Coca-Cola is easily one of the most recognized brands in the world. Could linking some of the most impoverished people in Africa to the corporate giant's supply chain be a win-win for both?

The Gates Foundation is funding a project to help farmers in Kenya and Uganda produce fruit for Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola says the farmers can help it meet a critical need to increase production as global and local demand for fruit juice grows.

ELLEN CREAGER/MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

The ubiquitous Coca-Cola brand reaches every corner of the world.

The $7.5 million Gates grant will go to TechnoServe, a U.S.-based nonprofit, to train mango and passion-fruit farmers to improve their quality and increase production, and to provide the farmers with credit.

TechnoServe works with large corporations like Coca-Cola, using a private sector approach to align corporate interests with those of small enterprises in developing countries, and increase profits for both.

The project aims to bring 50,000 farmers into Coca-Cola's supply chain for the first time and to double their incomes by 2014.

For some perspective on this new partnership, I asked Chris MacDonald, a business ethics expert who teaches at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Canada and is a Senior Fellow at Duke University. He has written about Coca-Cola's work in developing countries, including this report on an African water project.

"This clearly seems like a positive thing, over all," he said in an email about the new Gates-funded partnership. But the way it's set up makes all the difference. "It would be best if these farmers are being brought into Coca Cola's supply chain in a way that doesn't leave them dependent on it," he said. "Being dependent on the purchasing whims of any particular company seems dangerous, maybe a mixed blessing."

I also checked the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, which keeps track of the record of many companies, including Coca-Cola. The company has come under fire for its water use in India. Yet it has also taken steps to build or repair water infrastructure in African countries.

Coca-Cola said the partnership will also serve as a model for the way it approaches other developing country markets where it does business.The four-year, $11.5 million partnership includes a $3 million contribution by Coca-Cola and $1 million from its bottling partner Coca-Cola Sabco.

Including loans to farmers as part of the project also raises some questions. "Anything that requires farmers to go into debt is at least a little worrisome," MacDonald said. While debt can be useful for people expecting incomes to rise, "I hope those farmers are getting some good, impartial advice about their financial planning."

The Gates Foundation's longer term goals for African agricultural development are eradicating poverty and improving food security. With a company whose main product isn't healthy, "there's reason to be worried about the company extending its reach, and hence its market, into more and poorer countries," MacDonald said.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is making its first grant in response to the earthquake in Haiti -- $1 million to Catholic Relief Services (CRS) to aid its initial relief efforts, including immediate food, shelter, water, sanitation, health and other needs of people affected by Tuesday's earthquake.

UPDATE: On Friday, the foundation made a second grant -- $500,000 to Partners in Health (PIH) for immediate- and medium-term medical care through its existing 10 health facilities and temporary mobile clinics. The grant will also help pay for medical supplies, tents, blankets, water, and other essential items. Partners in Health has worked in Haiti for more than 20 years to bring medical care to poor communities.

CRS "has experienced personnel and a stock of emergency supplies in Haiti," the Gates Foundation said in a statement today. Catholic Relief Services personnel in Haiti were struggling to make sure that their 300 staff members are safe and accounted for, as well as beginning relief operations by preparing food supplies to be brought in Friday from the Dominican Republic. The CRS blog has some details about the situation on the ground.

"The humanitarian conditions are catastrophic, and much more will need to be done to address the immediate situation, as well as support the sustained recovery efforts in the weeks and months ahead so that people can rebuild their lives," the Gates Foundation statement said. "The foundation is continuing to monitor the situation and exploring additional opportunities to provide support for the relief efforts."

The largest private charitable foundation says it approaches emergency relief by trying to assist organizations that deliver food and clean water, improve sanitation, provide medical attention and shelter, and prevent or minimize outbreaks of disease.

It listed 10 relief groups actively working in Haiti for people looking for organizations to support.

The new face of U.S. foreign assistance stared into my living room from the TV screen, looking very familiar. There was Rajiv Shah, the former Gates Foundation agricultural development director, being interviewed by Jim Lehrer about Haiti.

Just when I was getting ready to write about how Shah must prepare to tackle things like streamlining bureaucracy, localizing programs and funding, and strengthening support for democratic governance (no pressure), along comes the biggest disaster in two centuries, striking an already fragile nation 700 miles from Miami. Now Shah, 36, is leading U.S. relief efforts just six days after being sworn into office.

COURTESY OF USAID

Rajiv Shah is sworn in as USAID Administrator as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Shah's family look on. Shah had supported her presidential campaign.

It's interesting to think that Shah was chosen to head the organization after the humanitarian physician Paul Farmer pulled out of the running last summer. Farmer, chairman of Harvard Medical School's Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, had dedicated so much of his life to improving health conditions in Haiti through Partners in Health that he would have seemed almost destined for that moment.

At Shah's swearing in ceremony, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lauded his passion, vision and quiet humility, his degrees in medicine and business and experience with the Gates Foundation. "He brings determination and an unwavering belief that anything is possible," she said.

Shah, in turn, said that belief "was founded on our country's rich experience turning crisis into progress."

Shah talked about the necessity of reforming USAID to create stronger local systems in the countries it helps, staying focused on tracking progress and elevating the position of women and girls. Now more than ever the world has the ability -- and the technology -- to create massive improvements in the human condition, he said.

"We find ourselves in a unique moment of opportunity," he said. "A powerful consensus has formed that development is vital both to our national security and the shared interests of an interconnected world."

On TV tonight Shah looked like he hadn't slept in a long time. He talked about President Obama's commitment to focus U.S. efforts around saving lives in the first 72 hours after the quake, working with various branches of the federal government and in partnership with other countries to be as effective as possible. He projected a steady, smart and genuine presence.

Shah's first major test is also an opportunity for the country to show a struggling neighbor how it intends to redefine its role in the world.

With the success of microcredit, poor people have access to more loans than ever before. But many are still stashing savings in a lock box, storing it with a "money guard" or pooling it in an informal savings club because they have no other options.

Many banks and other institutions don't make savings accounts available to the poorest borrowers.

Today the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is contributing $38 million in grants in a push to help leading microfinance institutions (MFIs) offer clients safe and affordable places to save money.

"We see it as a major step to drive change and help broaden the microfinance business model to include savings," said Bob Christen, the foundation's director of Financial Services for the Poor.

GRAMEEN FOUNDATION

Members do banking at ACSI, a microfinance institution in Ethiopia's Amhara region, which depends largely on agriculture. ACSI provides savings accounts for more than 586,000 people.

Six grants will help 18 institutions expand their portfolios and make savings accounts available to 11 million people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America over the next five years. The challenge of finding ways to reach poor savers is being met with the help of motorcycles, PDAs, mobile phones and even soap operas.

The largest grant, $9.8 million, will go to the Grameen Foundation to begin a Microsavings Initiative with partners in Ethiopia, India and the Philippines to test and fine tune models for savings for people at the bottom of the economic ladder -- those living on about $1.25 per day.

Even at that level, people are putting away small amounts -- often pennies at a time -- and using sophisticated balancing acts to stretch their capability. But the informal savings methods often lead to financial losses.

Many of the poorest people live far from cities, so the cost of traveling to a bank is too high. It's also expensive for banks to create branches in remote areas where the number of clients is limited and their deposits small.

A $5.8 million grant to ACCION International will focus on agent banking, mobile banks, and access to savings accounts over mobile phones. A $3.3 million grant to World Vision will help it offer savings accounts to rural farmers and poor people in Ethiopia through mobile technologies, including equipping savings offers with PDAs and motorbikes to travel to clients in outlying communities.

Collecting more savings deposits from local customers could help the microfinance institutions reduce their reliance on external funding from commercial banks, becoming more like community banks in the United States, said Kate Druschel Griffin, director of the solutions for the poorest initiative at the Grameen Foundation.

GRAMEEN FOUNDATION

The microfinance institution ACSI holds a meeting for clients in Ethiopia's rural Amhara region.

"For us it's how do we make sure we are enabling the poor households to have tools they need to work their way out of poverty," she said. Grameen's initiative aims to reach 1.45 million new savers over three years. Besides a safer place to store assets, clients can earn interest -- ACSI, Grameen's partner in Ethiopia, provides 5 percent interest on regular savings accounts, and between 5.25 and 5.5 percent on time deposits.

The Grameen Foundation has begun using a tool called the "progress out of poverty index" to measure the impact of credit and savings programs on borrowers. The index measures a range of non financial indicators, such as housing type and sanitation type to see whether living conditions improve.

An $8.5 million grant will go to Women's World Banking (WWB), a network of leading microfinance institutions and banks dedicated to the economic empowerment of women.

The grant will help WWB to create new savings products and services for nearly seven million low-income people in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

WWB will use the money to support its network members invest in market research, product design, marketing and sales and service delivery methods. The members are Banco ADOPEM in the Dominican Republic, WWB Colombia, Kenya Women Finance Trust, and Kashf Microfinance Bank in Pakistan.

"As the microfinance industry matures, we are seeing the beginning of a major shift from a focus on credit to an emphasis on savings," said WWB president and CEO Mary Ellen Iskenderian, adding that demand for savings among the poor is increasing.

WWB found that poor people save between 10 to 15 percent of their monthly household income, using it to pay for childrens' education, health emergencies, housing and marriage.

Since women tend to be the savers in a poor household, designing savings products for them is critical, WWB said.

Using a creative approach, WWB will launch a TV soap opera in the Dominican Republic, part of a financial literacy campaign to bring attention to the benefits of savings. WWB said it seeks to change cultural attitudes and behaviors related to money and will work with Puntos de Encuentro, a Nicaraguan NGO that has used TV serial drama to successfully affect social change.

"Loans or credit were the model for the first 30 years of microfinance," said Iskenderian. "Savings is the future."

Sam Dryden, an investor and entrepreneur, was named the Gates Foundation's new director of agricultural development today.

Dryden, a managing director of New York-based Wolfensohn & Company, an investment company, will begin the new post on Feb. 1. He replaces Dr. Rajiv Shah, who was sworn in Thursday as the administrator for USAID.

"Sam brings a wealth of experience to the foundation -- not only in agriculture, research and business, but also in a wide variety of projects related to agricultural development and public-private partnerships," said Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of the foundation's Global Development Program. "His strong leadership qualities will help the team deliver on our strategy to help small farmers improve their lives."

In his new position, Dryden will lead a team attempting to help the world's poorest farming families boost productivity and incomes with better seeds, management training, access to markets and effective policies. The foundation, which has targeted agricultural improvements as one of its core missions, has committed $1.4 billion to agricultural development initiatives in Africa and South Asia.

Dryden has written and lectured widely on food security and economic development issues and served as an adviser on rural development for the World Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation.

At Wolfensohn, which was founded by former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, Dryden focused on investments in alternative energies. He formerly headed Emergent Genetics, which develops and markets seeds. Emergent Genetics, the third largest cotton seed company in the U.S., was acquired by Monsanto in 2005 in a $300 million deal.

The foundation's choice of Dryden raises a red flag for organizations that advocate against genetically modified crops, Bill Freese, science policy analyst for the Center on Food Safety, told the AP.

"Appointing someone like this as head of their agriculture project is a bad sign," Freese said.

Dryden has also been president and chief executive of Agrigenetics, a seed company now part of Dow AgroSciences, and was founder of Big Stone, a private venture and development company. His career began as an analyst with the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Dryden has 25 years of experience as an investor and entrepreneur in the life sciences. He has served on a number of international boards and commissions focused on agriculture development, economic development and food security.

Two recent grants and a $10 million investment by the Gates Foundation aim to boost access to education and capital for African agriculture.

A $1 million grant today to Michigan State University will support a pilot project to create a virtual hub of agricultural education material.

The MSU researchers will work with African educators to develop material designed to improve agricultural practices in an 18-month project called AgShare Open Education Resources. The idea is to develop curriculum in the public domain to share freely among agricultural universities, NGOs and farmers around Africa.

DEBBIE DEVOE/CRS

Kenyan farmer Mildred Agola and her husband Patrick Karandi, left, greet partners in a Catholic Relief Services-led project to stem the spread of two diseases affecting the cassava plant. The project was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Michigan State University received a $10.4 million grant from the Gates Foundation last year to train African biosafety regulators on the latest advances in technology. Members of the African Biosafety Network of Expertise are taking classes and working with MSU faculty to learn about biotechnology issues affecting small farmers.

The Gates Foundation is also using newly designated funds for Program-Related Investing to make a $10 million investment in Root Capital, based in Cambridge, Mass.

Root Capital funds grassroots enterprises in developing countries, loaning to small businesses that often fall through the cracks between microcredit and commercial banks.

Root Capital said it will use the Gates funding to expand its operations in sub-Saharan Africa, providing access to credit, financial management training and global market opportunities to small and growing rural businesses. Root Capital also received a $4 million operating grant from the Gates Foundation to support a five-year growth plan to achieve a financially sustainable lending program by 2013.

Speaking of increasing agricultural knowledge, a local technology non-profit called Literacy Bridge has reported successful results from its own pilot program. Founded by Cliff Schmidt, a former U.S. Navy nuclear engineer, Literacy Bridge makes a $10 portable audio computer called the Talking Book. The device (pictured below) is designed to spread knowledge among populations with low literacy rates. It can be used to play and record hours of messages, and recordings can be shared from one book to another.

Working with agriculture, education and health officials in Ghana, Literacy Bridge produced content for Talking Books with such basic advice as when to start clearing farms, how to plant rows and when to start sowing beans.

Literacy Bridge delivered 21 Talking Books to a small village, to be managed by local leaders and shared by residents. After the first year, the program helped achieve a 73 percent increase in crop production and a $45,000 increase in crop value, the non-profit reported last month.

Ugandans could face the death penalty for being homosexual, according to a bill under consideration in the Ugandan parliament. The Anti-Homosexuality Bill can be traced back to remarks by several American evangelicals, as today's story details.

The bill has drawn worldwide outrage, and well known U.S. Christian leaders have condemned it as "un-Christian."

Seen from a global health perspective, the implications for addressing the HIV/AIDS pandemic are dire and could reverse the country's previous successes. The legislation would impose the death penalty for active homosexuals living with HIV.

Doctors treating HIV-positive gays could also be prosecuted for "aiding and abetting homosexuality," and some are clearly afraid.

World Vision, the Christian relief agency which has worked in Uganda since the mid-80s, said the legislation could undermine its work by stigmatizing people in communities it targets, according to Rudo Kwaramba, World Vision Uganda national director.

"Uganda is one of the first countries in which we started HIV education and prevention programs," Kwaramba said in a statement. "One of World Vision 's prevention models aims to reduce any stigma which may deter people from seeking to know their HIV status."

World Vision President Richard Stearns has been instrumental in getting more evangelical churches involved in addressing the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Such churches had been reluctant to help before because they regarded AIDS as a gay disease, or opposed condom distribution.

Kwaramba said World Vision is committed to working in Uganda regardless of whether the legislation is passed. However, to comply with the law, they could be forced to report homosexuals to the authorities.

The largest private international aid agency, World Vision has more than 500 staff members in the country.

As in other nations, "World Vision's work in Uganda is community-based and child-focused; the sexual orientation of those we serve, or those with whom we collaborate, does not arise," Kwaramba said.

Cassandra Nelson is no stranger to conflict and crisis, having worked for Mercy Corps in hot spots all over the world, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, Pakistan and Darfur.

But as she spent November in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she was immediately struck by two things: how much violence is still raging there, and how rich the potential is if the country can move beyond it.

CASSANDRA NELSON/MERCY CORPS

Women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo build stoves out of clay for cooking more efficiently and reducing the use of firewood, which contributes to deforestation and is dangerous for the women traveling greater distances from camps to gather wood.

"It's a spectacular country," she said, "lush and mountainous and everywhere you look are flowers. One moment you see that vista, and then you turn your head the other direction and see some of the worst human suffering you've seen in your life... you just think how can this all be in one place?"

More than a decade of fighting has claimed at least 5 million lives and left more than a million people displaced, pushed into makeshift camps to seek refuge. The war has caused nearly seven times the number of deaths of the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda, according to the Portland-based humanitarian group. The worst violence has been in eastern Congo, near Goma, the capital of Nord-Kivu province.

Recently "there's been a real perception that things have stabilized," Nelson said, but "the moment you leave Goma, things have not changed one bit. Every night there are gunfights and people getting killed."

Women and girls in eastern Congo have paid a terrible price.

Rape has become so common "it is almost a fact of life," Nelson said. "They're terrified of it but sometimes I get the sense they think it's unavoidable. It's happened to everyone."

As women go out to collect firewood for light, heat and cooking, they risk attacks by militia in the jungles and sometimes by government soldiers, too, she said. "Out in those woods there are a lot men with guns. It's either rape or it's harassment -- people stealing their wood or beating them."

The conflict has also taken a heavy toll on the environment. A recent UN study estimated that two thirds of the Congo Basin Forest will have disappeared within 30 years if the present rate of deforestation continues. Illegal logging and charcoal production remain a lucrative industry used to finance the ongoing conflict and buy guns for rebel militia groups, Nelson said. The strain on resources is even more severe as desperate people move into new areas and set up camps.

"First they're going out one kilometer and pretty much everyone has picked those," Nelson said. "In some places women go out 14 kilometers. People are literally spending half their day collecting wood."

CASSANDRA NELSON/MERCY CORPS

Congolese women make and store briquettes they created out of manure, which reduces deforestation and offers a safer alternative than searching for wood.

Mercy Corps is applying a practical solution to address both environmental destruction and women's security -- a fuel efficient stove.

The simple stoves can be made from sand, clay and brick found locally, and they consume less than half the wood of traditional cooking fires. That means women don't have to leave the relative safety of the camps as often.

About 30,000 stoves have been made through the Mercy Corps program and 10,000 distributed this year, Nelson said. Women are also learning to make briquettes from manure and other refuse, which burn more cleanly and are cheaper than charcoal. Besides saving trees, the stoves and briquettes provide a way to earn income for women who make and sell them.

So far Mercy Corps has trained 360 people to pass on the stove building knowledge to more women. "As they go home they take skills back and introduce this method to their villages," Nelson said.

The stoves have generated $160,000 worth of credits in the carbon market from the reduction in carbon emissions, she said. Mercy Corps uses the proceeds to teach women living in camps vocational skills, including animal husbandry, beekeeping and horticulture.

While the country continues to struggle with conflict and corruption, progress is measured in reducing danger and harm.

In the future, she said, "if the violence can ever be brought under control, it is a country with amazing natural resources and so much potential."

The Gates Foundation is getting some criticism from a local food co-op for supporting research into genetically modified crops to increase production in Africa.

PCC Natural Markets, the Seattle-based food co-operative, published a letter and editor's note this month taking a strong stance against genetic engineering of food.

"I caution the organic community to be watchful of this NEW Green Revolution, especially since The Gates Foundation science and technology efforts are led by a former Monsanto researcher,"
Dennis L. Weaver wrote in PCC's Sound Consumer.

"The Gates Foundation apparently is pushing genetically modified crops on African farmers," PCC editor Trudy Bialic added. She cited a $42 million Gates grant to a project involving Monsanto to produce corn resistant to drought "even though genetic engineering has failed to increase crop yields significantly, despite 20 years of research."

PCC, which has nine stores in the Puget Sound region and 47,000 members, is the largest consumer-owned natural food co-operative in the United States. Its staff writes a monthly report about issues in food safety and nutrition aimed at consumers.

Mark Suzman, director of policy and advocacy in the Gates Foundation's global development program, responded in a letter to PCC that the foundation is investing in a broad array of approaches and paying attention to environmental and economic sustainability.

"Most of our grants to improve seed quality use conventional breeding," Suzman wrote. "We include biotechnology when we believe there is potential to help farmers confront drought and disease, or to increase the nutritional content of food, faster or more effectively than conventional breeding alone."

The criticism by advocates of organic agriculture isn't new but illustrates a politically charged split over food, one that Bill Gates acknowledged in a speech in October at the World Food Prize symposium.

Gates said some critics are "instantly hostile to any emphasis on productivity," and that such an "ideological wedge" could thwart major breakthroughs to help farmers deal with the effects of climate change.

"The fact is, we need both productivity and sustainability -- and there is no reason we can't have both," he said.

But the local reaction reveals ongoing skepticism, even among an audience generally not at odds with Gates philanthropy.

"The organic community cannot buy into Bill's call to 'Let's just all hold hands, sing kumbaya, hug, air-kiss and "'get over" past "ideological" divides,' " Weaver wrote to PCC.

"I don't know exactly what is motivating the Gates Foundation to buy into the propaganda," Bialic said. "I think it's an ideology that technology can save the world."

As we await news of what world leaders manage to agree on, if much of anything, in Copenhagen, it's worth taking a look at one organization in Seattle that is training environmental leaders around the globe.

COURTESY OF EARTHCORPS

Roshani Rai of Nepal cuts a log for use on a trail structure in Seattle's Colman Park.

EarthCorps has been around since 1993, but it has taken some time for its efforts to gain traction. That's starting to happen as its 750 alumni disperse and apply their skills to new projects, from an international volunteer program at Lake Baikal in Russia, to a "zero waste" recycling enterprise in India.

