Tag Archives: TED

TED Talk on Ending Hunger Now: What’s Missing

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Watch Josette Sheeran, the head of the United Nation’s World Food Program on TED talk about different approaches to ending global hunger.

A handful of things stuck out for me. First, the statement that food is “the most fundamental expectation of every human being.” How true that is. And the brain scans comparing the brains of two 3-year-olds–one well nourished and the other deeply malnourished–are disturbing to say the least. If we want conditions to improve in hungry nations, ensuring adequate nutrition of infants and young children must be a top priority. Otherwise, we’re looking at a continued future of populations who cannot help themselves.

The most striking statement to me: ”This isn’t one of those rare diseases that we don’t have the solution for. We know how to fix hunger.”

But then, I really felt like something was missing from Sheeran’s talk. Aside from a handful of indirect linkages (local farmers in Brazil providing a third of the food for school feeding programs, villages setting up food storage banks), there’s not much mentioned about people feeding themselves.

Don’t get me wrong; you’ll never hear me say aid isn’t very important. But if we’re on the topic of Ending Hunger Now, shouldn’t we be talking about ending hunger long-term? Heifer’s founder, Dan West, is often quoted around here of saying “Not a cup, but a cow.” This simple statement, in my opinion, says so much. A cup of food will stave off hunger for a day, maybe. But livestock and knowing how to raise it has the power to change lives forever.

In this TED video, Sheeran holds up a food pack that costs only 17 cents a day. It’s got protein and vitamins the brain needs. She states that one package a day will overcome a child’s malnutrition. In an emergency situation, yes, these seem great. But these are hand-outs, and they won’t last forever, nor should they. There’s an image of a child eating from one of these packages, and I can’t help but think back to my trip to Uganda last year.

Photo by Dero Sanford

In this photo, you see a baby drinking from a package. But this is a different type of package. It’s filled with yogurt, made by a local producer, from the milk of local cows. This is a community feeding itself, feeding its future generation. THIS is how we end hunger now and for good.

Our Thoughts About International Women’s Day

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“Women and girls are not the problem,” Kristof said. “They are the solution.”

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof tells a story about an African girl who, because of donations through Heifer International, was the first of her village to study abroad and graduate from the Connecticut College. (Photo by Max Reed, Alligator Staff)
Nicholas Kristof, a renowned columnist for the New York Times and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, recently spoke to a group of people at the event, “Women: Holding Up Half the Sky,” hosted by the Bob Graham Center for Public Service in Florida.
Throughout his presentation, Kristof spoke about the fact that women still face oppression in the 21st century with gender discrimination and violence. The best way to fight poverty and extremism is to educate and empower women and girls, Kristof explained.
International Women’s Day 2011 is March 8 and will be celebrated with scheduled events globally. Heifer has projects specifically focused on women in a number of countries, including India, Nepal and Laos.
Photos by Geoff Oliver Bugbee
CEO Pierre Ferrari and Heifer staff recently traveled to Nepal where they saw first hand how families, communities and villages can dramatically change when women are given opportunities to make decisions, run businesses and take charge of their circumstances.
Villages like Khayarmara in Nepal are seeing dramatic change. Life was once much harder for women who spent four hours or more to get water. Now they have water pipes and organic vegetable gardens.
Pierre and the team also visited a 3-year-old buffalo and goat project in Pooja Swavalambhi where women are determined to bring their community out of poverty.
Video by Geoff Oliver Bugbee
“When we were gathered with the whole community, the women of the Pooja women’s group started talking and describing their experience of the change in their lives, which is pretty radical,” Ferrari said. “It suddenly all came together and was a very powerful experience.”
In December 2010, Madeleine Albright, first women Secretary of State for the United States, spoke at a TEDWomen’s conference where she said, “Women’s issues are the hardest issues.” She went on to speak about how it’s important for women to have a voice in political affairs and to become business leaders in their communities, making it much more likely they’ll be treated as equals.
“I believe that societies are better off when women are politically and economically empowered, that values are passed down, the health situation is better, education is better, there is a greater economic prosperity.”
This spring, in celebration of Women’s History Month, our 2011 Pass on the Gift campaign is going WiLD (Women in Lifestock Development). You can help Heifer transform the lives of struggling women around the world. Read more here: www.heifer.org/pog.

