Consignment and pay as you go : Needed replacement for microfinance

OPINION

Fixes: When Microcredit Won’t Do
By By TINA ROSENBERG
Published: January 31, 2011
A non-profit group is using a microfinance method that doesn’t involve loans to help improve the lives of rural poor.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/when-microcredit-wont-do/

Great article from the New York Times. Follow up articles coming.

Naomi Klein on Environmental Destruction for Profit

TedWomen Talk, December 2010.

Naomi Klein talks about big business and the risks they take with our world and the life on it. Naomi is not risk averse but her point, well taken, is that if you take a big risk, you should have a plan for recovery just in case it fails. BP Oil, are you listening? Sarah Palin and George Bush, if the guns fail? Canada! O Canada! I never thought you would allow such destruction of your beautiful land for oil that whose production will emit more greenhouse gases than the burning of the oil itself will. Think about it. Can you ever reclaim that land?

Naomi always talks straight.

Water—On Women’s Burdens, Humans’ Rights, and Companies’ Profits – Monthly Review

Water is a basic human need. There is no life without it.  The UN and other humanitarian organizations have worked years to bring critical consciousness to those of us who have rarely if ever been without water. For many, the availability of water every day is invisible, as expected as sunrise. And if we’re out, we think nothing of stopping at a convenience store and purchasing it.

In an article from the Monthly Review by Zuhal Yeşilyurt Gündüz, associate professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Baskent University, she illuminates in very clear and understandable language the impacts of the commercialization and privatization of water. The US/EU economics vs. the UN and Human Rights. Public vs. Private. And the extreme effects this is having on the women and their families — those who live in the poorest countries.

• 884,000,000 people worldwide do not have access to safe drinking water
• More than 2.6 billion people (or 40 percent of the global population) do not have access to basic sanitation services
• Every year, 3.5 million people die from water-related diseases
• Diarrhea caused by lack of safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene, and poor health and nutritional status, is the second most important cause of death among children under five
• Around 1.5 million children die of diarrhea each year
• Every twenty seconds, a child dies from a water-borne disease such as diarrhea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, guinea worm, and hepatitis

Water is now, first and foremost, a commodity, and the public ownership of water is the major block to the massive profits that can be gained through privatization by large neo-liberal conglomerates who see water as the “twentieth century oil.”

After a bottled water company opened a plant in Java/Indonesia in 2002, it consumed such a high amount of spring water, only twenty meters away from the region’s main water source, that farmers had less and less irrigation water, and their wells started to run dry. Several farmers lost their livelihood and had to stop farming. Coca-Cola, after exploiting the groundwater reserves, turned parts of Kerala/India into a desert. Entire rivers have been sold in India. (emphasis mine)

Read this excellent article by Zuhal Yeşilyurt Gündüz, associate professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Baskent University (Ankara/Turkey).

Water—On Women’s Burdens, Humans’ Rights, and Companies’ Profits – Monthly Review January 2010, v62 n8.

Muslim Women Gain Higher Profile in U.S. – NYTimes.com

Muslim Women Gain Higher Profile in U.S. – NYTimes.com.

Good to read a relatively positive portrayal of Muslim women in the US.  They don’t deny that they still experience discrimination and worse at times. But their successes, while staying within the framework of Islam, female, and America, make progress for all women.

These women have achieved a level of success and visibility unmatched elsewhere. They say they are molded by the freedoms of the United States — indeed, many unabashedly sing its praises — and by the intellectual ferment stirred when American-born and immigrant Muslims mix.

“What we’re seeing now in America is what has been sort of a quiet or informal empowerment of women,” said Shireen Zaman, executive director of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a nonprofit research institute founded after the 2001 attacks to provide research on American Muslims. “In many of our home countries, socially or politically it would’ve been harder for Muslim women to take a leadership role. It’s actually quite empowering to be Muslim in America.”

A bit later in the article, Knowlton states:

Yet in their quest to break stereotypes, America’s Muslim women have advantages. They are better educated than counterparts in Western Europe, and also than the average American, according to a Gallup survey in March 2009. In contrast to their sisters in countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, they are just as likely as their menfolk to attend religious services, which equates to greater influence. And Gallup found that Muslim American women, often entrepreneurial, come closer than women of any other faith to earning what their menfolk do.

Leadership in their religion is the most obvious missing piece in their move toward equality. It will be interesting to check in with these women in a few years.

“A Dangerous Journey Through Mexico”

http://twitter.com/Broadsnark/status/16707171186122753

200 years that changed the world – Gapminder.org – DATA Visualization!

Data visualization is so powerful. At http://www.gapminder.org they have taken over 400 tables of data from reputable sources (e.g., ILO, WHO, UN)  collected over spans of years and dynamically graphed them to show parts of the world (poor, middle, and wealthy, etc.) and allow a time lapse view of the changes. It’s incredible!