The non-profit has brought environmental leaders from more than 60 countries to work on projects in the Puget Sound area. Half of its members are from around the U.S. and half are from countries in the developing world, and they share knowledge and expertise.

Besides the main group of about 50 members, EarthCorps now has 11,000 volunteers in Puget Sound, executive director Steve Dubiel told me. The level of interest has jumped this year, with three to four times as many people coming to activities aimed at local environmental restoration. Its teams have worked to improve 100 parks and green spaces in the region.

About 75 percent of EarthCorps' budget comes from fees it collects for its environmental services, so it has a more sustainable model than nonprofits that rely on donations or endowments alone.

COURTESY OF EARTHCORPS

Roshani Rai of Nepal plants native trees and shrubs along the shoreline of Burien's Seahurst Park. The planting followed a seawall removal project and is an example of Puget Sound shoreline restoration.

One EarthCorps alumnus went home to create a program in India that cleans up the streets and helps marginalized people by employing them to collect, sort and recycle 200 different kinds of garbage. Nothing, not even waste, goes to waste.

EarthCorps also emphasizes training women as future leaders.

"We put chainsaws in the hands of women who aren't used to having power," Dubiel said. "It's life changing."

When he joined the organization 15 years ago, Dubiel said, "I don't think people knew what environmental restoration was. I would say 'invasive plant' and people would give me a strange look. Now tons of people are out doing this work."

One of its projects has been removing ivy from Seward Park, where the group has cleared the plant from 42 of 50 acres of the park's forests.

If problems seem overwhelming, it can be satisfying to "just start somewhere," he said. "Stop talking, pick up a shovel and do something."

EarthCorps members working in far worse circumstances inspire others to persevere.

One EarthCorps member is fighting against the odds to preserve a freshwater dolphin in an area of Pakistan where the Taliban is waging war.

"You could have a more lucrative career," Dubiel said, "but don't we owe it to them to do the best we can?"

For another look at how Washington D.C. can learn from Washington state's approach to environmental solutions, see this post.

Like a rider through a treacherous mountain pass, Greg Mortenson negotiates through seemingly impossible obstacles to find safe passage for his schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, choosing hope over fear and calling his only real enemy "ignorance."

Mortenson visited Seattle Tuesday and Redmond this morning to talk about his new book, "Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan." I spoke with him by phone on Tuesday while he awaited his flight from Portland. The Pacific Northwest is his biggest support network, where his champions hail from public libraries and book clubs to military bases and places of worship. His group Pennies for Peace carries on the work at home through programs for youth, teaching them about the world and how their philanthropy can make a difference. People in the Snohomish School District held a district-wide drive and raised more than $50,000.

The mountain climber and humanitarian founded the nonprofit Central Asia Institute, which has created 131 schools with the goal of advancing girls' education in rural Afghanistan and Pakistan.

COURTESY OF GREG MORTENSON

Greg Mortenson (third from right in back) with tribal chiefs from Urozgan province in southern Afghanistan, a Taliban stronghold where his institute established the first girls high school.

In "Three Cups of Tea," he writes about building schools for girls in the rugged mountains of Pakistan, while his new book focuses on neighboring Afghanistan.

Mortenson, 51, gives the mountains of remote Afghanistan the motto of his native Montana, "The last best place." There he found "a combination of courage, tenacity, hospitality, and grace that leaves me in awe," he writes. Such places often "represent the best of who we are and the finest standard of what we are meant to become."

I asked him how he manages to maintain his safety, let alone build girls schools, in Taliban strongholds:

TARA BISHOP

Author Greg Mortenson, son Khyber and daughter Amira in Gultori war refugee girls' school in Pakistan.

Establishing trust with local leaders is key, he said. "The Pashto word menawatay means the right of refuge. It means you will protect a guest with your life. Your honor in the tribal group is measured on your ability to provide hospitality for your guest. We have to take a lot of precautions, but my kids and wife do go to several places in Pakistan and Afghanistan."

(He was kidnapped and held for eight days in Pakistan in 1996.)

"Primarily we've tried very hard to work with the elders and we've put them in charge. The communities run the schools. When I am passing between two different feuding clans we'll sit there in the middle of nowhere and wait, and a military commander, a commandant, will send his emissaries. We'll have cup of tea and they will pass me off."

"It's absolutely imperative we build relationships..." As Mortenson's voice trailed off, he said he would call right back after passing through airport security in Portland. It took a lot longer than he thought. The U.S. Army veteran, whose advice has been praised by military commanders such as Admiral Mike Mullen and General David Petraeus, was detained again.

"Every time I come back into the country it's really difficult," he said later. "My passport is somehow marked. They ask me where I've been. I have to go into a special room. I don't look forward to coming back here for that reason."

Why choose to work in the remote Wakhan Corridor in Afghanistan?

"Our mission is to promote and set up schools, especially for girls, in areas where there is not education, generally in areas of physical isolation, religious extremism, conflict and war or natural disaster. Wakhan is the most remote. I think what really drew me there 10 years ago in 1999 a dozen Kirghiz horseman came over. They traveled six days a week, 16 hours a day on horseback. They were sent by their tribal leader to ask me to build a school in their region, the most isolated area in Afghanistan. You need to go in a jeep four days over rugged mountain and another three to four days by horseback over precipitous trails."

Why is girls' education the answer?

"Educating girls at least to a fifth grade level reduces infant mortality, and where I work about one out of three children dies before the age of 1. It reduces the population explosion. I think of all the problems in the world today -- we have global warming and wars -- I think there's just too many people on the planet. The number one way to reduce people is female literacy.

What I have seen is people coming home from the bazaar and they have vegetables or meat wrapped in newspaper. You'll see the mother very carefully unfolding a newspaper and asking her daughter to read the news to her. It's very empowering for a woman in an isolated area to read the news.

When mothers have an education they are less likely to encourage their sons to get into terrorism or violence. The Taliban's primary recruiting grounds are illiterate and impoverished societies. Most educated women refuse to allow their sons to join the Taliban."

On Afghanistan today:

"In the year 2000 there were 800,000 mostly boys in school, a Unicef figure. Today there are 8.4 million children in school including 2.5 million females. This is the greatest increase in school enrollment in any country in modern history. This is something few Americans are aware of.

Unfortunately the bad news is in the last three years in Afghanistan, the Taliban have bombed, burned or destroyed over 1,000 schools, and 850 schools in Pakistan. Ninety percent of the schools are girls schools. I think the reason they are bombing girls schools is because their greatest fear is not a bullet. It's a pen."

TERU KUWAYAMA

A school in a remote part of Afghanistan created by the Montana-based non-profit Central Asia Institute.

On what he teaches in the schools:

There are 131 schools now, plus another five dozen tent schools in refugee camps, serving 58,000 students (most of them girls): "Reading, writing, arithmetic, social studies. Elders come in twice a week and do storytelling to children...also hygiene, sanitation and nutrition. Since there's no health care, we teach teachers how to screen for vitamin deficiency, polio. We teach five languages by fifth grade, including Arabic and English, Dari in Afghanistan and Urdu in Pakistan and Pashto, and they also speak their tribal tongue. We are required by both countries to teach Islamiat studies, two to three hours a week studying the Koran and Islam. We teach kids to read and understand Arabic -- that's the difference between [our schools] and extremist madrasas. They teach how to read Arabic but not understand it. When you understand the Koran, there's nothing that says girls can't go to school. The two worst sins one can commit are killing someone and committing suicide. The real enemy anywhere is ignorance."

Does he still get threats here?

"I still get hate mail. I get threats. I've had threats all over the country. Our house was smashed by supremacists. People don't like the fact that I'm helping Muslims out. [Other] people don't like that I'm talking to the military. My wife says if people on the extreme right and extreme left don't like you, then you're doing the right thing. Americans are really great people. We're compassionate and courageous. There's too much emphasis on fighting terrorism, based on fear. If we promote peace, it's based on hope."

Did you manage to hear Mortenson's talk last night or read his books? Please share your thoughts.

You've heard of blood diamonds. Now mobile phones and other technology products are being targeted for containing minerals sold by armed groups engaged in war and rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

A House bill introduced today by Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) aims to curb that trade by identifying which mines are in conflict zones and requiring importers of related mineral goods to certify whether or not their imports contain minerals from those mines. Companies would have two years to implement the requirements, and the U.S. Trade Representative would report on their compliance.

McDermott said the conflict in eastern Congo is the deadliest since World War II and is fueled in a large part by the multi-million dollar trade in minerals. Armed groups generate an estimated $144 million each year by trading ores used to produce tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold, he said.

Co-sponsored by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), the Conflict Minerals Trade Act (attached here) requires companies to use outside auditors to determine whether refiners are "conflict-free." The USTR will report to Congress and the public which companies are importing goods containing conflict minerals.

In a report last December, the United Nations Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo found armed groups in the eastern region continue to fight over, illegally plunder, and profit from the trade of columbite-tantalite (coltan), cassiterite, wolframite, and gold. Such groups enslave child soldiers and use rape as a weapon.

Minerals from the DRC are used in industrial and tech products worldwide, including mobile phones, laptops and digital video recorders.

Companies and consumers have the ability to make an impact. But enforcement of such a law seems tricky. A couple of questions come to mind immediately -- will companies really be able to identify sources of their supplies that clearly? Even if they can, two years is a long time in an entrenched and brutal conflict that claims lives daily. And what about China (the world's largest market for mobile phones) and its hunger for resources with a no-strings-attached policy for dealing in Africa? This report identified European firms fueling conflict minerals.

The bill has the support of the Information Technology Industry Council and the Enough Project, a Washington D.C. group working to end genocide and crimes against humanity in Africa. I wrote a bit about local efforts here.

Enough Project co-founder John Prendergast said he expects a legislative battle. "The electronics industry has spent about 2 million dollars per month lobbying to relax similar, yet weaker, legislation in the Senate (S. 891)," he writes. He urged consumers to push for passage of the bill. "Together we can help turn a system of exploitation and violence into one of peace and opportunity."

U.S. legislation would be a good start to address the problem, said Rory Anderson, deputy director for advocacy and government relations for Federal Way-based World Vision, which works in eastern DRC and endorsed McDermott's bill.

"Americans deserve to know whether the electronics they buy are fueling bloodshed in Africa," she said, adding that the law would benefit the electronics and software industries by providing a certified mechanism to label their products "conflict free."

"We saw from the success of our 'conflict diamond' campaign a few years ago that American companies want to do the right thing," she said, but "without a uniform process, such as the one proposed in this legislation, it's very difficult for companies to tackle the supply chain challenge on their own."

It's a massive project taking shape during a steep decline in real estate development and commercial property values.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's new 900,000-square-foot headquarters, comprised initially of two six-story, boomerang-shaped buildings on 12 acres near the Seattle Center, is scheduled to be finished in April 2011 at an estimated cost of $500 million.

Update: The WSJ's Robert Frank asks: Does a charitable foundation need a $500 million complex?

The Gateses said Friday they are making a $350 million payment of personal funds into their foundation's $34 billion endowment for construction costs. The couple made the one-time payment to distinguish money for the campus from money they have given for grants.

The foundation purchased the parcel of land from the City of Seattle for about $50 million.

The construction project has been going on more than a year and is now about 40 percent complete. Here's a view of it from a live Web cam. It will house the foundation's nearly 800 employees, now working in five locations, and an 11,000-square-foot visitor center.

At the heart of the campus is an atrium six stories high that is completely open and enclosed by glass windows.

On the site at 500 Fifth Ave. N., 400 workers are busy welding steel, pouring concrete, operating now three cranes and reinforcing an underground sewer line. The building takes close to 7,000 tons of steel for the structure and more to reinforce the 67,000 yards of concrete. The project is being led by Sellen Construction based on a design by NBBJ architects.

Green building features include a living roof on the parking garage and a million-gallon rainwater storage tank to reduce water use. The project is aiming for a Gold rating in LEED Certification, an environmental building standard.

Taking a look at some other recent developments, the non-profit Mercy Corps completed its new global headquarters in Portland, transforming and expanding a historic downtown building at a cost of $37 million.

For its new headquarters in a building complex now under construction in South Lake Union, Amazon.com signed a deal to lease about 800,000 square feet for about $700 million, with an option to double that.

However, a recent national report predicted that the recession and bank troubles will continue to weigh down the Seattle market next year, with WaMu's collapse and new but mostly unoccupied office towers combining to push the downtown office-vacancy rate above 20 percent.

Northwestern Mutual bought the WaMu Center tower from JPMorgan Chase for $115 million, less than one-third of what it cost to build.

The Gates Foundation's headquarters is the biggest project in Brian Duke's 27 years at Sellen Construction, where he is senior superintendent.

The design and communications effort needed to pull it off is huge, he said.

Cranes operate in close proximity to high-voltage power lines. When winds are above 20 miles per hour, the cranes have to stop, which could slow progress over the winter. In the record heat this summer, temperatures on the steel decking reached 120 degrees.

One challenge was removing contaminated soil -- 600,000 tons of it, load by load. The soil and groundwater were contaminated from decades of fuel storage and vehicle maintenance.

Workers also had to rebuild part of a live sewer main in the middle of the project, he said. First they had to demolish an old brick manhole from the early 1900s, being careful not to damage the line, which runs underneath Republican and serves the South Lake Union neighborhood.

Duke said he draws inspiration from the foundation's charitable aims. "It makes it easier to come to work," he said. "Your job isn't just a construction worker; it has some meaning."

The Obama administration has found yet another job for Rajiv Shah, the former Gates Foundation executive who has spent the past five months at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

DEAN RUTZ/SEATTLE TIMES

Shah, 36, has been nominated to head the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), according to reports quoting unnamed U.S. officials.

Shah was running the Gates Foundation's agriculture development program when he was tapped for the agricultural post as Under Secretary for Research, Education, and Economics, as well as chief scientist, at the USDA.

Shah holds degrees in medicine and economics. A health care policy adviser on Al Gore's presidential campaign, Shah joined the Gates Foundation in 2001 where he worked as policy analyst and senior economist and developed an innovative program for vaccine financing. He served as director of strategic opportunities and deputy director of policy and finance for the global health program. While in Seattle, Shah served on the boards of the Seattle Public Library and the Seattle Community College District.

Meanwhile the top job at America's foreign assistance program has gone vacant for nine months at a time when the program and the Foreign Assistance Act need serious revamping, development experts say. The USAID's international affairs budget request for 2009 was close to $40 billion.

The Gates Foundation has shown its growing clout in the capital with Bill Gates among Obama's first visitors to the White House, influencing education policy, and Bill and Melinda Gates recently appearing before policy makers in Washington D.C., calling on them to maintain the U.S. commitment to foreign aid and global health funding.

Why Shah? It helps that he has already gone through the official vetting process, which has put off other candidates.

Senators John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Dick Lugar, the committee's top Republican, last month urged Obama to speed things up, saying that efforts to support the president's development agenda were being "hampered by a leadership vacuum" at USAID.

The Rural Development Institute said today it received the largest grant in its history -- $9 million over three years -- from the Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment group started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam.

Omidyar has taken an active role in the Seattle-based non-profit over the past couple of years, investing $4.3 million in 2008 to help RDI and local governments provide land to women in rural India.

RDI said today that Omidyar Network Managing Partner Matt Bannick will join RDI's board of directors.

That RDI's pioneering work is getting noticed and supported on such a scale is significant. While microcredit has grabbed the spotlight and billions of dollars in investments, micro-ownership in the form of land has received relatively little notice.

Small loans have helped entrepreneurs make money from their tiny shops and businesses, but building wealth is difficult without access to property rights, especially for women.

RURAL DEVELOPMENT INSTITUTE

Renee Giovarelli (center, in white), founding director of RDI's Global Center for Women's Land Rights, talks with people in Kyrgyzstan about their land rights. In 2008 Kyrgyzstan had a per capita GDP of $2,200, the same as Sudan, and less than Yemen or Kosovo.

Over the past three decades, RDI has been changing the equation by working with governments to give poor rural people secure ownership of small plots of land.

Omidyar shook up the field of microcredit when he began investing and backing its transformation to a commercial, profit-making approach. His views have clashed with those of Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning banker from Bangladesh who developed the concept of microcredit.

Omidyar's increasing involvement in land rights may also signal dramatic shifts. In fact, Bannick made the comparison to microfinance himself. (Microfinance includes credit and other financial services.)

"RDI is at the forefront of a high-impact movement designed to create economic opportunity for the world's poorest people through land rights--just as microfinance has done through credit," Bannick said. "RDI is the cornerstone of our work in the sector because their approach has produced sustainable change for millions. Partnering with RDI, we plan to raise the awareness of property rights as a means to transform economies through individual opportunity."

Omidyar's involvement means RDI will be beefing up its local and overseas staff, which now is composed mainly of attorneys specializing in international land rights. RDI says it will be hiring "experts in advocacy, communications, and development for its headquarters and experienced local leaders for its field offices."

RDI will use the new grant to expand existing programs in India, China and sub-Saharan Africa, and launch new projects through its Global Center for Women's Land Rights.

The investment will help RDI increase its impact, said Tim Hanstad, RDI's president and CEO. "With this grant, RDI will begin implementing an ambitious three-year plan to bring secure land rights to 9 million families living in poverty," he said. "These rights can bring about transformative economic and social benefits that improve well-being and restore dignity."

RDI was founded by Roy Prosterman, Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Washington and himself a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, who is still active in RDI's work. I wrote a profile of Prosterman here.

The interesting marriage between online communities and the social sector has produced two more offspring:

One is a project by Global Washington called Blueprint for Action, which asks the public to help set priorities for development by posting their ideas and solutions. Readers can vote on the ideas, and the author with the most votes gets to host a session on that topic at a conference next month in Seattle.

Here's an idea someone submitted to Global Washington called checks and balances:

"We need to have an improved system of communication between people in the rural developing countries and 'bright' planners and analysts working for organizations such as Gates Foundation. Otherwise, we will find again and again that interests are not aligned with increasing the sustainable livelihoods and economic independence of the poor."

JON OSBORNE

Kushal Chakrabarti, co-founder of Vittana, talks with members of the World Affairs Council's Young Professionals International Network in Seattle.

Another example of online media-philanthropy hybrids is a project to solicit audience help in choosing and awarding the best innovators, visionaries and leaders, who are profiled on Huffington Post.

Kushal Chakrabarti, co-founder of Seattle education non-profit Vittana made the Top 10 "Ultimate Game Changers in Philanthropy."

I wrote about Vittana here a few months ago, and the start-up has made some huge strides since then, including bringing student loans to Peru, Paraguay, Nicaragua and Mongolia, and getting its first repayment from students who now have jobs.

In addition, Vittana has received funding from some tech heavyweights, including Mitch Kapor and Mike Murray.

If you like what he's doing, you can vote for him over the next week or so.

The Game Changers awards honor 100 people for using new media to reshape their fields and change the world in politics, entertainment, technology, media, sports, business, style, health, environment and philanthropy.

Another person who made the top 10, the "godfather of social entrepreneurship," Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka, will be in Seattle on Nov. 17.

Leadership Tomorrow and CityClub will host a conversation with Drayton, chairman and CEO of Ashoka, moderated by Paul Shoemaker, executive director of Social Venture Partners. I won't have to travel far -- the event is being held in the Seattle Times Auditorium, 1120 John St., starting at 5 p.m.

Amina S. Ali, African Union ambassador to the United States, made her first visit to Seattle this week, seeking to build bridges with Washington state institutions, which she says are playing a more important role in African business and development.

Ali, who is from Tanzania, represents an organization of 53 countries formed in 2002 and loosely based on the European Union, with the goal of helping integrate the continent to give it a stronger voice in the global economy while also addressing social, economic and political issues. The AU launched its first diplomatic mission in the U.S. in 2007.

Ali is the second high-level diplomat to come through Seattle in a week to meet the Gates Foundation, with a message to focus more on improving maternal health. Both Ali and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned that the world's goal of improving the health of mothers and children is falling further behind.

The African Union is calling attention to the issue in a new campaign to reduce deaths of women in pregnancy and childbirth.

"We found for the last 10 years the donor community is focused on HIV/AIDS, and it's a stubborn problem," she said. "But there are other issues that confront women and children that nobody is talking about. There's no reason women in Africa should die in childbirth."

"We are thinking what can we do to bring women's issues to the top?" Part of the problem is a shortage of doctors and nurses, she said. Throughout parts of rural Africa, the ratio is 1 doctor to every 40,000 to 100,000 patients.

Like Ban, Ali also talked about the important role business can play in solving global issues. In Seattle, she met with Microsoft, the Trade Development Alliance and the African Chamber of Commerce.

Mobile phones are now helping medical diagnosis, she said. In Tanzania, patients living 1,000 miles from a city are using mobile phones to send information about illnesses and receive diagnosis.

For all the wrangling over trade with China, the U.S. should take a look at the way it's investing in Africa, she said.

"Americans should start to think why the Chinese have gone to Africa while the Americans have not taken advantage of that," she said. Americans have been more cautious, sitting on the sidelines. Chinese have been aggressively pursuing business, and while the relationship is not always easy, they are helping Africans solve key infrastructure problems, especially in building ports, she said.

