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Related to my previous post , Pew Research recently published findings on how richer the world is getting -- and from this marco perspective, it's a lot of good news. Overall, the world is getting richer, and more people are being pulled out of poverty. The greatest shift is of course, coming from China, where there is a rapidly growing middle class -- but the promise of a global middle class is still a dream. The rich world remains the same -- North America, Western Europe and Australia. More, here: Mapping the Global Population: How Many Live on How Much, and Where | Pew Research Center There's lots of data and graphs to explore. Enjoy.

The race to the bottom continues. The OECD Employment Outlook 2015 is bad news cloaked in good news. Yes, unemployment is dropping across the world, but those returning to work are coming back part-time and/or for less money. Read more: http://www.oecd.org/newsroom/jobs-outlook-improving-slowly-but-millions-risk-being-trapped-at-bottom-of-economic-ladder.htm

The latest OECD report on inequality paints a disturbing picture. The world is getting more unequal. The richest 10% of the OECD population now earns 9.6 times more than the poorest 10%. In 2012, the poorest 40% owned 3% of the household wealth in the OECD countries -- while the top 10% controlled over half; with the top 1% owning 18%. Increasingly, the culprit is low paying, non-standard work (temporary and contract). Between 1995 and 2013, 50% of new jobs created fell into this category -- and the disproportionately are youth and females. No surprise there. The OECD warns that the long term economic and social cohesion impacts will be significant if governments don't take steps to address the gap. Businesses also need to step up, as there is a direct impact to their viability. In Canada, income inequality has not increased during the economic downturn -- with Canada trending with the OECD average. But, the gap in pay between full-time workers and non-standard work...

I don't entirely agree with Foster's take, but he provides a context for the state of worker safety and rights in Bangladesh; as well as the unintended consequences that could result from the lawsuit against Loblaw (there's one in the US as well, against Wal-mart, et al).  The issue is more complex than western businesses taking advantage of cheap labour. Peter Foster: Why a $2-billion lawsuit against Loblaw, Joe Fresh could bring unintended results to Bangladesh | Financia…

Tomorrow, October 4th, is World Habitat Day -- a day designated by the UN to bring attention to the sorry state of housing for the world's population. Habitat for Humanity is one of those organizations that's putting sweat to the problem -- not thinking about the problem -- just working to fix it. Check out the link below for more. in reference to: "Every week, more than a million people are born in, or move to, cities in the developing world. As a result, the urban population of developing countries will double from 2 billion to 4 billion in the next 30 years. (Kissick, et al: 2006)   By the year 2030, an additional 3 billion people, about 40 percent of the world’s population, will need access to housing. This translates into a demand for 96,150 new affordable units every day and 4,000 every hour. (UN-HABITAT: 2005)" - World Habitat Day Oct. 4, 2010 - Social Media News Release ( view on Google Sidewiki )

My latest Kiva loan has just been given, to the Tanzanite Group of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania -- to be repaid in about 6 months or so. Specifically, my $25 will go to Patricia Mjuni, who runs a pharmacy business, though the repayment is being guaranteed by the Tanzanite Group . Group loans, as per Kiva: In a group loan, each member of the group receives an individual loan but is part of a group of individuals bound by a group guarantee. Under this arrangement, each member of the group supports one another and is responsible for paying back the loans of their fellow group members if someone is delinquent or defaults. Kiva does not directly manage the disbursement of funds, but rather, leverages field partners. In this case, my loan will be administered by Tujijenge Tanzania Ltd. , a micro-finance company that has been in operation for 4 years now, in Tanzania. They have given out over US$1.2M in loans, and have a return on assets of 2.03% -- coming from interests and fees charged to...

As soon as the money comes in, it goes out. I've had enough repayment over the last month to be able to cover another $25 loan to someone in the developing world that needs a helping hand. This time around, I just chose the first person on the list, when I clicked on lend on the Kiva site . Usually, I sort the loan applicants by region and gender, giving to women in Africa. This time around, a woman in Juba, South Sudan , was at the top of the list, and saved me the sorting effort. Agnes, to whom my $25 loan went to, is a mom with three kids and a husband, who is a soldier. She is looking to grow her charcoal selling business, with the hopes of using the additional profits to build a house. The loan is facilitated by BRAC , an NGO based in Bangladesh, operates a microfinance program in South Sudan, focusing on war refugees -- and already has 418 village organizations with more than 14,000 women members. The $25 loan is a drop in the bucket of world's needs, but even whil...

