MDG

A black hole for our best and brightest

The thing Deborah Jackson remembers from her first interviews at Goldman Sachs is the slogan. It was stamped on the glass doors of the offices in the investment bank’s headquarters just off Wall Street, the lure of the place in two words, eight syllables: “Uncommon capability.”

Global efforts have halved the number of people dying from malaria - a tremendous achievement, the World Health Organization says.

It says between 2001 and 2013, 4.3 million deaths were averted, 3.9 million of which were children under the age of five in sub-Saharan Africa.

Each year, more people are being reached with life-saving malaria interventions, the WHO says.

In 2004, 3% of those at risk had access to mosquito nets, but now 50% do.

Winning the fight

The Sunlight Foundation is releasing “Fixed Fortunes,” a groundbreaking analysis and dataset of the money the biggest corporate political donors put into campaigns and lobbying and what they get in return. 

Today, The Roddenberry Foundation announced a $100,000 contribution to the Global Learning XPRIZE crowdfunding campaign to support the development of technology that will bring literacy to hundreds of millions of children.

Think of a refugee camp and you're probably thinking of messy temporary lodging and throngs of displaced people. But Ken Banks, founder of Kiwanja.net and FrontlineSMS, says that refugee camps are surprising hotbeds of innovation.

Although the overall economy has been expanding slowly, the nonprofit sector is vibrant, according to a recent report in the New York Times.

From 2001 to 2011, the Times reports that the number of nonprofits in the United States grew 25 percent, while the number of for-profit businesses rose by half a percent, quoting recent figures compiled by the Urban Institute.

Interest on the minuscule loans made by microfinance outfits has always been high, but over the past few years it has become even higher. A recent paper, using data on over 1,500 microfinance institutions (MFIs) from around the world, shows that for the smallest loans, typically less than $150, the average rate climbed steadily from 30% in 2004 to 35% in 2011.*

·       Problem: World Toilet Day promotes the belief that we can solve the sanitation crisis by simply building more toilets across the developing world. But despite building more toilets, sanitation is the most off-track Millennium Development Goal.

·       Barrier to Progress: Organizations must rethink sanitation and the solutions to this global crisis.