Global Partnerships Named To List Of Top 50 Impact Investment Fund Managers

Online press release

Seattle, Wash., – Global Partnerships (GP), a Seattle-based nonprofit that invests in microfinance and other sustainable poverty solutions, was selected in the inaugural ImpactAssets 50, a list of leading private debt and equity fund managers that deliver social and environmental value in addition to financial returns. The list was announced today.

“We are honored to be recognized as a leader among impact investors,” said Mark Coffey, chief investment officer for GP. “Inclusion in the ImpactAssets 50 is a testament to our strong track record as a fund manager, and our commitment to reaching underserved communities in Latin America with the most effective solutions.”

Since 2005, Global Partnerships has created four debt funds—ranging from $2 million to its most recent fund of $25 million—that provide affordable loans to a select portfolio of microfinance organizations and cooperatives, its partners. In identifying partners, GP prioritizes organizations that reach people most in need of credit, such as the rural poor, and which provide borrowers with not just microloans but “microfinance-plus” services such as preventive health care, business education and agricultural training.

“Impact investing” refers to investment vehicles built to solve the world’s most pressing social challenges, while offering investors social and financial returns. The ImpactAssets 50 is intended to help investors make sense of the expanding universe of impact investing, and will provide financial and impact information on each manager.

About Global Partnerships: Global Partnerships (GP) is a Seattle- and Managua-based nonprofit that expands opportunity for people living in poverty. As of March 31, 2011, GP had $40.2 million in capital invested in 28 exceptional microfinance partners in seven countries in Latin America, which together serve 880,000 borrowers. Find out more at www.globalpartnerships.org.

About ImpactAssets: ImpactAssets is a nonprofit financial services company created to help solve the world’s toughest problems by catalyzing investment capital for maximum environmental, social and financial impact. The ImpactAssets 50 is the first “open source,” publicly published list of private debt and equity impact investment fund managers and is intended to serve as a gateway into the world of impact investing for investors and their financial advisors. www.impactassets.org/impactassets-50/

Recently, companies doing international development work have been distinguished as some of the best places to work by the Seattle Met. In last month’s issue, “The Best Places to Work… and Play” identified the best companies to work for. Companies were selected by editors, who asked HR representatives of these companies what they did to make their work environment “irresistible.” They also asked the employees for their opinions. Perks ranged from company outdoor excursions to bonuses and paid days off. Of the businesses Seattle Met assessed to be the top 20 best places to work in Seattle, multiple companies were from the international development sector, such as Remote Medical International, Greenfield Advisors, Institute for Systems Biology, and Projectline Services. These businesses are all growing fast and in the processes of hiring more people constantly. Below are descriptions of some of these fantastic for-profit organizations that are expanding into international development work.

Remote Medical International

Remote Medical International (RMI) is a medical and rescue services company supporting those who travel or work in remote areas around the world where hospitals are not accessible, from Africa to Antarctica. They provide their customers with equipment, training, telemedicine, evacuations, and onsite medical and rescue aid. RMI is currently supporting a family traveling around the world, a small research station located in remote South Pacific, and multiple expedition trips. RMI’s employees are committed to educating students and clients about how to respond to an emergency situation, ideally reducing the number of emergencies all together. RMI’s headquarters is located in Seattle where 24 employees work full-time, yet RMI also has “rock-climbers, mountaineers, flight paramedics, Iraq war veterans, firefighters, and backcountry skiers on call” outside of Washington.

RMI is a group of people committed to the team and the goals of the company before one’s own interests, creating a selfless, highly dedicated and effective team. Yet RMI’s employees still find time to have fun, going on hikes together or organizing Ping-Pong tournaments. RMI “is a hybrid of a high-performance team and family.” Those working for RMI help to enable individuals and organizations to fulfill their corporate goals or lifelong dreams by providing medical aid around the world.

Greenfield Advisors

Greenfield Advisors is a real estate and business consulting firm working on issues such as litigation, development, and preservation. Greenfield Advisors has worked on an array of projects both nationally and internationally, including “the preservation of the Hearst Ranch at San Simeon, the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill litigation, and multiple post-Hurricane Katrina matters.” They also advised the Japan Real Estate Institution and have lectured in Europe, Asia, and America on these topics. Greenfield Advisors has become internationally recognized for its work in contaminated property class actions.

