Tag Archives: poverty

iPads for poverty?

By Elmira Bayrasli | Published: June 1, 2010
These are kids I met in Cambodia.  But I shouldn’t have.  The older ones should be at school.  Instead they were with their parents, who are rice farmers selling rice to the mill.  Their farm is three to five miles away from the nearest school.  So they only go when they can. There are a [...]
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Can the brain drain help poverty?

By Elmira Bayrasli | Published: May 20, 2010
The Global Post ran a great story on the African Middle Class yesterday.  “Africa’s middle class,” says Vijay Mahajan, author of Africa Rising, “is the great economic engine that will drive development across the continent. That growth, author of the article Andrew Meldrum argues, is a result of better educational opportunities and entrepreneurship.  Interestingly he [...]
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Look at me, I saved the world

By Elmira Bayrasli | Published: April 18, 2010
Did I miss Bono at the Skoll World Forum?  In his piece “Africa Reboots” in today’s New York Times, he talks about many of the themes that were brought up during this past week’s social entrepreneurship gathering: citizens and entrepreneurs and catalysts and partnerships between the two to make change happen. In reading the article, [...]
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Skoll World Forum: Keeping social entrepreneurs real and relevant

By Elmira Bayrasli | Published: April 18, 2010
I didn’t want to attend the Skoll World Forum this year.  That is the annual spring gathering of social entrepreneurs in Oxford, England.  And after four years participating, I was skeptical that “Skoll,” as insiders call the conference, would be different from previous years. Seven years ago, when Skoll was launched it had one purpose.  [...]
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On poverty alleviation: stop the entrepreneurial madness

By Elmira Bayrasli | Published: March 22, 2010
David Henderson, a social enterpreneur, posted this great blog “No Not All Poor People are Entrepreneurs” on socialentrepreneurship.change.org today.  In it he points to something I’ve always believed was a problem in poverty alleviation efforts: the Western propensity to “romanticize the poor as entrepreneurs.” “The unifying trait of the poor is not entrepreneurial spirit. It [...]
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Guido Galli September 5, 1967-January 2010

By Elmira Bayrasli | Published: January 18, 2010
This morning I learned that Guido Galli was killed in Haiti last week. Guido was not a close friend. We met once, over brunch not far from Central Park, though I had been hearing about him through a mutual friend for a while.  At the time he was working at the UN headquarters in New [...]
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A Savings Revolution Sparked (Already…)

By Elmira Bayrasli | Published: January 1, 2010
It is time for the global microsavings movement Nick Kristof. In this column Kristof talks about “one of the ugly secretes of global poverty” which “is that a good deal of suffering is caused not only by low incomes but also by bad spending decisions.” That’s because most people in the developing world don’t have [...]
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