronto native, Kevin Edmonds, contributor of Tectonic Shifts, will be at A Different Booklist on February 16th at 7pm for a book signing and lecture. The event will be held at 746 Bathurst St. in Toronto, Canada. Please contact (416) 538-0889 for more information.

To order copies of the book, please contact customer service at (703) 661-1581 or, contact Kumarian Press Marketing Associate Jennifer Kern: Jennifer@styluspub.com

What's New With Kumarian Press: February New Releases

2012-02-01T06:10:00.000-08:00

Greetings KP Readers,

Kumarian Press shook up January with the release of Tectonic Shifts, edited by Mark Schuller and Pablo Morales. The book has received great attention by many in the fields of: Anthropology, Sociology, Politics and Caribbean Studies; and has also been featured at local Washington, DC and New York venues including: Busboys and Poets, The Brecht Forum and the Embassy of Haiti. Tectonic Shifts is available for purchase now.

February Releases Include:
Peddlers of Information, Detecting Corruption in Developing Countries

Peddlers of Information: Not only do most people remain largely excluded from ICTs, but when they do engage with these technologies, they do so in unforeseen ways. Peddlers of Information shows how local NGOs in rural India are actually using these technologies—particularly the internet—and the implications this has had for development work and ideas about poverty.

Detecting Corruption in Developing Countries: Detecting Corruption merges scholarship on corruption assessments with practical techniques on ways practitioners and policy makers can implement anticorruption assistance. Spector argue that assessments need to adopt a comprehensive “whole of government” approach that examines all key sectors where there are corruption vulnerabilities.

Contact Marketing Associate Jennifer Kern at (703) 996-1022 to obtain a review copy. Purchase through our website today.

Spot Tectonic Shifts at New York's Premier Book Event

2012-01-26T11:06:00.000-08:00

Editors Mark Schuller and Pablo Morales, along with their contributors will be at The Brecht Forum in New York tomorrow, January 27, 2012 to promote Tectonic Shifts. The event will begin at 7:30PM, and will include a book signing and lecture.

For more information, visit The Brecht Forum's Upcoming Events or contact me: Jennifer@styluspub.com

Tectonic Shifts Preps to Shake Up Washington, DC

2012-01-23T06:12:00.000-08:00

Dear Kumarian Press Readers,

Heard about the new Kumarian Press book, Tectonic Shifts: Haiti Since the Earthquake?

Editor Mark Schuller will be at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C. on January 24th for a book signing and lecture starting at 6:30pm. The event will be at the 14th and V location, metro-accessible on the green line.

Then, Schuller will make an appearance on January 25th at the Embassy of Haiti for a book signing and film screening with the Ambassador and the Prime Minister of Haiti. This event will begin promptly at 5:30pm.

For more information on attending, please contact me: Jennifer@styluspub.com and listen to NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition today and tomorrow for detailed information.

Guest Author Posting By Susan Dewey

2012-01-16T09:24:00.000-08:00

Thinking about ethical research on illegal sex work:
Three stories of privilege

At the Annual Meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) this November in Atlanta, Georgia, I chaired and took part in an extraordinary panel entitled “Sex Work and Social Justice: New Research Directions.” Panel participants interrogated the complex nuances of privilege in their own lives and research through the lens of their work as activists, health practitioners, researchers, and teachers. For me, participating in this panel was a very powerful experience in that it exposed the vulnerabilities that both researchers and research participants face in carrying out work on a topic that remains highly politicized and emotionalized in both research and practice. I told the panel’s audience how I originally became interested in sex work research when taking Women’s Studies for the first time as an undergraduate. My professor, a self-identified feminist, explained to the class that sex work unequivocally constituted a form of violence against women, a grave human rights violation, and, above all, activity to which no woman would voluntarily consent. I listened intently to the professor speak, all the time thinking about how the violence she described as inherent to sex work profoundly contradicted the stories I had heard from women I knew (some of whom were my family members) who had engaged in sex work. As a shy nineteen year working three jobs to pay my own way through college, I felt that the professor must be right (she was, after all, the professor), yet I also knew, intuitively, that her description certainly mischaracterized the experiences of women in my own life. After recounting this experience, I explained to the panel’s audience that when I now teach my own college classes about sex work, I am careful to explain to my students that, inevitably, someone in the classroom has exchanged sex for money or something of value. After all, as I always tell my students, we all trade sex for something, whether it’s money, love, or acceptance. Other panelists talked about their own experiences engaging in sex work, as well as about their activist work and the questions it encouraged them to think about. After the panel was over, a thirty-something academic woman approached me and said, “This was such a great panel. It really encouraged me to confront a lot of my own moral standards.” I felt complimented, but also strangely conflicted. Had the purpose of the panel really been to encourage her to think about her own value system? Where was morality in all of this?

I am currently engaged in a new research project that examines understandings and perceptions of the U.S. anti-trafficking laws amongst sex workers, social service providers, and law enforcement in a major city in the American West. This ongoing project has (like the audience member at the NWSA panel) indeed pushed me to confront many stereotypes I did not even know that I had. In the past few months, I have listened to a sex worker explain that she advocates the decriminalization of sex work in order to reduce violence against sex workers, to a law enforcement officer describe his frustrations with the revolving door justice system that characterizes prostitution offenses, to a community activist who told me “for sex workers seeking services, sometimes the state just becomes the new pimp”, and to a volunteer at a faith-based shelter explain how God called her to engage in service provision with sex workers. I have also seen things that have caused me great emotional angst and made me question my role as a researcher. The first time I drove past a street sex worker who was clearly underage in the city in which I am working, my first impulse was to stop the car and ask her if she needed help, or if she wanted the name and address of shelters that could assist her. I estimated that she was about thirteen years old, an age that even the staunchest advocates of sex work’s legalization or decriminalization would argue is too young. I did not stop the car when I noticed that she was standing with a much older man, as part of the risk reduction strategies I submitted for approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at my university mandated that I should never approach sex workers who are engaged in conversation or standing with men. I also do not have IRB permission to carry out research with minors. I then considered calling the police, but then hesitated when I remembered stories sex workers had told me about negative experiences in foster or institutional care. Despite the weeks of careful consideration I had put into designing my IRB proposal (and the years of research experience with sex workers that preceded it), I felt unprepared to deal with the surge of emotion I experienced when I saw her standing with others in a rather dangerous neighborhood synonymous with street sex work. That night, I was driving because I hadn’t felt safe walking; just three blocks earlier I had seen four men handcuffed and face down on the ground as two police officers trained their guns on them while others stacked bags of the narcotics confiscated from the men onto the hood of the squad car. Looking at the girl through the driver’s side window, I felt pity, anger, and, above all, an overwhelming sense of powerlessness and inefficacy in the complex matrix of authority and privilege that surrounds the slippery boundary that separates illegal albeit voluntary sex work from the coercion that defines contemporary sex trafficking legislation.

This semester I am teaching an advanced course called “Global Sex Work and Trafficking,” which is offered through Gender & Women’s Studies at my university. My students come primarily from Criminal Justice, Psychology, Social Work, and related fields. They hope to go on to careers that will likely involve sex workers in some capacity. For the Criminal Justice majors, this will most likely happen in the context of arrest and detention; for the social workers, it may come as part of court-mandated treatment or other forms of case management. The stakes seem inordinately high to me every time I prepare to teach this class, which meets once a week for three hours. I constantly ask myself how I can engage my students, who come from a wide range of backgrounds and life experiences, without causing the feelings of offense or alienation that can so easily derail a course on sensitive subject matter. I constantly repeat that we need to understand sex work intellectually, without allowing our personal moral philosophies to intrude upon our critical analyses of various debates with respect to sex work. As I endeavor to provide these students with knowledge so that they, in their future capacities as law enforcement officers or social workers, react sensitively when their work brings them into contact with sex workers, I remain vigilant of the nuanced ways in which they react, constantly watching their faces for signs of discomfort. Doing so makes me think, without irony, of the emotion management and negotiation in which sex workers engage with their clients. It also makes me think of the contexts in which the knowledge gained from my class will be used in their future careers.

I am cognizant of the fact that I currently live a life in which I am insulated by privilege in myriad forms. I know that I am different from the sex workers I have been getting to know through research, no matter how much I might empathize with and enjoy their company. I am not filled with the kind of visceral dread as some street sex workers when I encounter a police officer in uniform. Yesterday, for instance, I found myself pulled over on the side of an isolated road, squad car lights flashing behind me. The handsome officer, who was about my age, told me that I had just run a stop sign. I had been distracted on my way to the office, thinking about a grant proposal that I had promised myself I would finish that day. I really hadn’t seen the stop sign, I explained, but the officer looked skeptical. “Officer,” I said as I started to involuntarily tear up, “I really am a responsible member of this community. I teach at the university, and I have a lot of Criminal Justice majors in class. I’m on the Board of Directors at the Women’s Shelter, and I have so much respect for the police officers I meet when I’m doing my prostitution research.” He tilted his head. “You’re doing research on prostitution? What does that even involve?” I explained a bit about participant observation and ethnographic methods as I handed over my faculty ID and a copy of my insurance card, the only documents I had with me. He seemed interested and thoughtful as returned to his squad car, where he sat for a few minutes. I felt angry with myself as I waited. Why had I told him all of that? Why had I said “prostitution”, a term that the law uses but that I infrequently use myself? What kind of unethical person tries to demonstrate allegiances to avoid an expensive ticket? Where was my integrity? When the good-looking officer returned to my car window, he didn’t give me a ticket. “Promise me that you’ll watch out for stop signs from now on. You can’t get distracted just because you’re doing hard work.” And then he winked at me, and said “I understand.” As I drove away, tremendously relieved at having avoided the ticket, I wondered how different my interaction would have been with the officer had I been soliciting on the street. Would he have said “I understand”? Would he have winked?

Despite these mixed emotions, I understand that I am different from the police officers I meet through research, just as my life is very different from sex workers I encounter. I will never fully grasp what it feels like to arrest a street sex worker for the twentieth time when I know in my heart, as some police officers have explained to me, that addiction treatment would be a much more humane (and cost-effective) option. Likewise, I will never fully be able to feel all of the emotions that social workers do when they have a client refuse shelter and services in order to return to a life that may kill them. I feel so deeply privileged to meet the diverse array of actors who I regularly encounter in my research. I try to constantly interrogate my own positionality vis-à-vis their work and perspectives, attempting to remain impartial and to focus on understanding their worldviews without judgment. Some nights I cry as I drive home, while other times I just marvel at the infinite human capacity to face suffering fearlessly.

I have learned almost everything I now understand about what it means to be human by thinking about ethical research, and by doing my best to ensure that I hold myself to the highest of ethical standards. I believe that we, as researchers, need to listen more carefully to multiple perspectives when thinking about, and doing research on, heavily loaded topics such as sex work. It is only through listening intently, and without judgment, that we will truly come to understand the complex matrix of power and privilege that surrounds contemporary perspectives on sex work.

Susan Dewey is an Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wyoming and author of Hollow Bodies.

The Microfiance Debate Continues: Does it Really Work?

2012-01-10T06:17:00.001-08:00

David Rooman, a once ago defender of Microfiannce now says no. In his new book, Due Diligence, Rooman indicates that the average impact of microcredit on clients in zero. This conclusion is drawn off of years of research, stemming from the idea that tiny loans can be dished out to the poor, especially among women, to drastically reduce global poverty, and will overall positively affect our economy. This, however, only sometimes works, as billions are poured into government projects.

"Roodman's assessment is far afield from the enthusiasm microfinance programs have generated since the first institution for them, the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, opened in 1976. The bank's founder, Muhammad Yunus, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 and is probably the third world's most celebrated economist." (Read more)

Yunus' original idea seemed so simple at one point in time: that millions could be lifted out of poverty and the global economy could benefit if only the poor could obtain credit. Kumarian Press's new Whose Sustainability Counts? discusses Yunus's position in the microfinance industry and the state of the business today.

Although popular in the U.S. and in Europe, Rooman found that institiutions' repayment records affect the borrower. This came as a surprise as microfinance organizations have in the past been known for having a better repayment rate of loans than the banks themselves.

Rooman says that the generosity of the U.S. and the E.U. has lead to a negative impact on the economy. The giving is actually hurting, by not teaching those to save money.

Roodman says. "Poor people can save — they just want safe places to do it."

Milford Bateman, author of Confronting Microfinance will be at USAID in Washington, D.C. on January 30th to debate Rooman on this issue.

U.S DOD Assists Haiti Earthquake Aftermath Response

2012-01-06T07:02:00.000-08:00

This week, Haiti's Department of Civil Protection network received equipment from the U.S. Department of Defense for the use of disaster-response efforts. During the event, the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) received recognition and praise for their relief assistance in Haiti, and shows our strong ties and ongoing support of and with the country.

"In a ceremony held at the Directorate of Civil Protection in Haiti (DPC) in Port Au Prince , U.S. Ambassador to Haiti , Kenneth Merten , signed over the equipment to Haiti 's Minister of the Interior, Defense and the Collectivities Thierry Mayard-Paul, in support of Haiti 's Civil Protection network and ongoing disaster preparedness." (Yahoo Finance: U.S. Department of Defense Helps Bolster Haiti's Disaster Response)

The equipment given ranged from vehicles including SUVs, trucks, boats and canoes to tents and radios.

This gesture came only two weeks before the two-year anniversary of Haiti's devastating earthquake, that left the Capital in rubble and tore families apart.

"Haiti is in a geographic location that is vulnerable to the variances of nature, including hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes," said Mayard-Paul. "Our efforts to put this country back on course and to achieve our goals for sustainable economic development are also susceptible to these natural disasters. Therefore, the valuable contributions of our U.S. friends will help substantially in strengthening our disaster mitigation efforts while we continue to serve our individual communities through job creation and economic growth."

To learn more about Haiti's Earthquake aftermath, read Tectonic Shifts, a new January 2012 release by Kumarian Press. The book discusses Haiti since the Earthquake and provides insight into the lives of the people of Haiti today.

