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Global Hunger Index - BANGLADESH | RANK: 67, GHI: 24.70 (Alarming)

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) shows that worldwide progress in reducing hunger remains slow. According to the report, Bangladesh’s Global Hunger Index (GHI) score is 24.7, which gives it a rank of 67th out of 84 countries. The index ranks countries on a 100-point scale, with 0 being the best score (no hunger) and 100 being the worst.

This report compares the 2009 GHI with the 2008 Global Gender Gap Index, which is made up of four subindices: economic participation, educational attainment, political empowerment, and health and survival. The evidence shows that higher levels of hunger are associated with lower literacy rates and access to education for women. High rates of hunger are also linked to health and survival inequalities between men and women. Reducing gender disparities in key areas, particularly in education and health, is thus essential to reduce levels of hunger.

Katy Bacon at the official Google.org blog writes about the mobile phone revolution in Africa:

It is the story of Safaricom, the most successful telecom company on the continent. Safaricom started trading publicly on the Nairobi stock exchange in June and catalyzed the largest IPO on the continent ever. More than $800 million was raised from Kenyans from all walks of life, resulting in an over-subscription of stock of more than 400%. Mobile is growing faster in Africa than in any other part of the world. While levels of internet penetration are well below 5% for the continent, nearly 40% have access to mobile phones and Nairobi sends more text messages in a single day than New York (a statistic frequently quoted in the region).

Ten years ago people were talking about land lines and how they would ever penetrate rural Africa. Infrastructure has long been a constraint on economic development and growth in Africa but nobody imagined that a new technology would completely leap-frog the traditional phone and fundamentally disrupt telephony in Africa. I can't help but think about rural energy in the same light. Today, countries like Uganda are still 90% unserved by electricity. Can you imagine not having power in 90% of any country and still trying to grow the economy? Do we expect Africans to wait for grid electricity to incrementally reach people or are there disruptive innovations that can provide off-grid renewable energy to rural Africans in scaleable ways?

We may see similar response when Bangladesh's largest mobile phone provider Grameen Phone launches its IPO. And Grameen Phone's contribution to Bangladesh's rural economy should not be neglected.

A presentation was made recently at “Asia Regional Forum for Media Development: Creating a Democratic Media Culture in in Asia” organized by the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD) with Sri Lanka in Focus.

Some of the lessons learnt:

* If you work in Journalism, you work for an online news organization whether you want to or not.

* News is a conversation

* Blogs represent the most open public communications platform for the political disclosure

* The peer-to-peer architecture of the blogosphere is resistant to capture and control by the state than the older, hub and spoke architecture of the mass media model.

* Journalists under attack can still publish under new media.

* Leverage the growth of web media for development, democracy, human rights, good governance, transparency, accountability and peace building.

Here is the full presentation:

Via ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

Trailer of the documentary "Two Million Minutes". Two million minutes is how much time a student has after completing this eighth grade to prepare for college.

"How students spends the time during their high school effects their entire economic future. And by extension a country's economic future depends on how its students collectively spends those valuable minutes."

Via Evgeny

(First Published in Rising Voices)

We often talk about extending the global conversation to every corner of the world with the use of social media tools. The means to do this are manifold and depend upon the support and implementation of local institutions. The main impediment to this cause is the lack of awareness of the freely available tools available to enter the global conversation and the absence of basic communication infrastructure in the developing world. Essentially, the digital divide is much larger in these countries than the developed countries.

However, with the proliferation of mobile communication in regions such as the Indian Sub-Continent and Sub-Saharan Africa, internet access has reached remote rural areas without the need of additional infrastructure like cables and land lines. But the potential of this phenomenon is largely yet to be harnessed.

Non-Profits are the Key

The not for profit organizations or NGOs as they are known in some parts of the world have a wider influence on the population of the developing countries. In some countries they contribute by sustaining a large workforce and their development budgets frequently make up a major part of the economy. These non-profit organizations have the capacity to use this technology on a wider scale and, thereby, to inspire a communication revolution among the people they serve. So when we talk about bringing the fruit of social media to each and every person in the world, we cannot progress much without enlisting the help of non-profits.

The digital divide

Which side of the digital divide are the non profits and NGOs? First let us look at the developed countries. In the USA, the Overbrook Foundation had released a report assessing some of the foundation’s human rights grantees use of Web 2.0 tools. Some findings are:

• Most of the organizations use the web more as a source of information than as a tool for connecting with others.
• Roughly half of the organizations — in most cases, the larger ones — maintain blogs.
• Respondents experienced a great deal of frustration in determining which tools to use and where to turn for help.
• Participants felt a generation gap with the new technology. “I’m always trying to catch up to my younger staff members.”

If the exposure of non-profits from developed countries to social media look like this then imagine the state of non-profits in developing countries. They are still in the process of incorporating to the digital age. Slowly, more and more non-profit institutions are making their web presence felt. But their web presence is mostly characterized by static web 1.0 websites which don’t allow for participation or interaction. They remain typical brochure sites with nothing more than a mission statement, some advertisements, rarely updated newsletters, a few photos, contact information, and zero interaction.