One thing that has mitigated risk for the Chinese companies is a Chinese government development fund targeting Africa. The $10 billion China-Africa Development (CAD) fund aims to promote economic cooperation between China and Africa and advance Africa's economic development by providing money to Chinese companies starting ventures there.

Ali said she hopes the United States can create a similar, large fund to help American companies bridge the gap and start to invest more in the continent to transform its future.

Such a fund could go a lot further than simply giving money to government aid programs, she said. "Give the fund to your own people to invest in Africa," she said.

"It can be done," she said. "China 20 years ago -- it was nothing, and then the private sector decided to work with them. Let's try to work with Africa."

My story today tells about Jessica Markowitz, who at age 11 began a charity to help girls in Rwanda after she learned about a genocide that wiped out many of their parents.

She sends 22 girls to a rural school and is working on building a library there, using prize money she won for her efforts.

Two things seem to have been lost on some readers -- first that she is working with a local organization in Rwanda (FAWE), supporting them to take on the issue in their own country. That kind of grassroots social change can be much more profound than sending money from overseas.

LORI MARKOWITZ

Jessica spent time teaching English this summer to girls at a rural school she and her classmates are supporting in Rwanda.

And secondly that seeing the way kids live in places like Rwanda actually provides an invaluable of education for an American student. Kids in the U.S may have the kind of material wealth that is unimaginable to people in developing countries. Yet there is also an emptiness that leaves teenagers here sullen and depressed.

To experience what life is like in a poor country different from her own not only opens the eyes of girls like Jessica, it gives them a lifelong understanding of what philanthropy can do, which is worth much more than a $1,500 plane ticket. It creates a citizen who understands and appreciates her country all the more and its potential in the world. Seeing the fruits of her labor taking shape in the form of happier, smarter students trains a future social entrepreneur.

As Jessica said, the project has benefited her and her classmates as much as it has the girls overseas.

"A really nice thing happens when we tell people what we're doing," she said. "They say 'I never knew we could do something like that.' They jump in."

As for Rwanda itself, the country has made incredible strides in recent years, but with a war on its border and the global economic downturn reducing investment, its progress is fragile.

Last night Nicholas Kristof told the story of a boy on a beach who collected starfish washed onto the sand and threw them back into the ocean one by one. A man came along and told him he'd never make a difference, but the boy replied "It sure made a difference to that one."

What if there were thousands, or even millions of boys and girls on the beach, an entire clean up crew, and each one saved at least one starfish?

That is the possibility in cities like Seattle.

A city where each citizen is linked to another citizen of a city somewhere in the world that needs our help.

We have sister city programs where delegations of bureaucrats go visit each other and talk about expanding ties. That's the old paradigm. So here's my idea: take Seattle's enormous talents, compassion and global perspective, and scale it up.

Time for the younger generation to redefine this civic pillar and make it really meaningful.

Because something is happening here but you don't know what it is, in the words of Dylan. A whole generation is looking at the world in a new way and is hungry to change it. These are the students who pack auditoriums and line up for hours to meet their rock stars - the Paul Farmers and Kavita Ramdases and Nicholas Kristofs of the world.

Three years ago an 11-year-old girl, Jessica Markowitz, decided to help educate girls in Rwanda. She traveled back and forth, raised more than $30,000, and now she's expanding her partnership to high schools in Seattle and Kigali. At Bellevue High School Brett Mennella helped start a microfinance club, which raised more than $130,000 for a local non-profit helping poor entrepreneurs, and now five other high schools have followed his lead. There are countless other examples here and in cities across the U.S.

Everyone knows the wealth system today is unequal. As Kristof said, we who won the birth lottery buy lattes and iPods while kids overseas starve. But we as individuals have the power to change it ourselves right now, and even the technology.

The Kiva model has shown the possibilities for transformation when one person uses the Internet to send one tiny bit of her resources to one other person.

Joe Mallahan would like it, from what I hear about his ideas to use mobile phones for social business. Mike McGinn would like it, from what I hear about his enthusiasm for grassroots environmental movements.

Someone in Edmonds liked the idea, because he made sure every one of its 43,000 residents could give $1 to help Carol Schillios save girls in Mali.

Kristof also told us about a $10,000 bank mistake that saved a school in China that was able to waive $13 in school fees for each of the girls, who became accountants and sent money back to their town, which got a road built and attracted more investment, which made life better for everyone. A virtuous cycle.

What if we could change a whole town in a place like Cambodia or Cameroon, and create a new sister cities model for others? Take soft power right down to the local level.

We have 602,000 residents in Seattle, and most of them can afford a latte. Some school in some town with a poor girl who can't afford an education is just waiting for us to notice.

Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist and co-author of the book Half the Sky, said the inhuman reality many girls face in the world became crystal clear when he purchased two girls from a brothel in Cambodia for about $200 each, and was given receipts.

"It's no exaggeration to talk about this as truly slavery," he said, speaking to the World Affairs Council tonight at Town Hall.

At the peak of the transatlantic slave trade, about 80,000 people were sold. Today there are 800,000 women and girls being trafficked around the world, he said.

Anywhere from 60 million to 100 million girls have disappeared from the world's population because of female infanticide and inadequate care for girls' health, Kristof said, showing photos of a skeletal child being treated in a feeding center, whose brothers were well fed and healthy.

"Every kid in the feeding center was a girl," Kristof said.

But he argued that even small interventions can transform the situation, and education is the best place to focus resources.

The U.S. has spent $11 billion in aid to Pakistan since 9/11, money which has accomplished "next to nothing," he said. If some of it had gone to education, the impact would be felt by now.

Bangladesh, by contrast, invested in girls education after it split off from Pakistan. Now there are more girls in school than boys, the country is doing relatively well and tackling its remaining problems with home grown solutions such as microcredit.

Supporting local grassroots movements for female education and economic opportunity is one way Americans can encourage change without forcing their cultural values on others, he said.

He finds the rise of social entrepreneurs a revolution that will change the world.

People want to engage in causes larger than themselves because it makes them happy, he said. Asked how he remains hopeful in the face of so much suffering, Kristof said it's because he witnesses so many selfless acts by people working in terrible conditions to save lives.

But when he comes back and sees "people who express their humanity by buying the latest car or having the latest iPod -- that is truly depressing," he said.

He advised young people to travel abroad, go outside their comfort zone, be embedded in the home of a local family.

Some people ask him why we should care about the fate of people in other countries many miles away.

"When you actually see a girl in a Cambodian brothel with her eye gouged out you don't ask that question."

What happened to the girls he bought out of slavery five years ago? Kristoff said he stayed in touch and still visits them. One is married to a good husband who doesn't know her past. The other went back to the brothel temporarily to feed her meth addiction, and later married a police officer. But now the brothel no longer exists. U.S. government pressure on Cambodia to crack down on trafficking made it risky and expensive, so the proprietor turned it into a grocery store.

Food quantity or food quality? Can the world quell starvation now and still have a healthy ecosystem over the long term?

Tough questions for anyone concerned about agriculture and its relation to hunger and poverty.

In a keynote speech at the World Food Prize symposium today, Bill Gates said he supports sustainable agriculture, welcome words to experts in the field, who say there is no short term fix.

Much as he changed the landscape on health, the world's richest philanthropist is trying to spark a new revolution in agriculture. The first Green Revolution improved crop yields, but at the expense of the environment. This time, there may be a chance to get it right.

"Sustainability takes more time, more learning, more people," said John Reganold, Regents Professor of Soil Science at Washington State University. "In the long run it pays huge dividends."

"I really like the fact that here we have this huge philanthropic foundation and they're really trying to help Africa and South Asia," he said. "I don't mind hearing we want to feed people, we want to raise yields, improve their income, get roads and markets in there."

But Reganold said he would like to hear more about how sustainability will be measured and valued. "We tend to go in and say wow, we improved yields," he said. "That's great because these people need to eat. At the same time I'd like to hear wow, we improved the soil so that down the road they're going to be better off."

"They say the right thing, but I'm not sure they're doing the right thing yet," said Hans Herren, a Swiss scientist who won the World Food Prize in 1995. Both Herren and Reganold are attending this year's conference in Des Moines, Iowa.

Gates said in his speech that in their zeal for an ideal environment, some people "have tried to restrict the spread of biotechnology into sub-Saharan Africa without regard to how much hunger and poverty might be reduced by it."

Research into plant genetics is worthwhile, Herren said, but critics of its current usefulness in Africa shouldn't be vilified.

"What I think is wrong is to blame the people who question the utility now as the bad guys responsible for hunger," he said. "Look at the people who have quadrupled yield in perfectly good agriculturally sound systems. Why is this not taken as the example, not to multiply everywhere but as the basis to adapt to different systems?"

Herren took issue with the notion that ecological agriculture is a luxury for rich countries.

"The idea that is deeply ingrained is that the poor can't afford it. That's really a big problem and it's not true. To do it the right way is cheaper because you don't get in debt in the future," he said, by buying more expensive seeds and fertilizers.

More global investment is needed in sustainable agriculture, as well as policies to correct fundamental imbalances in trade and access to resources, he said.

Gates Foundation Chief Executive Jeff Raikes has deeply personal ties to agriculture. He grew up on a farm outside of Omaha, Nebraska, that has belonged to his family for generations. Raikes counted Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, among his heroes.

Earlier this year Raikes paid a visit to Borlaug at his home in Texas. Raikes had wanted to meet Borlaug at the World Food Prize gathering in Iowa, but he knew Borlaug's illness would make it impossible for him to attend. Borlaug passed away Sept. 12.

Borlaug was having some trouble with his hearing, but overall "he was doing amazingly well for somebody who is 94 years old battling cancer."

JAMES A. FINLEY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Nobel Peace Prize winning agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, pictured in 2005.

Raikes' burning question - what went wrong in Africa?

"When I asked him about Africa he immediately launched into a discussion about the importance of maintaining the investments and the commitment to wheat rust," Raikes said.

Last year, the Gates Foundation gave Cornell University $27 million to create a global partnership to combat the disease, called the Durable Rust Resistance in Wheat project.

A particularly virulent strain, called Ug99 because it was first seen in Uganda in 1999, has spread from Africa and can infect crops in hours. Clouds of invisible spores can be carried by the wind for hundreds of miles.

Borlaug's concern about the wheat rust problem reflected something larger, Raikes said. "What he was saying is that governments had not maintained their commitment to international agricultural development at the level they should have."

"What I took away from that conversation was how important it was to maintain the commitment to invest in agriculture when things like the opportunity for higher yield crops that better withstand wheat rust or drought are very important to food security."

Raikes sat with him for over an hour. While Borlaug had recently undergone chemotherapy and didn't get up from his chair, "his level of energy was quite impressive," Raikes said.

Borlaug is one of only a handful of people to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.

When Raikes visited, Borlaug's family was in the process of moving the awards from their safety deposit box to Texas A&M University, and showed Raikes the Congressional medal.

On the back of the medal is Borlaug's famous creed: "The first essential component for social justice is adequate food for all mankind."

Raikes accidentally dropped the medal, which landed on Borlaug's knee.

"I tested his reflexes and his reflexes were great," Raikes laughed.

Begging is a way of life for many women and girls in Africa. Carol Schillios wants to turn them into businesswomen.

Her Fabric of Life store in Edmonds is part of a non-profit that trains young women and girls in Mali, one of the poorest countries in the world. The shop, run entirely by volunteers, then sells the products made by the women -- woven fabrics with traditional patterns, bags and multicolored beaded jewelry.

Schillios funds a school called the Here je Center in Mali's capital that teaches job skills, along with health and nutrition, family planning, AIDS prevention and literacy. The students are paid $20 a week to help support their families while they are studying.

The idea is to reach girls who are begging and get them off the streets before they turn to prostitution. They continue being paid that stipend as artisans after graduation. On an annual basis, it's more than double the average income for a person in Mali.

Schillios decided to focus on Mali after working there as a consultant and meeting Kaaba Soumare, the CEO of a small microfinance institution, who eventually became her local partner.

The shop provides a critical link -- market access to American buyers.

"We're always going to be consumers," but there's a difference she said, holding up a mustard colored place mat. "When you eat on it you know you helped save someone from starving."

A consultant to credit unions and microfinance groups, Schillios says she takes no salary from her non-profit, the Schillios Development Foundation, and relies on volunteers rather than employees.

For the past three months Schillios, 56, has been living in a tent on the roof above her shop, accompanied by her 22-year-old cat Elliette.

She vowed not to come down until 1 million people each donated $1 to her foundation and shared how they are making a difference in the world. So far she's raised $66,000.

The blue tarp covered tent is visible from along Main Street in downtown Edmonds, where she gets stares, waves and donations of coffee and food. Extension cords linked to the shop bring electricity for her laptop, lights and a device that helps her breathe at night. There are bottles of Ibuprofen for achy joints. She's hung a Tibetan prayer flag and a Halloween skeleton for decoration.

One night everything went wrong. The tent leaked. The roof of the makeshift bathroom collapsed in on her. She was so frustrated she took off her clothes and danced on the roof in the rain at 3 a.m.

Eventually she realized her goal of raising $1 million might be too ambitious, so she plans to come down before Christmas. Still she's happy with all the attention drawn to the cause.

One supporter agreed to match donations up to $43,000, $1 dollar for every resident of Edmonds.

Revenue from the Fabric of Life shop has steadily grown since its opening last November, enabling Schillios to channel about $30,000 into grants to the school in Bamako. About 20 women have graduated so far. Not all of them make it-- one of the students died of malaria a few weeks ago.

"We didn't find out the extent of her illness until it was too late," Schillios said. Two others left the program after they became pregnant. Still, she is hopeful she can fund a third class of students this year.

"My dream is we create an industry for the whole country," she said.

Philanthropic efforts, when combined with the possibilities of the Internet, are producing interesting hybrids, and crowdsourcing ideas for development is one of them.

The Peace Corps is testing such an approach with Africa Rural Connect (ARC), an online community where creativity and global collaboration are the goals, and the best ideas can win $20,000 in funding. See the current top 10 ideas here. Oct. 15 is the deadline for submitting projects for the current contest.

PEACE CORPS

Molly Mattessich, pictured at right during her Peace Corps service in Mali, with her host, Niama Keita. She now manages an online site to take global ideas and apply them to problems she saw firsthand as a volunteer.

Anyone can submit an idea, endorse existing ideas and suggest improvements to them.

Hosted by the National Peace Corps Association, the site connects over 200,000 current and returned Peace Corps volunteers, African Diaspora, non-profit leaders, technology buffs and anyone else who has a solution for Africa's development challenges.

It uses a software called Wegora, designed to encourage a global exchange of ideas.

"We are excited about the caliber of ideas that have been posted on the site so far and we're really seeing the Wegora technology help foster a whole new way of thinking online about these types of issues," says Molly Mattessich, manager of Africa Rural Connect and a former Peace Corps volunteer in Mali. "The volume of posts from people and groups around the world has steadily increased and we hope to see that trend continue in the coming months."

The University of Washington again led the nation in the number of Peace Corps volunteers last year, with 104. Washington state has had more Peace Corps volunteers (8,087) than any other state except California and New York. A blending of humanitarian idealism with innovative technology seems to characterize perfectly this region's strengths.

Another such experiment with funding charity based on the wisdom of the crowd is Paul Buchheit's Collaborative Charity project.

Buchheit, the lead developer of Google's Gmail and founder of FriendFeed, introduced his project by declaring "I'm going to donate a bunch of money, but I want random people on the Internet to decide where it goes."

So far he has received 18,968 votes on 419 ideas from 3,274 people. Among the most popular ideas was the Talking Book project (with brightly colored Talking Books pictured above) by Seattle-based non-profit Literacy Bridge.

Westerners want to help women in developing countries, but their good intentions don't always produce effective solutions. The problem is more complicated, as members of the Seattle philanthropy group Pangea are learning.

Working on issues of poverty and disease since 2003, Pangea's volunteers eventually came to the conclusion that gender equity had to be part of the equation.

"As we traveled and worked with communities we became more and more aware of the challenge facing women in developing countries," said board member Chris Doerr. "Women are also leading the most successful interventions."

PANGEA

Chris Doerr (right), a volunteer with Pangea, and Judith Orawo, head of the Omeko Women's Group in western Kenya. Omeko's tiny community businesses provide jobs for widows and orphans of the AIDS crisis. Pangea funded a simple chicken coop and the start of an egg production business, and the next year helped triple the size of the poultry project, which is now profitable.

The question is how to help them. Pangea has funded a range of women's groups, from economic projects for widows in Kenya and Tanzania to a group training women in traditional healing arts in Mexico to a group providing legal aid to women refugees along the Thai/Burma border.

"They need to find their own pathway to change," says Pangea President Allan Paulson. "Our idea of change and the values we bring to that may be very different. That's part of what we want to learn about and figure out how we can support them rather than come in with a bunch of ideas from outside."

Pangea is an all volunteer philanthropy group for people in the Pacific Northwest who want to travel, take collective action to fund programs, and share what they learn to help educate the local community. Members contribute $1,000 to $10,000 annually, which is pooled to give out in grants. It has 50 members now and aims to grow slowly, adding about 10 new members a year. Pangea makes grants to small community development groups in rural areas in East Arica, Central America and Southeast Asia, providing over $350,000 to NGOs so far.

Working at the grassroots level in rural communities, the most basic things can make a difference in people's lives, Doerr said: washing hands, being able to sell excess produce or cereals; a house with a water-tight roof.

"These communities are unfailingly hospitable and grateful to know that people in other parts of the world care about what happens to them," she said.

Pangea is hosting a program tonight: "Supporting Women as Change Agents" with Shalini Nataraj, vice president of the Global Fund for Women, which kicks off the theme for the year. The group added gender equity to its funding criteria, meaning its grantees must include women in leadership and decision-making roles.

It plans to follow up this fall with a reading program for members, book discussion dinners and film screenings. Next year it will talk about advocacy for women and sponsor a program on grant making through a gender lens.

Understanding how to do it right takes time, members said.

"There's this general belief if you give women a $50 loan to start a cell phone business that will solve all their problems," said Doerr, a Microsoft alum. "The problems are far more profound than that. Women solving their own problems is what we're trying to learn about."

Pangea funded a project in Kenya for women to grow sunflowers and turn them into sunflower oil to generate income, using Pangea's grant to buy an oil press. It didn't work out so well. For one thing they couldn't make enough money from the sunflowers to replace food they would otherwise grow on the land, Doerr said. And their husbands didn't understand the project. The second year, most of the women didn't participate because their husbands wouldn't let them.

Doerr found the problems and cultural disconnects eye opening.

In Tanzania, she talked with one of the leaders of an organization that offers education for AIDS orphans, asking her about the continuing spread of HIV even when condoms are available.

"My naive question was why don't women just insist on condom use? She looked at me like you just don't understand. She said we could say that but then we'll just get beat up worse than we are, and it's not going to change things.

"It's very hard for liberated Western women to understand the conditions women live in in other countries," Doerr said. "Of course they hate being beaten up, but they probably wouldn't like our life either."

Pangea usually supports its grantees for one to three years. It starts by collectively deciding what issue it intends to tackle, and then volunteers in three groups -- focusing on Asia, Africa and Latin America -- evaluate proposals from non-profits seeking grants. Pangea is currently reviewing proposals and will make funding decisions at its annual meeting next month.

"It will be interesting to see how this new focus guides the way people think about the proposals," said Paulson. "It's a work in progress."

Update: Almost seven months after Obama announced a stepped-up civilian effort to bolster troops in Afghanistan, many civil institutions are deteriorating as much as the country's security, the New York Times reports today. System of delivering aid is "broken."

President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize?

Yes, we can celebrate it, but "we must continue to hold the President accountable so that he can, in fact, deliver on the promise of peace," says Kavita Ramdas, CEO of the Global Fund for Women.

But holding him accountable may also mean changing our ideas of what peace and security actually mean.

In Afghanistan, possibly the least peaceful or secure place on earth, it's time for Obama to shift the balance of U.S. troops from soldiers to armies of doctors, midwives, engineers and arborists, Ramdas said, addressing the University of Washington School of Global Health earlier this week.

"Stop feeding the beast," she said. "We have too many guns and way too little butter."

Fortifying militaries might make the public feel safer, but it is eroding the actual security and well being of the world's women, she said.

Ramdas made an argument I am hearing more frequently these days: that the world's security is connected to the welfare of women, especially in developing countries.

Their physical safety diminishes in militarized settings like Afghanistan, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gaza and even within the U.S., she said.

"When militarism combines with the ideology of patriarchy, which accords women intrinsically lower value than men, it results in what most of the world faces today -- stunningly high levels of violence against women in every part of the globe," she said. "The scale of this violence is truly at the level of an epidemic."

Ramdas grew up in a privileged family in New Delhi -- her father is the former head of the Indian navy, turned peace activist. She runs the largest non-profit organization in the world dedicated exclusively to international women's rights. Ramdas is also one of the more outspoken members of the Gates Foundation's program advisory panels.

Almost everywhere, a large presence of troops correlates with high incidences of rape, prostitution, domestic violence and other problems, she said. "Survival sex" is common -- organizations working in such situations report that girls are often resorting to sex for food.