The philosophy of "juche" Takes Place in North Korea as Leader Dies

2011-12-19T06:50:00.000-08:00

"The philosophy of 'juche,' or self-reliance, is the basis of North Korea's reclusive nature." (CNN: North Korea's Kim Jong Il dies; South goes on high alert) Today the people of North Korea are putting this principle into action as their leader, Kim Jong II dies at the age of 69.

Jong has been leading the socialist country since 1994, and has had an array of health problems. Officials state that Jong suffered "great mental and physical strain," suffering a heart attack on Saturday that could not be salvaged.

The people of North Korea appeared starry-eyed, as they learned the news about their "dear leader."

"My leader, what will we do? It's too much! It's too much!" one person sobbed on state television. "Leader, please come back. ... You cannot leave us. We will always wait for you, leader."

Set to take over is Kim's youngest son, Kim Jong Un, a four-star general that has received increasing responsbilities from his father.

But, North Korea isn't the only civil society under strain and devastated about the news of their leader's death.

As North Korea silences itself, struck with grief, South Korea is tightening security in preparating for an unpredictable North Korea. Officials are placing the region on emergency alert, prepping them for overtime shifts.

Obama stated that President Lee of South Korea and he have spoke about staying in touch as the situation develops. Lee has advised his people to "go on with their lives." I, for one, really hope that we do not send out troops to the region unless needed. I don't feel it is right to Americanize them. (Similar to this debate is the US's Role in Africa in African Security and the African Command.)

"For the sake of the future of the Republic of Korea, peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula is more important than anything else. It should not be threatened by what has happened," he said.

Former U.N. Ambassador, Bill Richardson of the United States stated that the humanitarian efforts should remain there for the people of Korea, but to keep a watchful-eye. I feel there must be a fragile balance between politics and humanitarian concerns. We, as the U.S. should aid them in food and security, but we should not control their political endeavors.

"People are starving there," stated Richardson.

Will North Korea embrace South Korea or push them into further war? Will North Korea talk about nuke control with the United States? Deep questions like these hope to be answered over time.

The Cat Belonged to Which Witch in Witching Country?

2011-12-12T06:23:00.000-08:00

With the lack of government funding, political upheavals, social changes, innovations in technology and a worldwide fight against terrorism, the 21st Century looks self-reliant, belligerent and down-right awkward. So, how are we supposed to deal with the tides of the 21st Century?

To survive and succeed in this environment, individuals must understand the driving forces of globalization and the trends that are likely to shape our future. Employing an accessible "connect-the-dots" metaphor, Kumarian Press publication, Coming of Age in a Globalized World pulls together the threads that link humanity.

Our Modern Age may seem bleak to some, but it must be better than the past, with technology, democracy and civilization. Sure, we have to deal with change, both good and bad, but change inspires progression. And, we are working on building peace with our international comrades. Don't believe me that we have it better than our relatives in the past? Read on.

During routine maintenance on a reservoir today, engineers uncovered an artifact from one of Britain's most-famous witch trials in Pendle Hill in Lancashire, England. But, unlike a sterling-silver fork, or glimmering sapphire, a once-feline friend was found hidden in the walls of the old-age withc trial cottage.

The cottage is known for housing trials in the 1600s for 10 women and 2 men suspected of using witchcraft to murder.

"It is thought the unfortunate feline may have been buried alive by the cottage's superstitious inhabitants, in an attempt to protect them from evil spirits." (Read more at CNN - Mummified cat walled up in 17th century 'witch's cottage'

How do you feel now? And, we thought we had it rough.

Warning of Taliban Return in Afghanistan Is On the Horizon

2011-12-05T06:00:00.000-08:00

Afghanistan President, Hamid Karzai, warned the international community on Monday that the Taliban could make its return if immediate action is not taken.

"There has been progress in Afghanistan since the overthrow of the Taliban in the wake of the hijacked plane attacks on the United States," he said.

President Karzai stated that much help is needed in the fight against Terrorism - and the Taliban - but will need at least a decade's worth of committment and assistance by outside military forces, including the United States.

During a conference to discuss the U.S.' role in Afghanistan (and whether we will pull a troops out by 2014), U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton vowed that the United States was "prepared to stand with the Afghan people for the long haul."

Iran's Foreign Minister spoke out against having troops in Afghanistan, and stated that the country should discard any outside foreign military bases.

"We believe that any international or regional initiative to restore peace and security in Afghanistan could only be successful if they discard the presence of foreign military forces and especially ... the founding of foreign military bases in Afghanistan."

I found this statement intriguing, as African Security and the African Command's contributors discuss the U.S.' right to "assist" other countries in times of warfare. Are we westernizing the countries? Or, are we just acting as bullies to show our role as a supreme power?

But, although I feel that we should not interfere in other countries' policies, I do feel the timing is appropriate to "assist" when the welfare of the world rests on our helping partners shoulders. If we all work together, then we can build peace, not just for Afghanistan, but for the international community.

Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers

2011-11-28T05:16:00.000-08:00

Below, author Anne-Meike Fechter speaks about her new title, Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers:

When I began research among international aid workers in Cambodia in 2007, I hadn’t quite realized what a diverse and complicated, transient and highly mobile world it was. Among the people I spoke with were high-school leavers who had their first experience of riding on the back of a pick-up truck through the Cambodian countryside wedged in between piles of agricultural produce (strictly forbidden by their organization), who were trying to figure out if they could imagine a life in development. There were those who had only planned to come for a year to support a local NGO, and who had found themselves extending their contracts, extending them again, and then applying for a follow-on job in Lao PDR. Some people that I encountered early on had left by the time I returned half a year later – they were fed up with their organization and infuriated by what they saw as mind-boggling aid bureaucracy and incompetence. Their departure was sometimes commented on: ‘well if you can’t deal with that, you won’t last...’. Others yet had begun working in the refugee camps on the Thai-Cambodian borders in the late 1970s and were still here, thirty years later.

What they had in common, despite their utter diversity in many ways, were their full-time jobs as aid workers. As my research progressed, it became clear that there were a wealth of issues that they were contending with: work and personal life were closely intertwined; development practice harbored, perhaps unsurprisingly, many frustrations, as well as unexpected social and emotional rewards. Yet, the rich and complex lives of these people who were so central to delivering aid, seemed comparatively invisible in existing literature on development: official reports, the bulk of development studies are focused on ‘the world’s poor’, the recipients of aid, leaving out those without whom things would not happen. In order to help putting aid workers themselves onto the agenda - of researchers, policy makers and practitioners - my co-editor, Heather Hindman and I collected studies on national and international aid workers from across the world, which make up our edited volume, ‘Inside the everyday lives of development workers: the challenges and futures of Aidland’, which came out in paperback earlier this year.
We thought it was time that development workers were given the attention they deserve, rather than being treated as mere ‘implementers’ or ‘brokers’ for overseas aid programs. It is evident that they themselves are keen to tell their stories: the numbers of aid blogs, practitioners’ network forums, and even aid memoirs is forever increasing. But how does this matter for development studies, and for aid practice? As the different case examples in this collection show, neglecting the professional and social beliefs and practices surrounding aid work may be detrimental to the overall project of development. As becomes clear from the chapters, it is useful to know who joins the aid sector, the values and attitudes they hold - and what makes people leave their jobs. Rather than portraying them in a permanent present, our aim is to capture them as people with a past- and a future, for which they are constantly trying to align their personal and professional aspirations. Issues such as maintaining personal relationships, constant mobility, increased outsourcing practices, and safety and security issues are important for many - yet these concerns, and their consequences, have not yet received the wide recognition in the development literature or in policy and practice that they deserve.

The reasons for this relative invisibility are manifold, and likely deep-rooted: if development is thought of as a ‘helping’ profession, then it would appear unseemly to spend too much time navel-gazing and pondering the fate of the helpers, since the needs of aid recipients are clearly paramount and more urgent. And yet, such considerations have not hindered the establishment of a solid body of research for example in nursing and social work on practitioners beliefs and motivations, and their working experiences, knowledge which feeds directly into training initiatives and better recruitment and retention policy and practices. At the same time, one could argue that excluding aid workers from analytical view may hide a multitude of sins, such as the considerable salary differentials in the sector between national and international staff and the detrimental effects this might have for aid delivery, or the daily tensions and frustrations which are inherent in aid work, but which aid workers are usually expected to ‘get on with’, without particular support from their employer. We thus hope that looking at aid workers’ everyday lives can be a first step to raise awareness of these issues, including the flaws and ambitions that characterize them as human beings, the challenges they face, and what this means for everyone else engaged in their shared project of overseas aid.

Thank You for Supporting KP at ASA & ARNOVA

2011-11-22T06:17:00.001-08:00

Despite a lower attendance rate for both conferences, Kumarian Press received great attention; and we would like to take a moment to thank attendees for coming out to support our endeavors.

We met a variety of individuals at ASA, ranging from your everyday professors to historians, researchers and development workers. We appreciate book ideas, and are working hard to implement these ideas for our readers.

I would also like to thank Lou Picard, author of KP's African Security and the African Command and A Fragile Balance. For two days, he welcomed our guests and signed copies of his two books.
Our trip to ARNOVA was also a hit, where our authors were found meeting and greeting our readers and attendees. Chris Corbett, author of Advancing Nonprofit Stewardship Through Self-Regulation, spoke at the conference, while Susan Ross, Shae Garwood and Jennifer Brinkerhoff promoted their new and upcoming titles.

We are thankful for our readers and their continuing support; and we look forward to seeing them next year at ARNOVA and ASA 2012.

NOTE: ASA and ARNOVA attendees - Do not forget about your post conference discounts. Source code is located on the top right corner of the order form. Valid for one month.

Lessons to be Learned From Joe Paterno

2011-11-14T07:46:00.000-08:00

Even if you aren't a football fan, you probably heard the news about Joe Paterno. But, for those living under a rock, I will put you up to speed on who Joe Paterno is. Joe Paterno, 84 years of age, was Penn State's head coach for almost half a century (up until last week), and has the most wins in Division 1 college football (second is Bobby Bowden - FSU's past coach, (around the same age) who retired two seasons ago.

Joe Paterno was fired this past week because he did not report the sighting of former assistant Jerry Sandusky raping a child in a shower. He should have reported what he thought he saw. Maybe he would have kept his job and this disgusting individual would be in jail. But unfortunately, child abuse happens in all communities in all parts of the world, and many do not report such sightings. Fear perhaps?

Since the allegations, Paterno himself has been called a child abuser, and has left Penn State. He now deals with a tarnished reputation along with constant humiliation- and people could care less about his coaching abilities.

Because of the recent Penn State Scandal that has rocked the mindsets of football fans nationwide, multiple advocacy leaders from all over the nation have come out against Paterno, and have voiced their opinions on the subject. Advocates wish that children would be left as children, and not violated or forced to work in child labor or harmful environments. (To learn more about child labor rights, read Shae Garwood's Advocacy Across Borders.)

What has the world come to when children are used as sex slaves, tormented and abused? (Reluctant Bedfellows discusses this issue in finer detail.) And, why aren't adults holding their responsibility to report these sightings to authorities? Both sides seem to need a lesson in social justice and advocacy.

KP Preps for Two Conferences Next Week

2011-11-08T11:20:00.000-08:00

November 17 - 19, 2011 has brought along a whole new meaning to Kumarian Press, who is gearing up for not one, but two conferences to showcase newly released titles.

We will be attending ARNOVA in Toronto and the ASA Conferernce in DC, both starting and ending on the same date.

We will be at ARNOVA highlighting our NGO/nonprofit and government titles. This conference is a must for us, as many of our authors will be in attendance including Christopher Corbett (who will be speaking at the event), Shae Garwood, Jennifer Brinkerhoff and new KP author, Susan Ross. These authors can be found at Author's Corner where they will have a booth available with flyers and copies of their publications. If you are attending, be sure to stop by and meet our authors.

KP is excited to attend the ASA Conference, as well where we will showcase our African Studies titles. We will have plenty of books to show along with brochures. We are pleased to have Lou Picard, author of the recently released KP publication African Security and the African Command join us at our booth for a book signing and podcast segment. For those of you who miss our interview, we will post it.

We are very excited to be a part of these events and look forward to meeting our readers.

Development Titles Desired At APHA Medical Conference

2011-11-02T11:33:00.000-07:00

I just attended the four-day long APHA Conference, held October 29 - November 2, 2011 in Washington, DC. I met a variety of individuals of all ages and skills ranging from academic professors, physicians, students and dentists. Not only was the conference hall packed with these exceptional folks, but our medical titles were a huge success.

But, out of all of the people I had met, I was surprised to speak with a few development workers who wanted to learn about the advancement of medicine in different countries (mainly Third World). This turn-out was a pleasant surprise, as I never would have expected them to show up at a medical convention.

What surprised me even more was their interest in our own KP title, Anticorruption in the Health Sector. One medical professor I met, even said he used the book in his law class!

This conference was worthy of our time, not just for our own titles. It shows that our titles do not only appeal to one group of readers, but to workers in the field of International Development (for example), as well as in classes such as nursing, medicine, law and ethics.

Turkey Devastated by a 7.2 Magnitude Earthquake

2011-10-24T08:46:00.000-07:00

Rescuers continue digging with heavy machinery, as well as their bare hands, in the villages of Van and Ercis Monday morning as Turkey gets hit by a massive earthquake that has left more than 270 individuals dead and 40,000 homeless.

The 7.2 magnitude quake, which struck on Sunday morning, had the most severe effect in Ercis, a town of around 75,000 people.

"It is a very urgent situation," Hakki Erskoy, a disaster manager for the Turkish Red Crescent, told the Guardian. He said his organisation was dealing with 40,000 homeless people, adding: "Right now, we are facing a race against time to provide shelter for people."

Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan - who toured the devastated region by helicopter - told reporters that the buildings in the area are made of mud brick, and are therefore more prone to earthquakes.