Nepal’s ASMITA is a powerful advocacy organization where a small group of female media activists are playing a pivotal role in the country’s history. ASMITA uses many forms of media. “It acts as a print magazine, a media campaign for women’s rights, a research group, a media watchdog, a TV and radio producer and a publisher of educational literature.” But what it does not have are participatory web media tools like blogs, videos, podcasts.

More than 20,000 NGOs work in Bangladesh. The official websites of Bangladesh’s two big NGOs BRAC and Grameen have still yet to incorporate web 2.0 applications on a visible scale.

In the era of Web 2.0, non-profits must take their online messages to a new level. Using social media tools like blogs, podcasts, videos and collaborative wikis they can initiate more interaction, make their work more interactive, and can positively distribute their message. We have seen that there is occasionally mistrusts among people regarding certain non-profits, which are not always transparent about their activities. When communicating with interactive social media, stakeholders and supporters can have each have better understandings of each other and ascertain whether everything is working properly.

What is social media or web 2.0?

Techsoup explains web 2.0 in the context of the non-profits:

“Web 2.0″ to me is the building of community and collaboration on a website — wikis, social-networking, user-created content, repurposed content, people interacting publicly through a website, users interacting with staff and with each other.”

The advantages of web 2.0:

You do not need special programming skills to use these tools.

Most of them are free or extremely low cost.

Beth Kanter is a trainer, blogger, and consultant to non-profits and individuals who want to effectively use social media. She writes in the Read Write Web:

Non-profits that integrate Web 2.0 tools and techniques effectively into their communications and programming strategies are reaping many benefits….

…In a recent blog discussion on the Netsquared community blog, some nonprofit techies believed that the answer is actually a change of mindset. Their point was that non-profits need to adopt a new philosophy of making their constituents the distributors of their message, and their work. To facilitate this shift, there is a need to educate more non-profits about what possibilities Web 2.0 tools offer and the practical ways to get started. It took years and small steps for many in the nonprofit sector to make the leap from fax machines to email - and it’ll be the same when taking the leap from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0.

Seth Godin’s free one-pager for non-profits courtesy of Npower New York and Squidoo.

Examples of the use of social media tools

• Flickr as Nonprofit Documentation Tool: What happens when you give a grantmaker a camera and flickr account? An interesting use of Flickr as a documentation tool! Also look at the International NGOs flickr group.
• Wiki Adoption in Organizations: Wikis are good for creating a collaborative and flexible knowledge base.

Best practices for non-profits using web 2.0

“How are smart non profits using the power of the web to spread information and have virtual conversations with their supporters? Who are using the web to deliver their message, but more crucially, to engage audiences in a conversation?”

Alexandra Samuel answers those questions in Social Signal quoting some of the best practices:

• The UN Foundation has had a dazzling success with its Nothing But Nets site, which focuses specifically on providing malaria nets to kids in the developing world.
• Invite your community to make contributions other than money. The web is a great place to ask for other kinds of contributions — whether that means connecting people directly with people who need their expertise or services (as in Nabuur) or asking them to share their personal experiences (as with the March of Dimes’ Share your Story project).

Check the rest here.

Why the Web 2.0 is important for small local non-profits?

Ken Goldstein writes that using interactive applications, two-way online communications and user-generated content the established core constituency of a non-profit can be expanded wider, possibly transforming it to a global powerhouse. Some advantages:

• Blogging communicates with the target audience more frequently and more cost-effectively than newsletters and appeal letters.
• RSS feeds of blogs, videos, etc., allow supporters to receive, read, and act upon the communications at their own pace.

How non-profits can start leveraging Social Media

Masternewmedia prescribes ten ways to do it.

If, as a decision-maker of a non-profit, you still are not convinced of the power of new media, then read Beth Kanter’s entire Blog dedicated to the theme: “How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media.”

I had another visit to Euro shop (everything priced at 1 Euro) yesterday. You get amazing things at one Euro for example a stainless steel (rust free) bowl something you will not get even in Bangladesh at this amount.

Did we ever wonder why are stuffs being offered cheaper and cheaper even less than the developing country standards?

A relevant video might provoke some questions:



The story of Stuff has answers to those questions.

Black Looks Blog points to the fact:

90% of the stuff consumed in the US is trashed within six months - now that is truly scary.

One thing I can urge to people (including me) please please buy less. How much do a human being needs?

Have you heard about Miracle that has happened in Bangladesh over the last 30 years? No? Bangladesh has the highest population density among the worlds big countries, today, Bangladesh has more people than Russia. But the area is smaller than Florida.

So what is the Miracle? In 1970 an average women in Bangladesh gave birth to 7 children, and on of four of them died before the age of five. But after independence from Pakistan in 1971 things has improved. See Hans Rosling's GapCast to see how much.

Here is the wikipedia entry for Hans Rosling and information about the Gapminder project.

Via Aumit Ahmed