Conversely, where women's health and education is improved, and more females enter the workforce, countries achieve rapid reductions in poverty.

In Afghanistan, an infusion of new troops was supposed to secure control and help pave the way for more "soft power" efforts. But some influential aid groups, including World Vision, have argued that the U.S. should pay more attention to economic development, and separate that work from its military operations.

Ramdas poses a more fundamental question: "If the strategies that we used up to this point have not succeeded in ensuring the safety and well being of women and girls, what makes us think that increased militarization with 30,000 additional US troops is somehow going to improve the situation and security of women in Afghanistan?"

Asked what would she advise Obama in Afghanistan, Ramdas said he should set a time frame of less than five years to invert the balance of U.S. investments toward more development assistance and fewer military troops.

Even in the U.S., "the Third World is alive and well," she said. Close to 15 percent of the population is living below the poverty line, and 70 percent of them are women.

In 2007, 250,000 women and girls in the U.S. were raped or sexually assaulted. "How is it possible we don't see that as a public health crisis?" she asked.

"We must change the way we define health. It must be truly human security that we all fight for."

Journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn set out to write a book. By the time they were done they had managed to ignite a movement. In "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide," they compare emancipating women to the abolition of slavery.

The statistics stop you cold: one million children forced into prostitution every year; three million women sold as sex slaves; more women likely to be maimed or killed by male violence than by cancer, malaria, traffic accidents and war combined.

Traveling around the world, the husband-and-wife team profile individual women who are among those forced into sex trafficking and prostitution or faced with appalling health conditions. Even more remarkable, though, is how the women overcome those circumstances and go on to change their lives and help others.

Using the Web and TV, including an appearance on Oprah, to spread their message, Kristof and WuDunn invite people to join the cause of fighting poverty and extremism by educating and empowering women and girls. One local non-profit is organizing book clubs around the country to encourage activism. Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and New York Times columnist, will visit Seattle next week, talking with educators and giving a speech Thursday at Town Hall, sponsored by the World Affairs Council. He will discuss how our own national security, as well as the prosperity and stability of the world, is tied to the well being of women.

In the week leading up to the talk, I will be featuring perspectives on the issue from local organizations and individuals working on behalf of women around the world. Do you know of one such remarkable person or group? Please share your thoughts and suggestions.

COURTESY OF NICHOLAS KRISTOF

Nicholas Kristof met a group of young refugees who had fled from Darfur in a visit to a refugee camp on the Chad-Sudan border earlier this year.

A: Gendercide is a term to describe the way millions of women and girls die around the world because they don't get the same access to food and health care that males do. It's common when food is scarce to feed sons and starve daughters, or to take a sick son to the doctor while feeling a sick daughter's forehead and saying, "Oh, she'll be better tomorrow.'

Q: At what point did you decide to go from an observer to someone taking an active role in this issue?

A: I went into journalism in part because I wanted to have an impact, but it's a delicate balance - you can't march in as a crusader into a school board meeting you're covering. But we wrote Half the Sky not so much to inform people as because we wanted to shake people up and help address these issues.

Q: What is it that causes so many societies around the world to oppress women?

A: Traditionally, what mattered in many agricultural societies was physical strength, and men tended to have more of that. In addition, conservative sexual mores and taboos about menstruation sometimes led women to be further cloistered, which eroded the ability of women to contribute to the family - and thus devalued them further.

Q: Will eliminating oppression mean that humans have to overcome something in their nature?

A: Oppressive attitudes are often embedded in culture, but we can change them. After all, Sheryl's grandmother had bound feet, and Sheryl certainly doesn't.

COURTESY OF SHERYL WUDUNN

Sheryl WuDunn won the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Lifetime Achievement with her husband, Nicholas Kristof, for chronicling human rights in developing countries. Her grandmother grew up in China with bound feet.

A: Empowering women tends to lead to faster economic growth, which in turn tends to undermine extremism and reduce civil conflict. In addition, there's some evidence that countries that marginalize women tend to be more likely to have the macho values of a boy's locker room or an armed camp and are more prone to violence - bringing women into the picture tends to result in more security.

Q: Can you give an example?

A: One example is Pakistan and Bangladesh. They used to be all the same country until Bangladesh split off in 1971, and at that time Bangladesh seemed utterly hopeless. Kissinger described it as an international basket case. But the one thing Bangladesh did was invest in girls, especially girls' education, and today Bangladesh has more girls in high school than boys. All these educated girls then poured into the labor force and were the pillar of the new Bangladeshi garment industry, which buttressed the economy and undermined fundamentalists. All those educated women also reduced birth rates and supported civil society organizations that promote development, like Grameen and BRAC. There are other factors at play as well, but it's fair to say that partly because it educated girls, Bangladesh is more stable and less prone to terrorism and violence than Pakistan itself.

Q: You make the argument that Westerners don't invest enough in changing culture, and connect the boom in Muslim terrorists with the broader marginalization of women. If Muslim women are oppressed but don't feel they are, how can Westerners effectively change that?

A: Sheryl's grandmother probably didn't feel oppressed when her feet were bound, but with education people began to see things differently. It doesn't work for Americans to denounce other cultures as barbaric, but promoting education does have an effect, and so does supporting those within a society who are seeking change. For example, we would be more effective in the Muslim world if we did less speaking through the megaphone ourselves and did more to support women leading the way for change in those countries.

Q: You gave your own blood to try to save Prudence, a woman in Cameroon, only to watch her die when the doctor could not be found. How did that affect you?

A: It was so frustrating. I could have wrung that doctor's neck, although it wouldn't have done much for my humanitarian credentials. I knew intellectually that one woman dies a minute in childbirth, but to see it happen so unnecessarily in front of you - that shakes you, galvanizes you and is hard to walk away from. "Half the Sky" is partly a legacy of that experience and others like it.

Q: Half the Sky refers to a Chinese saying by Mao, whose Communist revolution helped emancipate Chinese women. Yet because of the preference for male babies, China today has a dangerous gender imbalance --119 male births for every 100 girls. This suggests that even revolutions sometimes fail to change entrenched cultural beliefs about the role of males and females...

A: Changing cultures doesn't happen overnight, and the son preference is deeply embedded within Chinese society. But there's no question that China has made vast progress in creating opportunities for Chinese women, and eventually I think that imbalance will right itself. South Korea used to have a similar imbalance, and now it is correcting itself as parents realize that daughters have certain advantages.

Q: Regarding health spending and women's well being in developing countries, is too much money going toward fighting specific diseases like AIDS and malaria and not enough into maternal health programs? Would we be better off eradicating fistula than malaria?

A: It's hugely important to fight malaria, and I don't think we should walk away from that. In the case of AIDS, there's a general recognition that it was a mistake to channel resources just to AIDS while leaving women to die in childbirth unless they also happened to have HIV. We need to do a better job of supporting health systems generally, and improving maternal health tends to do just that.

Q: How do you and Ms. WuDunn, practically the power couple of gender equity issues, divide your own work on the book?

A: With previous books, we wrote different chapters. This time, I wrote the subjects and Sheryl wrote the predicates. No, no, just kidding. We shared the writing and edited each other. Just as couples grow to look alike, so does their writing.

Q: All the publicity surrounding the book and movement has made you something of a celebrity (Indeed you've traveled with a celebrity, George Clooney, to Darfur refugee camps). Is this helpful to your cause?

A: I'm not remotely a celebrity, and I tend to stay away from conferences because I learn more in villages. I'm a deep believer in the need to get out and travel and talk to ordinary people and truly listen to ordinary people. But where there is interest from TV, I welcome it. I've traveled with Ann Curry of NBC to Darfur and Pakistan, and the upshot was that NBC Nightly News did a show on maternal health. A film crew did a documentary about me for HBO, to air next year, and there were times in the Congo with them that I could have wrung their necks, if it wouldn't have undermined my image as a humanitarian. But now I'm so glad they came and did the documentary, because it helps shine a light on atrocities in Congo. And shining a light is the first step to making a difference.

Author appearance:
"Saving the world's women: An evening with Nicholas Kristof," Thursday, Oct. 15, Town Hall, 1119 Eighth St., Seattle; Doors open at 6:30 p.m., program begins at 7 p.m.; cost: $40 members, $60 nonmembers, $40 students; preregister online at the World Affairs Council Website or call 206-441-5910.

Update: I wrote a little more about this partnership in my story today. What's at the heart of this effort seems to be identifying the most urgent health needs of Pro Mujer's clients in Nicaragua and then using microcredit to create a model to finance solutions that are both affordable for the clients and sustainable for the non-profit. Currently the health programs are subsidized by the financial arm.

The partners say they hope the model can be applied anywhere.

"Microfinance alone, healthcare alone or education alone cannot solve all of the issues of poverty," remarked David Valle, CEO of Esperanza International, a Bellevue-based non-profit that is integrating microfinance, healthcare and education in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. "But when these solutions are combined...now you have something powerful!"

______________________________________________________________________

Local non-profits Global Partnerships and PATH will work together on a global health initiative using microfinance to reach women in Latin America.

The two will work with Pro Mujer, an organization that funds microcredit cooperatives in Latin America and combines small loans with other services, such as business training and regular health checkups. More details on the partnership are expected next week.

Microcredit, with networks reaching millions of people in developing countries, is thought to be a promising way to distribute health solutions and other services to the rural poor.

One innovative program by Pro Mujer provides health screenings using a van retrofitted with consultation rooms and staffed by medical personnel. Global Partnerships CEO Rick Beckett described the mobile health clinics in a recent presentation about Pro Mujer's work to provide cervical cancer testing to its borrowers in Peru.

The health screenings increased the number of women tested from one third to about 95 percent over four years, and revealed treatable tumors that could prove fatal if undetected.

Global Partnerships has committed about $52 million toward microfinance in Latin America and is working to help Pro Mujer find a financially sustainable way to fund such health programs.

It's a natural fit for PATH, which could contribute its health systems expertise for the developing world, along with potential technology and commercial partners.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing more with its money than giving it away. It has been moving into investments, loans and loan guarantees aimed at furthering its programs.

The $30 billion foundation has made several investments so far and others are in the works, as I reported in this story today.

Program related investments or PRIs are one way the Gates Foundation can increase its impact beyond the $3.5 billion a year it makes in grants. The approach also imposes financial discipline on recipients so they operate more like businesses.

What will be most interesting to watch is to what extent the foundation uses its $30 billion endowment towards its charitable goals. It plans to carve off a portion of the endowment to invest in ventures related to its programs, but has not released details about how that will work..

That step could mark a shift from the strategy of the past several years in which it invested its endowment, or asset trust, solely with the goal of maximizing profit.

The next PRI could be a loan guarantee towards U.S. education.

PRIs are set up to further the charitable mission of a nonprofit, not to make money. They are risky and the default risk rises in a bad economy, but they can also be very profitable. The investor can also call in the loan if the recipient is not adhering to the stated mission.

Examples could be a low interest or no interest loan to needy students, an investment in a low-income housing project or a loan to a for-profit pharmaceutical company. In fact a new designation called an L3C, or a low-profit limited liability company, has been created to facilitate such program investments.

The Gates Foundation has made least three program-related investments in the area of global development: $20 million to Africa ProCredit Holding to increase access to banking services for micro entrepreneurs, small businesses and low income groups; $20 million to ASA International Holdings to scale up a proven microfinance model in several countries in Africa and Asia; and $10 million to Opportunity Transformation Investments to create or expand commercial banks for the poor across five African countries.

They are not the same as mission-related investments, which align investment of assets with a charity's mission, and include actions by shareholders to affect the behavior of companies, said Lance Lindblom, chief executive of the Nathan Cummings Foundation.

The Gates Foundation came under fire in 2007 following a report that it was investing in companies contributing to health problems and other human suffering the foundation was working to alleviate through its grants. At the time, the Gates Foundation said it would not alter its approach to investing its endowment.

When screening companies for behavior contrary to a foundation's mission, sorting out responsibility can be difficult, Lindblom said. He advocates that foundations exercise their proxy votes to persuade companies they invest in to act more responsibly.

The current investments of the Gates Foundation's endowment trust can be found here.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is making its largest grant to date in the financial services space -- $35 million to help set up a global network to help the poor gain access to savings accounts and other financial tools.

The grant announced today will create the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, a coalition of bankers and policy makers from developing countries, aiming to expand savings accounts, insurance and other financial services to people living on less than $2 a day.

The alliance is based in Bangkok and managed by the German development organization Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), the recipient of the Gates grant.

The Gates Foundation has invested $350 million so far in financial services for the poor, a relatively new program for the world's largest private philanthropy. Gates started with a broad approach that included credit and insurance, but has narrowed it down in the last year to focus mainly on savings.

Microcredit, making very small loans to poor entrepreneurs, has captured the world's attention and billions of dollars in donations and investment.

Savings accounts are at least as important as credit, but efforts to expand savings are not being funded, says
Bob Christen, who directs the Gates Foundation's financial services initiative.

Not everyone is an entrepreneur -- among the poor are legions of maids, day laborers, factory workers and others who don't run their own businesses, he said.

The problem for many low income people is they have no safe place to put their money. Banks don't consider it cost effective to take the tiny amounts they are able to save. And many microfinance organizations that give out loans are not licensed to take deposits from the public.

The newly funded alliance will share information about innovative ways to help people save money, such as allowing retail stores, post offices and mobile phone networks to receive deposits and process bank transactions. "We believe virtually everyone could use a deposit account," Christen said.

How did a tiny non-profit in Fremont attract the attention of a global pharmaceutical giant, a multinational beverage company, governments from India to Senegal and a $1.4 million investment announced this morning by a European venture fund?

COURTESY OF VILLAGEREACH

Women in Mozambique walk for miles and wait for a rural health center to open. The health center is among those supported by Seattle-based VillageReach. .

VillageReach has figured how to get health care into the heart of remote communities that others haven't managed to reach -- the so-called "last mile" -- and pay for it with a for-profit energy business.

With billions of dollars being spent to develop new vaccines, bridging the last mile can mean the difference between lifesaving drugs getting stuck in a bottleneck or reaching the people who need them most.

VillageReach applied a logistics model for delivering and tracking vaccines in remote settings similar to the way UPS might deliver its packages. In fact, VillageReach hired a veteran UPS employee to help improve its operations and industry partnerships.

COURTESY OF VILLAGEREACH

A health center in rural Mozambique is powered by propane supplied by Vida Gas, a company half owned by Seattle-based VillageReach.

The problem typical in developing countries is that medical supplies from big donors like Unicef reach the capital or nearest port city, and national authorities distribute them as far as the provinces, but that's where they sit waiting to be picked up by local health workers -- when they have the time and transportation.

"It's as if your mail is only delivered up to Olympia," said VillageReach President Allen Wilcox.

VillageReach moved that work from a collection-based system to one with dedicated distributors, freeing up health workers to focus on treating patients.

VillageReach worked with the government in Mozambique to set up a fleet of seven trucks and seven field coordinators whose sole job is to get vaccines, equipment and medicines to 261 rural health centers. VillageReach helped acquire some of the vehicles initially, but the trucks are owned and operated by the government health authority.

The field coordinators return to two central offices that have laptops and Internet access, and upload information into an online database. They report what supplies were distributed, how many vaccines were given out and how much inventory was left.
VillageReach has been able to assemble a detailed picture of what is happening at each health center with updates every two weeks, said John Beale, strategic development director, "so we can see the trends for better or worse."

VillageReach can then share the online data with partners in Seattle and with policy makers in Geneva. The management information system VillageReach has developed is receiving a 2009 Tech Award from the Technology Museum of Innovation in Silicon Valley. In Mozambique its program has helped boost vaccination rates from 68 percent to 95 percent, according to an independent study cited by the non-profit.

In a country like Mozambique, where cars and even bicycles are rare, people walk for miles to reach medical care. It's important they find something at the end of the road, said Beale. "The greatest benefit we provide is community confidence in the health care system."

The non-profit supports its work with a propane gas business that also powers much needed refrigeration for the medicine.

The population of northern Mozambique lives largely off the electrical grid. Less than 10 percent of the country has electricity, so most people cook and heat with charcoal or wood.

VillageReach needed energy for critical health services such as sterilizing equipment, helping mothers through childbirth at night and keeping vaccines cold. Propane was their only viable fuel option.

Being entrepreneurs, they launched a company called VidaGas to supply it themselves. The alternative would have been to use donations to buy propane, Beale said, but once those dollars ran out, so would the cold chain upon which the health system depended. "The whole program would not be sustainable," he said.

In 2002 VillageReach partnered with a local non-profit, the Foundation for Community Development, to start VidaGas. (The foundation is headed by Graca Machel, Nelson Mandela's wife. The two paid a visit to Seattle in 1999 and received $30 million for their charities from local donors.)

VidaGas sells gas to the region, offering a cleaner alternative to charcoal, and it's now the largest propane distributor in northern Mozambique. Besides supplying energy for the health system, it's fueling the hotel and tourist industries, small retailers and family homes.

VillageReach is holding up VidaGas as an example of a successful social business that supports a humanitarian mission. Harvard Business School recently published a study of its model for integrating global health programs with social businesses to benefit remote communities.

Luxembourg-based Oasis Capital today announced it will make a $1.4 million investment in VidaGas, which will allow the company to expand its services to more customers and to build additional filling stations.

VillageReach has been hired by the World Health Organization and Seattle-based PATH for a pilot project in Senegal, and by a large pharmaceutical company to conduct a health strengthening program in a remote part of India. The non-profit is also working with a multinational beverage maker to use its vast transport networks to help distribute medical supplies.

Its goal is nothing short of a sea change in global health practices.

"What is unique about VillageReach is we are trying to enhance systems that exist and leave behind a legacy of infrastructure improvements to allow the system to sustain itself," Wilcox said.

Charles "Chip" Lyons is leaving the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to head a foundation working to fight HIV/AIDS in children.

Lyons, who is director of special initiatives in the Gates Foundation's Global Development program, has been named president and CEO of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, based in Washington D.C., the Glaser foundation announced.

He will start the new job in January, succeeding Pamela Barnes.

Accepting his new role, Lyons said, "I am delighted to join the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Its exceptional worldwide reputation and the extraordinary impact it has made in the lives of women and children in those countries hardest hit by the HIV/AIDS epidemic should be applauded."

In 2007, the Elizabeth Glaser foundation received a five-year, $9.7 million Gates Foundation grant to research and develop potential vaccines for the prevention of HIV infection in children.

Before joining the Gates Foundation, Lyons worked for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) -- as program officer in Mozambique, chief of staff to the executive director at UNICEF headquarters and as president and CEO of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.

Lyons joins a number of senior executives departing the Gates Foundation this year or leaving the Seattle office.

Heidi Sinclair left her position as chief communications officer in February and started her own consulting firm. Rajiv Shah left his post as the Gates Foundation director of agricultural development in May to join the U.S. Department of Agriculture as under secretary and chief scientist, and Joe Cerrell, director of global health policy and advocacy, will leave Seattle in January to head the foundation's new European office in London.

Deborah Jacobs went from helping build Seattle's state-of-the-art Central Library to visiting libraries overseas with no heat or running water and budgets as low as $30 a month.

In her first year on the job at the Gates Foundation, she has directed an expanding program called the Global Libraries Initiative, which aims to improve free access to computers and the Internet in public libraries.

Today she is presenting a $1 million prize to a foundation in Medellín, Colombia, for its innovative use of technology in libraries to promote community development.

GREG GILBERT/SEATTLE TIMES

After more than a decade as City Librarian in Seattle, Deborah Jacobs now manages the global libraries program at the Gates Foundation.

In her travels over the past year Jacobs said she has seen "absolute heroism and commitment to what libraries can do," in places where "librarians are having to close the door to go across fields to their house to get warm water or go to the toilet or wash their hands."

"A million dollars feels like a lot of money to a library system," she said.

The Fundación Empresas Públicas de Medellín, or EPM Foundation, won the Gates 2009 Access to Learning Award.

The network of 34 libraries is part of a regional initiative to use technology to increase the transparency of government, create a competitive business environment and improve education. It serves patrons from low-income communities where people have no computers at home.The network includes five library parks throughout the city that serve as cultural centers with educational resources and training programs for how to use computers and the Internet.

The EPM Foundation's efforts have contributed to the revitalization of Colombia's second largest city, Jacobs said, and its work can be a model for other communities.

"As a librarian I really recognize that libraries with computers can open the doors to people, help people feel a sense of inclusion and greater connection with the broader world," she said. It has also made libraries busier than ever.

The number of library visitors in Medellín's network has jumped from 90,000 to more than 500,000 per month, and the program has helped reduce the individual-to-computer ratio from 140:1 in 2005, to 47:1 in 2008, according to the Gates Foundation.

The EPM program will use the Gates award to increase its library network, develop additional training programs and expand its services.

Apart from the annual award, the Gates Foundation has made about $230 million in grants to library programs in 10 countries as part of its Global Development program -- in Chile, Mexico, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Vietnam, Poland, Botswana, Bulgaria and Ukraine.

Unlike other programs where applicants themselves submit requests for grants, the foundation first identifies a country whose library system is suitable for the Gates program, Jacobs said, and then foundation representatives begin contacting government officials. The Gates Foundation targets countries making investments in their public library systems.