The employees of Greenfield Advisors enjoy the ability to set their own hours “as long as you get your work done and are here generally at the same time as everyone else.” Greenfield Advisors is a relaxed environment. Lisa MC Sherry, Director of Administration, says “when it gets stressful we laugh and joke even more.” Greenfield Advisors employees are also involved in fascinating work that has a real impact in the world. Throughout all of Greenfield Advisors’ work is a “commitment to excellence, intellectual rigor and constant improvement.”

Institute for Systems Biology

This research nonprofit was founded in 2000 with the goal of using new technology and systems biology approach to “predict and prevent diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and AIDS.” The hope is that, as scientific knowledge has led to the eradication of many diseases, a deeper understanding of how the body functions will aid in the fight against these modern diseases. The founders of Institution for Systems Biology emphasize “collaboration across disciplines and organizations.” In just ten years this nonprofit has grown to more than 300 staff members from all disciplines and collaborates with academic institutions, companies, and governments around the world. Institute for Systems Biology’s innovative way of understanding biological complexity is influencing the way in which life sciences and medicine are practiced internationally. Institute for Systems Biology is focused on transmitting the knowledge they gather to the public through commercialization so that society can receive its benefits and science education can be advanced.  Working at Institution for Systems Biology, one has the opportunity to conduct “groundbreaking science with world-class resources and equipment” and to be a part of publishing some of the most scientifically influential research in the world.

Projectline Services

Projectline Services, a sponsor of Global Washington’s 2010 Annual Conference, is a “marketing and consulting firm dedicated to advancing innovation through integrated Customer Engagement and Business Intelligence.” With a diverse and talented team, Projectline Services has the ability to see customers’ programs from start to finish. Projectline has the resources to help customers with a broad range of projects, such as managing a marketing program, gaining better insight into one’s business, or developing new content for print or the web. Recent projects include aiding the US Subsidiary of Microsoft’s marketing group with their work creating an array of collateral for the Small Business PC Campaign by communicating with various vendors, incorporating feedback from stakeholders, and ensuring quality deliverables in time for their deadline. Projectline Services was also hired by Avanade’s Global Technology & Solutions division to help them “produce excellent costumer evidence with minimal oversight.”

At Projectline Services, the employees are experienced and passionate about their work, throwing themselves into each new project. As Projectline Services writes on their website, it is a company where “exceeding expectations is the norm.” Projectline employees are not only highly committed to helping their customers, but also to giving back to the community. Employees participate in monthly volunteer activities with local organizations and Projectline gives monthly donations to Kiva’s global micro-lending initiative, helping entrepreneurs in developing countries build up their businesses and rise out of poverty. Projectline Services has also been recognized Seattle Business Monthly, Puget Sound Business Journal, and NWjobs as one of the best places to work in Seattle.

Seattle has become a center for international development work as an increasing number of organizations working in this sector are based out of Seattle. Therefore, the number of jobs in Seattle in the international development sector is growing and getting involved in this fascinating work is becoming easier. As Seattle Met highlights, companies working in the international development sector are not only among the most rewarding places to work in Seattle, but also the most fun.

Dean Karlan, founder and director of the non-profit research organization Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), at a recent workshop in Seattle, clarified a misconception about their work: Karlan discourages looking backward to see if a donor’s money made a difference. Instead, Karlan recommends building evaluation into the planning process for future projects. Evaluation will help sharpen the overall project and deliver more useful, credible results. “We need to understand whether programs are really effective or not so that we know as donors what to support, and as practitioners what we should be doing. Rigorous evaluations help us do just that. We also must learn why programs work, rather than merely evaluate whether something works. It is the why that helps us know what lessons to take from one country to another, from one year to the next.”[1]

IPA’s research spans a variety of fields, including microfinance, education, health, agriculture, charitable giving, political participation, and social capital. Attendees at the Global Washington workshop heard from Dean Karlan, Jake Appel, Tania Alfonso, Anna York and Mary Kay Gugerty about the methodologies for assessing program impacts.