Although 24 individuals were rescued from the rubble within the first two hours of the quake, many of still missing including many university students in Ercis.

"University students are said to be living here," Mustafa Bilgin, a mine rescue expert, said. "We don't know how many of them are still inside – we've reached their computers, clothing but we did not see anyone."

A number of countries have offered assistance with both relief aid and search and rescue efforts. This immediate reaction is appreciated by the people of Turkey, and shows how government assistance can change when a natural disaster occurs. This response can be viewed in Jennifer Hyndman's new book Dual Disasters when she describes what happens when “man-made” and “natural” disasters meet.

As of yet, there have been no talks about civil wars breaking out since the quake, as those fight for their safety, homes, loved ones and own lives.

KP Author Louis Picard on AFRICOM and the LRA

2011-10-20T06:09:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, Obama sent U.S forces into Africa to confront Lord's Resistance Army. Below is Kumarian Press author Louis Picard's response to the AFRICOM situation against the LRA:

From its beginning in 2008 the United States African Command (AFRICOM), part of the American geographical defense system has been controversial and it remains so. Initial concerns focused on the impact of AFRICOM on African conflicts, on African sovereignty and debates about human security. This was followed by the increasing debate about the special forces of AFRICOM and its increasing involvement in Somalia and the fight against Al Shabaab, and Al Qaeda linked organization. It has also been engaged with Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, parts of West Africa and especially in Nigeria (with Boko Haram, an Islamic militant group). AFRICOM also brought us the first ten days of the Libya invasion. Now the African Command is to engage in the struggle against the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, South Sudan, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo. To gain a better understanding of the complexities of the African Command and African security read African Security and the African Command by Terry Buss, Donald Goldstein, Joseph Adjaye and Louis A. Picard.

Protesting Leads to War Not Peace

2011-10-11T07:58:00.000-07:00

Washington, DC is a symbol for democracy, growth and empowerment; and what would the district be without its common protesters?

For those that have not been following the news: Washington, DC has received another tirade from angry protesters ( “October 2001/Stop the Machine” ) fighting with those that will listen, in an effort to end all wars (ironic, isn't it?). This only came two weeks after the NYC protest which lead to 700 arrests.

But, 2pm yesterday marked the end of the protesters' alloted time to stand blocks away from the White House gates to fight for the freedom of our troops.

Police were ready to arrest yesterday at 2pm - and the protesters were ready to be arrested - stating that they would fight for their cause. But, protesters received an offer yesterday from police announcing that the protesters would be allowed to march for another four months. And, after hours of consideration, they politely accepted.

“It was a no brainer,” said Mr. Kauff, adding that protesters are willing to share with such groups as those participating in the dedication this weekend of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial. However, he was unsure how long protesters would stay.

Margaret Flowers, another organizer, called the offer a “transformative moment.”

“And I mean that 100 percent,” she said.

These anti-war advocates won the battle this week; but what happens when advocates fight for a cause such as anti-sweatshop labor which should be heard across the globe? We don't hear about it much in the States, but it is common in Asia and in Central Asia, mainly used on child workers and women. Advocacy Across Borders reveals the relationships that Northern-based NGOs forge in order to exert influence on powerful actors in the sweatshop industry. Shae Garwood’s study of these organizations points the way forward for civil society actors reaching across borders to advocate for a better world.

Our right to protest comes with its own cost. Protesting ignites the fire and only spreads the flame. We seem to be the cause of our own war. African Security and the African Command discusses how the US created a new military presence in Africa, thus taking it upon ourselves to help Africa by enforcing our own ways of thinking. Some would suggest we only made the Africans more westernized, spreading our way of life onto them. But, does this make Africa better, or were we only trying to act as the Supreme Power?

Overall, protesting may make leaders listen, but is it worth having a civil war to end the ultimate war?

Are Impact Investors Creating a Real Impact?

2011-10-05T08:43:00.000-07:00

According to the World Bank, there are approximately 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty - making less than $1.25 a day, and approximately 2.6 billion people living in moderate poverty - making less than $2.00 a day. The majority of these individuals live in South Asia, a population density that exceeds Africa's total population.

These groups, like everyone on the planet, need fuel, lightening, affordable heathcare and more; but sadly they do not have the means to do anything about it. With numbers this high, are Impact Investors not doing enough to reduce global poverty? After all, most government agencies are corrupt, with leaders stealing money from their patrons. India, for example, has had approximately 50-70% of welfare stolen by selfish government officials plaguing individuals to receive quality [health]care services that were promised to them. (Upcoming Kumarian Press book, Detecting Corruption, talks about how corruption can be eliminated for the benefit of the citizens. More on that coming soon.)

But, when government officials fail to meet the needs of citizens, who best to turn to but the Impact Investors. So, why aren't they doing enough to hault corruption and help reduce poverty?

The microfinance industry is known by many as a loans savior to those living in extreme poverty, or to those in need. The industry started in ther late 1980s in Bangladesh, India by Microfinance Legend, Mohammad Yunus and his founding of the nonprofit Grameen Bank. But recently, despite many successes, the Microfinance Industry has been under scrutiny, tackling concerns about where the industry's money is going; and who it is most benefiting. Not surprisingly, exploiting the poor is one of the main concerns. In India, credit histories cannot be shared, and "appropriate consumer-protection code and a nationwide regulatory framework are still lacking." (The Microfinance Catalyst, Project Syndicate) Confronting Microfinance talks about the recent concerns in the industry, and discusses the sacking of Yunus from the Grameen Bank, which lead to a huge uproar.

Now, NGOs supporting microfinance loans are under the gun, gearing up for high supervision by government officials."Although impact investors can lay the groundwork for commercial investors, they must also work in unison with government authorities to ensure well-functioning market systems. Only when such systems are firmly established will the poor be able to participate in today’s vast global economy." (The Microfinance Catalyst)

Until this gets more mediated control by the government, what can we do but ask: Whose sustainability really counts?

Working For Workers' Rights

2011-09-29T06:12:00.000-07:00

Child labor and sweatshops still exist. In 2006, it was reported that Ipod factory workers in China worked 15 hour days and slept in dormintories where visitors were not permitted, all to obtain $50 per month. These stories are all too common, but they don't have to be.

Through the clothes we purchase, and the choices we make as consumers and suppliers, we can live in a world where sweatshops cease to exist. Organizations such as Green America provide programs, suggestions and new ideas that allow our voices to be heard, encouraging companies worldwide to come on-board in the fight for fair labor rights.

Kumarian Press' recent release, Advocacy Across Borders focuses on this cause and the role of globally Northern-based NGOs in transnational advocacy networks who aim to provide fair working conditions for everyone. The book includes case studies of four NGOs and highlights their link with the anti-sweatshop network.

Learning about fair trade will educate us and others to do the right thing for labor workers worldwide.

Cambodian NGOs Raise Doubt

2011-09-19T06:23:00.000-07:00

Cambodia-based NGOs are under the gun "as the government gears up to pass controversial legislation regulating the country's estimated 2,000 civil society groups" (Asia Times Online) who are part of a foreign donor-funded railway renovation project, costing approximately $141 million that will affect more than 4000 poor families living near the tracks.

On August 4, 2011, the Cambodian Ministry of Interior suspended Sahmakum Teang Tnaut (STT), one of several involved with monitoring the resettlement of residents displaced by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and AusAID-funded rail project. At first, talks of suspension were due to inconsistencies in the group's paperwork, but later we found out the truth.

"STT operated and incited people to oppose national development by the government in order to make the development partners suspend or stop the project," the ministry said in an August 14 statement.

Since the suspension of STT, the government has warned NGOs about making "false" claims, such as the death of two children last year.

These NGOs have received criticism that marks them as using a project that will only benefit their career by exploiting others. They stay firm though stating that they are not opposed to national development.

But, since the United Nations "mission of the early 1990s seeded Cambodia with a vibrant civil society sector, NGOs here have had an ambivalent relationship with the government." (Asia Times Online) This, until recently, made Cambodia a safe and welcoming place to hold an NGO.

Some NGOs in Cambodia, such as VBNK- an NGO founded by Kumarian Press author Jenny Pearson - hold no responsibility in this debate, but still have to worry about more government interference. Like many NGOs, they choose to do business in a truthful way that will positively affect those in the country.

However, with the new regulation on the horizon, this may change things for NGOs, favoring more government involvement. If NGOs were honest, and handle their business practices with integrity, there, most likely, would be less government interaction. (Read Chris Corbett's new read to see how to create an honest nonprofit organization.)

These projects must be sustainable and help the people of Cambodia and if the government must intervene in order for this successful transition, then so be it.

Read more about this issue now.

Ten Years After

2011-09-15T11:19:00.000-07:00

I was in Canada attending the CIVICUS World Assembly (http://www.civicusassembly.org/) during the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The assembly, a gathering of NGOs, civil society activists and youth from all over the world, stood in silent prayer and reflection as a mark of respect for those who died on that horrendous day as well as those who have died since as a consequence of the “war on terror.”

A common question during those sad and confusing days following the events of September 11^th was “Why do they hate us?” They, being for the most part, a homogenous and poorly conceived Islam with its faceless (especially women “hiding” behind the veil or chador) Muslim adherents. A facile and misleading answer to this question was, “They hate us for our values and our freedoms.”

The dead should be honored and the perpetrators of this crime against humanity need to be brought to justice. I am being deliberately ambiguous here because without doubt those who funded and organized the crime and those who commandeered the planes that day were criminals, but to my mind, so too are the members of the US government who sanctioned and supported a response that has resulted in two wars, countless thousands of deaths and maiming, not to mention the considerable damage to the US as an upholder of democratic and respectful human rights values.

It is easier to rely on technological, military and economic might and reality TV visions of warfare and “shock and awe” than to tackle the complex factors that contributed to 9/11. It is also easier to mask rank opportunism—control of vital oil resources, for example—behind the rhetoric of patriotism and freedom.

Many commentators, Juan Cole (http://www.juancole.com/) and George Packer among them (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/09/12/110912fa_fact_packer), have noted what has been lost since 9/11. As editor for Kumarian Press, I have been fortunate to work with two authors who have also looked sensitively at a society which in many respects seems to have lost its moral compass (and I am not talking about those in the Middle East many of which have shown, through the “Arab Spring” a much firmer grasp of concepts such as democracy, freedom of expression and social change than we in the US have at the moment). Robert Ivie’s brilliant book Dissent from War (http://www.kpbooks.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=187285) addresses how words themselves are weapons of war and offers suggestions for transforming words from swords into ploughshares. Lyn Boyd Judson encourages us to never lose sight of the humanity of our enemies in her passionate examination of the ambiguities of diplomacy and morality in her book Strategic Moral Diplomacy (http://www.kpbooks.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=208807).

Both of these authors hope that their books will help readers of any ideological stripe or religious faith to think about not only who and what they are, but more importantly, who and what they can become, help us to loosen the shackle of despair, fear and hatred and open ourselves to the truly infinite possibilities for good that we intrinsically possess.

Exposing NGOs Through Education

2011-09-09T10:09:00.001-07:00

Today, the American Graduate School in Paris, a nonprofit organization of higher education, is starting a Graduate Certificate Program in NGO Management. The classes will be taught entirely in English, and will be co-taught by UNESCO senior program specialist Clinton Robinson and Human Rights Watch France director Jean-Marie Fardeau.

The objective of this two semester-long program is for students and professionals alike to gain a better understanding of NGO management by exploring common principles and practices used by today's leading NGOS.

NGOs, such as VBNK, have made a name for themselves -by building from the ground up with integrity, courage and committment. VBNK, for example, is a well-known, Cambodia-based NGO started by Kumarian Press' Jenny Pearson, author of the new NGO management book Creative Capacity Development. In Creative Capacity Development, Pearson outlines how she started VBNK, and what priniciples she used to build-up her name, now recognized by many in the business.

But, why is it important in today's world to know about NGO Management?

Fardeau says: "NGOs have become key players on the international scene. Growing out of an understanding of democratic action that is rooted in citizens' concerns, they aim to express the values, ideas and commitments of civil society."

To learn more about the Program, read on.

Standing Up For African Security

2011-08-30T13:12:00.000-07:00

In the news, yesterday brought along blood-shed and tears in Jos, the Plateau State Capital, between the Muslims and the Christians in Africa, killing at least seven individuals. This attack between the two groups came not long after a clash erupted in the two regions of Nigeria.

"Trouble started when Muslim faithful of the Izala sect in their numbers were trooping to the prayer ground along Rukuba road Jos, to celebrate the Eid el-fitri Sallah and were allegedly challenged by the Christains who accused them of spoiling their Christmas last year by bombing their homes." (Daily Champion)

The situation soon got out of hand, as gun-fire spread. Special military ops took charge and scared away young fighters, leaving at least five dead at the scene.

"It took the combine efforts of members of the STF, members of the state security outfit code name operation rainbow to rescue those trapped at the prayer ground with armoured vehicle as they hurriedly escorted them to safety."

This is not the first time military ops were forced to intervene an out-of-control battle, and it certainly will not be the last. The question to really ask is: Is the military really helping? After all, at least five people were killed.

African Security and the African Command by Kumarian Press discusses this when the editors of the book showcase Bush's AFRICOM project as a way to "better" African security in the midst of war. But, is AFRICOM causing more harm than good? Some would say that placing our troops into Africa has helped Africans, leading toward democracy, freedom and human rights. Others would suggest that the African people are losing their identity and being forced to do things the "American way."

But, like the battle in Nigeria, my opinion stands that without intervention more harm could have been caused. More people could have died, and we need the government to step-in to regulate us. Without the authority, crisis will sweep the nation, and therefore the world.

What do you think we should do to increase national and international security?

Defend the Reputation of Microfinance

2011-08-22T10:49:00.000-07:00

Microfinance has taken flight over the last two decades bringing in new development policies and many reasons to celebrate (especially if you are a woman). However, NGOs and small business owners, such as SKS, in India are far from celebrating. Andhra Pradesh, India's microfinance-meca hit crisis today after state legislators passed a law that would regulate microfinance firms.