"The government has to show generally they are willing to prepare buildings for new technology," she said, which could include putting in new roofs and heating systems, bringing in furniture and providing last-mile Internet connectivity to the building. "We're seeing governments are really beginning to understand the importance of technology in their towns even under bad economic times."

In some cases, the library funding overlaps with other Gates Foundation work, such as financial services, agriculture and health. In Botswana, the global library initiative works in tandem with a comprehensive AIDS program that is also funded by the Gates Foundation, she said. The Botswana libraries offer books and training on HIV prevention and even provide condoms.

COURTESY OF THE BILL & MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION/PATRICIA RINCON

Professor Alejandro Lobo Santamaria helps students practice their computer skills in a library created inside a series of donated train cars. The program received a $1 million award this week from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. .

The Gates global library program has a partnership with Microsoft, which has donated software to all 10 countries where the Gates Foundation has made grants, totaling about $30 million.

After the Gates Foundation makes the grant for computers and training, the country has an option to request a donation of software from Microsoft, said Tom Murphy, public relations director for Corporate Citizenship at Microsoft. All of the libraries have taken the offer of software, made through Microsoft's technology donations program for non-profits, he said.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is giving $4.8 million to a project to identify new methods of on-site sanitation in developing countries.

The grant to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine supports a three-year project to research and develop new concepts for sanitation such as improving pit latrines, which are the only option for about 1.7 billion people without access to sewage systems. The London School will research how advances in biotechnology, using enzymes and micro-organisms to convert plant waste to biofuel, for example, might be applied to sanitation.

The London School also received the $1 million Gates Award for Global Health this year.

The Gates Foundation's program on water, sanitation and hygiene is only about three years old but has grown to 19 grants so far totaling about $160 million.

Unsafe water and poor sanitation and hygiene are leading causes of illness and death in the developing world. Improving them could prevent one tenth of global diseases, according to the World Health Organization. About 2.4 million people die from diarrhea and other water-related illnesses every year.

With its water-related grants, the Gates Foundation has funded low-cost, practical solutions that can be commercialized.

Among the recipients is Seattle-based PATH, which is exploring water quality through a $17 million, five-year grant to help develop low-cost filters, gadgets and other water-treatment products.

In 2008 the foundation gave $13 million to an international consortium led by the University of Bristol to develop Aquatest, a simple diagnostic tool that can give a reliable indication of whether water sampled is safe or not.

Since little research has focused on the development and use of pit latrines, the London School said it aims to build knowledge about decomposition processes and evaluate the potential of biotechnology and improved design to accelerate decomposition.

Its goal is to find solutions that can be turned into affordable, sustainable products available on the market. Researchers say such innovations can improve health and reduce costs for sanitation in an environmentally safe manner. The project will combine academic and industrial expertise and provide an innovation fund to turn promising ideas into prototypes.

Locally another non-profit, Seattle-based Water 1st, has been working on projects that integrate water supply, sanitation and health education in four countries, taking safe water as the basis for ending poverty.

As Afghanistan holds its presidential election today, optimism has been dampened by a lack of progress in development on the ground, say leaders of a local humanitarian group active in the country.

While completing peaceful elections would be a positive step, "Afghans I've spoken with don't feel invested in these elections because they're not seeing progress or a viable government in their own communities," said Christine Beasley, country program manager for World Vision, a Federal Way-based group that has worked in Afghanistan since 2001 with a staff of 250 on the ground, mostly local Afghans.

The Christian aid organization decided to pull its 15 foreign staff members out of the country temporarily over security concerns during the election period. They plan to return at the end of August. Local staff are suspending operations and restricting their movements.

COURTESY OF WORLD VISION

An Afghan woman in Badghis Province and her children shell pistachio nuts, earning less than a dollar for every eight kilograms shelled. The province has 300,000 acres of pistachio forest.

Currently uneven distribution of aid, lack of donor coordination and some duplication of services are weakening reconstruction efforts, Anderson said.

World Vision is calling for more attention to economic development, saying civil society resources to support education, jobs, good governance and agricultural alternatives to the poppy trade are crucial to progress.

The U.S. government needs to create a clear development strategy for Afghanistan that is separate from the Department of Defense's counterinsurgency strategy, the group said.

A coordinated development strategy means, "measuring the number of children in school and the content and quality of their education, not just the number of insurgents defeated," said Rory Anderson, World Vision's deputy director for advocacy and government relations.

Gen. David Petraeus, the head of the U.S. Central Command, spoke about the challenges ahead in Afghanistan at a talk in Seattle last month. Later this month, my colleague Hal Bernton will be reporting from Afghanistan and writing a blog from there.

COURTESY OF WORLD VISION

Women at a sewing workshop run by World Vision in Herat, in western Afghanistan near the border with Iran, are the sole breadwinners for their families. Yet they can't disclose their names for fear of reprisals for working outside the home.

"An economic development strategy is not the same as a counter-insurgency strategy--although the end goals may align, the operational approaches are very different and they follow different time frames," said Anderson. "If a free and peaceful Afghanistan is the goal, forcing square pegs into round holes won't work."

Without a distinct development strategy, "the 'civilian surge' is understood to be a military surge, which by itself will not help Afghans take control of their own country," she said.

Another local group working in Afghanistan to address the effects of war is Clear Path International. In Afghanistan nearly a million people are disabled, many because of land mines, according to Clear Path, a Bainbridge Island-based non-profit that helps land mine and bomb survivors.

Clear Path supplies prosthetic devices, builds handicap access ramps in schools in Kabul, advocates for the rights of disabled and provides employment for land mine victims through its Afghan Mine Action Technology Center, which makes de-mining equipment. The center sells the products at a lower price than international suppliers charge, and it uses the revenue to support rehabilitation services. Read more about the group's work here.

Jeff Raikes has kept a pretty low profile in his first year as chief executive of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The man who built Microsoft Office now runs the largest private foundation in the world, which gives out more than $3 billion a year from an endowment of $30 billion.

Raikes recently talked about the fallout of the economic crisis on the foundation, the importance of risk taking and failure in philanthropy, and his experience working with Melinda Gates, which he said has been the most fun. He spoke at a breakfast last week sponsored by the Puget Sound Business Journal. (I couldn't get in, but thanks to the Seattle Channel I was able to watch it here).

DEAN RUTZ/SEATTLE TIMES

Jeff Raikes grew up a "farm kid" in Nebraska and later gave up a job at Apple to join Microsoft in 1981. "Steve Jobs yelled at me, telling me that Microsoft was going to go out of business," Raikes said.

Not a lot of what he said was new, but he did reveal some insights from his first year, including how serious the stock market plunge hit the Gates Foundation.

"The biggest impact by far is on our partners and the people that our partners and we strive to serve," he said. "It's one of those things if you think about it you get a little depressed."

On Jan. 1, 2008, the Gates Foundation's endowment was $39 billion. In just one year it had dropped to $30 billion.

"That's nine billion," Raikes said. "Part of that is the payout, part of that is the drop in the market. Let's say you have another 10 percent drop in the market. We're paying out $3.5 billion in direct charitable activity. Jan 1, 2010, we're now at $23 billion."

"At one point in time I thought that was the scenario I was looking at," he said. "The good news is the market has come back. The situation isn't quite as dire as it was a few months ago."

"At the end of the day we're very fortunate that Melinda and Bill took a deep breath and decided we're going to keep investing." The foundation's direct charitable giving is up about 10 percent this year, and its endowment stood at $30.2 billion at the end of June.

But the crisis has forced a renewed focus on top priorities, Raikes said, namely the biggest killers of children in the developing world -- HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea.

"We have to figure out how we can keep the momentum going in the short term while recognizing we have to conserve financial resources for the long term," he said.

One of the most important things he's learned in the first year is how the role of philanthropy differs from business and government.

"The private sector certainly is important but appropriately driven by the profit motive... government has the responsibility to provide services to raise the overall standard of life... You really don't like the government doing risky things with your tax dollars."

The Gates Foundation will take on some risky ventures and challenging ideas that government couldn't take on alone, he said.

"There are going to be times because we're taking risks we will fail... that's part of our role," though the goal is to succeed, Raikes said. "It's not that different frankly from how we operated at Microsoft."

Billionaire Warren Buffett, who is giving the bulk of his fortune to the Gates Foundation, told Raikes the foundation shouldn't be succeeding all the time. Raikes understood the message, but said it's another thing to try to pass it down.

"Warren would say swing for the fence," Raikes said, using a baseball metaphor. "But I've got the 700 or 800 employees at the Gates Foundation saying oh, alright, it's OK for me to fail."

Raikes has known and worked closely with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates for 28 years. Raikes joined Microsoft when the company had about 100 employees and met his wife, Tricia, there.

He said working with Melinda Gates has been a highlight of the year.

"I knew Melinda at Microsoft, but in particular for me the most new fun in this year has been working with Melinda," he said. "For me she's a tremendous collaborator, a great coach, a great mentor." She has a deeper understanding of how the foundation works than her husband, who was busy at Microsoft until last year, he added.

Raikes said former Microsoft President Jon Shirley and baseball manager Lou Piniella are among his own mentors. He said he looked up to Shirley because he could not only guide others but "personally step in, roll up [his] sleeves and make it happen."

On Sept. 25 Raikes will address the annual meeting of the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, focusing on the impact of the economic downturn on efforts to address family homelessness. Details are here.

Seattle-based PATH announced today it has won the world's largest humanitarian award, the $1.5 million Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize, for its work creating effective health technologies for the developing world.

Hilton Foundation Chief Executive Steven M. Hilton, who introduced the award during a press conference this morning, said PATH's work helping to develop 85 technologies, along with its commitment to sharing ideas and making sure products are sold at affordable prices, have had a profound impact on alleviating human suffering. More coverage of the award is here.

COURTESY OF PATH/PATRICK MCKERN

PATH CEO Christopher Elias (left) and Conrad N. Hilton Foundation CEO Steven M. Hilton (right) tour PATH's Seattle headquarters following the announcement that PATH has won the 2009 Hilton Humanitarian Prize.

The prestigious award is well deserved recognition for the long-term efforts of its staff, who often work years before seeing the results, PATH Chief Executive Chris Elias said. PATH now has 850 employees working in 20 countries.

Its Seattle headquarters near the base of the Ballard Bridge buzzed with excitement as the news was announced this morning.

The award "will open many doors" for future goals, Elias said, and PATH plans to capitalize on the recognition to expand its partnerships around the world.

PATH will use the $1.5 million in prize money to seed an innovation fund aimed at investing in new technology and health interventions, he said. PATH will begin a five-year drive aimed at raising a total of $25 million for the innovation fund.

The non-profit has an annual budget of $250 million, 65 percent from foundations, 30 percent from governments, and 5 percent from global organizations. Only a small percent of the contributions are unrestricted, a portion Elias calls "innovation capital."

Through the innovation fund, Elias aims to raise the amount of flexible capital from about 3 percent to about 10 percent of PATH's budget.

PATH has used such capital in the past to set up an office in South Africa, which could then begin applying for grants and offering programs that had been successful in East Africa to address similar health problems. Five years later the South Africa office, focused on improving maternal and newborn health, has grown to one of PATH's largest, with a staff of more than 30 people.

"Innovation capital can respond to emerging needs and opportunities," he said.

One goal of the fund is to invest in taking technology innovations that come from 21st century scientific discoveries, such as new diagnostic tools, and applying them to affordable products for the developing world, he said.

The fund will also be used to increase the usage of essential health products PATH has developed and to expand its field presence, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, Elias said.

The Hilton Foundation will present the award to PATH formally at a Sept. 21 ceremony in Washington D.C with keynote speaker Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel laureate, founder of the Grameen Bank, and former Hilton Prize juror. PATH, which had been nominated for the Hilton award in the past, was the winner this year among about 200 nominees.

This post was written with Hal Bernton

Northwest non-profits have been making an impact around the globe, and now they're also helping to reshape the urban landscape back home.

At a time when many capital campaigns have come to a halt, two state-of-the art buildings are under construction to house the headquarters of growing non-profits.

CAITLIN CARLSON / MERCY CORPS

Mercy Corps new headquarters in downtown Portland.

Mercy Corps' $37 million headquarters building in downtown Portland isn't scheduled to open for business until Oct. 9, but reporters were given a sneak peak today.

The building, which will replace six leased offices that house 150 Portland-based staff, includes solar panels, a green roof, natural ventilation and other energy-saving features that have earned it a LEED Platinum rating - the highest of a four-tiered certification system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council.

The 80,000 square-foot headquarters will include a first-floor "Action Center" to educate people about global development issues and a space for Mercy Corp's Northwest staff, which is involved in aiding small entrepreneurs in the region. The building in the Old Town Chinatown neighborhood will give the aid organization a much higher-profile in its hometown.

"A lot of people tell us that Mercy Corps is one of the best kept secrets in Portland, and we really haven't had a way to welcome people," said Paul Dudley Hart, a Mercy Corps senior vice president. "This is what the ground floor is about."

Mercy Corps, which also has an office in Seattle, operates in more than 35 countries with a budget of more than $300 million. The new headquarters has been financed by a mix of tax credits, grants, a $7 million loan and a $10 million capital campaign that is about $1.4 million shy of its reaching its goal, according to Mercy Corp officials.

The headquarters project involved renovating and adding on to a historic Skidmore Fountain Building that first opened to business in 1892 as a center for wholesale grocery distribution. The expanded structure includes four floors of office and working space and a partial basement.

The Action Center, which will be the center of public involvement, will feature four "training towers" where students and other visitors will be challenged to help tackle development issues. When the center opens in October, the training towers will include a look at war-torn Afghanistan, climate change in Niger and land reform issues in Guatemala.

Dudley Hart said that the building's costs were dramatically lowered by the grants and tax credits, and that the end result will be a big savings compared to trying to rent space in downtown Portland. The LEED Platinum rating also will yield energy cost savings in the decades ahead, and is expected to deliver a major reduction of the building's carbon foot print.

As part of the effort to green the headquarters building, there are no special set asides for employee parking, and most of the Mercy Corps staff are expected to walk, bike or take mass transit to work.

In Seattle, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's $500 million new headquarters is more than halfway finished. The foundation was originally scheduled to move into its campus in the winter 2010, but the current home page lists a move-in date of spring 2011. The 600,000-square-foot facility, with two 6-story office buildings designed by NBBJ, covers an entire city block. You can watch the progress on this Web cam, thanks to this report.

People from the Gates Foundation recently visited Mercy Corps in Portland to take a look at the center and compare notes as they develop plans for a similar public outreach. Both of the headquarters will change the way the groups relate to their communities by giving visitors a hands-on way to explore their work.

Mercy Karanja knows first hand what happens when money for agriculture goes away.

She was working in the Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture on extension programs for farmers. The system had been funded mostly from outside donors such as the World Bank.

In the early 1990s, the country started a period of structural adjustment under guidance from the World Bank and IMF. That resulted in a complete reorganization of government budgets. One of the first things to go was support for agricultural extension services.

COURTESY OF THE BILL & MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION

Mercy Karanja, senior program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

For Karanja the change hit suddenly.

"The World Bank just cut the umbilical cord," she said. "It was so harsh."

She recalled receiving a notice that the following week there would no more visits to farmers to take care of cows.

"I had cows myself," she said. "It was like this is incredible. Artificial insemination requires refrigeration. Tell me who is going to invest in that?"

The cost of inseminating one cow jumped from 20 cents to $30, she said.

In 1998 Karanja left her government job and joined the Kenya National Farmers Union. She wanted to mobilize farmers to give them a stronger voice in decision making.

Farmers suddenly had to shift focus from relying on the government to fending for themselves, she said. Yet there was not enough of a private sector to support their needs.

"It was extremely painful and it has never come back," she said. "Farmers are still struggling. In my own experience this is what has caused them to really regress."

In the new scheme, the World Bank funding for agriculture was subsumed under rural development, which meant roads and other priorities, she said. As a result, money for farming went from a significant part of the budget to almost nothing.

The World Bank has since acknowledged that agricultural development is a key to reducing poverty in Africa and has increased its commitment.

Karanja was later tapped for a job in France at the International Federation of Agricultural Producers. She joined the Gates Foundation in early 2008, working under Roy Steiner on farm productivity.

The program targets small farmers living on less than $1 a day.

"We have to be more creative in reaching these small farmers," she said. One project that looks promising uses radio programs to get information out to farmers, such as how to keep plants free of disease.

As for the role of genetically engineered seeds, Karanja says she witnessed a huge debate in Kenya in the early part of the decade. Kenya has a problem with drought, diseases and productivity, she said.

"We asked transgenic proponents what does it offer us?"

The Gates Foundation has funded reseach into drought tolerant maize and fortified cassava. Such specific products might be helpful, she said, but they're not an option now.

Farmers in Kenya are "not ideologically inclined toward one thing or the other," she said. "They're saying give us solutions. Give me whatever medicine can make me better."

Karanja said the Gates program has made progress helping farmers, including getting more varieties of seeds distributed to agro-dealers and reaching some areas with irrigation, but it's too early to see an increase in productivity.

Drought and civil strife have taken a harsh toll in Kenya, which is experiencing hunger in regions where there was no such hunger before. People will have to take a long view of change, she said.

"Please let's keep the momentum for a little longer to create the mechanisms for the system to stand on its own."

Africa is getting more attention with a new U.S. administration that says it's committed to helping African countries achieve self sufficiency and food security. The Gates Foundation has also brought a renewed focus on African agriculture through its own programs and grantees, including the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).

What is the best way to move forward from decades of neglect and a recent food crisis that pushed 100 million more people into poverty?

As U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tours Africa this week, a coalition of grassroots groups says "business as usual" won't work, and criticized the U.S. for pursuing a narrow approach that puts too much emphasis on biotechnology.

SIMON MAINA/AFP/Getty Images

US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton meets Masaai traditional dancers in Kenya after addressing the 8th Forum of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA).

The US Working Group on the Food Crisis used a visit by Clinton and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) to raise the question of whether U.S. tax dollars for food-related aid to Africa are being spent wisely.

The United States and other top industrialized nations pledged $20 billion to promote sustainable agricultural development in the world's poorest regions last month at the G8 Summit in Italy.

The USAID's policies toward agriculture in Kenya, stated here, include a public-private partnership with KARI and Monsanto to develop genetically engineered sweet potatoes resistant to virus, and promote public awareness about the technology in Kenya.

(The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center said it was never involved in the original project. I had listed the Danforth Center among the partners, based on information from the USAID Kenya Web site. Roger Beachy, president of the Danforth center, said the center brought material from Monsanto and KARI to its labs and is working on the project using a different technology, in partnership with the government of Uganda).

After 14 years and $6 million, the project proved to be a failure, the coalition said, adding that local varieties outperformed genetically modified varieties in field trials.

The coalition called such policies "misguided" and at odds with a report on the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development. The report, which came out earlier this year, took four years and was commissioned by the World Bank and United Nations to evaluate the impacts of agricultural methods on hunger and poverty, rural livelihoods, health and sustainable development.

The report was approved by more than 50 governments, but not the United States, Canada or Australia.

The way the world grows its food will have to change radically to cope with a growing population and climate change while avoiding social clashes and environmental disaster, said the co-chair of the report, Hans Herren, who is president of the Millennium Institute.

"I fear within the new (U.S.) administration not enough time has been devoted to reading and digesting the report so it can be used for its full potential to address problems at the root," he said.

Herren, who received the World Food Prize in 1995 for developing a pest control program that rescued the African the cassava, said building more resilience in plants through classical breeding is a better answer than engineering for drought resistance. Climate change may produce drought but also may produce severe storms and unpredictable weather patterns. He said the Kenyan agricultural institute is on the right track in broadening its approach more recently.

The report's findings reject current industrial farming methods as a solution to sustainable food production, concluding that the benefits of modern agriculture have not been equitably shared and have come at too high a price to the poor and to the environment.

Josphat Ngonyo, head of the Kenya Biodiversity Coalition, a network of 60 community groups, said that small holder farmers in Africa have been left out of the process of determining agricultural policy.

"We find that most of African governments ignore local farmers. They are not consulted," Ngonyo said. "We see heavy manipulation by multinational companies who have their ways to influence policies and legislation."

"What (farmers) clearly need is not biotechnology," he said. "They need water, markets for farm products. They need good roads to access markets, and they need incentives that would enhance getting their products to the markets."

The Kenya Biodiversity Coalition said the visit to KARI showcases "the Obama Administration's betrayal to Africa's small scale farmers and misplaced priorities on how to achieve sustainable food security in Africa."

"Chemical-intensive production methods continue to have adverse health and environmental effects," the group said, "while 'modern biotechnology' (genetically engineered seed) has contributed to hardly any verifiable positive impacts on equitable and sustainable development."

Asked to assess the work of Gates-funded AGRA, Herren praised its emphasis on soil quality and a program to train traditional plant breeders.

"What I think is a problem is they feel they know it all," he said. "To go out here and try to replicate the green revolution is not good enough."

He said where the effort falls short is in understanding "how the whole system operates." Key road blocks include lack of market access, infrastructure and training for farmers, he said.