IPA promotes the use of rigorous experimentation, or “randomized control trial” experiments, to evaluate whether an intervention has an impact and if so, why the intervention worked. The team presented what makes a good evaluation, including the detailed assessments needed and the time involved to collect quality data.  The heart of a randomized trial is making one set of data (with the intervention) equal to the other set (without the intervention) in order to answer the question: where would the studied population have been without the intervention. As IPA notes in their website FAQs: “If we want to know how effective a program is, we need to have a comparison group. Without a comparison, we can’t really say anything about what would have happened without the program. And the only way of having a fair comparison group is with random assignment.” [2] Using case studies, attendees shared questions and opinions about the value of randomized control trial evaluation. Attendees also learned about cost-benefits of randomized control trial evaluation. The workshop provided attendees a great opportunity to ask questions of Dean Karlan and Jake Appel regarding their new book, More Than Good intentions. In their book, Karlan and Appel claim that accounting for irrational behavior and introducing a method of controlled experiments will help fix the problem of failed humanitarian interventions for poverty alleviation.

Overall attendees were able to reflect collaboratively upon implementing greater strategies for evaluating interventions. One participant learned enough to recommend  her organization take a step back and revisit their evaluation plan: rather than conduct a small randomized trial, the organization decided to focus on telling “success stories” in the coming year. If you want to know more, please read IPA’s blog, http://www.poverty-action.org/blog or write to Innovation for Poverty Action (IPA) at contact@poverty-action.org.

One of the four principles that Global Washington identified in its 2009 white paper on global aid effectiveness and highlighted in its 2010 policy paper is “Transparency and Accountability” — information on strategy, goals, and spending [should be] clear and readily available to U.S. taxpayers and international beneficiaries.

It turns out that Global Washington is in line with much of the rest of the world in its call for transparency. Publish What You Fund, a London-based group, is sponsoring a global campaign for aid transparency, in preparation for the upcoming High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Korea in early December.

The upcoming High Level Forum will be the fourth such forum sponsored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). At the third forum, held in Accra, Ghana, in 2008, OECD issued the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA), which included the following action:

“We will make aid more transparent. Developing countries will facilitate parliamentary oversight by implementing greater transparency in public financial management, including public disclosure of revenues, budgets, expenditures, procurement and audits. Donors will publicly disclose regular, detailed and timely information on volume, allocation and, when available, results of development expenditure to enable more accurate budget, accounting and audit by developing countries.”

Publish What You Fund is working with a global coalition of partners, including U.S.-based Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN), to collect organizations willing to sign onto a petition urging governments and other donors to make their aid more transparent. Global Washington has recently signed onto the petition, and urges individual members to sign on as well.

This guest post from Kunle Oguneye, president of the Seattle chapter of The African Network was originally posted in Humanosphere and is reposted here with permission.

One glaring omission which prevails in the global health and development community in the Greater Seattle region is the absence of Africans or Indians or Chinese or Vietnamese.  Those of us who live in the poverty-stricken regions of the world have no input in the so-called solutions to eradicate malaria or to fight global-poverty.

I find it quite disturbing that the so-called beneficiaries are not consulted when seeking solutions to the challenges that we face on a daily basis.  I would not be so concerned about this, but for the fact that some of the policies and activities of well-intentioned advocates may actually be detrimental to the poor communities of this world.  Why does the global development community assume that we Africans don’t know what works in addressing poverty?  Why do they assume that we do not have the answers?  Why does a white man or woman visit Africa and immediately prescribe a solution based on their three-week visit?

Many of us in the African immigrant community have seen poverty first-hand.  Many of us have watched our relatives and friends pull themselves out of poverty or further fall into poverty.  We understand what solutions can and do work.  We understand that technology can help, but only to a point.  We understand that you cannot address a society’s problems without boots on the ground.  We understand that no program will be successful without the buy-in of the community.

