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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.