To celebrate a Women’s International Day in your area, please visit http://www.internationalwomensday.com. To learn more about how Heifer is working with women please visit www.heifer.org.

Heifer CEO Pierre Ferrari in Winning TEDxChange Lineup

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Heifer CEO Pierre Ferrari is part of a winning lineup for a “Build Your Own TEDxChange” contest organized by GOOD in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, GOOD announced this week.
You can see highlights from the GOOD announcement below or read more on their web site.
The winner is Chandra Wroblewski, whose lineup—Muhammad Yunus, Michelle Rhee, Pierre Ferrari, and Anders Wilhelmson (with musical guest Arcade Fire)—had the most exciting and topical selection of speakers. On top of that, it has an amazing idea audience interaction: social network gaming.
Wroblewski explains her selections in her pitch to GOOD:
I was looking for an interesting mix of people to cover all areas that are important for global development and health. At first, someone might listen to these speakers’ stories and say “What were you thinking?” That, to me, makes it more interesting and shows they are truly thinking outside the box.

* Give money to people who might not pay you back?
* Shake up bureaucracy for student development?
* Create a poop bag? For… people?
* Free cows? Overseas?

My line-up features people of different trades, nationalities, locations, gender, ages, and causes – but they all have one thing in common, which is to believe in the potential of all people in the world. Each speaker’s ideas and approach to change betters the global community – improving education, creating opportunities, finding simple solutions, believing in one another, and lending a helping hand.

Additionally, I particularly like this line-up because all these speakers are smart, educated, very fortunate people that could have simply worked to make money, but made something more. If you listen to their stories you’ll notice they didn’t anticipate being where they are today — Rhee, expected maybe to be a doctor. Yunus, always surprised about the new venture. Wilhemson, an architect by trade. Ferrari, making plenty of money at Coca-Cola. They all took their time and talents to create unique, sometimes controversial, solutions to help people near and far.

Let us know what you think about this lineup. We’ll share more details here as soon as we have them.

Women Reshaping the World

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This week TED held the first-ever TEDWomen conference which invited men and women to explore the question, How are women and girls reshaping the world? Speakers included women who are changing the world around them by creating inventions and businesses, and learning how to bring peace to their communities.

During the conference, surprise speaker Hillary Clinton took the stage to discuss what needs to be done to widen the circle of opportunity for women and girls worldwide.

“We can already see power of women and girls as agents of change,” she continued. “I have made it clear as secretary of state that the roles and rights of women will be a central tenet of American foreign policy. Where girls and women flourish, our values are also protected.”

Clinton ended her speech with a story of an African teenage girl who was told by her father that she would quit school for an early marriage. The young girl refused. The reason? If she had to have an early marriage she would take the cow which was given to her family by a project like Heifer. Her father agreed and let his daughter finish school because he wanted to keep the cow within the family.

Heifer believes in empowering women and helping bring peace to community tribes. Currently we are working with a group of women in Rajasthan, India where we’re teaching them about diverse resources, such as livestock and kitchen gardens. By the end of the project, the women will have an increased income, food consumption, and improved health. They will have also created a life built by sustainability.

To view just how Heifer is helping in India – watch the video below.

Is Malaria Eradication the Right Goal?