In 1804, Haiti was the first nation to outlaw slavery. That is an amazing accomplishment -- but you wouldn't think so if you knew Haiti today. Today, 10% of the most vulnerable population in Haiti, the children, live a life of slavery. Child slaves in Haiti, known as restaveks , number around 300,000. They come from large homes, where parents can't afford to keep them, to homes of affluent family members. Often, these children suffer abuse at the hands of families they are enslaved to. The practice having restaveks has been around since 1804. Lighter skinned Haitians became the ruling class -- and the darker skinned, poorer Haitians, were made to believe that if they couldn't take care of their children, it was acceptable -- and better for the child -- to be shipped off. This has been a widely acceptable practice around the world -- back in the day -- but it shouldn't be, anymore. The root cause of the problem is large families. It's not uncommon for pare...

The UN Population Fund has published their latest report, State of World Population 2009. The authors are focused in this report on the impact of climate change on the human population. As I have argued in previous posts, climate change is no longer a question. It is happening and it is due to human activities. The rapid change is inevitable. The uncertainty now is on the impact to the human population and the environment. History has lessons for us on how we will deal with the inevitable change. It doesn't need to be a disaster, like a tsunami or a hurricane or an earthquake -- though disasters like that will occur as a result -- it can subtle -- like changing weather patterns that bring floods or droughts. Just small changes that doesn't necessarily punch an immediate hole in our day-to-day should be reflected on, to forecast what's coming. When subtle change comes, we the rich, will be able to cope. We the rich will have choices. We are much more capable of adap...

I just made my 9th loan on Kiva -- with no additional funding supplied by myself. It was made from the money repaid to me by borrowers from around the world. My 9th loan, of $25, was made to a woman in the Philippines, who's raising funds to grow her farm business -- and make a better life for herself. I love the concept behind Kiva. The money I loan goes directly to the people looking for a helping hand to get themselves out of poverty and make a better life for themselves. Just this week, Kiva loans of $2.7MM was made -- that amounted to a loan made every 9 seconds. How's that for making a difference? in reference to: Kiva - Loans that change lives ( view on Google Sidewiki )

When he was just 14-years-old, William Kamkwamba from Malawi, dropped out of school because his family could no longer afford to send him to school. With just a science text book, Kamkwamba decided to build a windmill, for electricity, to power his home and pump water. The people of his village thought he was crazy. But from parts salvaged from junk, a windmill emerged. That has since been replaced by another Kamkwamba built. Now 22-years-old, Kamkwamba is attending university on a scholarship, and plans to go back home and bring electricity to his entire country. Simply amazing. So, what you done today?

The UN refugee agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), has a stated purpose to lead, coordinate and safeguard the rights and well-being of refugees worldwide. It exists to ensure "everyone can exercise the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge in another State, with the option to return home voluntarily, integrate locally or to resettle in a third country." And by UNHCR's own count, business is unfortunately quite good, and has only been getting better since the agency was established at the end of 1950. UNHCR today lists 31 million people to be in some state of concern around the world -- directly assisting 4.5 out of 11 million refugees, and advocating for the rest. It's an admirable job, with Africa, the Middle East and Asia, getting most of the attention. Wherever there is trouble, you'll probably find the UNHCR logo fluttering in the parched, smoky and quite possibly, violent winds. Critics of UNHCR however hardly see th...

I finally got around to logging into my Kiva account tonight, and re-loaned $75 that was sitting in my account for a little while. It's amazing to know that I'm my own little development bank for those in developing countries, and that $75 has already made the rounds and a difference in lives far-far away.

I initially invested $100 into Kiva loans -- Kiva, the non-profit that facilitates micro-loans between lenders and those in need of loans in developing countries. Of the $100, $40.17 has been repaid. Kiva puts a lower limit of $25 increments to loan. So I could now loan another $25, dipping into my available $40.17 credit. Which is just what I tried to do, however, Kiva lenders have managed to exhaust the system. Every loan on the site is now fully funded. According to Kiva, this week alone, over $1MM was lent -- at a rate of a loan every 20-seconds. Totally cool. And sorta restores a little faith in humanity. Maybe we will make it after all. Update: 7:13PM Okie-dokie -- I just checked out Kiva again, and new folks were fundraising. I've sent $25 to Men Theary -- a 28-year-old from Battanbang province, Cambodia. She's raising funds to buy fertilizer and rice seeds for her farm, and to add to her handbag inventory (she's also a professional tailor).