Critics say that the new law regulation in India could cripple microfinance firms, stating that the collection of dues has already fallen around 10%; but to "backers of the law, it's an attempt to rein back the worst excesses of an industry, which it is claimed, is charging exorbiant interest and is responsible for an increasing number of suicides because of heavy-handed debt collection methods."(Poverty Matters Blog: "Development Panacea or Exorbiant, Ineffective PovertyTrap?")

So, is microfinance really helping community development?

The idea of microfinance, to many, sounded promising as a savior to poor communities looking for poverty reduction, bringing in savings and loans. But, although microfinance (and microcredit) brings in huge support and praise, it also comes with an arsenal of critics who argue that it is being used as a measure of poverty reduction rather than poverty transformation. Some critics even state that small loans are only used for new businesses and not used for poor people themselves who need the money for healthcare and education expenses. (Critics of microfinance would love Milford Bateman's upcoming release Confronting Microfinance.)

This isn't the most pleasant news for small busines owners looking to self-regulate their own business. And, for authors like Chris Corbett who just released his new title Advancing Nonprofit Stewardship Through Self-Regulation - which highlights Independent Sector's 33 Principles of Self-Regulation in an effort to help these small firm owners reach success through integrity and genuine practices - this news couldn't have come at a more inopportune time.

India's news even struck a nerve with Father of Microfinance, Mohammad Yunus who stated that small companies are "misusing" and "abusing" his concepts.

Being a lover or a hater of microfinance has depended on evidence of individual lives who have played a part in this dramatic play.

Do you think microfinance is good for community development? If not, how would you control the rise of poverty?

Read Charles Buxton's Interview on Central Asia Newswire

2011-08-16T07:58:00.000-07:00

Recently, Charles Buxton spoke with Jackie Jacobsen from Central Asia Newswire regarding his new title The Struggle for Civil Society in Central Asia. Read Buxton's Interview from Newswire now.

Confronting Microfinance Set to Release This September

2011-08-08T11:14:00.000-07:00

Beginning with the pioneering work of Dr Muhammad Yunus in 1970s Bangladesh, the concept of microfinance (more accurately ‘microcredit’) very soon captured the hearts and minds of a generation. Microfinance seemed such a blindingly obvious idea: provide tiny microloans to the poor and you will allow them to establish or expand a very simple income-generating activity, with the additional income that they would thenceforth earn helping them to escape poverty. The heady rhetoric and seductive vision put forward by Dr Yunus along these lines was more than enough to get the international development community to stand up and take notice. By the 1990s, microfinance had become the most popular anti-poverty program of all. Importantly, the spread of microfinance was usefully consolidated by a steadily growing number of impact evaluations undertaken by the microfinance institutions themselves and by their supporters in the international development community, all of which, inevitably, appeared to confirm that microfinance was indeed having an amazing effect upon the poor and poor communities. It also greatly helped to sell microfinance to the general public when its cause began to be taken up by a raft of influential individuals - Hollywood stars, CEOs, Western European and Middle Eastern Royalty, major sports personalities, high-profile politicians (notably Bill and Hilary Clinton) and self-styled ‘trouble-shooting’ economists, such as Jeffrey Sachs and Hernando de Soto.

However, thirty years into the microfinance movement and it is now becoming quite clear that the seductive vision elaborated so skilfully by Dr Yunus and others has turned out to be nothing more than a mirage. The evidence for this is now all around us and it is overwhelming, even to long-standing supporters of the microfinance model. And even though many microfinance supporters and institutions are desperately finding new goals for microfinance to address – notably ‘universal financial inclusion’ – or else have begun to stress the importance of other aspects of microfinance rather than just the original core idea of microcredit (e.g., micro-savings, micro-insurance, micro-leasing), it is perfectly clear that a major paradigm shift in development policy is well underway – that is, the original narrow Grameen Bank concept of ‘microcredit’ is now effectively dead in the water.

Consider first the problems that have arisen in Bangladesh, the ‘spiritual home’ of microfinance. We can do no better than to reflect upon its economic and social impact in the location it was first introduced in the late 1970s and thereafter rapidly proliferated; in and around the famed village of Jobra near Chittagong. If Yunus is to be believed, then here more than anywhere else in Bangladesh we should expect to see major poverty reduction gains registered this last thirty years. But, it is not like that at all. Instead, endemic poverty and deprivation still very much persist in Jobra today. Put simply, local demand for the simple items and services produced using a microloan does not automatically elastically stretch to ensure that everyone starting a new microenterprise will also find enough customers to earn an income and survive. Just because one basket-maker can find enough local buyers for her product and so survive, this does not mean that everyone else who then chooses to make baskets will enjoy the same outcome. Economists call this basic error the ‘fallacy of composition’, and it is this that Dr Yunus fundamentally misunderstood when formulating his plans for microfinance.

The generally finite level of local demand means that the constant new entry of ‘poverty-push’ microenterprises generally reduces the margins, wages and profits of all market participants, thanks to generally lower turnover per microenterprise. Local prices for microenterprise outputs are also depressed because of the additional (but largely unnecessary) local supply. These factors are, of course, why most existing microenterprises when asked about what would help them in their micro-business, all too often reply ‘very much less competition’. The typical snapshot of village life is that of many traders and retailers sat alongside each other waiting for hours on end for the few customers able to buy their wares. Local demand constraints are also one of the reasons why a very high percentage of new microenterprises in Jobra, and right across Bangladesh, quickly fail – they simply can’t find any customers (at least at a price commensurate with basic survival). Micro-business failure is very important to consider because it all too often plunges the hapless micro-entrepreneur into irretrievable poverty and deprivation. This is especially the case if they have had to sell their land or housing in order to repay the microloan, as is very often expected of them. Finally, there is now a serious new social problem to deal with in Jobra - personal over-indebtedness. In the last few years the increasingly commercialised Grameen Bank and its competitors have taken to hard-selling microloans in order to build and maintain market share and profitability, and as a direct result far too many poor individuals have wound up in possession of a bundle of unrepayable microloans.

Crucially, Bangladesh as a whole stands out as having been almost entirely left behind by its rapidly growing East Asian ‘tiger’ economy neighbours. This is not a coincidence, but a result of policy choice. By and large, the successful ‘tiger’ economies all opted to deploy a pro-active, subsidised, policy-based but nevertheless well-managed local financial model radically different to the Grameen Bank microfinance model that today dominates in Bangladesh. Simplifying, the heterodox East Asian local financial model is marked out by the provision of affordable financial support for scaled-up formal sector small businesses and family farms that can efficiently link up with other sectors of the economy (i.e., with state companies, large private businesses, marketing cooperatives). Consider just the experience of Vietnam. It is well known that in the 1990s Vietnamese government officials checked out the Grameen Bank with a view to replicating it in their own country. But they came home disenchanted, and decided instead to establish the Grameen Bank model’s mirror opposite. Thank goodness they made this choice, one might say, because in less than twenty years Vietnam’s heterodox local financial system has played an important role in helping propel the country out of abject poverty and into near middle income status.

Turning to the very many developing countries, regions and localities that have also deployed the Grameen Bank microfinance model, they appear to have fared no better than Bangladesh. Effectively diverting their scarce financial resources into the tiniest of informal microenterprises, these countries have generally seen little economic or social benefit over the longer term and, indeed, most eventually ended up having to deal with a destructive sub-prime-style ‘microfinance meltdown’ scenario. Bolivia, Mexico, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Morocco and, most stunning of all, the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh in late 2010, all are now viewed as examples of how microfinance can seriously destabilise and undermine the local economic and social structures of most benefit to the poor, not strengthen them.

Are the Western Balkans countries any different?

The Western Balkans is one of the regions where microfinance was most brought to bear under the pressure of the international development community. In the aftermath of the collapse of the former Yugoslavia and the vicious civil war that ensued, microfinance was seen by the international development community to be one of the main recovery policies. It would supposedly address the region’s most pressing issues - poverty, inequality, exclusion and rising unemployment. Much was expected of it, especially in seriously devastated Bosnia. Many programs got started using large amounts of international reconstruction aid. Very soon the main international development agencies and key individuals were touting the apparent initial progress as indicative of a major boost to recovery and reconstruction.

However, from the vantage point of more than fifteen years of experience on the ground, our new book out in September with Kumarian Press - ‘Confronting Microfinance: Undermining Sustainable Development’ – offers a very sobering estimation of the ultimate sustainable impact of microfinance. Put together by an almost uniquely experienced group of academic economists, enterprise development advisors, policy consultants, and high-level government officials (including several previous government Ministers), the general message that emerges from the book is that the hype and PR surrounding the microfinance model in the region simply does not reflect the reality on the ground. Going further, the accusation is raised that the microfinance model has actually been a major contributory factor in what is now increasingly accepted as a failed recovery in the region.

The book outlines the most pressing problems directly or indirectly precipitated by the microfinance model since 1995. Some contributors see the overarching problem to be the channelling of financial support to the very simplest of microenterprises, a trajectory that has manifestly accelerated the primitivisation, deindustrialisation and informalisation of the average local economy. In many of Serbia’s regions, for instance, a growing number of local communities are swiftly losing all touch with the formal sector, and are becoming resigned to a future of informal, non-tax-paying microenterprises servicing what little local demand exists. In Bosnia, the formal sector has also been ‘crowded out’ by this new microfinance-induced informalisation trajectory, especially the small-scale industry and industrial services sectors that history shows often provides the most number of sustainable and well-paying local jobs.

Another theme touched upon by virtually all of the chapters is the huge opportunity cost represented by the lack of funding for the crucial SME sector. Virtually all of the chapter contributors were at pains to emphasise that their respective SME sectors have been disadvantaged because of the effective diversion of scarce funds (savings and remittances) into the least productive informal sector, and so away from potentially more productive - and desperately needed - formal small and medium businesses. The authors all argue that such a process of financial intermediation cannot be an efficient economic development trajectory for society, no matter how profitable it is for the individual financial institutions directly involved. In fact, it took the global financial crisis to finally shake governments and the international development community into urgently providing major new programs of financial support for the SME sector. For profit-maximisation reasons, of course, the private commercial banks were simply unwilling to engage with the risky and low return SME sector, much preferring the high and relatively risk-free profits to be made by hugely upping the supply of microloans to poor households. Indeed, a noted feature brought out by several of the chapters is that the commercial banks have not been lending to enterprises of any size, but have jumped into providing simple consumption loans to households right across the Western Balkans. The result is that many local communities have been artificially pumped up with consumer demand fuelled by such household microloans, but only for things to fall apart later on when these household microloans were retired, called in or defaulted on. A great many towns across the region are now pockmarked with only recently renovated but now hastily abandoned stores and warehouses, a testament to the temporary uptick in local consumer demand facilitated by simple household microloans, but at the cost of wasted resources into the longer term.

In agriculture, several chapters outline why only the most primitive and least sustainable agricultural operations have been supported, leaving the much more efficient family farms and agricultural cooperative structures to go without any serious form of affordable financial support. The Croatia case illustrates this problem well. Several of the microfinance institutions entered into providing support for the proliferation of ‘two-cow farms’, thinking that they were doing some good in a particularly hard-hit post-war region. But this was entirely the wrong sort of support for a recovering dairy industry, and it resulted in nothing more than a wasteful process of entry and exit, and it also depressed raw milk prices thanks to the inevitable local over-supply. Several of the chapters, including a special chapter on gender and microfinance, went on to deal with the widely celebrated issue of gender empowerment. While the websites of the main microfinance institutions typically display their own ‘role models’ of success, the conclusion reached is that real evidence of ‘gender empowerment’ is simply not there. Indeed, with one of the most high-profile gender-driven microfinance institutions - Žene za Žene (Women for Women) - now having to cope with a flood of delinquent women clients, the conclusion is that the wisdom (not to say morality) of blithely encouraging poor women to supply petty items and services to already vastly over-supplied local markets needs to be very strongly challenged. Finally, the book also touches upon the impact of the global financial crisis. We find very similar sub-prime style misadventures in several countries. However, thanks to its uniquely damaging microfinance ‘boom to bust’, it is the people and government of Bosnia that have by far the most daunting set of microfinance-related problems to first overcome before they can get their economy and society on to a road leading to sustainable economic and social development.

All told, ‘Confronting Microfinance’ argues that the microfinance model has probably been one of the most damaging of the many neoliberal economic and social policies to have been implemented in the Western Balkans after 1995. These largely negative experiences therefore resonate with what is being uncovered in almost all of the developing countries in recent years, as I noted earlier, which is that microfinance simply doesn’t work.

_________________
Milford Bateman is the editor of ‘Confronting Microfinance: Undermining Sustainable Development’ which comes out with Kumarian Press in September 2012. He is also the author of ‘Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work? The Destructive Rise of Local Neoliberalism’ that was released by Zed Books in 2010. Dr Bateman is a freelance consultant on local economic development and also, since 2005, A Visiting Professor of Economics at Juraj Dobrila University at Pula, Croatia.

Seeing through Transparency

2011-08-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

In the July 25th edition of The New Yorker there is a profile of Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s biggest hedge fund. Dalio prides himself on creating in Bridgewater, a culture of “radical transparency.” Among the rules of radical transparency in Bridgewater is that face to face encounters are encouraged and behind the back discussions are frowned upon. The goal is to create an organization where there are “no ego barriers, no emotional reactions to mistakes.” There is an implicit linkage between the presumed openness of radical transparency and accountability and organizational effectiveness. As depicted in the magazine article, Bridegwater sounds creepy to me, evoking images of brainwashing, the Cultural Revolution, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it does stress one of the buzzwords in development discourse that is examined cogently in the Practical Action book Deconstructing Development that is distributed by Stylus.