"There are major gaps there in the AGRA program which are not addressed to have the impact they think they're going to have."

AGRA's main programs are seeds, soil health, market access, and policy and partnerships. The alliance has said it seeks to avoid the adverse effects of the original Green Revolution in Asia and Latin America, including overuse of fertilizer, and focus on small farmers living on less than a dollar a day--most of whom are women.

Last month AGRA, chaired by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, launched a program with KARI and other partners to improve maize yields by counteracting soil acidity.

The Gates Foundation's own assessment of the program last year can be found here.

Technology holds the key to solving problems of health, education and poverty, Bill Gates made a point of saying in his recent visit to India.

The wholehearted embrace of technology comes as no surprise from the chairman of the world's largest software company. But in the context of philanthropy, perhaps he should have added the words "when appropriate."

MANISH SWARUP/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Indian President Pratibha Patil, left, hands the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development to Bill Gates as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, second left, applauds.

Gates touted the benefits of computers to help rural people access video lectures in villages without schools, and mobile devices to help doctors examine patients remotely. Slum dwellers in Bangalore can use mobile phones with SMS messaging and GPS to find jobs as day laborers through a Gates Foundation-supported program called LabourNet. Technology can reduce government corruption if citizens can use mobile phones and public computer terminals to give feedback on public services, he said.

"I am a 24-hour technology person," Gates said.

He visited India to assess the foundation's programs and receive the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development on behalf of the foundation. His appearances seemed to be a mix of the foundation's work and Microsoft's mission. Gates said Microsoft would like to partner with the Indian government in a project to provide each of India's 1.17 billion citizens with a unique identity number and biometric card.

The visit came after recent suggestions that the Gates Foundation's Avahan program has not lived up to its goals of curtailing the spread of HIV/AIDS. The $258 million initiative has been led by highly paid business consultants rather than people with public health experience. After the Indian government balked at taking on what has become one of India's largest health programs, the Gates Foundation increased its funding by $80 million.

In health and development, high-tech solutions don't always work. They can even make things worse if applied in the wrong way, by diverting resources from more fundamental programs or missing the root cause of a problem, for example.

Sometimes the most appropriate technology is none at all. Ironically this point was made best by one of the Gates Foundation's biggest grantees: PATH.

Its name stands for Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, and the idea behind that was reflected in a speech by Margarita Quintanilla earlier this year in Seattle.

Quintanilla, PATH's country leader in Nicaragua, got her start working at the ground level as a community health coordinator teaching basic concepts as washing hands to avoid diseases and getting regular pap screenings. She realized that technology could not overcome one of the biggest obstacles to health: gender-based violence and its effects, contributing to the spread of diseases like HIV/AIDS, unwanted pregnancy and other problems, all of which are common in India. Her approach was to build projects to teach life skills and health education to pre-adolescent girls and promote respect for women in families.

The more PATH's work grew, the more Quintanilla realized it would have to include "both technical and social approaches to increase the country's capacity to ensure better health," she said.

"We have to be wise and intelligent in our solutions. We have the responsibility of promoting change in the right way."

About 800 people listened to Quintanilla, but billions listen to Gates. As one of the world's most respected voices, he has a unique opportunity to call attention to social issues that no technology alone can solve.
________________________

UPDATE: Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn analyze the links between gender discrimination and poverty, child mortality, global health issues and other problems in this excellent magazine series.

Rajiv Shah is bringing two familiar faces to D.C. -- a former colleague at the Gates Foundation and Sen. Maria Cantwell's chief of staff, both of whom have just joined him at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Rachael Goldfarb was named counselor to the under secretary last week by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. She will work under Shah, who heads Research, Education and Economics at the USDA and is also chief scientist.

At the Gates Foundation, Goldfarb was special assistant to Tachi Yamada, president of the foundation's global health program. Shah was the founding director of the Gates Foundation's agriculture program. Kudos to Clay Holtzman for following the trail of foundation execs to the Obama Administration.

Goldfarb, a Philadelphia native, was assistant to John Podesta, President Clinton's chief of staff. Before that she was assistant to the policy staff at the National Economic Council. She also worked at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Another Washington state Democrat now part of Shah's team at the USDA is Maura O'Neill, formerly Sen. Cantwell's chief of staff. She was named senior advisor for energy and climate, which is also part of Research, Education and Economics. O'Neill has an extensive resume, including starting technology companies, promoting investment in regional biotech, serving on Seattle City Light's Energy Advisory board, and lecturing at UC Berkeley and Columbia University. She earned a bachelor's degree and PhD from the University of Washington.

The Seattle non-profit Global Partnerships has dollars to invest, but the microfinance institutions (MFIs) it's trying to help need money in local currencies. In the case of Honduras, it's easy to see why that gap is dangerous.

Global Partnerships has made several loans to organizations in Honduras, in dollars, and those organizations in turn lend money to poor entrepreneurs in local currency, the lempira. The ongoing political crisis has pushed an already weak Honduran currency to the edge of a major depreciation. In that case, the local organization will have to pay back possibly twice as many lempira as it borrowed, and pass the costs on to its borrowers.

"There hasn't been a credible mechanism to be able to hedge our loans so that the risk of depreciation is not absorbed by the poor borrowers this is supposed to be helping," said Gary Mulhair, chief investment officer at Global Partnerships.

Soon there may be a new solution to the risk of such currency fluctuations in the microfinance industry. Global Partnerships is helping to back a new company called MFX Solutions.

CHRIS MEGARGEE/GLOBAL PARTNERSHIPS

Silveria Champi Choque took a loan to help with a family business raising livestock in Peru. The lender, an NGO called Arariwa, received funding from Seattle-based Global Partnerships.

Its debut today is the result of a three-year effort involving more than 30 microfinance organizations from around the world, led by Global Partnerships, Calmeadow Foundation, ACCION International, Calvert Foundation and MicroRate.

MFX was created to apply modern hedging instruments to microfinance lending, analyzing and quantifying currency risk and mitigating that risk by trading among a basket of currencies. MFX also offers free Web-based risk management tools tailored to microfinance needs.

The initial backers are U.S. and European microfinance funds, networks, and foundations that have pooled their resources to set up MFX. In its first round of financing, MFX has secured $13 million from 17 investors, with Omidyar Network providing the biggest chunk: $9.3 million.

Other investors include Seattle-based Unitus, Triodos-Doen and Hivos-Triodos Fund of the Netherlands, Incofin CVSO of Belgium, ADA (Luxembourg), Grameen Foundation, Blue Orchard (Switzerland), Mecene/Africap, Microcredit Enterprises, Grassroots Capital, and Developing World Markets.

The Ford Foundation, The Currency Exchange Fund (TCX), The Dutch Development Bank FMO and USAID all contributed grant funding for MFX.

"Hedging goes on every day between very strong banks and companies," said Mulhair. Global Partnerships has tried to do such currency swaps with a bank, but "we're not big enough for banks to take us seriously."

With MFX, Global Partnerships may have to pay a higher cost up front to invest in places such as Honduras, he said, but ultimately it will have "less risky transactions, the cost will not be born by the micro-borrower, and we can do business with (microfinance organizations) we could not do business with before."

Unitus, a Seattle non-profit supporting microfinance around the world, is entering a new phase as it expands into northern India and Africa, and its social enterprise investment arm builds a second equity fund of at least $70 million, almost triple the size of its first fund.

From its new location on the fifth floor of a Queen Anne building, Unitus President Ed Bland talked about the group's progress to help small microfinance organizations grow by providing capital and business consulting. Unitus has about 40 employees and 24 microfinance partners, 14 of them in India.

ADAM HUGGINS FOR UNITUS

Flora, an entrepreneur in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, used a microloan to expand a business renting chairs and tents for local events.

Among them, SKS Microfinance in India is the fastest growing microfinance organization in the world, reaching more than 4 million clients today from the 12,000 it had when it first received support from Unitus in 2003. I wrote about SKS here when its founder Vikram Akula was in town.

SKS, which has relied on private equity so far, is likely to go public within the next 18 months. "It will make a big splash," Bland said, but not in the same way as the last major microfinance IPO, Compartamos of Mexico. SKS charges interest rates of 26 percent, compared to the 84 percent interest charged by Compartamos, he said. The IPO helped fuel a debate about the role of microfinance.

A public stock offering would be one way for investors in Unitus Equity Fund to get back their initial capital investment. Another way would be for a microfinance partner to be acquired by a bank in a private buyout. That could help the bank push its services to more low-income clients, who have proven to be reliable borrowers with higher than 90 percent repayment rates. Two-thirds of the Unitus Equity Fund's investments are in microfinance organizations that Unitus supports on the non-profit side.

The first fund's investors were socially minded individuals willing to take a risk for a modest return over 10 years. The $24 million fund was managed with a "charitable override," Bland said. That meant that its social purpose was the most important aim, and making money was second.

Now Unitus' for-profit arm has been renamed Elevar to avoid confusion with the non-profit. Elevar is raising the second fund with a different strategy: broadening its investors to include institutions that weren't part of the first fund at all. To draw investors such as pension funds, Elevar changed its mission to remove the charitable override, Bland said.

It still has a social mission, but that can't be above profit, he said.

The fund will make almost no investments in Unitus' partner microfinance organizations, but rather invest in "innovation at the bottom of the pyramid," Bland said. That includes things like technology, insurance for the poor, private education and anti-malaria bed nets.

The second fund has a target of $70 million to $100 million, focusing on a new category of investing in services for the 4 billion people at the lowest socioeconomic rung.

Unitus opened an office in Nairobi earlier this year, along with the Africa Microfinance Growth Centre, an 18-month program in leadership development for microfinance CEOs. As it moves into Africa, Unitus has partnerships with MFIs in Kenya and Tanzania and hopes to expand to groups serving Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia in the future.

Some of the challenges are different, Bland said. Capital is much harder to come by than in India, where the government has identified microfinance as a priority sector and banks have an incentive to support it. In Africa costs are higher, and MFIs must hedge against currency fluctuations as they borrow in dollars and lend in Kenyan shillings, for example.

But Unitus' mission is to put its resources into promising regions where microfinance is struggling. Places that are "harder but not so hard you're stuck there for 30 years banging your head against the wall," Bland said.

Mercy Corps received a $10 million contribution this week from Qatar Charity for its work in the Gaza Strip. The two organizations said they will focus largely on developing economic opportunities.

Mercy Corps and Qatar Charity signed an agreement to collaborate on a large-scale cash-for-work program involving removing rubble, restoring buildings, helping fishermen and small farmers, teaching entrepreneurship skills and designing a business resource center.

The groups said the funds will also help expand the Global Citizen Corps, a Mercy Corps leadership training program for young people in the region.

CAITLIN CARLSON / MERCY CORPS

Mercy Corps CEO Neal Keny-Guyer, left, with Abdullah Al-Nameh, managing director of Qatar Charity (center) and Yousef Al-Hammadi, board member of Qatar Charity (right).

Mercy Corps has worked in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip since the 1980s. Ongoing instability has crippled the economy and contributed to the highest unemployment rate in the world.

Qatar Charity, a private Islamic charity started in 1992 and based in Doha, is one of the largest NGOs in the Persian Gulf region. For Mercy Corps it is the second collaboration this year with an NGO from Qatar. In January Mercy Corps announced a partnership with Reach Out to Asia to address disasters, conflicts and economic collapse in the region.

Mercy Corps CEO Neal Keny-Guyer, meeting with representatives from Qatar Charity in Portland this week, said partnerships with Middle East-based organizations are essential in efforts to achieve stability and prosperity in Gaza.

Soccer Saves, the Seattle non-profit affiliated with Seattle Sounders FC and Save the Children, is starting its first program targeting kids in Ethiopia. I profiled the organization here.

Using the magnet of soccer, the group aims to teach disadvantaged youth about healthy lifestyles by partnering with humanitarian organizations promoting HIV/AIDS education, nutrition, gender equity and reproductive health.

This week co-founder Cliff McCrath is blogging from Ethiopia, where he says Africa's second most populous country now has 5.5 million orphans and vulnerable children. Most have been orphaned because one of both of their parents had HIV/AIDS and died.

Closer to home, the second annual Puget Sound Soccer Challenge kicks off at Qwest Field on Saturday. Employees from Boeing and Microsoft have been competing since 1997, but last year they expanded the event to include more teams and raise money for philanthropy. At 11 a.m. team Boeing plays against Microsoft, followed by Starbucks vs. Expedia at 1 p.m.

On Thursday evening, organizers are throwing a pre-match auction and dance party at the Highway 99 Blues Club in Seattle, with Sounders FC player appearances. All proceeds from both public events will go to the Ronald McDonald House Charities of Western Washington & Alaska.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is giving $20 million to the World Bank for a program to provide financial services in developing countries.

The World Bank said today it will use the Gates funding to establish what it calls the Agriculture Finance Support Facility.

The program's mission is "to increase access to financial services, such as savings, credit, payments and insurance, in rural areas in developing countries as profitable business lines," according to the World Bank. It will make grants to banks and other institutions.

The global economic crisis means access to financial services has become even more difficult for small farmers and rural entrepreneurs.

Where traditional financial cooperatives are not providing sufficient services, the World Bank seems to be looking at funding alternative programs.

In microfinance, the World Bank Group's biggest investor is the IFC, a profit-oriented financial institution with a mixed record.

The IFC had a microfinance portfolio of $498 million in 2007 and planned to double its investment to $1.2 billion by fiscal year 2010, which would make IFC the largest investor in the microfinance industry.

The World Bank said its data shows that 69 percent of small farmers in India did not have credit with formal financial institutions. In Honduras, Nicaragua and Peru nearly 40 percent of agricultural producers are "credit-constrained," and less than 1 percent of farmers in Zambia and less than 2 percent of the rural population in Nigeria have access to credit from formal institutions.

"There is a great need among smallholder farmers, who make up the bulk of the world's poor, for ways to save and manage their money," said Carlos Cuevas, deputy director of Financial Services for the Poor at the Gates Foundation. "Having access to safe and reliable financial services such as savings, credit and insurance, allows poor farmers to safeguard cash, which they often receive only once a year during harvest."

Lack of access to credit was one factor behind the sharp rise of farmer suicides in India over the last decade. But some argue that World Bank policies are also to blame.

This post was written by Sandi Doughton

Somalia is the "most dangerous place on Earth," says Matthew Lovick.

That's why it's one of the African nations where Portland-based Mercy Corps is expanding operations, Lovick told a small group of Seattle supporters Thursday.

MOHAMED DAHIR / AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Somali government soldiers engaged in a shootout with Islamic militants in Mogadishu this week. The heavy fighting in a densely packed neighborhood sent thousands of residents fleeing the capital.

"There's not a single person in this room who could go to Somalia and not be kidnapped and ransomed," he said during the informal briefing on the aid organization's Africa programs.

Even Lovick stays out of the country, though he's Mercy Corps' regional director for East and Southern Africa. All of the organization's work there, including cash-for-work levee construction to protect villages from seasonal floods, is run by native Somalis.

Mercy Corps specializes in conflict zones, where it moves in quickly to help fill immediate needs, like clean water -- but also to build roads, establish jobs programs and take other steps to get beyond the immediate crisis and push development forward, said Phil Oldham, director for West and Central Africa.

"We're not going to tread water for years on end," Oldham said.

As the need for outside help has dropped in places like the Balkans, Mercy Corps has quadrupled its work in Africa over the past 3 years. Ten African nations now account for more than a third of the group's budget.

But decades of work can be wiped out by conflict, and Mercy Corps is riding the new wave in aid work: Promoting reconciliation and peaceful conflict resolution.

Programs go beyond training communities in conflict resolution, Lovick said. Most conflicts originate in poverty and competition for jobs, money and resources. So in Kenya, for example, Mercy Corps hires young men from warring factions to work together on road-building and other infrastructure improvements.

Mercy Corps is also unusual in incorporating global warming in its programs.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where more than 850,000 people displaced by conflicts live in sprawling camps, the demand for fuel wood is decimating forests. Mercy Corps has distributed more than 20,000 fuel efficient stoves, which use half the wood of traditional stoves. And they've sold credits from the resulting reduction in greenhouse gas emissions on the European market.

At the same time, Mercy Corps is helping villages plant tree farms, to provide a sustainable, future source of firewood and protect native forests.

Mercy Corps was one of 13 NGOs expelled from northern Sudan recently, in response to the International Criminal Court's indictment of Sudanese President Omar al Bashir for war crimes in Darfur. (Some leaders of humanitarian organizations, such as InterAction chairman Charles MacCormack, thought the indictment might do more harm than good.)

The groups met last week in Khartoum with Scott Gration, the US special envoy to Sudan, but Lovick said the concerns of the NGOs are only a small part of Gration's mission.

Jeff Raikes, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, admits that the world's largest charitable foundation needs to improve its internal processes and the quality of its outside partnerships.

"Our staff also told us that it can be hard to get things done at the foundation," Raikes wrote in his first annual letter as CEO, a post the Microsoft veteran began nine months ago. "We need to clear some hurdles so we can all focus our energy on the people we aim to help."

The feedback came from a survey of employees (the first one the foundation has ever taken) earlier this year, Raikes wrote. His letter is part of the foundation's 2008 annual report, which was released today.

ELAINE THOMPSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Jeff Raikes discussed the transition from business to philanthropy in his first annual letter, showing some of the humility and frankness he was known for at Microsoft.

Raikes said his first priority is to "make sure our internal processes run smoothly," and his second is to "improve the quality of our external partnerships." (I guess you don't hone phrases like that without a couple of decades as a software executive. Was he talking about Office?)

"I know we are not doing as good a job as we can in this area," he wrote. "Starting with me, everybody at the foundation needs to make a concerted effort to listen more carefully to what our partners in the field have to tell us."

In a time of economic uncertainty, such changes can make each dollar spent have greater impact, said Raikes.

Looking at finances, the foundation paid $2.8 billion in grants and other charitable expenses last year and expects to pay out $3.5 billion in grants and related expenses in 2009.

It reported endowment assets of $29.5 billion, following a 20 percent drop in its portfolio value last year as a result of the economic downturn. In 2007 its assets stood at $38.7 billion.

Warren Buffett contributed $1.8 billion in shares of Berkshire Hathaway "B" stock to the trust that manages the endowment, while Bill Gates contributed about $183 million in investment management services.

But the world's top two billionaires weren't the only ones giving money.

"Several donors from the general public made contributions to the trust and foundation," according to a footnote in the report. Even though the foundation doesn't solicit donations, it received $10.4 million from individual, unnamed donors in 2008.

Raikes, who grew up on a farm in Nebraska, has had a chance to get back to his roots in agriculture. He traveled to Kenya and Zambia earlier this year to visit projects, including a milk-chilling plant that Gates funded with Heifer International. Raikes said the investments in feed storage and refrigeration are helping African farmers produce more milk with their cattle and find new markets to sell it.

Global health accounted for 65 percent of the foundation's spending in 2008. Raikes said the foundation plans to spend "tens of millions" to help fund the final phase of clinical trials for a malaria vaccine, which started last month.

Whit Alexander hopes rechargeable batteries can give a boost to incomes of people in Ghana.

It's the first product in a new Seattle venture that Alexander has started called Burro, a for-profit company with a social mission: to help people in developing countries improve their productivity.

"Our mission is to profitably deliver affordable goods and services to empower the poor to do more with their lives," Alexander said.

AL SADANAGA

Hayford Atteh (left), field agent with new Seattle startup Burro, Philip Sarpong (center), the first Burro employee, and Burro founder Whit Alexander, a Microsoft veteran and co-founder of Cranium.

He started Burro last October, after waiting two decades to get back to the part of the world that held a special appeal for him since high school. He and his wife majored in African studies at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, and Alexander later did consulting work in the region for World Bank projects.

After that came a five-year stint at Microsoft, where he created the Encarta world atlas, and then more than 10 years at Cranium, which he co-founded with Richard Tait. Now owned by Hasbro, Cranium closed its Seattle offices just last week.

"I'm coming up on 48 and I thought if I don't do this now when am I ever going to do it?" Alexander said of his new project.

The startup will focus on products that help people earn more income or provide a more affordable replacement for a product they're already buying.

He came up with the name Burro, using a symbol that is "a good animal in most cultures, hardworking and trustworthy, with extraordinary productivity," he said.

It also serves as a kind of "call to action" to do more, he said. "This isn't a handout."

Giving away the batteries wouldn't be sustainable, so Alexander had to figure out how to charge for them.

"The for-profit model is fundamental for me personally," he said. "We really do have to demonstrate that private enterprise can create opportunities that are sustainable, responsible and driving important social change."

He began by looking at where people were spending their money. People earning about $1 a day spend $2 to $6 a month on disposable batteries. Rechargeable batteries would save people money in the long run, but they couldn't afford the higher cost up-front, and most of them didn't have electricity to charge them.

So Alexander is introducing rechargeable batteries that people can rent rather than buy, and pick up through Burro agents who then take them to a central office to be recharged.
The customer pays a flat fee of 60 cents a month per battery, with unlimited exchanges for a fresh battery. Alexander figures his customers will get four times the energy of their standard batteries for about the same price.