Watch this one first. Hans Rosling explains the process.  Fabulous teaching tool.

200 years that changed the world – Gapminder.org

Wealth & Health of Nations from gapminder.org

Here are more examples. Note the categories of the two axes and the play button which will display the period of time the data covers from oldest to most current (usually around 2008 for the latest data).  I find you can also manually (and slowly) go through the visualization, mousing over the various circles to identify each country as it moves.

• Wealth & Health of Nations
• CO₂ emissions since 1820
• Africa is not a country!
• Is child mortality falling?
• Where is HIV decreasing?

In the top menu, click on DATA to see all the different charts and tables available. You also can search on a particular facet.

Lots of presentations to download, TED talks by Hans Rosling, and help for instruction.  I believe students will understand the big issues presented in this manner.

Let me know if you have used them or use them in the future or find a particularly effective visualization which makes a global view and understanding  more apparent to your students.

Inside the World’s Deadliest City — In These Times

Jeremy Gantz interviews Charles Bowden whose new book Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields—

whose most chilling subject is an experienced sicario, or hitman—all the more remarkable, and important. For while authorities on both sides of the border explain the violence engulfing Juárez with familiar “war on drugs” rhetoric, Bowden argues it is the predictable result of NAFTA’s failure, endemic poverty and America’s appetite for drugs.

Inside the World’s Deadliest City — In These Times.

You write that free-trade schemes “have failed and in Juárez are producing poor people and dead people faster than any other product.” What is NAFTA’s relationship to Juárez’s descent into violence?

In the late ’60s the Border Industrialization Program, the prototype of what became NAFTA, was established in Juárez. At the beginning, wages were higher than the people of Juárez had experienced, but after 40 years, they have steadily declined. Factories employ children. NAFTA produced enormous squatter barrios of people who are fully employed by American factories and couldn’t make a living wage. NAFTA destroyed light and middle industry in Mexico, and it destroyed peasant agriculture.

But NAFTA is a disaster that cannot be recognized as a disaster because what we call “free trade” is not an empirical policy tested by fact; it is a theology. NAFTA is a failure. It doesn’t solve poverty, it expands it. And the people burn out because it suddenly dawns on them that they’re like hamsters on a wheel, and they’re going backward instead of forward.

Juarez. How did the U.S. contribute or even create the problems for women and families there? Read the whole article from In These Times: Inside the World’s Deadliest City — In These Times

Equal Pay Day #fairpay

It’s that day of the year again. April 20. The day that we finally come to parity with men’s pay which they earned by the end of last year.

There’s a $10,622 gap between the median yearly earnings of men and women. That’s $10,622 missing from a woman’s income each year. Without the wage gap, how would your life be different?

Women are notorious for spending money on their families — for good food, clothing, education — things that make life better for those around her.  Take a look at AAUW’s interactive map of the U.S.. Mouse over your state or the state your daughter or sister or brother or aunt or uncle or best friends live. The numbers are there.

Paycheck Fairness Act is currently in committee.  Please urge your Senators to support this bill, and find out more about equal pay for women.

Let’s make next year better.

From the British “Economist” magazine: Women in the workplace cover story

On Dec. 30, 2009, the Economist loudly proclaimed:

The rich world’s quiet revolution: women are gradually taking over the workplace

Getty Images

AT A time when the world is short of causes for celebration, here is a candidate: within the next few months women will cross the 50% threshold and become the majority of the American workforce. Women already make up the majority of university graduates in the OECD countries and the majority of professional workers in several rich countries, including the United States. Women run many of the world’s great companies, from PepsiCo in America to Areva in France.

Women run many of the world’s great companies??? What does “many” mean? I have to admit, they do try to address a lot of the issues that have plagued women’s progress in the workplace. It’s a short article, full of quick facts, lots of sound bites, basing all its discussion on statistics — as if numbers tell the whole story.  It’s worth reading if only to see the 195 comments that it generated from its readership (some of my favorites are below. Here’s the URL:

via http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15174489.

And here are just 3 of the comments:

mahagwa’s comments

The disparity between men and women’s wages has been proven to not be systematice but more so due to the fact that many women leave and re-enter the workforce and other factors which are insitigated by women…
My greater concern is what is going to happen to society. With women being the greater number of college graduates, and with women becoming more INDEPENDENT, and hence either postponing motherhood or somehow integrating it into their work environment, you will now see within the next 10 years women actually earning more than men. This new economic power will translate into political power..because women fight for their causes (even if they make things up) — like all this ENVIRONMENTALISM and SMOKING CESSATION..dubious claims which have gained mainstream acceptance.
So, you now have a world where women control the money, and women control the laws. You have a world of CASTRATED men, who no longer have any sense of worth. Because remember, for many, many years, men were wired to be the breadwinners, the protectors, and so forth. Now all of a sudden, the women make the laws, and control the money…men will be in a state of confused dementia.
What will happen then? Will gender roles reverse (as is now happening– i no longer understand the difference between men and women). WIll men now be the homemakers? Will women now support their men (as is already begining to happen).
What will the sons envison themselves as? What will the sons aspire to be when they grow up?
There is a very dangerous shift happening in society today. And it has nothing to do with conservatives or liberals. It has nothing to do with sexism or feminism. It is a very dangerous societal shift taking place, and many people are sleep-walking down this path to oblivion. I fear what the world will be like in 10 years.