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Back in 2007, the contemporary titans of development funding, Bill and Melinda Gates, called for the global eradication of malaria. Remember when Bill unleashed supposedly malarial mosquitos on an audience at TED (5:05)?
Surely malaria eradication a good thing, right? The WHO thought so, and they got on board. But a new series of papers published in the journal Lancet is not as gungho.
The Guardian‘s Global Health blog has a good synopsis of the findings:
“The most startling paper … is an analysis by Oliver Sabot and colleagues from the Clinton Health Access Initiative in Boston, USA, who take a hard-headed look at the relative costs in four impoverished malaria-endemic countries of eliminating the mosquito-borne disease, versus controlling it. They found that there was a only a small probability (less than 10%) that elimination would be cost-saving over 50 years in three of those countries … and a moderate chance in the other. …
“The other problem they found was that funding for malaria control at the moment is geared to bringing down the numbers of cases rapidly – good in itself, but not the way things have to go if elimination is the goal. …
“All this is not to say that elimination should no longer be contemplated. It’s just more possible in some countries than in others. …”

A New Nonprofit Model? Coke Is It.

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In her work with the Gates Foundation, Melinda French Gates visits loads of places in developing countries where people have no electricity, no running water, no decent shelter. “I’m startled by all the things that they don’t have,” she said during a TEDx talk last month. “But I’m surprised by the one thing that they do have: Coca-Cola. Coke is everywhere.”

And so Gates set out to study why the Coca-Cola Company can get their products to remote places never blessed with necessities like vaccines and toilets. “If they can do that, why can’t governments and NGOs do the same thing?” she wondered.

Gates identified the three keys to Coke’s success, and nonprofits who struggle to serve people in far-flung places would do well to take note. Tracking and using real-time data, tapping into local entrepreneurial talent and marketing strategically have made Coke products a hot commodity around the globe. Just imagine what the world would look like if quality health care, education and food security were as in demand and easily available to everyone.

Heifer International is partnering with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in East Africa to help dairy farmers improve milk production and distribution. Learn more about the project here.

Graphics Show Good News

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Good news is reported on lower child death rates in Kenya and other countries. Ted Conference presenter Hans Rosling uses graphic “bubbles” to show new UN data to help us see the big picture on reaching Millennium Development Goals. Some investments — electricity, clean water, and education (especially for girls) — may take an entire generation, but great progress steadily follows.

Click here for more information.

Measuring the Fight Against Poverty

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Photo courtesy betterplace.org

The May 17 edition of the New Yorker profiles Esther Duflo, an M.I.T. professor of development economics who co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in 2003. The article offers insight into the study of poverty issues from a new perspective. Click here for a sneak peek.

A MacArthur “genius” fellowship winner who also won this year’s John Bates Clark medal for the best economist in America under age 40, Duflo is counted among the economists who believe there is something that can be done about poverty. According to the article, “she boldly told the TED conference that she could ‘take the guesswork out of policymaking.’”

Writer Ian Parker tracks her on trips to India and Rwanda, where she helps conduct and evaluate randomized control trials (like those used in drug trials) to test social policy questions like: Does microfinance work? Can watching a play that demonstrates the worth of women in leadership roles prompt social change?

It’s an interesting discussion of one economist’s theories of how governments and NGOs should tackle poverty alleviation. The New Yorker requires a subscription to read the whole article online; but you can also pick up a newsstand copy almost anywhere.

Is Aid Money Well Spent?

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Yesterday, CNN featured on their website development economist and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of poverty alleviation Esther Duflo as part of Ted Talk Tuesdays. Duflo spoke at the TED2010 conference in February.

The lead paragraph says, “Governments and charities have spent billions to try to wipe out poverty, but award-winning economist Esther Duflo says we really don’t know if that money has been well spent.”



While Duflo advocates using the scientific method to determine the best use of aid, a five-year study of Heifer projects conducted by Western Michigan University found that Heifer’s model of sustainable development works.


Over a five-year period, evaluators assessed more than 139 projects, interviewed nearly 5,000 participants, and visited 1,300 projects in 20 countries. The evaluators summarized that, “it is beyond doubt that in all 20 of the countries we have examined, Heifer has brought large overall benefits to very large numbers of low income rural families. In particular, there are always substantial benefits wherever the elements of basic human needs are in short supply…”


Read more about Western Michigan’s evaluations here.