He's starting in Ghana but believes the products could work well in many developing countries. For now, until he can prove the business model, Alexander says he's funding the venture himself with a lot of "donated sweat equity" from friends, including Jan Watson, Cranium's former operations manager.

Alexander is already experimenting with two additional products -- battery-powered lighting to replace kerosene and battery-powered cellphone charging. Both are significant expenses for people in Ghana.

BURRO

Burro produces rechargeable batteries for the West African market.

When Cranium closed its doors in Seattle last week, Alexander was there for the send-off with employees. "It was bittersweet," he said. "It's not the storybook ending we hoped for."

Now he's turning to a different market, one that relies on consumers in Africa and the uncertainties of their disposable incomes, which often fluctuate around harvest time.

"We are literally waiting for the corn to come in," he said.

To overcome shortages of farmland or water at home, a few wealthy countries are turning to buying or leasing land in Africa to produce their food.

Saudi Arabia, for example, has started farming in Ethiopia, where it recently brought in its first 2,000 tons of Basmati rice.

Abdullah Alireza, the Saudi minister of Commerce and Industry, talked about the practice in a recent visit to Seattle, where he addressed a private gathering of local business people.

JULIE MCMACKIN PHOTOGRAPHY

Abdullah Alireza is leading a drive by Saudi Arabia to invest in overseas agriculture.

Not only has the rice been grown successfully in Ethiopia, he said, but it's also cheaper to produce there than it is in India, he said.

It's all part of a drive by the desert kingdom to make agricultural investments abroad, which Alireza is spearheading. The Saudi government is investing in Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania, countries chosen for their close proximity to Saudi Arabia and abundant water supply, Alireza said. But competition for water is already causing conflicts in Ethiopia, and like many countries in Africa, it struggles to produce enough food for itself.

The three countries would make up a new agricultural export zone. "If we can string them along we can actually begin to create a whole area built for agriculture," Alireza said.

The Economist reports that nearly 50 million acres of African farmland worth $20 billion to $30 billion has been acquired by China, Saudi Arabia and other countries for offshore farming. Critics call it the newest form of colonialism and say the deals are destabilizing land grabs that push out local farmers.

Others say that after decades of neglect and failure by international aid organizations to improve the situation, commercial investment might actually help. To learn more about the topic, check out excerpts and videos from a conference at the Woodrow Wilson Center International Center for Scholars.

The Gates Foundation-supported Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) aims to reduce poverty using market-based approaches and improving things like seeds, soil and irrigation for small-scale African farmers. The Rural Development Institute focuses on stronger legal rights for African farmers, most of whom are women.

The way Alireza sees it, the practice of offshore farming can enhance food security in Africa.

"We can become the farmers of the world in terms of food security to Africa," he said. "Although we're taking so many hectares, we are actually going to be helping farmers contiguous to our farms, assist them in repairing the land, plant seedlings, and have an agreement if they wish so that we can buy their products."

Saudi Arabia has slipped from a grain producing nation to a net importer, and water security is a major concern. At the same time, a development push to open six new economic cities and various new industrial zones in Saudi Arabia will consume even more land and water resources.

"We are going to be importing a lot of wheat from all over the world," Alireza said.

After sitting next to Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA) at the Seattle dinner, Alireza hinted that he might reconsider where to make investments. "He has given me many, many thoughts," Alireza said. "Maybe Seattle might be a better place to come in."

This post was written by Hal Bernton

In Guangxi Province in southern China, a wealthy businessman who sells motorcycles has organized 20 volunteers who look after children and help clean the homes of the elderly.

It's a good program, said Luo Rixin, vice president of the Guangxi Regional Youth Federation. But it needs to get bigger and serve more people.

GREG BAKER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Nike says consumers who buy its products want the corporation to shoulder social responsibility.

Luo is one 18 young Chinese leaders who visited to Oregon recently for an unusual weeklong seminar to find out more about how activists in America and elsewhere innovate for social change.

A new generation of Chinese leaders is looking for creative approaches to address poverty, pollution and other problems unleashed by the fierce juggernaut of growth.

There has been a lot of buzz about social entrepreneurs. But the concept sometimes gets lost in translation.

"This [the United States] is so different from China, which is government taking the lead," said Dong Xia, a deputy secretary general of the All China Youth Federation. Two years ago the group reached out to Portland-based Mercy Corps to organize the seminar.

Paul Dudley Hart, a Mercy Corps senior vice president, noted that America has lessons to learn from China as well. "You have taken more people out of poverty than any other country in history..." he said.

The training was originally scheduled for May of last year, then postponed by the earthquake that ravaged Sichuan Province. The tragedy unleashed a huge wave of volunteers in China as tens of thousands of people donated time and labor to the recovery. Yet the government keeps many civil society groups under strict control.

The seminar explored partnerships between non-profits and governments. The Chinese learned how U.S. organizations sometimes hire lobbyists to gain funding from Congress. Zhou Mi, vice president of the Chongqing Municipal Youth Federation, wanted to know how much that lobbyist costs.

At the end of a day, there was also time set aside for a more familiar activity: shopping. The group received a special invite to the Nike employee store.

Read a longer report about the Chinese efforts to understand social entrepreneurship, with photos from the seminar, here.

It seems appropriate that PATH held its biggest event of the year not in a downtown hotel or restaurant but in a Ballard parking garage.

About 750 people packed into PATH's spiffed-up garage this morning for an annual fund raising breakfast, consisting of simple quinoa pudding, empanadas and flat breads.

The global health non-profit displayed some of the ways it channels its money into low tech but effective methods of improving health around the world, from a delivery kit for hygienic home births to a new female condom.

COURTESY OF PATH

A stream in the Korogocho slum of Nairobi is the only water source for thousands of people.

One of its most interesting new creations is called an "electro-chlorinator," which PATH developed with the help of Seattle-based outdoor gear maker Cascade Designs.

Disease persists in many parts of the world where garbage and sewage pollute water that people use for drinking, cooking and cleaning.

PATH CEO Chris Elias described such conditions in the Korogocho slum near Nairobi, where more than 100,000 people live in less than one square mile.

COURTESY OF PATH

A kiosk where local women in a Nairobi slum are selling purified water.

A year and a half ago, PATH used $20,000 from donors marked for "innovation funding," to create a new solution in Korogocho. Those funds are set aside to try riskier but potentially successful new ventures.

The goal was to find a way to provide safe, clean water to a community within the slum, Elias said. The two partners came up with a device that runs on little more than salt, water and electricity from a car battery.

It works by producing a chlorine solution that kills dangerous microbes, making the water safe to drink, he said.

PATH hired a local contractor to build a building with electrical power and a water tank, and a kiosk where the water and chlorine solution could be sold. Three local health workers were trained to operate the electro-chlorinator and six local women to dispense the chlorine solution and instructions.

In December, "the first customer bought ten jerry cans of the treated water, at a price of one Kenyan shilling per liter," he said. "That's a little more than a penny apiece--affordable even in Korogocho."

Elias said he hopes to test the prototype in other locations and expand the model to many parts of the world lacking water treatment systems.

COURTESY OF PATH

An electrochlorinator device made by Seattle-based Cascade Designs with the global health non-profit PATH as a cheap water purifier.

Another of the non-profit's milestones was helping distribute mosquito bednets to two-thirds of homes in Zambia. PATH expects to reach the whole population within the next two years, he said, making Zambia the first country in Africa to meet the global targets for malaria control.

As a result, malaria prevalence in children has gone down by more than half, and the number of children dying of malaria in Zambia has been cut by a third, Elias said.

Looking at health care from another angle, PATH Nicaragua country manager Margarita Quintanilla talked about programs for adolescent girls and boys aimed at reducing violence against women in a country where one out of three women is abused.

PATH also focuses on heavily on vaccines, such as a new meningitis vaccine for sub-Saharan Africa, where about 450 million people -- more than the populations of the U.S. and Canada -- are at risk from the disease each year.

The first wave of young people will get the vaccine by the end of this year, Elias said, adding "It's the beginning of the end for a disease that has devastated Africa's poorest communities for more than a century."

The Gates Foundation has pledged $40 million to independent think tanks in developing countries, starting with a 24 institutions in Africa.

The aim of the initiative is to provide long-term funding to organizations so they can produce sound research that influences national policy debate and decision making, said Mark Suzman, director of policy and advocacy for the Gates Foundation's global development program.

The Gates Foundation and two partners, Canada's International Development Research Centre and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, pledged a combined $90 million in grants to the effort.

"Effective development in a sustainable way really only happens when you have committed national governments putting in place the right policies based on the right information..." Suzman said. "There's a limit to what outsiders can do even with the right intentions."

The grants will go to organizations focusing on economics, technology, social and environmental policy, in countries including Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Ethiopia and Senegal. Four think tanks were funded in Kenya and Nigeria and three in Tanzania. A complete list is here.

Although the funding is unrestricted, Suzman said the think tanks are expected to do research in many of the areas where the Gates Foundation works.

"We do hope and expect much of the work they do will support areas we at the foundation care a lot about, like health, agriculture and financial services," he said.

One focus of the research will be agricultural development.

"We know that African countries nominally committed to spend 10 percent of their national budgets on agricultural issues," Suzman said. "The question is what is the best way to spend those resources. The answers need to be locally based."

The think tanks receiving grants range from very small and new, with only a couple of employees, to older, more established institutions. More than 300 submitted applications. They are required to be independent of government with no links to a political party and a track record of peer-reviewed, evidence-based research, Suzman said.

But some of their work will involve gathering the most basic data.

"It's important not to underestimate just how little knowledge is available in some countries of things we take for granted," he said. "What is the real distribution of poverty, what are the regions where things are working well or not? Often they just don't have that information at hand."

How to help Africa, an important endeavor for so many of Seattle's non-profits, is the subject of heated debate these days, thanks in part to a provocative book by Dambisa Moyo.

Rich countries have poured more than $1 trillion in development aid into Africa over the past five decades, and all that money has made Africans even worse off, she argues in "Dead Aid."

Moyo, a native of Zambia who has a PhD in economics from Oxford University, worked for investment bank Goldman Sachs and consulted for the World Bank. Instead of charity, she proposes market-based alternatives such as trade with China, accessing capital markets and microfinance. A substantive review of the book is here.

Whether the current approach is working seems a fair question, one that more people have begun asking. For countries like Zambia that are doing all the right things according to economists' prescriptions, where is the Western investment? Why is it that people are willing to invest billions in disease eradication or humanitarian aid but not a dollar in African business?

Foreign aid props up corrupt regimes with cash and propagates the aid industry, built on "orchestrated worldwide pity," Moyo writes.

"I think she's a change agent," said Eliza Kelly, director of global communications for Unitus, a Redmond non-profit that supports microfinance. "She's bringing out something we've long suspected but nobody wanted to say."

With 560 million people, or about 73 percent of sub-Saharan Africa's population, living on less than $2 a day, poverty remains chronic.

DAVE HOGAN/GETTY IMAGES

Bono has been an outspoken advocate of debt forgiveness and aid to Africa. Moyo argues that Western celebrities have become the spokesmen for the African continent.

But others say Moyo goes too far.

"Her suggestion to simply cut off all foreign aid over the next five years would do incalculable damage to the lives of ordinary people living in developing countries," said David Scheiman, senior director of Africa programs for World Vision, the Christian humanitarian agency headquartered in Federal Way.

Moyo calls aid "an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world."

"That simply isn't true," said Scheiman. Foreign aid has also saved countless lives, particularly in conflicts and disasters.

Like Moyo, many Seattle non-profits see a huge potential to alleviate poverty in entrepreneurship.

Unitus is trying to expand the availability of micro loans in Africa, where it's setting up a branch office in Nairobi, hiring local employees and starting a leadership development program for CEOs of local microfinance institutions. Regulations have improved there making it easier to do business in a relatively stable environment, Kelly said.

Borrowers there don't want a hand out, she said, they want a job opportunity.

While economic development is important, progress can't be measured by raw economic growth alone. And it's hard to keep civil strife and disease from spilling across national borders and infecting countries that are faring well themselves.

Having more African voices contribute to the debate is valuable. Maybe just as important is some experience with extreme poverty, which Moyo lacks, says Scheiman. "I think she would have a different perspective if she was one of the millions who has benefited from and is alive today because of appropriate aid over the last several years," he said.

I'm looking forward to hearing her talk at UW's Kane Hall tonight at 7 p.m., and the questions sure to follow.

Two characteristics seem to be emerging from the Obama Administration's agriculture policy -- a global outlook and confidence in technology solutions.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack lately has been talking about the link between food security and global stability, warning that unless countries take immediate steps to sharply boost agricultural productivity and reduce hunger, the world risks fresh social instability.

Just how to do that is an important but controversial question.

ALEXANDRE MENEGHINI / ASSOCIATED PRESS

Farmers in developing countries face price volatility, changing weather patterns and other pressures

With the challenge of feeding the world's population compounded by climate change, Vilsack called on G8 countries to back the use of science in agriculture, including genetically modified organisms, to boost productivity, according to the Financial Times and coverage of the issue on the Grist.org Web site.

Earlier this week, Vilsack nominated Gates Foundation agricultural development director Rajiv Shah as chief scientist and undersecretary for research, education and economics.

Shah, the bright star at the Gates Foundation who helped design the partnership for a new Green Revolution in Africa (and recruit Kofi Annan as its chair), will now be in a position to shape much of the research and science policy within the federal government.

The move was praised by the chairman of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, among others. William Danforth chairs the non-profit institute, which received a $3.3 million grant from the Gates Foundation to enhance the nutritional value of cassava through genetic engineering. This year the center received $5.4 million from the Gates Foundation to help secure the approval of African governments to allow field testing of genetically modified banana, rice, sorghum and cassava plants.

A rash of magazine ads for Monsanto in recent months also links the global food crisis with the potential of technology to solve it. But some governments are uneasy about the implications of crops like GM corn, which was banned in Germany this year.

A key piece of legislation, the Global Food Security Act of 2009 S.384 sponsored by Sen. Richard Lugar, would authorize appropriations through 2014 to provide assistance to foreign countries to promote food security, stimulate rural economies, and improve emergency response to food crises.

Part of the bill includes a provision to "include research on biotechnological advances appropriate to local ecological conditions, including genetically modified technology."

That clause is sparking vocal opposition by groups including Food First, the National Family Farm Coalition, Organic Consumers Association, Rainforest Action Network and others who say the bill's intentions are good but the approach is wrong.

"While the intentions behind the Global Food Security Act may be laudable, the question is whether poorer farmers left behind by the last Green Revolution will again be swept aside by a top-down approach that benefits mostly transnational corporations," said Andrew Kang Bartlett of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Instead, the coalition supports a number of actions to address the food crisis, including
regulating commodity futures markets to end excessive speculation, halting growth of industrial crops for fuel in developing countries, stabilizing commodity prices through food reserves, setting fair regional and global trade agreements and directing efforts toward ecological farming practices.

Northwest philanthropy programs are reaching into India with microcredit, improved land rights and water access. The Gates Foundation is applying techniques from the original Green Revolution that changed Indian agriculture in a huge push to transform farming in Africa.

The situation on the ground in India shows how complex those challenges are. Under desperate conditions, individuals pay the price with their lives. In one state, 1,500 farmers have committed suicide, complaining of escalating debt from loans, drought and failed crops, according to a report this week.

An in-depth series by NPR offers a cautionary tale about the Green Revolution.

The approach that seemed so promising four decades earlier -- importing modern methods of fertilizer, high-yield seeds and irrigation -- is on the brink of collapse in Punjab, India's breadbasket. Diminishing groundwater from heavy irrigation use seems to be at the heart of the problem.

KRISTI HEIM

A farmer and his young daughter on a train in Punjab province.

Almost every village in Punjab has witnessed a suicide in once-prosperous farming families and it is a major issue in the general election, notes this report from BBC.

With so much effort to expand microcredit in the region, it turns out farmers are still borrowing from moneylenders to pay for other production costs.

Each year before the harvest, small farmers of Punjab borrow from rural moneylenders at exorbitant interest rates to meet production costs, including seeds, fertilizers and electricity for irrigation.

The demand for electricity is causing a different problem along the Ganges. Dams being constructed in the foothills of the Himalayas are disrupting downstream flows and changing conditions on a river central to Hindu faith. Desperation over that issue is prompting hunger strikes. At a temple in the holy city of Varanasi, I met a man named Baba Nagnath Yogeshwar, who was rail thin and moved around in slow motion.

ANAND SINGH

Baba Nagnath Yogeshwar is on a hunger strike in Varanasi, India, to save the Ganges from hydroelectric dams that would restrict its flow and disrupt life along the sacred waterway. He is being monitored by a doctor.

He said he has been fasting since last year to protest the dams. Another activist, one of India's best known scientists, AD Agarwal, came close to dying earlier this year after staging a hunger strike in protest of the dams.

"It is our privilege to live near the holy mother Ganga which nourishes
our lives," Nagnath said through an interpreter. "Keeping the mother from impurity and destruction is our sacred duty if we want to continue receiving the irreplaceable benefits that the mother freely gives us everyday."

Questions of how to grow enough food for a burgeoning population without destroying the environment and how to modernize the country without sacrificing its identity remain central to development efforts and the Northwest dollars that support them.

Garfield High School graduate Jackilin Abiem remembers fleeing civil war in Sudan and walking three months across the country with her father to Ethiopia. Some refugees traveling the same path never made it, she told me. They were killed by lions along the way. Although her father managed to get her safely across the desert, he was killed in the fighting when he returned to Sudan on his own. She doesn't know what became of her mother in Sudan.

The same week that Abiem told me her experience as one of the rare lost girls among thousands of "Lost Boys" orphaned by that war, I was hearing another story of countless others suffering in the seemingly endless conflict in Darfur.

A dozen of the largest humanitarian organizations, including Mercy Corps, were expelled from Darfur eariler this month by Sudan President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. He accused them of cooperating with the International Criminal Court in the Hague, which issued a warrant for his arrest on war crimes charges. World Vision was among a few groups allowed to continue operating.

Save the Children President Charles MacCormack, who is also chairman of a coalition of 170 humanitarian aid groups, said the situation leaves about 3 million displaced people in a crisis. His agency had been working to supply a million people with food, shelter, protection and medicine in Darfur.

"What's going to happen to those people?" he said. "There's nobody there to run the thing. We've got 500 trucks and all the infrastructure, but that's unraveling as we speak."

I met MacCormack while he was in Seattle briefly last week. While he said nobody deserves indictment more than al-Bashir, he wondered whether the decision was ultimately the right one for people on the ground.

"I've been ambivalent about how smart it is to have done it under that set of circumstances... I've always felt don't start something unless you're prepared to see it through to the bitter end," MacCormack said. "This thing has no game plan, other than to issue the indictment."

There are stories of aid workers basically held hostage as the government demands millions of dollars in fines in exchange for the necessary exit permits.

Both sides appear to have reached a stalemate. Al-Bashir doesn't have any choice now, MacCormack said. "If he were to back down, he'd be overthrown." The Sudanese government has not responded to pressure from the UN, and it has written off the U.S. "as a Western cabal imposing anti-Muslim ways and out for regime change," he said.

Meanwhile, with private aid groups out and the rainy season on its way, Darfur is likely to see even more disease and starving children, as this story warns. Abiem, who left Sudan when she was 3 years old and lost everything, is one of the lucky ones.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation plans to open a European office in London this year.

The new office will work on public policy, led by Geoffrey Lamb, a former World Bank vice president who advises the foundation on international policy development. Lamb, an Irish citizen, most recently accompanied Gates to meet with the Obama Administration and European leaders, urging them to maintain funding for global health and education despite the economic crisis.

The London office "will allow the foundation to deepen relationships with its Europe-based partners, liaise with grantees, and work closely with governments, European institutions, and non-governmental organizations," the Gates Foundation said in a statement. The office will initially employ five or six people. Lamb will be based in Washington DC, but oversee hiring of the London director.

It will be the foundation's fourth office outside its Seattle headquarters, after Washington D.C., New Delhi and Beijing.

Some of the top experts on land rights and their impact on women are lawyers working with Seattle-based Rural Development Institute.

Their approach seems to be paying off, even in a tough year for non-profits. RDI's annual Women's Day fund-raising event defied the anemic economy with a turnout of 550 people Thursday and a total of $115,000, twice the amount it raised last year, not including sponsor underwriting of the event.

"Land is the most fundamental asset for most of the poor in most of the developing world," said Roy Prosterman, who founded RDI 40 years ago and has been nominated for a Nobel Prize. When I profiled him a few years ago, he was content not owning a house, property or even a car.

EMILY WAX/WASHINGTON POST

Women's ownership of property has been tied to respect and social standing. Gitanjali Chaudhry, 17, of New Delhi, started attending women's self-defense classes last year after being harassed by men on her way to school.

While women are responsible for most of the world's agricultural production, they own just 2 percent of the land, according to RDI. In some countries women don't have a right to own property; they are property. Such entrenched customs are hard to change, but RDI has made progress in places like Kyrgyzstan by advising the government to strengthen women's ownership rights in the process of reforming land laws, said Asyl Undeland, a Kyrgyz anthropologist.