Mz. Hubriz’s comments

not… sure… as one of two women, (the 2nd woman came on board a few months back), in a reporting structure of ~50 men at an Ivy League University, I am wondering where the progress is.

generated2173760’s comments

What bothers me is what has always bothered me, has anybody asked whether this is a good thing? I mean it forced nearly all households to become dual income and I am not quite sure children or people are any better / happier than they were of yesteryear. To me its seems like the greatest coupe by industry ever, get 50% more consumers with no real social or lifestyle gains. Plus I hate when people throw income disparage around, it could be women make less because they often do less work, less productive, etc etc …. over my years I rarely have seen a woman as productive as a man in the same position; also in most families the men are still the breadwinner with women working a lower skilled or part-time job.

I also am amazed how many women see this as a good thing, I mean honestly any man I know would happily trade the toil of forty hours in a deadend job to be a kept man sitting at the pool with his friends playing games while his wife slaves away sixty hours a week supporting them …men call that housewives, women call it deadbeat husbands.

Lastly I have a hard time with the numbers. Nearly every man I know (I lived in a middle class inner ring suburb) wife is a housewife; hell as far as I can tell from Google nearly 30% of all women are still housewives. Giving women only outnumber men by a percent or two how is it that 30% of women can be housewives yet outnumber men in the workforce .. what are all the men doing?

I still thinks insane though to call a family working more and harder for less happiness and purchasing power progress.

Many more. I thank the AAUW for keeping an eye on the news and their efforts on all women’s behalf.

Socially Conscious Gifts 2009

Updated for 2009!

Some folks already have everything they need and you just don’t want to add to their load of stuff. Consider making a donation in their name to a good charity. If you don’t have a favorite local, national, or international charity, use the Charity Navigator to find one. It lists a great many — like Oxfam, Women for Women, Care, and many more. It also rates these and lets you see how much of their money is spent on salaries, expenses, if they hire fundraisers, etc.

If you’d like to be a more socially conscious consumer, here are some organizations, some local, some online, where you can purchase gifts while making a difference in the lives of real people. These suggestions come from two of our UConn professors who teach and embody the ideals of these organizations. The sites are listed alphabetically! No order intended. If you have some other suggestions, please add them via a comment to this blog. And pass these on to your friends and family!

A Greater Gift from SERRV:

A Greater Gift is a program of SERRV International, a nonprofit alternative trade and development organization. Our mission is to promote the social and economic progress of people in developing regions of the world by marketing their products in a just and direct manner. Our goal is to alleviate poverty and empower low-income people through trade, training and other forms of capacity building as they work to improve their lives. SERRV has worked to assist artisans and farmers for more than 55 years through the following:

• Marketing their handcrafts and food products in a just and direct manner.
• Educating consumers in the United States about economic justice and other cultures.
• Providing development assistance to low-income craftspeople through their community-based organizations.

SERRV International was one of the first alternative trade organizations in the world and was a founding member of the International Fair Trade Association (IFAT). We offer our artisan and farmer partners up to 50% advance payment on orders. This advance helps them to purchase raw materials and have a more regular income so they can avoid high interest rates from borrowing locally.

CoOp America

About Co-op America Co-op America is a not-for-profit membership organization founded in 1982. Our mission is to harness economic power—the strength of consumers, investors, businesses, and the marketplace—to create a socially just and environmentally sustainable society. Our Vision We work for a world where all people have enough, where all communities are healthy and safe, and where the bounty of the Earth is preserved for all the generations to come.

CREA: Center for Reflection, Education and Action (based in Hartford):

“Believing that the earth is home to all, CREA facilitates analysis of human, social and economic policies from the perspective of their effects on human lives, beginning with the lives of people who are poor.”

Dean’s Beans (fair trade coffee):

We only purchase beans from small farmers and cooperatives, largely made up of indigenous peoples working hard to maintain their culture and lifestyles in a hostile world. We do not buy beans from large estates and farms. We’ve been there, and have seen the conditions of chronic poverty and malnutrition within which these farms produce those other coffees. Look in your kitchen – do you know where your beans come from? Each player in our cycle of production and distribution, from the farmer to the consumer, participates in socially just and environmentally responsible trade. We hope that all other coffee companies will follow our lead. We are proud to be a founding member of Cooperative Coffees, Inc., the first roaster’s cooperative created to buy direct, Fair Trade coffee from farmer coops, and make it available to any small roaster who wants to participate in the Fair Trade movement. We are also active members of the Fair Trade Federation, an international organization of dedicated Fair Traders (no poseurs allowed).