I'm Shawn - a 27 year old Canadian from Toronto. Before starting this project, I was a graduate student on scholarship at Notre Dame University. My life took a turn after I met Dr. Jeffrey Sachs (author of the book "The End of Poverty") when he came to give a speech at Notre Dame. That speech inspired me to withdraw from grad school, liquidate my savings, and begin this journey to try and make the world a better place - one meaningful difference at a time. How totally cool is this? Check out more about Shawn on his website, the Uncultured Project , and his YouTube channel . It's a noble ideal, unfortunately, it seems like Shawn is running out of money, and won't be able to continue the project for much longer. But, cool idea nonetheless. For those who care to make global poverty a thing of the past by helping the poor help themselves, check out Kiva and Canadian Food for the Hungry -- both of which continue to receive support from my family. Hey, if Shawn...

First, it took the animals. Goats fell silent and refused to stand up. Chickens died in handfuls, then en masse. Street dogs disappeared. Then it took the children. Toddlers stopped talking and their legs gave out. Women birthed stillborns. Infants withered and died. Some said the houses were cursed. Others said the families were cursed. When an investigation was finally launched in Thiaroye Sur Mer, a town outside of Dakar, Senegal, what they found weren't the usual scourges of Africa -- what they found was lead -- lead from years of car battery recycling , that had contaminated the soil. Much of lead battery manufacturing and recycling has moved to the developing world, where regulations are lacking, and the locals are ignorant of the danger lead poses to their health. As we continue to buy more cars in North America, Europe and in the rapidly growing economies of the world, the poor will make, recycle and die for our love of cars.

Joshua Silver started on a remarkable quest in 1985 -- provide vision for the world's poor that desperately needed glasses, but couldn't afford to eat, let alone pay for prescription lenses. It would take the physicist of Oxford's Department of Atomic and Laser Physics, over a decade to create a solution that is both cheap and easily adaptive -- allowing the curvature of the lenses to change without specialized knowledge or equipment. The solution: tough plastic lenses holding membranes containing fluid, which can be adjusted by adding or removing fluid using a syringe attached to the arms of the spectacles. To add or remove fluid, a dial is turned on the spectacles. Already, 30,000 pairs of spectacles have been distributed in a trial to the poor in Africa and Asia. Silver has ambitions of helping the UN achieve its Vision 20/20 programme by distributing 1 million more next year and ramping up to 100 million per year in a few years. By 2020, there could be over a bi...

By a vote of 180 in favour to 1 against (United States) and no abstentions, the Committee also approved a resolution on the right to food, by which the Assembly would “consider it intolerable” that more than 6 million children still died every year from hunger-related illness before their fifth birthday, and that the number of undernourished people had grown to about 923 million worldwide, at the same time that the planet could produce enough food to feed 12 billion people, or twice the world’s present population. And there you have it folks. It's quite simple. The United States has voted to starve the world -- including people in the US -- in its participation on the UN Human Rights Council's Working Group on the Right to Development. By the terms of the text, the Assembly would express concern that, in many countries, girls were twice as likely as boys to die from malnutrition and childhood diseases and that twice as many women as men were estimated to suffer from malnut...

This image was taken by Kevin Carter of a starving child struggling to a UN food station, a kilometre away, in 1993. A vulture patiently waits for the child to die. Kevin Carter won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in April. In July, he committed suicide. "I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners...I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky." Today, despite photos like these, children continue to starve around the world, including in our city. How can we look at ourselves in the mirror?

Micro-lending was such a novel concept to help the poor, help themselves. It started with not-for-profit organizations, lending to the poor in developing countries -- lending really small amounts of money to help folks start a small business and give themselves a sustaining chance. And it is still going strong around the world, sustained by not-for-profits -- but these days, the greedy feeding frenzy of for-profit business is taking over. The thing about lending to the poor is that most often, they are honourable, trusting people. Getting a loan establishes them in the group on their way out of the hovel, and they would do anything to not default on that status -- anything, including not going into personal bankruptcy. The poor also tend to be uneducated and unaccustomed to the sophistication of modern banking. They care only about how much they regular payment needs to be, and how long they need to make them. They are ripe and ready to be plucked. Easy pickings for those that...