Another glaring omission in the debate around global development is the absence of the business community.  Communities thrive around business.  All the efforts to provide a village with bed nets and anti-malaria drugs will ultimately fail, if those villagers do not have the means to purchase those items once the initial donations run out.  We must be encouraging businesses to engage with the developing world.

We need to stop presenting the image of Africans and indeed the developing world as helpless lost souls who need help from the benevolent white man or woman in order to survive.

If the community is really sincere about development, then they should ask the people of that community what works.  Help them acquire the necessary infrastructure, provide relevant educational opportunities and then get out of the way.

Kunle Oguneye

By Sam Daley-Harris

The deed is done.  On May 5^th the appellate division of the Bangladesh Supreme Court agreed that the Bangladesh Bank, the nation’s central bank, was justified in firing Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus from his post as Managing Director of Grameen Bank, the institution he founded more than three decades ago.  Prof. Yunus’ lead lawyer, Dr. Kamal Hossain, one of Bangladesh’s most distinguished attorneys and a drafter of the nation’s constitution, was scarcely able to hide his disgust at the Appellate Division order, when he said: “I [apparently] have to take admission to university again to newly learn the constitutional laws of the 21st century.”

The dismissal is not the lone action of one government institution but is part of a premeditated campaign that starts at the highest level with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.  Their reason for sacking Prof. Yunus?  He’s “too old.”  Never mind that the 70-year-old Yunus maintains a rigorous schedule or that the Finance Minister, another key player in the sacking, at 77 is somehow not “too old” for that post.  Their excuse would be laughable if it were not for the calamitous impact it portends.  What makes the decision to remove Prof. Yunus so disgraceful is not that he would be out of a job – any university in the world would welcome him with open arms as a visiting professor.  No, the atrocity here is the fact that the independence and integrity of one of the world’s premier poverty fighting institutions is now at grave risk.  Grameen Bank, an extraordinary institution with more than 8 million microcredit borrowers that took 35 years to build, could be destroyed in a matter of months by incompetent government action.

The government’s action cannot honestly be in response to accusations by a Danish documentary maker about an improper transfer of Norwegian aid funds more than a dozen years ago, because both the Norwegian government and Bangladesh’s own review committee have found that Grameen did nothing wrong.  It cannot be due to the documentary maker’s charge of excessive interest rates, because Microfinance Transparency and the government’s own review committee found Grameen has the lowest interest rates in the country.  Instead, most observers see this as an inexcusable political vendetta by the Prime Minister against Prof. Yunus, stemming from his short-lived attempt to start a political party in 2007.

Consider these groundbreaking innovations that Prof. Yunus’ poverty-fighting laboratory has brought to the world and what could be lost in the future from his unwarranted ouster:

• In 1976 he made loans of less than US$1 each to 42 desperately poor Bangladeshis to start or build tiny businesses – and the microcredit revolution was born.  It has made its way all around the world.  While others have seen microfinance as a way to make big money for investors, Prof. Yunus has never once diverted from his original intent to empower the poor.
• In 1997 Grameen Phone Ladies started bringing cell phone technology to remote villagers throughout Bangladesh—providing the dual benefit of creating jobs and increasing communications, which enhanced others’ work.
• Grameen Shakti, an energy firm, has installed more than a half-million solar home systems and sold more than a quarter-million improved cooking stoves.
• In a joint venture with Danone, the yogurt maker headquartered in France, Grameen Danone is bringing low-cost fortified yogurt to malnourished children throughout the country – and creating a business opportunity for the poor women who sell it.
• College scholarships and loans have gone to 180,000 students. Most remarkably, in almost all of the cases, these are the children of illiterate parents who have had the help of Grameen Bank in breaking the bonds of intergenerational illiteracy.

A government that so rashly and ruthlessly ousts this innovative and transformational leader cannot likely be trusted to continue his revolutionary work.