In his essay on transparency, Jonathan Fox questions the assumption that transparency generates accountability and vice versa. As he notes, transparency mobilizes the power of shame, and truth and openness do not always lead to justice. Fox concludes that the real questions to ask are what kinds of transparency lead to what kinds of accountability and under what conditions. As Jenny Pearson observes in her recent KP book, Creative Capacity Development, her study of her work on capacity building (another development buzzword) for a Cambodia NGO, the historical and cultural contexts in which transparency is constructed are extremely important.

How would you define transparency and in what ways do your organizations promote or hinder transparency? What is the role of transparency in development?

It was just another Manic Monday

2011-07-26T09:23:00.000-07:00

I doubt anyone truly likes Mondays. After a relaxing weekend - what's to enjoy about waking up at 6:00 A.M., all to stuff a bagel down your throat, throw on some wrinkled clothes and get in the car and rush to work? Mondays - I could do without them.

Do I sound all too bitter? Maybe I am. But first, give me a chance to explain myself. I never minded Mondays. Honestly, not until yesterday when it finally happened...

Yesterday morning carried on without any complaints. I ate breakfast, put on decent clothes, and hopped into my car with a full tank of gas. But, as I cruised down the highway -with only two exits to go, I might add - I couldn't help (a.k.a. didn't have a choice) but to notice the dancing lights behind me. Yes, I finally got my first speeding ticket. I suppose I didn't make a good enough case because the paperwork is waiting for me back home.

Sure, I suppose it's my fault for speeding (or at least getting caught), but I really didn't need that. Money is tight for everyone, and I am no exception. I spent the majority of yesterday disappointed with myself and thought about all of the people who are struggling to make ends meet and would love more money. For me, the State of Virginia will get their money this time; but what if one day I can't make ends meet? And, even though I know I will be fine today, all I could do yesterday was whine and think to myself "Where's my bailout money; and what is Washington, D.C. (my home away from home) really doing to help me in my time of need?"

I know I sound like a Free Market Purist, although I am not trying to sound like one at all. But, in times of desperation, don't we all wonder where or to whom the government's money is going and why we can't, as individuals, get freebies from the government so we will be okay in times of need? It may sound selfish, but money is the necessary-evil that keeps us alive and thriving.

Many wonder where our money is going and how we can obtain aid - especially in times of need. I suppose that we must first find out about aid assistance and then maybe Kumarian Press authors such as Steve Berkman can provide us with some blunt truths and insight into where our money is going. For example, in Berkman's book The World Bank and the Gods of Lending, he shows the mismanagement of aid assistance for programs that were meant to improve industries including healthcare and education as well as improve the status of the poor, but aren't. Berkman also exposes several fraud projects and declares that The World Bank's money is going to programs and thieves that are not deserving.

I don't know, but when I have one of those days when I feel like it couldn't get any worse, I tend to think about those that are struggling to make ends meet and think about what we can do to help those in need, and therefore help eachother. By reading up on finance and the aid industry, I think we can all learn how the aid industry works, where our money is going, and what we can do to help alleviate poverty and control theft. Maybe then we won't have to worry so much about economical issues and focus on more pleasant things.

A Friend’s Dinner with David Harvey and Reflections on Intellectuals, Progressive Publishing and Kumarian Press

2011-07-19T04:26:00.000-07:00

At the post office the other day, I met a neighbor who works with the progressive nonprofit Solidago Foundation. She was all excited because she had just come back from New York City where she had dinner with David Harvey. In my opinion, David Harvey should be a household name, but in case his is a new name to you, Harvey is distinguished professor of anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center.

His numerous books, heavily influenced by Marx and characterized by dialectical engagement with issues of social, political and economic injustice, are required reading for many graduate students in the social sciences. His online course on Volume One of Marx’s Capital is the best guide that I know to unraveling the complexities of this gargantuan and wonderful book.

Back to my friend: She hoped that she could encourage David to help spread the word about progressive organizations such as Solidago. Her comments got me to thinking about whom to enlist in progressive causes and the position of intellectuals (in the Gramscian sense of a distinctive class of individuals: clergy, philosophers, professors and teachers, etc. that engage in intellectual activity as a specific social, political and economic function) in these causes. I have heard David Harvey speak in both formal academic settings where his language (or “discourse,” rather) and argumentation is complex and “informal” gatherings where he communicates the same ideas with an awareness and sympathy to a “non-specialist” audience without condescension or dilution of his arguments and ideas. And he is a wonderful teacher: do watch his video on Marx!

But his books, marvelous and penetrating as they are, can be difficult, reinforcing the Marxian conviction found in Volume One of Capital that there “are no royal roads to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.” This is not to denigrate the value or importance of Harvey’s work, but I doubt if many beyond the institutional venues where intellectual activity is commodified and exchanged would have the time and energy to read, say, Harvey’s The Limits of Capital, let alone in conjunction with Marx’s Capital itself!

In these times of economic, environmental and all manner of turmoil and conflict that indeed pose a threat to the very survival of the human race, the role of the intellectual and the role of Kumarian Press as a site for the transformation of intellectual labor into a commodity that both sustains and questions the structures, systems and practices that characterize our era is both paradoxical and critically important. Paradoxical in the sense that Kumarian Press is after all a capitalist business venture that has to be competitive and has to reap continued growth in terms of sales and profits in order to survive and important in the sense that Kumarian, in spite of its imbrications in the contradictions (and perpetuation, albeit slightly) of capitalism, seeks to provide viable alternatives that run counter to the interests and power of dominant groups in society.

One of my favorite passages in a David Harvey book comes early in his Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference.

While attending an academic conference on globalization with its tense and frequently hard to follow arguments afflicted by the radical and no doubt chic skepticism of poststructuralism, deconstruction, postmodernism and so on, he sat in on a conference of evangelical Christians that was taking place at his hotel. Harvey was struck by the enthusiasm of the crowd as they listened to the preachers and it was clear that what was happening at the evangelical conference was an “orchestration of emotions and passions rather than of intellect.” But it was an orchestration that was explicitly scored with expressions by the evangelical of foundational beliefs. Harvey wondered what would happen if he returned to the academic conference and spoke of foundational beliefs. He would probably be put out to pasture or seen as a dinosaur. While I believe, as does Harvey, that one should scrutinize all manner of foundational beliefs (including those of the secular Left), his experience with the evangelicals led him to a rather disturbing conclusion: “…when a political group armed with strong and unambiguous foundational beliefs confronts a group of doubting Thomases whose only foundational belief is skepticism towards all foundational beliefs, then it is rather easy to predict who will win.”

The tensions and imperatives of capitalist commerce, the necessity for global social, political and economic change, and encounters with the powerful armed with foundational beliefs: all these are familiar components of work at Kumarian. The bulk of my career at Kumarian has been during the bleak years of the second Bush administration. Talk about foundational beliefs and power! And as the evermore seemingly dysfunctional and rough beast that is the US government slouches towards Bethlehem (and possible default), I ask myself the same questions that I do every day: what is the role of Kumarian Press, what the role of its authors is and how to be “progressive” during periods of intolerance and myopia. I’ll conclude with another of my favorite David Harvey reflections, this one from The Limits of Capital as he gives me a valuable answer to my questions and hope. He writes about the need to project theory “into the fires of political practice” so that “new strategies for the sane reconstruction of society can emerge.” This statement I have emblazoned on my wall as it encapsulates for me the very essence and purpose of Kumarian Press and forms the framework for my editorial strategies. We need sanity now more than ever and Kumarian Press needs authors who can write for wide audiences with a diversity of experiences and knowledge so that the fires of political practice will burn brightly and guide us to, if not a promised land, at least one in which empathy, justice and equity and environmental preservation are primary concerns.

Charles Buxton Announces New Civil Society Book

2011-07-11T06:03:00.000-07:00

The Struggle for Civil Society in Central Asia:
April-June 2011… April 7th was “black and red” day as Bishkek’s evening paper put it: one year after Kyrgyzstan’s bloody uprising, during which the President’s forces shot over 80 protestors dead on the main square…That event happened as I was putting the finishing touches to my book for Kumarian “The struggle for civil society in Central Asia”. As Kumarian’s editors “got their teeth” into the book, an even worse loss of life took place, in June 2010 – over 400 people dead after inter-ethnic clashes in Kyrgyzstan’s southern capital Osh and neighbouring Jalalabad.

I have been living in this region for almost ten years, working in civil society development. The ex-Soviet countries that seemed so similar are now moving apart so fast. Kyrgyzstan having had two revolutions (2005 and 2010) while in Turkmenistan there are few independent NGOs at all, and in Kazakhstan President Nazarbaev has just won a new term with – apparently – 95% of the vote in a turnout of over 80%!

Some brief thoughts for Kumarian readers:
Indeed, civil society development is a “struggle”. Often we don’t see clearly where the CS struggle ends and the political struggle begins.
Over the last year, as the political struggle in Kyrgyzstan took more and more of people’s energies, CSO had the important role of trying to ensure some basic rules (legality, non-violent behaviour, not sacrificing everything for the sake of power) still obtained.
It is CS’s fate seemingly to be used by other actors. Unfortunately, our region has seen it used for neo-liberal gains, then sidelined by the foreign donors as their government focus on the search for oil or political stability. We see civil society used by national government (setting up their own “GONGOs”) and by political radicals. But the more it is used, the more important, it seems, is the struggle to keep open a space for debate and collective action by citizens.

Watching the news from the Middle East… Having seen violence close at hand in Central Asia, I can’t say I feel euphoric about the demonstrations. Like here, the motor for them is ordinary people’s pent up economic and social demands. It is not clear what the new regimes will or can do, especially as far as democracy is concerned. When big changes come, the little changes (our project work, more participative ways of doing things, attention to minority – or majority - groups of all kinds) seem to take a hit. All we can say is there are more difficult times ahead.

Last week I was in Osh starting a programme training local NGOs and government staff in analytical and research skills. The idea is to help develop new policy and practice around the idea of diversity – to increase government accountability to citizens and reduce the risk of violence. I hope my own analysis in the Kumarian book will be of use in the region – both to international development practitioners, and to local NGO activists.

Charles Buxton, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, 23.6.2011

About the Author:
Charles Buxton is an INTRAC Capacity Building Specialist based in Central Asia. The Struggle for Civil Society in Central Asia was published in May 2011 and is now available in paperback.

Jenny Pearson's Creative Capacity Development - Now Available in Paperback

2011-07-05T05:52:00.000-07:00

Ground control to Major Tom
Creative Capacity Development – reaching out across the space between multiple perspectives on capacity development

Several times in recent years I have found myself sitting in a room with some high powered people – bureaucrats, academics, technical experts, donor policy makers and the like – gathered together to discuss capacity development. At the first of these events I started by wondering what on earth I was doing there – I felt I was out of my depth and wouldn’t be able to contribute anything of value. Within an hour I had changed my mind and knew that what I had to contribute to the discussion was a much needed ‘voice of practice’. As I sat and listened to some eminent people saying some very interesting things, the title riff of the David Bowie number ‘Ground control to Major Tom’ kept popping into my head, and it just wouldn’t go away. From my perspective as a long term capacity development practitioner in a developing, post-conflict country it seemed to me that some of the ideas and opinions being expressed were just out there in the stratosphere. ‘Ground control to Major Tom’ is now my private mantra for all such meetings – it helps me stay grounded when the conversation is going off in directions I don’t understand, and it also helps me frame my contributions.

My book, Creative Capacity Development: Learning to adapt in development practice – launched June 2011, is the story of me and the organisation I founded trying to understand and integrate learning and change into our work as essential components of achieving sustainable capacity development. It explores the challenge of overcoming the profound blocks to capacity development that arise in complex cultural and post-conflict societies. It shows clearly that sustainable change only comes when you leave behind doing business as usual and embrace creative approaches that help people overcome their fears and move forward. My hope is that this book will make a contribution to building the bridges that are so badly needed to connect all the different groups concerned with capacity development – from practice on the ground to the upper echelons of political policy making, and all the levels in between, especially the in-country missions of international organisations, donors and INGOs.

I’m the first to admit that I don’t get it about the political and economic considerations and other mechanisms that drive aid and development policies, whether at global, home country or local office level. I realise that lack of understanding may reduce my capacity to be effective in facilitating positive change. However, on the other hand, I don’t very often hear any of the bureaucrats or experts I meet admit that they don’t get it about the realities of capacity development practice. The good news is that many are now recognising that the problem isn’t so much about knowing what good practice for capacity development should look like – the theory and some good examples are well documented - the problem is about knowing how to operationalise what is known. The bad news is that even in this changing understanding the voice of practice is rarely heard and even less valued in most of the debates about aid effectiveness, country ownership, and so on. Those who have something to say about the realities of actually doing capacity development don’t get a lot of air time in the complex agenda that seems mostly concerned with political considerations, accountability and measurable results. Despite the fact that we all (allegedly) have the same end goal in sight, there isn’t a lot of space for those who want to argue to doing things differently at the level of operations. Within the aid and development sectors there are multiple realities, world views and ways of doing business that are very far apart and this is reflected in the language we use, what we value and how we go about our business.

So who needs to learn to talk whose language? Who needs to understand whose perspective? Who needs to change their ways of working? The answer, of course, is that we need to learn how to understand each other in order to find a middle way that will increase the level and pace of change for the better. I learn about the issues and imperatives driving aid from going to meetings, reading position papers, research documents and so on. I hope that if some of the people working at other levels of the sector read my book, they will start to learn more about the challenges and realities on the ground and that will help us all move one small step closer to a shared understanding. Only when we all have appreciation and respect for each others perspectives and take them into account when framing our approaches to capacity development will we jointly be able to make a real difference.

Jenny Pearson has lived and worked in Cambodia since 1995. She has qualifications in social work and management and worked in the public sector in England before coming to Cambodia. She arrived in Cambodia as a volunteer and went on to found and direct VBNK, Cambodia's leading capacity building institution. She has played a leading role in developing the capacity of the not-for-profit sector in Cambodia, introducing creative approaches to capacity development and serving on the boards of several prominent development organisations.