Global Exchange

Why Fair Trade? Our consumer spending choices affect people’s lives around the world. The products we enjoy are often made in conditions that harm workers, communities and the environment. But increasingly consumers are demanding more humane, more environmentally sensitive products. In today’s world economy, where profits rule and small-scale producers are left out of the bargaining process, farmers, craft producers, and other workers are often left without resources or hope for their future. Fair Trade helps exploited producers escape from this cycle and gives them a way to maintain their traditional lifestyles with dignity.

Heifer International

Heifer’s Mission to End Hunger Heifer envisions… A world of communities living together in peace and equitably sharing the resources of a healthy planet. Heifer’s mission is… To work with communities to end hunger and poverty and to care for the earth. Heifer’s strategy is… To “pass on the gift.” As people share their animals’ offspring with others – along with their knowledge, resources, and skills – an expanding network of hope, dignity, and self-reliance is created that reaches around the globe. Heifer’s History This simple idea of giving families a source of food rather than short-term relief caught on and has continued for over 60 years. Today, millions of families in 128 countries have been given the gifts of self-reliance and hope. Read more about Heifer’s History.

Ithaca Fine Chocolates

FAIR TRADE Ithaca Fine Chocolates is proud to be the first U.S. chocolate company to offer fair trade certified chocolates, and we continue to offer ONLY organic and fair trade certified chocolates. Our cocoa beans are carefully selected from the El Ceibo Cocoa Coop in Bolivia. Fair trade fosters self-reliance in small-scale cocoa farmers, which effectively raises their living standards. ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT The cocoa beans used in Art Bars are cultivated using sustainable, shade-grown, organic practices that help to protect the health of the earth’s ecosystem. The outer wrapper, art cards, display boxes and gift boxes are all made from recycled paper.

NOVICA

Mission We want to give artists and artisans around the world a global platform to express their true artistic talents and to spur their creativity. And, we want to provide you with access to unique, hard-to-find items at great values that only the Internet infrastructure can allow. At the deepest essence of our philosophy, we want to create a bridge between you and the many talented artisans across the globe. We want you to know about who you’re buying from. We want you to feel that attachment to the product and to the hands that created it. In the spirit of the Internet, let us bring you together. NOVICA. The World is Your Market.

10,000 Villages

Our Principles of Operation At Ten Thousand Villages we add our own principles of operation to the IFAT key principles of fair trade:

1. We honor the value of seeking to bring justice and hope to the poor.
2. We trade with artisan groups who pay fair wages and demonstrate concern for their members’ welfare.
3. We provide consistent purchases, advances and prompt final payments to artisans.
4. We increase market share in North America for fairly traded handicrafts.
5. We market quality products that are crafted by underemployed artisans.
6. We build sustainable operations using a variety of sales channels, including a network of stores with a common identity.
7. We choose handicrafts that reflect and reinforce rich cultural traditions, that are environmentally sensitive and which appeal to North American consumers.
8. We encourage North American customers to learn about fair trade and to appreciate artisans’ cultural heritage and life circumstances with joy and respect.
9. We use resources carefully and value volunteers who work in our North American operations.

Save the Children Holiday Gift Catalog

With 75 years of history and more than 41 million children and 25 million adults benefiting from our programs, Save the Children has built a name that children and communities can trust. It is because of our commitment to children that Save the Children is ranked high among other non-profit organizations. For the sixth year in a row, Charity Navigator has awarded Save the Children its highest four-star rating, reflecting the agency’s continued high standards in financial management. Save the Children also stands out in Charity Navigator’s list of “Best Charities Everyone’s Heard Of.”

Tropical Salvage Old wood. New use. Positive change.

Tropical Salvage practices a simple business model. We salvage old deconstruction and rediscovered wood and put it to new imaginative use. In doing so, we contribute to positive economic, social and environmental change. Old wood, new use, positive change. The disappearance of old-growth tropical forests in the developing world is largely influenced by the developed world’s demand for exotic wood products, its demand for wood pulp to supply industrial paper production, and its demand for industrial commodity quantities of agricultural products whose cultivation converts biologically diverse ecosystems into vast monoculture plantations. Salvaged wood provides all the same benefits, without the high environmental costs. Tropical Salvage offers a conduit to access accurate information about logging industry practices in southeast Asia and an opportunity to buy responsibly, thereby choosing reform of needlessly destructive policies and practices.

Fair Trade Federation