But the deed is done.  Here is a sample of the visionary voice that Bangladesh has likely lost in this despicable government act.  Reflecting on the 1997 Microcredit Summit Prof. Yunus wrote: “In teaching economics I learned about money, and now as head of a bank I lend money.  The success of our venture lies in how many crumpled bank bills our once starving members now have in their hands. But the microcredit movement, which is built around, and for, and with money, ironically, is at its heart, at its deepest root not about money at all.  It is about helping each person to achieve his or her fullest potential.  It is not about cash capital, it is about human capital.  Money is merely a tool that unlocks human dreams and helps even the poorest and most unfortunate people on this planet achieve dignity, respect, and meaning in their lives.”

Sam Daley-Harris is Founder of the Microcredit Summit Campaign which seeks to reach 175 million poorest families with microloans www.microcreditsummit.org and of RESULTS which seeks to create the political will to end poverty www.results.org.

Giving small loans to the working poor as an answer to poverty has had huge appeal to people of all political persuasions, and it proved especially popular in Seattle, where at least 20 different organizations support microlending.

Now some are saying that its merits have been oversold.

“Microfinance got romanticized,” says Rick Beckett, CEO of Global Partnerships, a Seattle nonprofit that funds microloans and other services for the poor in Latin America. “We have to own the fact that we fell in love with it.”

“That story, as cool as it is, is just not true,” he says. “A $100 loan does not change the world.”

Beckett and other experts in microfinance met here last week to take stock of a crisis that is shaking the worldwide microlending movement to its core. The discussion was hosted by the group Global Washington.

After growing at a red-hot pace over the last decade, institutions in India that provide credit to poor borrowers now find themselves facing new regulations that have brought the industry to a halt and encouraged widespread default.

Nowhere was the growth as fast as in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, where profit-driven lenders seeking higher returns competed for borrowers, who often juggled multiple loans.

One Indian company funded in part by Seattle backers, SKS Microfinance, went public last summer and generated millions for its wealthy investors.

Making so much money on the poor became politically difficult, says David Roodman, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C., who participated in the discussion.

The core problem was fast growth, Roodman says. “It sounded a lot like the mortgage crisis here.”

Microcredit also has taken off in other parts of the world, with varying degrees of risk. Roodman suggests establishing a credit bureau to collect and share information on the financial obligations of microcreditors would help create a culture of restraint. And growth financed by savings deposits rather than outside investors provides much more stability.

While microcredit does give people more control over their finances, there’s no proof that it has alleviated poverty, he says. In the U.S. what reduced poverty most was industrialization.

But microlenders’ networks of village credit provide one of the very few ways to reach hundreds of millions of poor people, Beckett argues. They can serve as distribution channels for other things, such as health education or technical assistance for farming. One of the organizations his group funds is Pro Mujer, which combines loans with low-cost health services for women.

Peter Bladin, former vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based Grameen Foundation, says that when small loans help parents improve their incomes, the next generations tend to be better off. He calls microfinance “one of the best tools for development ever devised.”

Roodman, eager to dispel what he called another misconception about the industry, says microfinance can’t claim the only reason it targets women is to empower them.

Another big reason is that women “were found to be more reliable when it came to repayment,” he says, which made the work of bankers easier. “They didn’t argue as much as men.”

It’s uncertain how the crisis in India will be resolved, but with the field of microfinance in flux, supporters will have to strive for measurable results and clear social benefits, participants concluded.

Chris Wolff, a senior director at ACCION International, says one lesson is to just listen to clients.

Loans may not be “the only thing they want, need or say they benefit from,” he says. “Let’s get better at what they really need and what their lives demand of them.”

Microloan Crisis Prompts Questions
The Seattle Times |  Kristi Heim | May 14, 2011

On Monday over seventy five people gathered at St. Mark’s Cathedral to hear an expert panel speak about the global implications of India’s micro-credit crisis.  Among the panelists were David Roodman, a senior fellow at The Center for Global Development Rick Beckett, president and CEO of Global Partnerships, Chris Wolff, senior director at accion international and Peter Bladin, executive vice president at the Grameen Foundation.  Prior to the event, Global Washington members working in micro-finance gathered for a private round table discussion to examine what their organizations could learn from this crisis.