In 2007 she was a visiting fellow at the Institute of Development Studies in the UK. Since her retirement from VBNK in 2008, Jenny spends her time consulting and writing about capacity development, drawing on her years of experience to contribute the voice of practice to the international discourse on capacity development. She holds dual British and Cambodian citizenship and lives in a village outside Phnom Penh with her adopted Cambodian family.

Augusta Dwyer's "Broke but Unbroken" is Ready to Read

2011-06-27T05:49:00.000-07:00

Read on to get an insider's view into "Broke but Unbroken" by Augusta Dwyer. Here, Dwyer talks about her inspiration for the book and what readers will get out of reading this new smash hit.

In 1987, in Rio de Janeiro, I saw a documentary that had just been released by filmmaker Tete Moraes, the friend of several journalists I knew back then. Her film was called “Land for Rose,” in English, and was about the struggles of a fairly new social movement attempting to take land – in this case, a huge, unproductive estate called Fazenda Annoni – so that they could make a living. Over the course of the filming Rose, a poor field worker gave birth to a baby boy. At the end of the documentary, however, we learned that Rose had been struck by a truck that rammed its way through a picket line, killing her and two others. I remember thinking to myself that, like the landless peasants interviewed in the documentary, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST, didn’t stand much of a chance.

In 2001, I took part in the large protests in Quebec City revolving around that year’s Summit of the Americas, and attended a lecture given by an MST delegate. I remember spending most of it, sitting in the dark, internally rocking in astonishment. Against all odds, the Sem Terra movement had become an enormous success. It had won tens of thousands of hectares of land for more than 250,000 Brazilian families. It had set up schools and cooperatives, sent dozens of peasants’ children to study medicine and agronomy in other countries and carried out training courses for its continually recycled and evolving leadership. Fazenda Annoni itself, by then renamed Sarandi, was producing and selling enormous quantities of milk, grains, meat, vegetables and even herbal tea.

Four years later, I decided that the public needed to know more about the positive outcomes of the many growing social movements of the Global South. In a world where ostensibly sane and clear-thinking people had accepted the travesty of the Iraq invasion, increasing global environmental destruction and a host of other depressing phenomena, I felt we were all in need of some good news for a change.

The result of my research brought me into contact with scores of impoverished people from Brazil to Indonesia and Argentina to India. They and their fellow members had all made similar strides in overcoming poverty on their own, rights-based, terms. Among the participants of these movements, moreover, I found a determination not only to grasp the resources that should have been theirs, but also to foster democratic decision-making in their methods, to preserve and protect natural environments, educate themselves and their children, and share the fruits of their victories among ever-wider communities. I found innovative ideas and strategies, and the desire to turn the top-down anti-poverty mechanisms of giant bi-lateral and multi-lateral aid institutions on their head in favor of managing the struggle against poverty themselves.

What I hope people will pick up from Broke But Unbroken: Grassroots Social Movements and Their Radical Solutions to Poverty is an entirely new way of looking at traditional poverty alleviation – and at the poor themselves. I believe that their stories of organized struggle and achievement paint a collective picture of them not as victims but as protagonists. Most of all, however, I hope that they will be inspired to learn more about and support these movements.

Augusta Dwyer is an award-winning independent journalist living in Canada.

Professionalizing the Humanitarian Sector

2011-06-20T11:16:00.000-07:00

I recently attended the Second World Conference on Humanitarian Studies at Tufts University. The “humanitarian sector” is a growing field with anticipated 6% annual growth in terms of expanding needs for humanitarian assistance and concomitant increases in the numbers of those engaged in humanitarian work.

About 400 scholars, practitioners, educators and the Kumarian Press editor attended the conference. As Peter Walker, Director of the Feinstein International Center at Tufts, explained the conference was to be very much a work in progress where ideas, suggestions and musings could be distributed in an open and receptive environment. I found the meeting fascinating. Clearly, with the growth of the humanitarian industry, something similar to what happened with business schools as explored in a wonderful book by Rakesh Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands (Princeton University Press, 2010) is a distinct possibility. Khurana notes the emergence of the MBA, designed to inculcate standards and levels of competence for those at managerial levels in the private sector. The professionalization of business required codifying knowledge relevant for practitioners and developing enforceable standards of conduct.

The Tufts conference attendees noted that professionalizing the humanitarian sector would entail devising sets of core competencies, enacting processes of certification and accreditation, inculcating opportunities for apprenticeship and lastly, forming a kind of professional association.

Obviously such professionalization is not without controversy or challenge. For one, the question of voice and who determines standards and core competencies remains unresolved. For another, the possibility of a professionally trained humanitarian elite—comprised of individuals from both the global North and South—runs the danger of devolving into the trajectory Khurana observes for business schools. Initially envisioned as training that would create a professional business class that would serve the needs of both society and business, the moral and ethical framework of professional education and apprenticeships in MBA programs became muted as business schools increasingly adopted the perspective that professional managers are merely agents of shareholders, responsible only for increasing profits.

Given the fact that humanitarian aid is also big business with a wide range of economic interests and competing stakeholders involved (indeed, among the attendees at the conference were some hedge fund managers), my fear is that a cadre of professional humanitarians could lose its way and professional humanitarians could become more the servants of special interests and organizations and less the helpers for those in need.

What do you think? Is there a need for defining and professionalizing the humanitarian sector? What would be some features needed to professionalize the sector?

KP Author Chris Corbett Reflects on Three Cups of Tea and its importance for NGO accountability

2011-05-18T07:47:00.000-07:00

At a prior time, the Three Cups of Tea controversy could have been, and would have been, comfortably ignored by many of us and dismissed by others as a “tempest in a teapot”. That time is long passed.

We have all been subjected to too many nonprofit scandals, over too many years. We find them online, in newspapers and magazines, or on 60 Minutes, like the recent expose alleging malfeasance at the Central Asia Institute (CAI). We are faced with investigative reports, like Three Cups of Deceit, by authors like J. Krakauer-- reports that deprive all but a few us of the luxury of ignoring or dismissing the allegations.

And now the long investigations and lawsuits begin. The federal government (IRS) must step in; the state has stepped in (Montana AG) and two state lawmakers have initiated a class action lawsuit against CAI. And over how many months and years will all these and future investigations take their toll on public trust and confidence in nonprofits? How much more can the public, elected officials and the sector bear?

And the impact of this scandal far exceeds most others. Three Cups of Tea sold over 4 million copies. CAI markets itself to schools and schoolchildren through its Pennies for Peace Program. Who will tell all those children and what are they going to say? No easy answers here. Our President reportedly donated Nobel Prize money to CAI. Our military reportedly promotes the book with soldiers to provide valuable perspective. What happens when government leaders become vested or reliant on a nonprofit-- and then that trust is damaged or destroyed? No easy answers here.

Ignore the scandal we cannot. Learn from it we must. As donors, we must more effectively scrutinize who we donate to. We must be alert to experienced watchdogs that give us much insight into individual nonprofits. One watchdog (AIP) found problems in 2009 and publically exposed them a year ago (Vol. 54, April/May 2010). Any donor who read that report would likely have already written his or her last check. As board members, we must ask: could I find myself in similar shoes as CAI board members do now? When I express a concern at a board meeting, is it taken seriously? When I ask for information, do I have access? Are we handling and scrutinizing conflicts of interest proactively? Do we grasp that the mere appearance of a conflict of interest can be every bit as damaging-- or more damaging-- than an actual conflict?

The burden of improving the status quo lies on all of our shoulders--whether as a member of the public, a donor or, most especially, as a board member where opportunities for improvement can be but a board motion away. We must become more conscious of our responsibilities to choose nonprofits wisely and understand how we can make a difference while expecting more of our nonprofit leaders. Otherwise, the alternative harsh reality will very likely be more government regulation and intrusion that will come at great cost to all nonprofits and the communities they serve.

Note: These views reflect the author’s perspective that self-regulation is far preferable to more government regulation and intrusion by the IRS, or other federal and state regulators that will come at great cost to fragile nonprofits and the communities they serve. His views are contained in Advancing Nonprofit Stewardship Through Self-Regulation: Translating Principles Into Practice (Kumarian Press, April 2011). The book identifies ways to implement the 33 Principles of Good Governance and Ethical Practice issued by Independent Sector’s Panel in 2007 which are relevant to various areas of CAI controversy.

Living and Working in Aidland

2011-04-18T07:06:00.000-07:00

What kinds of stories or people did you find in research that surprised you? How have you seen people coping with the cultural divides between foreign and local aid workers who spend every day together?

Heather: What has surprised me the most is the changes that have occurred over the last dozen years within the world of development professionals in Nepal. Many of the larger aid agencies, both governmental and non-governmental, have dramatically reduced their permanent staff, both foreign and local. There has been a turn towards hiring consultants and shorter-term contracts since in the mid-1990s. This is changing both the kinds of people who come to Nepal to do aid work and their relationship with Nepal.

Consultants and those on three to six-month contracts have less incentive to learn anything about Nepal, and being based in hotels or temporary housing means they have less reason to venture beyond a defined route between home and work. This new employment structure has also driven a wedge between long-term foreign residents or those on long-term contracts in Nepal and this new consultant class.

The Chinese, Japanese and South Korean aid workers who are becoming more numerous in Kathmandu are not following this short-term pathway. Instead, one sees East Asian nationals investing in learning Nepalese and making friends with local colleagues. There has also been an expansion of businesses and schools to serve this new group of foreign aid professionals. The shops that once catered to European and American families now are stocked with Korean, Chinese and Japanese groceries and household supplies.

Anne-Meike: I was initially surprised that a place like Phnom Penh could have become a destination for “lifestyle migration”--people mentioned how good it was for expat families with young children; how village-like, how easy, how comfortable. I know it’s a special case, simply because there are so many international aid workers there, but it amazed me at the beginning. It also meant that people could--and did--continue the kind of lifestyle they might have had in Europe or the US: buying organic vegetables, go to Yoga or Pilates classes, buy fair-trade accessories. It all makes sense, but I wasn’t quite expecting it.

The other big insight for me was how much was going on in terms of aid work that was NOT related to organizations or agencies. For example, quite a few of the people I talked to were engaged in “aid activities” in their free time, like helping to establish a local NGO, sponsoring their cook or domestic worker to learn new skills, spending time with Buddhist monks at the weekend.

I thought if their day job was all about aid, they might want a break, but some continued this in their spare time. Related to this, I was interested to see so many “aid entrepreneurs”--people who had come to Cambodia independently, and set up their own projects, kind of outside the established NGO/governmental aid sector. I think this is also worth looking into more.

- From an interview with authors Anne-Meike Fechter and Heather Hindman (Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers) by Daniel J Gerstle, HELO Magazine. Read the rest of the interview here.

Guest Blog: Muhammad Yunus and the Faltering Reputation of Microfinance

2011-03-07T05:40:00.000-08:00

Update, 3/9: Check out Madeleine Bunting's recent article in the Guardian's Poverty Matters blog about Bateman and Ha-Joon-Chang's paper, The Microfinance Illusion.

By Milford Bateman

Microfinance has been described as the one international development policy that the average person in the street knows a little about and fully supports. Most average people today, however, are probably becoming aware of the fact that there is a growing crisis in the previously saintly world of microfinance. Indeed, many ordinary people will have been horrified to read that the patron saint of microfinance – Bangladeshi economist and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus – was recently fired from his job at the Grameen Bank, the bank he founded in 1983 to provide microloans to the poor. Wider still, there is the unmistakable feeling that the microfinance concept itself is also under real threat. This is a development that probably makes no sense to the average person, who for many years has been regaled with positive media images, heart-warming individual stories, a steady stream of feel-good documentaries and films, and numerous high-profile celebrity endorsements (Bill Clinton, Bono, Jeffrey Sachs) all testifying to its hugely positive impact on the poor. So what is going on here?

Microcredit is the provision of tiny loans to the poor that enable them to open or expand an income-generating activity, and thus supposedly begin their escape from poverty. The microfinance concept is most widely associated with Muhammad Yunus, who quickly attracted international support for his efforts back in the 1980s by claiming boldly that microfinance would ‘eradicate poverty in a generation’, and that future generations would have to go to a ‘poverty museum’ to see what all the fuss was about. On March 2nd the Bangladesh government, which owns 25% of Grameen Bank, made world headlines by firing Yunus from his long-standing position at the helm of Grameen. The ostensible reason for this move was his age – 70 – which apparently contravened Bangladesh law on the age of retirement (it should be 60). However, everyone in the world of microfinance and beyond understood right away that this was merely the pretext for Yunus’s dismissal, and not the real reason.

It still remains to be seen precisely why the Bangladesh government has decided to move against Yunus right at this moment. However, I understand that one central reason for the current events is that in almost every respect the Grameen Bank has failed to live up to the expectations that it would meaningfully improve the lives of the poor in Bangladesh. The Bangladesh government now, albeit belatedly, feels that it has been sold a lemon.

Indeed, it is now becoming very widely understood, and not just in Bangladesh, that the microfinance model has been quite unable to produce any convincing evidence to confirm it has been making real and sustainable progress anywhere in reducing poverty and promoting ‘bottom-up’ economic and social development. On the contrary, wherever microfinance has made the most inroads into a local community – that is, wherever it has achieved ‘saturation’ - the longer-term result has been to undermine, if not to destroy almost completely, the needed impetus for sustainable ‘bottom-up’ development and equitable growth. My own view on this issue, formed as a result of more than 20 years of research and consulting in local economic development, is summarized in my 2010 book Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work?. Many other analysts have been coming out with similarly pessimistic assessments of late, notably Malcolm Harper, Tom Dichter, Ananya Roy and Lamia Karim. Put simply, one need only look to Jobra, the village where it all started for the Grameen Bank in the late 1970s, to find the key elements of the problem here: Jobra is a village still mired in deep poverty, deprivation, industrial primitivization and disempowerment. Worse, it has begun to experience a quite new structural problem – a growing number of its poor inhabitants have racked up crippling levels of microdebt to local microfinance institutions, including to the Grameen Bank. Unfortunately, as they too have approached to microfinance ‘saturation’, many other countries/regions have seen almost exactly the same ‘Jobra-style’ debilitating dynamics emerge, predictably in the Andhra Pradesh state of India, Bolivia, Bosnia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Montenegro, Cambodia and Mongolia.

