I had the good fortune to listen to Sachs speak at the biannual CIDA conference in Ottawa last year. Although I had read things about him before the meeting describing him as some sort of “economic hitman”, I was impressed by his presentation. Now I just finished reading his book End of Poverty, Economic Possibilities […]

This is simply awesome! I wish I had thought of that; Kiva is a website gives you the option to make direct microcredit loans to small entrepreneurs in developing countries. You can choose to donate as little as 25$ through Paypal, and throughout the duration of the loan (usually 6-12 months) you get updates from […]

Last Thursday, I spent several hours reading up on Norwegian and Canadian statistics in a number of categories; partly because I was preparing a research paper on Norwegian development aid, and partly because of proper interest. Here are some of my disparate findings (sources: Statistics Norway, CIDA, Norad and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs […]

Just doing research for a short paper on brain drain. The statistics I am coming over are quite incredible. For example, there are more Ethiopian doctors in Chicago alone, than in all of Ethiopia! And of the 700 doctors that were educated in Zambia after independence, only about 60 are left. 80% of all the […]

Today we all went over to the students from Mexico city who are working at the project, they rent a house in the village. We saw Voces Inocentes (Innocent Voices), a movie about some little boys growing up under the civil war in El Salvador. Although sometimes a bit clichy, it was still very well […]

I became interested in BRAC after listening to a presentation at the Dean’s Graduate Conference at OISE (an otherwise very interesting conference), and decided to read up on it. This thesis was in the OISE library, and I couldn’t check it out, so I had to return three times to finish reading it. Quite enjoyable […]

I think I found out about this book from the Engineers Without Borders discussion forum. (Actually, I read Mastering the Machine, and then leafed through MTM Revisited to see if anything was new.) It is produced by a foundation set up by E. F. Schumacher, which works with appropriate technology in developing countries. The author […]

This is a spin-off of an essay I did for envirosci about urbanization. I came across it in a reading, ordered it through interlibrary loan, and it arrived like a month later - think they had to get it from another university. Really nice and readable book, with only one section that I found not […]

Ever since I arrived in Toronto, I’ve been fascinated by the multi-culturality and the way different cultures integrate or do not integrate with each other. I’ve wanted to understand more about the process, and I was happy to come across Calculated Kindness : Global Restructuring, Immigration and Settlement in Canada published by OISE and edited […]

The conference in Ottawa was all about the Millenium Development Goals - but what are those? According to statistics, less then 10% of Canadians have ever heard about them (and I can’t say I really knew, before I began my studies), so let’s do a little introduction. According to Stephen Lewis, special UN envoy for […]