The event kicked off with a fifteen-minute crash coursegiven by David about what had happened to cause the micro-finance crisis in the India.  He explained, that the region of Andhra Pradesh had been experiencing a very high rate of growth in micro-finance for the past twenty years or so.  Among micro-finance providers was Sks, a large MFI that went public at the end of last summer.  The organization was founded by Vikram Akula, whom was previously valued at an astounding 90 million dollars.  These big numbers hit the papers and showed how much money was being made off of the backs of the poor, which created some negative back lash towards micro-finance.

Roodman said: “there were many causes from global warming to political parties but I do think the main problem was fast growth, credit just became too easy.”  He went onto say: “should we blame profiteering for what happened in India?  My answer is no” In addition to high growth, Roodman seemed to think investors needed to take more accountability for the bubbles that were being created by this oversees capital.

Roodman explained three main notions that surround micro-finance.  Firstly, he expressed the idea of micro-finance as helping people escape poverty.  When describing this notion he boldly stated “we don’t have evidence it reduces poverty.” The second notion he described was micro-finance as freedom.  Here, Roodman brought up several fantastic examples from the book: Portfolios of the Poor which he used to make the point that “poor people don’t have perfect financial services,” such as health insurance.  Therefore micro-finance can be one more tool that helps the poor in the times that they are not able to cover their expenses.  The final point he made was the idea of micro-finance as industry building.  Here he gave the famous example of the Grameen Bank, which has created thousands of jobs and improved the industry in Bangladesh. From this overview, the discussion was then opened up to the panel of people that represented micro-finance practitioners to see what their interpretation of Roodman’s thoughts were.

Beckett embellished on Roodman’s point about the bubble saying: “it is not only the amount of capital, it is the nature of the capital” that we need to pay attention to when looking at investments in micro-finance.  While Wolff highlighted that we need to use this event in India as a learning experience, he said we must all ask the question:” How can we use this situation to be better, to be more client focused?”  Bladin hinted that profit may have played a role in the problems in India when he said: “you’ve got to have the double bottom line and measure how you are reaching the people there.” Ultimately, while most panellists seemed to agree with Roodman’s points, there was a lot of discussion about how to further expand these lessons all the way from India to the MFIs operating in Seattle.

One of the few points of contention seemed to be whether micro-finance had truly made an impact or not.  While Beckett acknowledged that micro-finance may not be perfect, he said: “One of the great challenges in global development is there are very few ways of reaching 100’s of thousands of people. Micro-finance does this so it has the ability to serve as a sustainable channel for other things…. There just aren’t that many things that do that.”  Others brought up the point that while there was no evidence that micro-finance was actually pulling people out of poverty; there was also not evidence to the contrary.  Overall there seemed to be a consensus that regardless of the result of these studies, micro-finance had succeeded in making poverty more liveable, so this form of development is at least providing a short-term solution. “There is a piece of this that is important for us to own, that MF got romanticised…and we fell in love with it” said Beckett.  Everyone seemed to agree that recent events in India were an opportunity to see some grounding realities in the world of micro-finance, but not to fall out of love with the field entirely.

To read more about the event please visit the KPLU Humanosphere recent posting.

“Kids in the developing world need the newest technology…”[1]

“Can the cellphone help end global poverty?”[2]

Amidst such buzz around technology’s role in global poverty and human rights, Kentaro Toyama provided a poignant presentation on the myths of technology in international development to Global Washington members on Friday, May 6, 2011. Following the presentation was a lively discussion between Toyama and the audience, comprised primarily of Global Washington members with theoretical and field expertise in this area.

A visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and former co-founder of Microsoft Research India, where he designed electronic technology for international development, Toyama intimately understands technology’s role in supporting poverty alleviation work. Throughout the presentation, he stressed that “technology magnifies intent and capacity” and cautions against looking to technology, in and of itself, as a solution to global poverty.

Toyama’s presentation focused on countering seven myths regarding technology in international development.

Myth #1: Technology undoes the rich getting richer.

Toyama began with a question to the audience that went something like, “you and a poor Ugandan rural farmer are each given an e-mail account and asked to raise as much money for the charity of your choice. Who would be able to raise more money?” The room indicated that they would be able to raise more funds due to various reasons, from the relative affluence of their friends to their computer literacy skills to their education in articulating written concepts.  And thus began Toyama’s presentation, highlighting that even with identical technology, other capacities and systems have to be addressed to gain equality.