Another fundamental problem with the microfinance model is that, under pressure in the late 1980s and early 90s from right-wing economic and political philosophies, the original and unproblematic subsidy element involved in supporting microfinance (the Grameen Bank was very heavily subsidized right from the start) had to be brought to an end: in the future the poor would have to pay the full cost of making their own supposed way out of poverty. In microfinance practice, this meant market-based (i.e., high) interest rates and other commercializing measures had to be introduced. The new ‘best practice’ was to structure all microfinance institutions as private profit-driven financial institutions driven by Wall Street-style incentive structures, such as high salaries, bonuses, share options and the possibility of management buy-outs. The expected outcome was for the volume of microfinance available to rise massively. The managers of the main microfinance institutions would very likely be very generously rewarded for achieving this, but these rewards would be justified because the result, it was believed, would be massive reductions in poverty, deprivation, insecurity and suffering in the poorest communities right across the globe.

Unfortunately, the commercialization and Wall Street-ization of microfinance has only served to destroy what precious few measurable benefits were being registered by old-style Grameen Bank microfinance. Starting with Bolivia in 1999, one by one the most aggressively commercialized microfinance sectors entered a ‘boom-to-bust’ trajectory. Next in line were Morocco, Bosnia, Nicaragua and Pakistan. 2010 then saw the worst ‘boom-to-bust’ disaster to date, in the Andhra Pradesh state of India where the microfinance sector plunged into a non-repayment crisis that saw repayment rates fall from 98% down to as little as 20%. The cause of all this economic and social destruction in India was the intense competition between the top handful of microfinance institutions, each wishing to get as large as possible, as profitable as possible and as soon as possible. The underlying driving force was the prospect of huge personal financial windfalls arising from higher salaries and bonuses, as well as the possibility that a manager’s own shares in their microfinance institution could eventually make them spectacularly rich when publicly floated (via an IPO). Similar destabilizing and unethical dynamics have been playing out in Bangladesh, Peru and Colombia of late, and many observers are now watching these and other countries for similar signs of tipping over the edge into a full-blown over-indebtedness crisis.

And in all this mayhem, we need to remind ourselves that there are still no definitive signs whatsoever of any real sustainable economic or social advancement by the poor: we find only advancement (in fact, stratospheric advancement, with tens of millions of dollars made a number of the most savvy managers) by those actually providing the new form of commercialized microcredit, not those using it. Bravely, it must be said, even Yunus has recognized the damage being inflicted by the growing commercialization of microfinance, controversially attacking for-profit microfinance providers in an Op-Ed in the New York Times earlier this year.

So, finally, to the calls for Yunus to retire. What factors might lie behind this? Some say it is a fear that Yunus may try to enter politics once more (he tried to form a political party a few years back, but found no public support and quickly abandoned the idea), or that Bangladesh’s current Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, is jealous over the Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded in 2006 to Yunus and not to herself. Others point to the fact that Yunus and the Grameen Bank have perhaps unjustifiably sucked up a vast amount of the international donor funding meant for the entire Bangladeshi people, but over which the Bangladeshi people (through their elected government) actually had very little say in how it was spent. Still others resent the self-interested way that Yunus appears to have managed the Grameen Bank. Despite recent PR attempts to portray the Grameen Bank as some sort of quasi-cooperative owned and controlled by its savers, it is no secret that Yunus has run the Grameen Bank as his own personal fiefdom right from its foundation. Notable in this context is Grameen Bank’s very unorthodox long-standing commercial relationship with Packages Corporation, a company owned by Muhammad Yunus’s own family. In virtually any other institution such an arrangement would be seen as an appalling breach of legal, ethical and corporate procedures, but strangely not with regard to Grameen. Yunus has also recently claimed that he needs to remain at Grameen Bank because ‘there is no obvious successor’, and that his departure might precipitate a run on the bank. Given that it was Yunus himself who for many years has continually dismissed all potential successors, this is a somewhat strange excuse to rely upon. The latest dismissal took place in early 2010 when Dipal Barua, the Deputy Managing Director and Yunus’s obvious successor, was abruptly ‘invited to resign’ after nearly 30 years of apparently distinguished service to the Grameen Bank.

Moreover, in building up an ‘Empire’ around the Grameen Bank quite unlike anything else in the world of microfinance, and particularly in making links with multinational companies, Yunus has inevitably laid himself open to charges of having completely lost sight of the original anti-poverty mission of the Grameen Bank. Just take one example, that of the GrameenPhone ‘social enterprise’. Originally trailed as being a project ‘all about helping women to escape poverty’, on this criterion at least the project was a complete failure. There is today no real evidence that any of the so-called ‘telephone ladies’ contracted to sell mobile phone time managed to permanently escape their poverty. This is largely because so many women were signed up to participate that the competition among them meant hardly any of them could individually amass enough regular clients to survive, still less to do well. Of course, the competition among the ‘telephone ladies’ need not have been quite so fierce had some fairly standard operating territory limitations been put in place, just as in most western countries with regard to sales territories. However, a ‘saturation’ tactic was preferred because it meant that the actual volume of calls was maximized at little additional cost, which in turn was the best way to maximize profits. It was therefore no coincidence that those running and owning the various enterprises involved in the GrameenPhone venture, notably the Norwegian company Telenor, ended up making quite staggering profits, while the large numbers of ‘telephone ladies’ all pretty much struggled right from the start. These and other anti-social developments in other Grameen Bank ‘social enterprise’ projects thus show to many that the Grameen Bank is no longer an institution that primarily focuses upon the poor, so much as an institution narrowly focused upon building the Grameen Bank’s ‘Empire’ and mainly advancing the commercial and pseudo-philanthropic interests of its wealthy business associates.

Consider also one of the issues raised recently in the media by award-winning Danish documentary film maker, Tom Heinemann, that of NORAD grant funding given to the Grameen Bank. Leaked documents clearly show that in 1996 around $100 million grant funding was given to Grameen for housing loans, but legal ownership of this grant was quickly transferred to another unit of the Grameen network – Grameen Kalyan – which then instantly transferred legal ownership of most of this sum back to Grameen in the form of a loan. The poor women shareholders of Grameen Bank were thus given a generous windfall by the Norwegian government, which vastly increased the value of their shares in Grameen bank, but then Yunus immediately wired this cash on to Grameen Kalyan, and the poor women ended up with a $100mn liability instead! To their enormous embarrassment, NORAD officials only got wind of this transfer a few years later, and instantly demanded it be returned to the Grameen Bank. After some negotiation, it seems that Grameen Kalyan did indeed return most of the original grant to the Grameen Bank. Nonetheless, the fact that the original transfer had to be reversed two years later is enough to confirm that this was something very serious indeed, not a routine mix-up or simple disagreement. The entire episode never hit the headlines at the time, however, for reasons that are very well known to everyone working in the microfinance industry – the fear of tarnishing the idea of microfinance. For sure, NORAD had very little incentive to appear to expose either the wrongdoings of an individual (Yunus) or an institution (Grameen Bank) because this would inevitably call into serious question the efficacy of microfinance as a global development policy (indeed, as it is today). Also why flag up to the Norwegian public that it took two years for NORAD to even become aware that their $100 million grant had not been used as per the agreement signed with Grameen? Thus both NORAD and the Grameen Bank had very strong motives to want to avoid any public scrutiny of this unsatisfactory episode, which is why, of course, they secretly agreed to bury the matter.

So, my opinion is that specific recent events sparked off the current moves against Yunus, but that the essential underlying factor that accounts for the growing problems at Grameen Bank actually relate to the sheer lack of evidence of poverty impact. I understand that it is this ‘lack of impact’ factor that has finally begun to anger many in the Bangladesh government and policy-making elite, who now see themselves (along with very many others, it has to be said) as having been ‘fooled’ by Yunus into believing the hype that he and others built up around microfinance and the Grameen Bank. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that the Bangladesh government now wants to know a lot more about the Grameen Bank, that it wants to find out where all the huge international grants made to the Grameen Bank actually went to, and – most important of all – it needs concrete proof as to whether or not microfinance has actually been impacting positively upon the poor in Bangladesh. That the Bangladesh government is undertaking this exercise now, rather than much earlier, can justifiably be criticized in terms of bureaucratic slowness and political opportunism: but that this re-evaluation of Grameen Bank and microfinance needed to be done at some stage surely cannot be denied by anyone.
_________
Dr. Milford Bateman is Research Fellow in the Private Sector and Markets Programme at the Overseas Development Institute, London, and, since 2005, Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Juraj Dobrila Pula, Pula, Croatia. He is the editor of the forthcoming Kumarian Press book, Confronting Microfinance: Undermining Sustainable Development which mainly focuses on the experience of microfinance in South East Europe.

Q&A With Author Jennifer Hyndman

2011-03-03T05:25:00.000-08:00

Jennifer Hyndman, author of the new book Dual Disasters provides insight on the 2004 tsunami and what it means for humanitarian response going forward. To see a video companion to the book, click here (password: Lhokse).

Explain the meaning of your book title: “Dual Disasters”

The concept describes a situation where a humanitarian crisis with human-made political roots overlaps with a humanitarian crisis induced by environmental disaster.

You conducted many interviews with aid workers, activists and government officials in researching this book. What was the most surprising thing you learned from these encounters?

People worldwide will respond generously to help the blameless survivors of a tsunami, but are much less interested in helping those dispossessed by war. This differential response creates disparate landscapes of humanitarian aid.

What are some ways that social and political realities shape disaster response?

Prejudice, discrimination, and exclusion do not disappear during a crisis. In fact, they are often exacerbated. International aid can fuel flames of nationalism and mistrust if not carefully calibrated to a context of conflict.

How was the response and recovery different in Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia? How were they similar?

The Indonesian response was more state-centric and slower, with sovereignty and recovery tightly interwoven. In Sri Lanka, aid was a tool for reconstruction but also became a medium of political negotiations among oppositional factions in an unresolved conflict. As such it was politicized more than in Aceh.

Why did the 2004 tsunami attract more aid and attention than the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan? What factors determine the level of response in disasters?

People across world regions could witness the dramatic disaster of the tsunami, even envision themselves as part of such a tragedy given the heavily touristed areas hit. The earthquake in Pakistan in 2005 was in a remote area without the same 'CNN effect'. While Haiti scooped the big aid dollars of 2010, Pakistan and its deadly floods later in the year affected more people but attracted far less money.

In the book, you outline a feminist approach to studying natural disasters. Explain how the 2004 tsunami had gendered impacts.

We know that roughly three women died in the tsunami for every man. In conflicts, men are often more at risk of death than women. Both kinds of disasters destabilize social relations, including gender, and remake society in new ways. For me, a feminist approach to studying disasters is one that engages actors and survivors on the ground, and analyzes a range of power relations that include gender but also ethnicity/race, caste, region, and other kinds of politicized status.

Why do you think international aid given after the Haiti earthquake disaster has generated so little meaningful progress?

The lethargy of recovery in Haiti has everything to do with the dual disasters thesis. With a poorly functioning state and weak institutions to implement and monitor humanitarian aid, capacity to respond to the earthquake was far lower than it was in Chile months later where both physical and social infrastructures were in place.

What’s the best lesson we can take away from the 2004 tsunami response when addressing future natural disasters?

Many humanitarian crises to come will be dual disasters or even multiple ones. All humanitarian needs should be addressed, regardless of whether they are related to global warming, ongoing war, tsunami, or earthquake. Inequitable aid distribution after the tsunami in Aceh created disparities and tensions that have the potential to undermine the current peace.

Answering Your Questions

2011-03-02T07:52:00.000-08:00

Here are some common questions we get about our publishing program. Feel free to leave us a comment if you have your own!

Can I buy [book title] as an ebook for my Kindle/Nook/iPad/etc.?

We hope to have our recent books (2010 and newer) available in popular ebook reader formats within the next few months. It’s a mixed bag for most of our older titles, especially if we don’t have digital files for them (not uncommon for titles published before the mid-1990s). We’re slowing working our way through the backlist, assigning the ebook isbns necessary to sell them in that format. In the meantime, we have a few titles for sale at the Google eBookstore and with library vendors Ebrary and Ebooks Corp.

I have a great book idea. Would you publish a book on [topic]?

We’d love to see your project. Just make sure to follow our proposal guidelines. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to: international development, international relations, NGOs, globalization and economics, women and gender, environmental sustainability, peace and conflict resolution, and works that link the shared problems faced by both the North and the South.

Bear in mind that the market for books and information is highly competitive, and that as authors and publishers we need to focus on filling real needs, such as providing new ideas, information, solutions or concepts that have value for our audiences in their scholarly and professional capacities.

How are you guys related to Stylus Publishing?

Kumarian’s founder and long-time publisher Krishna Sondhi decided to enter a well-deserved retirement in 2008 and hand the reigns over to the capable hands of Stylus Publishing. Stylus was a great fit – it’s also a small publishing company but also distributes books on international development for publishers around the world including Practical Action and IDRC. We’re still a distinct entity with our own unique mission, list and staff: it’s just that we now have the ability to reach more people as an imprint of Stylus.

Why does it take so long to publish a book once I send in my completed manuscript?

It takes a lot of folks to polish that Word doc you send to us into the final glossy book that arrives many months later. Each book gets a cover designer, typesetter, proofreader, indexer, copyeditor, and an in-house production manager to shuttle it around to everyone. Some tasks take more time than others, but 2 weeks here, 4 weeks there ends up adding up to about 6 months. Much of the communication and editing is done without putting pen to paper these days using digital methods such as Adobe Acrobat’s markup tools.

2011 Kumarian Press Catalog

2011-02-17T08:58:00.001-08:00

Click on the thumbnail to view our newest catalog.