I've always thought what RDI does is an interesting counter point to the explosion of microfinance, and RDI addressed that during the event.

"Before you can give a woman a loan to help her lift herself out of poverty, first she has to have land," said Radha Friedman, RDI's associate director of development and communications. If she doesn't have land, it's hard to use the money for a sewing machine or a cow, since she may have no stable place to earn her living.

DOUG PLUMMER

RDI's Tim Hanstad worked in the fields in Skagit County as a boy.

In India, RDI has a strategy of purchasing land from sellers to obtain "micro-plots" for landless farmers to build a shelter, grow food and raise animals. RDI CEO Tim Hanstad moved his family to India and lived there for about four years to get the program going with a grant from the Gates Foundation. Now the concept is part of the country's current five-year development plan.

For years, RDI toiled in relative obscurity. But last year it won a World Bank competition for its "barefoot lawyers" project to offer legal aid and education to China's rural poor, and a new $6.7 million Gates Foundation grant to expand its "micro-land ownership" program across India.

RDI is also expanding in China and Africa. This fall it will create a Global Center for Women and Land in Seattle to train law and policy experts on gender-specific problems related to land rights, and build an electronic library of laws related to women's land rights that practitioners around the world can access and use to share information.

The Gates Foundation's grant to a cocoa industry group is raising questions about labor rights.

The foundation said this week it will give $23 million to the World Cocoa Foundation and $25 million to a German development agency to help farmers in West Africa improve production and obtain higher prices for their cocoa and cashews.

The non-profit World Cocoa Foundation represents 70 chocolate companies, and most have not lived up to an agreement they signed to stop the worst forms of child labor in their cocoa supply chains, according to the International Labor Rights Forum.

Almost eight years after the major chocolate companies signed an agreement called the Harkin-Engel Protocol, they have not instituted programs to ensure that they are complying with international labor standards, says Tim Newman, the group's campaigns assistant in Washington D.C.

"After millions of dollars and many years, it appears that the chocolate companies, through their charitable organizations, are not having a broad impact on improving the lives of children on cocoa farms," Newman wrote in response to the Gates announcement.

Richard Rogers, Gates Foundation program officer in agricultural development, answered my questions today about the labor issues. He said commercial involvement is necessary for the project to succeed.

The debate reflects a gap between those who question corporate involvement in global development and the Gates' view that embraces such public-private partnerships.

By having the private sector directly involved, "farmers can have a clear understanding of what the market demands," he said. Companies will contribute technical and managerial skills and resources to help farmers develop better seed varieties and plants and post-harvest handling methods.

Rogers said he chose the World Cocoa Foundation for the grant because "they have the best network of connections with governments, NGOs and corporate partners we feel are critical to this project."

Historically, the cocoa companies have worked "in silos," Rogers said, but the Gates Foundation has tried to play a role bringing them together for the first time, "getting all these companies to share their best practices and technical innovations to have maximum impact."

Hershey, Kraft Foods, Mars, Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill were among those contributing $42 million in cash and in-kind donations to the Gates project. Those contributions "enable our dollars to go twice as far," Rogers said.

West African farmers, including young children, supply 70 percent of the world's cocoa, earning just $30 to $110 a year, according to the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.

The goal is to drive up income for the 2 million small farmers in the region who earn a living through cocoa production by addressing the root cause of child labor -- low income.

When families are struggling to get food on the table every day, they need the whole family to chip in and work on farm farms, he said. "One of first things farmers do when incomes improve is send their kids to school."

But others argue that unfair trade policies lie at the root of the problem.

Stephanie Celt, director of the Washington Fair Trade Coalition, said she agrees with the message the Gates Foundation is sending that "current free trade policy is not bringing promised benefits to many family farmers and agricultural workers around the world." However, she added, "we hope that the foundation will also recognize that programs such as this one only have a chance of creating long-term benefits if they are partnered with more comprehensive reforms to the trade policies that are keeping many agricultural workers in poverty."

The Washington D.C.-based World Cocoa Foundation will re-grant virtually all the Gates funds to three non-profits working in Africa, Rogers said, after using some to hire a project director, coordinator and finance specialist, and a few management consultants.

Rogers said he believes the chocolate companies are working to help solve child labor problems, but "the challenge is the constant monitoring. It's difficult to be monitoring 2 million farmers 24 hours a day."

The International Cocoa Initiative has some information and reports here.

"Certain groups will always feel there could be more done," he said. "As long as companies are abiding by their commitments and putting effort toward ending child labor, we feel satisfied with that."

I asked why organic farming isn't a part of the project. Roger responded that farmers can decide themselves what to grow. While "organic, single origin markets have been growing, they are relatively small, he said.

"We want to have large scale impact and reach the largest number of farmers. To do that we need to get at the mainstream market. Most people aren't willing to pay the premium for specialty chocolates."

One goal is to improve diversification of crops, but cocoa is the main focus because it gives more bang for the buck. For a farmer on less than 3 hectares of land, about 25 percent would be dedicated to growing cocoa, but cocoa would contribute half of the farmer's income.

Raising income may be the one way to find common ground.

"If all of us can agree that improving income is the key to improving livelihood," Rogers says, "we have a great opportunity in front of us."

At least not for many farmers.

West African farmers, including young children, supply 70 percent of all cocoa, satisfying the world's cravings for chocolate while staying on the verge of starvation themselves. Annual incomes average $30 to $110 per household member, according to the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.

In West Africa, farmers might get half of the international cocoa price, while in other countries farmers are getting up to 90 percent of that price, says Rajiv Shah, agricultural development director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

ALAN BERNER/SEATTLE TIMES

Cocoa production has a bitter history in West Africa

Trying to raise the margins for farmers, the foundation is giving $23 million to the World Cocoa Foundation, a non-profit industry group of 70 companies, in a partnership to improve productivity and market access.

Some of the World Cocoa Foundation's members, including Hershey and Mars, have been criticized by the International Labor Rights Forum for failing to honor their commitment to ending child labor and ensuring transparency in cocoa supply chains. Here is the 2009 company scorecard.

Hershey, Kraft Foods, and Mars, along with Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, were among those contributing $42 million in cash and in-kind donations to the Gates project. Starbucks was also one of the corporate sponsors.

The money will go toward hiring local extension workers to train farmers and provide much needed technical and management support.

The five-year project will reach about 200,000 small cocoa farming households in Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Liberia, and Nigeria, with the goal of doubling their incomes by 2013, says Shah.

While farmers in Malaysia produce 800 to 1,000 kilograms of cocoa per hectare, those in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire produce 200 to 500 kilograms per hectare, he said.

"We can double or triple that just by improving the use of best practices, appropriate fertilizers and better tending to the trees," Shah said. "That's a big output gain."

West Africa produces a third of the world's cashews, but the lack of processing facilities in Africa makes the market inefficient and denies Africans the economic benefits of jobs in the sector.

With a $25 million Gates grant to the German development organization Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), the cashew project aims to help 150,000 small cashew farming households in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Mozambique increase their incomes by 50 percent over the next three years.

GTZ will lead the cashew project with assistance from the African Cashew Alliance (ACA), FairMatch Support and TechnoServe. Financial supporters include Kraft Foods and Costco Wholesale.

The roots of the problem of poverty behind sweetness are related to free trade, structural adjustment, and corporate control, says the group Global Exchange, which promotes fair trade products.

Prices are low because "major chocolate and cocoa processing companies have refused to take any steps to ensure stable and sufficient prices for cocoa producers," the group said.

Fair trade advocates may take a dim view of the program, considering that fair trade is not the aim of the corporations involved.

World Cocoa Foundation President Bill Guyton says the Gates-funded program is "looking at improving environmental, economic and social aspects of growing the crop," but that his group "does not get involved with certification of products."

Still there is one thing that both sides can agree on as a benefit: cutting out the middleman.

During a long day of discussions on the energy and the environment involving the world's top two consumers and polluters, one of the most startling facts was a look at where greenhouse gases are increasing fastest.

Over the past decade, carbon dioxide output increased about 1 percent in the United States and 4.7 percent in China but 12.7 percent in Indonesia, according to McKinsey & Co., which is researching the potential of various technologies to reduce carbon, and weighing them against cost. Measured in gigatons of CO2 per year, the U.S. now produces about 7.2, while China produces 6.8 and Indonesia 3.1.

MERCY CORPS

Women operating small food stalls use new clean burning stoves in a program being tested in a Jakarta slum.

Two local efforts address climate change in emerging markets by linking them with carbon credits, trying to reach the millions for whom survival means burning coal, slashing forests and breathing toxic indoor air.

In Indonesia Mercy Corps is using private seed capital (much of it from Seattle) to fund a program to manufacture new cooking stoves and replace kerosene with compressed bricks made from plant matter. The program aims to offer the stove buyers an immediate financial reward for reducing their carbon emissions. That's a whole story in itself, related to the purchase of a commercial bank, which I'll write about later.

MERCY CORPS

New stoves are made to burn vegetable pellets, cheaper and less polluting than kerosene.

MicroEnergy Credits is a Seattle-based effort to use microfinance as a way to pay the upfront costs of purchasing simple clean-energy systems, such as stoves, solar panels and biogas digesters. Through carbon credits, microfinance institutions earn revenue when they lend money for such systems that create verified carbon emissions reductions.

MicroEnergy Credits Director James Dailey, a Peace Corps veteran, previously worked for the Grameen Technology Center, where he led development of the Mifos open source software project. Co-founder April Allderdice is a veteran of Grameen Shakti and McKinsey.

The World Bank's Carbon Finance Unit is testing the waters with agreements to buy the carbon credits associated with greenhouse gas reductions in Bangladesh.

With carbon cap and trade programs, measurement and verification remain key questions. Nevertheless, the work of small start-ups and non-profits is important to addressing the energy problem, and a resource that big government and business pow-wows haven't given adequate attention. By making clean energy part of building small enterprises from the ground up, the hope is that poor countries can grow economies without the heavy toll on the environment that richer ones have already taken.

Washington state is in the soft power business. Dozens of local organizations involved in global affairs have a stake in defining the U.S. role in the world, and they're calling for an overhaul of some basic principles.

They're hoping to influence policy in the other Washington to focus on more equitable, efficient and sustainable development as the Obama Administration sets its budget and priorities.

One area that needs changing most is foreign aid, participants at a Global Washington forum on Monday agreed.

WALLY SANTANA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The U.S. foreign aid program needs a thorough overhaul to be more effective, many NGOs say.

The current Foreign Assistance Act, all of 417 pages, contains programs to attack the Soviet threat and address disasters in Nicaragua and Pakistan that ended in the 1970s, said Jenni Rothenberg, field director of the U.S. Global Leadership Campaign. With 140 priorities and 400 directives, it's complex and cluttered without any clear road map.

The campaign, whose leadership includes local charities such as PATH, Mercy Corps and World Vision, along with Boeing and Microsoft, is advocating for a strong international affairs budget. The administration's current international affairs budget proposal for fiscal 2009 is $39.8 billion, about 1.3 percent of the total budget request, according to the campaign.

As the U.S. has been involved in two wars, the military role in development has grown significantly, said U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (D-Tacoma).

The Defense Department "moved into what was traditionally the State Department's lane," Smith said. Now it's in over its head in some places and needs to work cooperatively with more civilian experts in a broader mission. But as for getting the military out of the business of development entirely, "it's not going to happen and it's not desirable," Smith said.

Foreign investment and trade will play a key role, but the U.S. needs a new approach to that as well, he said.

"We have learned an enormous amount about how to not make it work," Smith said. "Foreign investment comes in, keeps separate from local populations, sucks money out, pays shareholders somewhere else, pays no taxes and flees."

JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGES

As the U.S. military has expanded its role to include more international development, it has stretched beyond its capability and needs more civilian involvement, local leaders say.

Bill Clapp, a Seattle businessman and philanthropist who launched the Global Washington network, suggested that the mission of the U.S. trade representative should be redefined.

Rather than simply negotiating the best deal for U.S. companies, "there has to be a change in priorities, or an additional priority on the trade arm, that says economic development is also one of the outcomes we are looking for," Clapp said.

Speakers debated the role of corporate involvement in economic development.

Foreign aid, originally used to bring foreign countries in line with Washington and promote U.S. economic interests, has fostered a sense of mistrust of U.S. programs, some said.

Margaret Willson, international director of Bahia Street, a Seattle non-profit that aids impoverished girls in Brazil, said her organization refused money from the U.S. Agency for International Development. "All the construction materials had to be brought from the States, supervisors had to be from the States. No money was going into the community. They did not own it, they did not supervise it." In addition, USAID "wanted dossiers on every person involved in the organization," she said.

Simeon Karanja Waidhima, a businessman from Kenya, pointed out that while many criticize U.S. foreign investment, almost none has actually gone to Africa. He also argued that foreign aid has done some good.

"I'm a product of foreign aid," he said. The aid that came in the 1960s and 70s was visible on the ground in the form of teachers and machinery, he said. But in recent years "what we received is not visible," he said. "It's packaged in democratization, but this has no effect on the local population."

Aaron Katz, senior lecturer at the University of Washington School of Public Health, said business interests can be a positive force for development if the focus is on creating economic opportunities for families.

"If there is an intersection between the interests of some corporations and expanding opportunities for those families, I say great," he said. "It's not the companies' interest or U.S. interest that should be paramount. It's the economic well being and opportunity to expand one's freedom that should be paramount."

Since foreign debt consumes up to 70 percent of the budgets of some countries, it has to be addressed to make resources available for health, education and other services, Katz said. An audience member from Ethiopia, however, was quick to chime in that governments often don't use those resources appropriately, and the savings from debt relief does not go to the poor.

Katz and Willson put forth what they called "A Modest Proposal" for U.S. foreign aid, based on the following principles: Do no harm, support public institutions and transparent decision making, invest locally, serve local agendas and priorities, and foster equitable relations.

It's a sign of the times that whenever a Gates Foundation employee speaks in public, the question and answer session becomes an audition for would-be job candidates. You can save the world and still wear Prada, too.

MICHEL EULER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Shaping the post-crisis world with an economy on edge.

Gates Foundation CFO Alexander Friedman spoke to the Trade Development Alliance in Seattle this week, offering such a clear, detailed and unvarnished analysis of the market it's amazing there was no run on banks.

The talk came after Bill Gates revealed his foundation lost 20 percent of its assets in 2008 but vowed to push ahead this year, and just before Gates headed to Davos to urge other non-profits, businesses and governments to do the same.

In Friedman's analysis, the roots of this crisis date back a long time. In the 1980s, the current account balance flipped as the U.S. began importing more than it exported. At the same time, Americans started saving less.

Interest rates came down from the ultra-high levels of the late 1970s and early 1980s; largely as a result, home ownership surged from the mid-1990s until 2007. Subprime loans grew from about 6 percent of all loans to 20 percent. And most mortgages, rather than being held by the banks that made them, increasingly were packaged together and sold as securities.

FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images

Davos: a spectacle of wealth, power and debate... but less caviar.

With money so cheap, investment banks borrowed more to increase their profits. Consumers went on a debt-fueled spending spree, borrowing against their homes and loading up their credit cards. When the bubble finally burst and defaults started rising, mortgage-backed securities went from 100 cents on the dollar to 15 cents on the dollar. About $2 trillion in securities were downgraded.

How much could it all cost to fix? To shore up the financial system, U.S. government agencies have committed almost $8.5 trillion, even before the $819 billion stimulus package. That's about half of the U.S. GDP, and the single largest expenditure in American history.

Looking at various financial crises over the last 30 years, the minimum losses from this one appear to be far more severe -- almost double the losses from Japan's banking crisis of the 1990s and triple those of the Asian financial crisis.

Global markets have fallen in tandem with the U.S. What's the net result? Poverty is likely to rise sharply, especially in the poorest countries.

The World Bank estimates 20 million more people will go into extreme poverty for every one percentage point drop in developing countries' growth rate. Overall growth rates of developing and emerging economies are projected to fall from 8 percent in 2007 to about 5 percent in 2009. Robust African growth rates of 5 or 6 percent are almost certain to drop, too. Add at least another 60 million to the 100 million people pushed into poverty by the food crisis

So back to Gates' mission. Poor countries, especially in Africa, depend on foreign aid, which typically makes up 10 to 25 percent of their GDP. Aid has disproportionately gone into education and health, so those programs will be hit hard if it falls.

The prospects for aid look fairly grim throughout much of the world, said Friedman.

United States: Could be reduced or stretched out over longer period.
Japan: Flat or falling, unless aid becomes part of an anti-deflationary package.
Italy: Threatened 50% cut in bilateral aid program..
France: Official intent is to flat-line aid, but internal discussions indicate cuts.
United Kingdom: Holding firm -- so far.
Canada: Flat to negative.
Gulf states: Falling oil prices and financial contagion likely to minimize their role.
Nordic countries and Netherlands: Maintaining aid targets for now, but ministers say that's politically unsustainable if big donor countries cut theirs.

Gates is holding a press conference Friday to call on global leaders to maintain their commitments.

Meanwhile, Friedman thinks consumer debt, commercial real estate and private equity could be the next trouble spots in the U.S. economy. Big commercial banks may not be prepared for much higher unemployment levels and the related defaults, he said. Still he's trying to stay optimistic.

"When you're in a crisis, you tend to think the sky's falling," he said. "When you look at a 5 or 10-year horizon you adopt a more positive frame."

"We're trying to address diseases that are essentially Biblical..." Friedman said. "They've been around thousands of years... so the time frame of two or four years is something we can't let distract us."

It's a provocative question and a good one if you consider the system of lending to the poor rests on basic fundamentals that modern financial markets seem to have long forgotten, argues Alex Raksin in this column.

He says microfinance "offers a transformative vision," holding up Redmond-based Unitus as an example for its venture capital model and technology innovation to help microcredit programs succeed and expand.

Microloans generally have high repayment rates, but what happens when borrowers default? Often the problem can be traced back to borrowers spending their money on health care bills. So one of Unitus' microfinance partners created a solution by offering a health insurance program.

"Everything we've started since then has been a response to some social challenge, from micro-housing to micro-health insurance and even micro-water programs," says Ingrid Munro, founder of Jamii Bora. "To get out of the vicious cycle of poverty, people need more than just access to finance." They also need insurance, education, healthcare, and housing.

Microfinance as a whole has held up well despite the global recession.

"We never have felt any problems because we rely on deposits that we collect," says microcredit pioneer and Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus. In Bangladesh Grameen started a microcredit fund, a fund from which microfinance organizations can borrow at wholesale rates and use to lend to the poor. As a social business, it doesn't depend on donations, and it's also separate from commercial banking.

Supporters of microcredit are working to change laws in other countries to allow microfinance organizations to accept savings deposits from the general public. That could push the concept of peer-to-peer lending to a new level.

The Grameen Foundation is expanding its microcredit program in New York City. It now has 500 borrowers and a repayment rate of 99 percent, Yunus said.

"So it shows a strength despite the fact that the economy is in bad shape and the financial system is in trouble."

During the recent floods this winter, I couldn't help but think of Marla Smith-Nilson. If only we could take all the excess water creating havoc in the Northwest and pipe it over to the places she's trying to reach. Smith-Nilson is an engineer who founded Water 1st, a Seattle non-profit working to relieve poverty by starting with the most basic necessity: safe water.

There's nothing fancy or high-tech about the group's work. They work on the simplest kinds of wells or distribution systems from local springs that can be built and maintained by communities, one village at a time. Water 1st works with local partners in four countries: Honduras, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and India.

One problem with past projects built by outside organizations like the World Bank is that they are complex and expensive, but not regularly maintained or repaired, Smith-Nilson said. Locally no one can agree who is responsible for the well, so half of them fail.

ALAN BERNER/SEATTLE TIMES

A farm is totally surrounded by flood waters in the Snoqualmie Valley.

Water 1st decided to enlist local residents to plan and build the projects.

"If you've invested half a year of labor, there's no way you're going to let that system fail," she said.

Progress is especially important for women and girls, who are usually the main water bearers. If they don't have to walk miles every day to collect water, they can spend more time in school. Water 1st also focuses on training in food preparation and hygiene and building latrines.

In Seattle Smith-Nilson raises money mostly by word of mouth through her network of friends, enlisting help from local schools and businesses.

ALAA AL-MARJANI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A man sows a crop on a dry field on the outskirts of Najaf, south of Baghdad.

On Friday evening Water 1st is holding its fourth annual Water 1st - Beer 2nd event at the Lake Union Park Armory, including a presentation about the world water crisis.

Another event on the calendar is a unique combination of water causes and the trendy microblogging phenom of Twitter. On Feb. 12 Twestival Seattle, a grassroots effort to raise money and awareness for charity, will kick off with a focus on water.

One person in six, or more than a billion people worldwide, has no access to clean water, according to the group. More than 4,500 children die each day from dehydration and water-borne diseases.

One of charity:water's solutions is to donate 100 percent of profits from the sale of a $20 bottle of water to help build wells. Founder Scott Harrison said he had to rethink his lush life in New York after a trip to Liberia, where he could feed four people for the price of one $16 margarita he consumed in Manhattan. That's nice. But maybe he should rethink those plastic bottles... no sense helping one problem only to contribute to another.