Myth #2: Hardware and software are a one-time cost

Toyama reminded Global Washington members that the average American mid-size corporation spends approximately $7,000 per year on their IT budget. Thus, hardware and software are NOT a one-time cost. In contrast, there is a need to continue to invest in technology.

Myth #3: Needs translate to business models

Using the fact that Google does not make a profit from YouTube and Google Maps – services that we might consider quite useful in our lives – Toyama illustrated that people don’t always pay for needs.

Myth #4: Automated is cheaper and better

Toyama highlights problems with full automation, particularly in the developing world: cost, literacy, lack of technological familiarity and errors within technology. 

Myth #5: Information is the bottleneck

In the developed world, and even more so in the developing world, time, effort, basic needs and a host of other priorities get in the way of obtaining all of the information that’s available. For example, just because a person has access to the Internet, and thus educational resources, does not mean that person can and will obtain a full education.

Myth #6: Technology’s impact is only positive

Because “technology magnifies positive and negative intent,” technology may have positive as well as negative effects. For example, technology can easily further the negative effects of gender inequality, abuse and child prostitution.

Myth #7: Technology X will save the world

Contrary to popular belief at the time of their invention, radio, TV, landline telephones and PCs have yet to save the world. In fact, in places where we would most desire to see technology make positive change, we don’t see this change because other key systems are missing: physical, social, financial and digital infrastructure.

So, how do we use technology successfully in global development work?

Toyama offered recommendations for successful use of technology, which include:

• Apply technology to existing social trends or institutions, which are already making an impact.
• Focus on nurturing human “intent and capacity.”
• The human component to any technology is critical.

Global Washington members dug deeper asking about and commenting on their work in community readiness for technology, successes and failures in technology, public-private partnership models and the role of education.

Global Washington’s mission is to convene, advocate, and strengthen the international development sector in Washington State, with an emphasis on the sectors of Global Health, Global Education, Environmental Sustainability, and Poverty Alleviation.  In this role, Global Washington brings together its members and the community to discuss critical global topics. Consider two upcoming events focused on technology and global development: Mobiles in Development on June 16 and the Dark Side of ICCT on July 14.

by Bridgette Greenhaw

What do the Zambian economy and a volcano eruption in the Democratic Republic of Congo have in common?

Apparently nothing. However at Global Washington there is a regular combination of cultures and information sharing taking place where people, creativity, and cross-cutting ideas can come together and make the most unlikely connections. On Thursday, April, 28, 2011, Global Washington hosted Mr. Alfred Chioza is the Deputy Ambassador of Zambia in Washington D.C and Maisha Soul, a musical group from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Zambian government’s efforts and results in creating attractive economic investments frameworks, as well as the country’s successes in economic development were mentioned by the speaker.  The audience was invited to invest in agriculture, water resources, raw materials extractions, mining, tourism, health and education. Many participants at the event mentioned that they visited Zambia before and were already working in these areas or are planning to in the future.

Maisha Soul is a band from the Democratic Republic of whose name means “soul of life”. They sang a number of songs in a mix of Swahili, English, and French. The message of the music written and performed by the four young brothers is a call for peace, promotion of brotherhood, equality, human rights, and freedom. The group was formed in 2002 after the volcanic eruption in Goma, when many people from Congo, including the performers, were in refugee camps. By that time they became a voice of hope in the middle of despair their country has struggled with for decades. The group was sponsored by HEALAfrica, a member organization of Global Washington.

Global Washington’s mission to convene, advocate, and strengthen the international development sector here in the state, with an emphasis on the sectors of Global Health, Global Education, Environmental Sustainability, and Poverty Alleviation.  As numerous international visitors come to Seattle to meet with businesses, policy makers, and educational institutions, Global Washington supports its members in organizing events like this to make the visitors accessible to the community of NGO’s, foundations, and individuals dedicated to all aspects of global development.

Liuba Ceban

Liuba.ceban@gmail.com