A growing disillusionment with top-down aid industry prescriptions to poverty has brought Southern solutions boisterously to the forefront over the past several years, whether in the form of cash transfers, microsavings or homegrown NGOs. Kumarian’s authors have always explored the rich and complex landscape of actors from the Global South and the transnational connections that hold us together. This year’s new books continue that tradition... Read more

Making Fair Trade Work for Women

2011-02-09T07:02:00.000-08:00

In a new article, Marsha Dickson (Artisans and Fair Trade) says that fair trade standards, which tend to limit what constitutes a "proper workspace", often fail to take artisans' lives into consideration. This is to the detriment of many women artisans who work from home and need flexible hours. The authors propose that certification schemes broaden "assessment of the benefits of fair trade and demonstrate organizations' accountability to fair trade principles." Here's a video of Marsha speaking about the inherent potential of fair trade to reach new people.

Philanthropic Glamour and the Uprisings in the Arab World

2011-02-04T09:29:00.000-08:00

By guest blogger and Kumarian author Lorenzo Fioramonti:

A few months ago, I wrote a piece criticizing the Giving Pledge, the multi-billion philanthropic initiative launched by Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. My line of argument was very simple: if these cosmic billionaires want to really help the world (as their wealthy foundations claim), they should first of all change the way in which their businesses operate. It is pointless that Bill Gates crisscrosses the globe, buying mosquito nets to poor African kids or distributing medicines to village dwellers, when the company he founded (and made him rich) draws millions of dollars away from African governments through its expensive software licenses, violates antitrust regulations and builds one of the biggest corporate monopolies in the world (thereby limiting freedom of information, restricting access to resources and hampering the widely heralded market competition that should help poor countries defeat endemic poverty). My conclusion was that the best way to be a true philanthropist was to generate well-being and promote equality as a good businessman, not only when wearing the official ‘charity’ hat.

Now, while observing the inspiring revolts in the Arab world (hoping that they will not end up deceiving the genuine demand for participation and democracy made by individual citizens), I think one can make a similar observation with regard to some glamorous charity initiatives celebrated in the past few years. These initiatives directly involve two women. Suzanne Mubarak, the first lady of Egypt, has always been concerned with charity. In 1977, she founded a nonprofit organization to support children and she is now the president and founder of the Women’s International Peace Movement, which promoted the rights of women and, among others, combats human trafficking. She was regularly invited to international summits, delivered speeches to diverse audiences of social entrepreneurs and charity workers and, more recently, she ran a series of adverts on CNN to campaign for women’s rights.

Now the question is: can the wife of a dictator, who has imposed a 30-year iron-fist state of emergency and blatantly abused the fundamental rights of millions of women and men, be considered a philanthropist? Shouldn’t we expect that her first concern, before getting involved in all her beloved charity work, would have been to exert influence on her husband’s government to democratize Egypt? Why hasn’t she done that? Why hasn’t she denounced the continuous human rights abuses perpetrated by the Egyptian regime? Since she claims to be concerned about human trafficking, she should know that the first cause of this unacceptable practice is poverty and ignorance. The same poverty and ignorance her husband has massively caused through three-decades of authoritarian rule.

The second woman is Queen Rania of Jordan, another country that might soon be ravaged by popular unrest. The good-looking consort of King Abdullah has always been drawn to the cause of children and education. In 2000, UNICEF even invited her to join its Global Leadership Initiative. Then, in 2009, she founded 1 Goal, the global campaign to bring all children to school by 2015, which turned her into one of the most common icons of the global charity circles and a sought-after speaker at most philanthropy gatherings. Now that thousands and thousands of Jordanians (including women) are protesting in Amman, demanding the very freedom and democracy that Queen Rania’s husband has deprived them of, the same question still stands: can we consider her a true philanthropist?

Most generally, I think, all these examples show how unclear the concept of philanthropy is and, most importantly, how controversial the ‘philanthropic industry’ can be. Through the glamour of giving, it is nowadays possible for reckless businessmen and even dictators to become internationally accepted icons of ‘good will’. And, of course, when millions of dollars are poured everyday into foundations, charities and NGOs, it is not easy to find independent voices capable of unveiling this unacceptable contradiction and its underlying conflicts of interest. Until, of course, millions of people wake up. And, all of a sudden, all the glamour of certain philanthropic circles (and its inherent hypocrisy) melts like snow in the sun.

Photo source: Reuters

Lessons in Civic Action from India

2010-12-30T09:22:00.000-08:00

Arriving with the birth of 2011 is our newest book The Politics of Collective Advocacy in India by Nandini Deo and Duncan McDuie-Ra. In addition to revealing the amazing diversity and complexity of India’s civil society sector, the authors highlight practical strategies that NGOs and other actors can use for the greatest impact in their work. An excerpt:

Successful collective advocacy—whether by a social movement, an advocacy network, or a loose coalition of civic actors—comes from people, organizing strategy, relationships, and principles.

The attributes of successful involvement of people
• implicit, restricted membership criteria with daily responsibilities for members
• a division of labor based on membership and either mission or activity
• frequent interaction among organization leaders to coordinate mission and strategy

The attributes of a successful organizing strategy
• It is sustained over long periods of time.
• The recruiters become community insiders who relate to recruits as mentors and friends.
• The new activists are free to choose the means by which they contribute.
• The activists and their families are supported by the movement.

The attributes of successful relationship management
• accepting support but not becoming wholly dependent on it
• targeting individual donors who are unlikely to take over the mission
• using a mix of methods to reach individuals

Musings Before the Holiday Noise

2010-12-22T11:35:00.000-08:00

I was listening to Beethoven's Third Symphony, the "Eroica," the other day. The onslaught of chords that begin this symphony has always evoked in me at least two sets of contrasting feelings and impressions. One is a sense of awe in regard to the utter confidence and certitude that these chords display; the other is goose-bumpy fear and wariness of that certitude. As I have grown older and more conversant with the language of music, I have come to be more attentive to the silences between these chords. When I think of these chords in relation to development theory and practice, it now strikes me that development may be seen as a panoply of "chords" each for a time trumpeting certitudes and pieties: modernization, dependency, grassroots participation, neoliberalism, microfinance, etc. And to pursue further the idea of silence, it seems to me that silence is indeed a form of invisibility. I have learned to listen for the silences in Beethoven's symphony. But the silences would not be so deafening were it not for those opening chords! Perhaps when confronted with the "chords" of development theory and practice we should learn to listen for the silences between them?

And I think too of Milton's phrase in Paradise Lost:

No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv'd onely to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes

In this season of wish lists here's mine. I want Kumarian Press to give sound to silence (apologies to Simon and Garfunkel), give light to darkness (apologies to Milton), give development practitioners insights and ideas so that the vital work that they do imparts hope and purpose and does not draw nectar in a sieve (apologies to Blake).

Last, I wish everyone a safe and happy holiday and look forward to posting more blog thoughts in 2011. And of course, please do send me your ideas and book projects!

Jim Lance
Editor and Associate Publisher
jlance [at] kpbooks.com

Dispelling Myths--a message from KP editor Jim Lance

2010-12-10T07:49:00.000-08:00

The 13 December issue of The New Yorker has a superb article by John Cassidy on China's "state capitalism" and how it challenges the free market ideologies espoused by many in the United States. Cassidy goes on to show in the article that in spite of the free market rhetoric, the history of capitalism in the US is rampant with examples of state interference in the supposedly efficient operation of the "free" market. As Cassidy concludes, the greatest danger to US economic interests comes not from China, but from the persistent myth in the US of a free market unfettered by interference from the government.

Cassidy's article brought to my mind a book we published in 2009, The Myth of the Free Market, by Mark Martinez. And it struck me that one of the missions of KP is precisely to dispel and disrupt conventional wisdom, the myths and ideologies that often pose as truth or hard fact.

As editor for the press, I am constantly on the alert for authors who question conventional wisdom and received narratives. So for my first blog posting, I am asking a question: what are more myths that require dismantling and examination? Feel free to respond to me personally. I give my contact information below.

I look forward to posting more entries on the KP blog and I look forward to hearing from potential authors!

Regards,

Jim

James Lance, PhD
Editor and Associate Publisher
Kumarian Press, an imprint of Stylus Publishing, LLC
PO Box 185
Williamsburg, MA 01096
413-268-9068
www.styluspub.com

The Other Side of Microcredit

2010-12-02T12:31:00.000-08:00

Sam Daley-Harris, Director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign and author of several Kumarian Press books including More Pathways Out of Poverty, was interviewed on the Kojo Nnamdi show yesterday about recent scandals in India involving microfinance. He was joined by Center for Global Development Research Fellow David Roodman. Listen to the interview here.

And here's Roodman's take on the Indian Microcredit Crisis:

Perhaps the heedlessly expanding Indian microcredit industry deserved a smackdown. But what matters most is not what is fair to the microcreditors but what is best for the poor. The Indian government has built an impressive 50-year track record failing to meet the financial service needs of the poor. Under the right circumstances the private sector can help fill the gap. The goal should be to reform microfinance, not kill it.

Money Wars: Beating up on Beijing?

2010-11-03T08:46:00.000-07:00

The United States can talk all it wants about how irresponsible the Chinese are in manipulating their currency. But if the Chinese ever stopped doing it, at the same time that the United States is running a big deficit, the U.S. economy would explode. Right now, the Chinese are saving our bacon -- no one else is willing to do it. Read more...

-- Author John Isbister in an October editorial for Foreign Policy in Focus

10 Questions With Katie Smith Milway

2010-10-26T13:14:00.000-07:00

Katie Smith Milway (The Human Farm; Growing Our Future) has released a new book for children, The Good Garden: How One Family Went from Hunger to Having Enough (Kids Can Press, 2010). She spoke with Open Book Toronto about gardening and activism with kids:

I hope my stories will help kids to feel empowered to apply their heads, hands and hearts to any problem to help themselves and others. And I especially hope The Good Garden interests them in combating world hunger — ideas for action are listed at the back of the book. I also hope we see even more school, community and family gardens sprouting up — so kids can identify, if only in a small way, with the billions of poor in our world who live off the land, and so they can experience the satisfaction and nutrition of self-grown produce. Read more...

How billionaires can help the world...or not

2010-10-05T10:34:00.000-07:00

Lorenzo Fioramonti (Civicus Global Survey of the State of Civil Society, Vol. 2) provides a dazzling critique the underlying philosophy behind the poverty pledges of high profile "philanthrocapitalists" like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

If we recognize that big business is co-responsible for the state of our economies and social welfare, how can then the Giving Pledge address the injustices its supporters have contributed to creating? Philanthropy is a noble sentiment but it can at best scratch the surface of social problems. Often, unfortunately, it hides or even entrenches the structural injustices in our current economic and financial system: as long as you give something back – the philanthropy creed seems to imply - you can carry on with your life doing ‘business as usual’.

The future of the MDGs – from global poverty to national development?

2010-09-22T06:11:00.000-07:00

David Hulme (Just Give Money to the Poor) writes about fighting poverty in a post-MDG world for The Broker. An excerpt:

What has 10 years of the MDGs achieved? On the positive side: one, they reversed the post-Cold War decline in foreign aid; two, they helped promote the understanding that ‘growth is not enough’ and that growth plus basic needs is the minimalist credible strategy (even though it is not enough); three, they helped re-engineer social norms in the UK (anywhere else?) and get the three main political parties to commit to increasing and improving the quality of aid. But, there is also a negative side to these laudable goals, and it is a big negative – they allowed world leaders to make big promises and then carry on with business almost as usual.

New 2011 Stylus Development Catalog

2010-09-21T06:53:00.000-07:00

It won't be in mailboxes for another month, but you can get a sneak peek at the new development catalog right here:

With books from CABI, The Commonwealth Secretariat, CSIRO, Earthscan, IDRC, KIT, Kumarian Press, Oxfam, Practical Action, RFF, Trentham, and the World Health Organization.

View more backlist titles in development here.

David Hulme on Word of Mouth

2010-08-06T12:17:00.000-07:00

David Hulme was interviewed on New Hampshire Public Radio's "Word of Mouth" program last month about Just Give Money to the Poor. Listen here.

Sam Daley-Harris and TEDx

2010-08-02T05:46:00.000-07:00

Kumarian author Sam Daley-Harris (More Pathways Out of Poverty) is founder of RESULTS, a citizen lobby on ending global poverty, and founder of the Microcredit Summit Campaign. In May 2010 he gave a talk at TEDx NJ Libraries titled: “Purpose, Poverty, Pitfalls, and Redemption”:

CMS 16

2010-07-27T13:01:00.000-07:00

Next month, The University of Chicago Press is coming out with the 16th edition of its famed (and infamous) Chicago Manual of Style. The 15th edition is a common site on the desktops of many a production editor. Kumarian has been using the guide as its house style for years, so I’ve grown familiar with its innards. It seems intimidating at first glance – the section headers, the tangled citation rules – but it’s proven a comforting authority on many occasions. There are, of course, too many rules to memorize. When an author comes to me with a question about formatting, I usually reach for the orange behemoth and flip through its pages to find the satisfying, solid answer. For word people, who tend to dwell in ambiguity and intuition, the reference provides a helpful frame to stick everything in. Here’s a list of changes to the new edition.

Cash Transfers in the Boston Globe

2010-07-22T12:24:00.000-07:00

New book Just Give Money to the Poor gets a nod in Sunday's Boston Globe:

"We’re arguing, basically, that poor people are poor because they don’t have money. It’s not that they’re stupid or need education. They actually know what to do with the money,” says Joseph Hanlon, a development expert at England’s Open University and coauthor of a new book on cash transfers entitled “Just Give Money to the Poor.” “You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you don’t have boots, and cash transfers are providing boots.”

Projeto Seringueiro and Grassroots Education

2010-07-22T11:52:00.000-07:00

We've just uploaded a new video featuring Denis Heyck, author of Schools of the Forest. She talks about why she decided to write a book about the rubber tappers of Acre, Brazil and the activities of their empowering grassroots educational program, Projeto Seringueiro.