How to Cook without a Fire

Posted on February 9, 2012 | Leave a comment

One of the most difficult facets of life for the poorest people in developing countries, is the daily work of simple cooking. First you must gather firewood (and water), then you need to transport this to where you live, and cook your food over an open flame, while inhaling smoke from this highly inefficient means of cooking your meals. Smoke from indoor cooking fires kills more than 2 million children a year in the developing world.

Despite the quantities of oil and gas currently being pumped out of the ground in Africa, most of the rural population still depends on firewood or inefficient charcoal as shown in this slideshow of people making charcoal in Liberia. (Liberia has severe fuel poverty and a non-existent rating from the World Bank for Alternative Energy.) Both the firewood gathering and the process for making charcoal have contributed to deforestation as well. The time spent in these activities can also contribute to children’s inability to spend sufficient time in school and the distances traveled can frequently present life-threatening situations for women especially, as in Darfur.

A potential solution to these many problems is solar cooking and there are several organizations involved in getting the technology into the hands of the people who most need it. These cookers work purely with the bright light of the sun (no fires!), cook the food in a better way, preserving nutrients, and can even be used to purify water. (Solar Cookers International even brings all the data together in one wiki so you can browse and find the most recent information on a particular country like Liberia.)

Sometimes I think that all the solutions are there: we just need to open our eyes, minds and hearts to see them!

Thanks for stopping by,

Heather McC

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Posted in Sustainability

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Transparent Apples

Posted on February 4, 2012 | Leave a comment

Apple Inc. has been in the news recently as, among other efforts to pressure the company on ensuring a “clean” supply chain, an internet petition for the company to ensure protection for its Chinese suppliers’ employees has been circulating. This is a great idea and one which I hope will be implemented (actually, Apple already seems to be doing quite a fair amount) but a lot of people seem to be missing some amazing and positive aspects of this story:

  1. Westerners (mostly American) are protesting working conditions in China, which, just a few years ago, was almost as opaque as North Korea. Now we are getting news on what’s going on and workers in China are even able to protest their own working conditions. With China’s drive towards economic power, and the West’s insatiable desire for cool gadgets, a nice side-effect seems to be improved working conditions in China.
  2. Because of the increasing interdependence of the global economy, consumers now have an interesting new source of political leverage. Although lots of people lament the flight of American manufacturing jobs overseas, this paradoxically seems to have given us more ability to influence a country’s treatment of its own citizens, even helping to stop child labor.
  3. We can actually trace the supply chain. This isn’t an easy thing to do. Supply chains, sometimes because of corrupt practices, but also due to incredibly complicated logistics (multiple vendors, countries, regions, transportation issues, thousands of humans involved, tracking mistakes) are not easy to track back. It’s a lot of work but with new technologies in supply chain management (and with the help I’m sure of some of those iProducts) this is now becoming possible.
  4. Apple’s step in releasing supply chain information is nothing short of world-shifting. If other companies follow this path, a level of transparency will exist in the global economy that is breathtaking to contemplate.

And it’s not just the technology industry that is being affected. (Although it does make some sense that, given that the technology industry is by definition on the cutting edge of technology, they would also be the first to implement new processes.) Blood diamonds, timber tracking, fair trade practices, all of these point to a global drive towards transparency which I am watching with a mixture of both awe at the speed this is taking place, and increasing hope that this heralds a better future for not just factory workers but for all of us across the planet.

Thanks for stopping by,

Heather McC

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Posted in Good Governance

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Peace in Surprising Places

Posted on February 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

I’ve been gradually updating my numbers in the New Year but noticed that my peace numbers (from the Global Peace Index page on Wikipedia) are all up to date (Iceland, New Zealand, and Japan lead the way, while Sudan, Iraq and Somalia hold the bottom posts) so I wanted to focus on something a little different.

I came across a TED talk yesterday, Why I chose a gun, given by Peter van Uhm, the Netherlands’ chief of defense. It’s a terrific talk and presents a fascinating and cogent explanation of how a strong national defense actually preserves peace.

But going even further, a really terrific example of people in uniform committed to and working towards peace is the non-profit organization, Spirit of America, which helps fund development projects initiated by U.S. military personnel overseas, with donations. These have included everything from procuring sewing machines for Afghan women in Kandahar to helping the Navy SEALS help a child with a life-threatening tumor get medical treatment.

Sometimes the people who we would least expect to be promoting peace are actually the ones who are the most passionate about it. I know lots of people will disagree with this but if you can put aside the media hype both ways and look a little deeper, what you find may surprise you.

Thanks for stopping by,

Heather McC

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Gauging Women’s Well-being

Posted on January 29, 2012 | Leave a comment

I checked on the indicator I’ve been using, Women’s Proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments (%) this morning and found that the 2011 numbers had not yet been uploaded. As I’ve been updating these numbers for the New Year, I’ve also been looking at the indicators I’ve chosen. In the case of gauging women’s well-being, I would ultimately like to get the figures of how much of the wealth of any particular country is realistically controlled by the women of that country. (Though I don’t believe wealth alone is the perfect indicator of empowerment, it is about as close as I believe you can get.) That measure doesn’t exist yet so I will have to keep looking and, in the meantime, women’s participation levels in their governments will have to do.

But this exploration always brings up a difficult question. There are many women who do not believe they should have the rights and privileges as men. This came home to me after seeing an article on the “honor” deaths of four women in one family in Canada. The husband, second wife (the marriage was polygamous), and son felt completely justified in murdering the father’s three daughters and first wife, because the women were acting “dishonorably” in the frame of traditional tribal Islamic laws. (They were also from Afghanistan which possibly still has the most repressive laws in the world regarding women’s rights.)

But this is what they believe in with all their heart. Who are we to impose our belief systems on other countries?

Although the above example is a very stark example, there are millions of other less-defined examples that we, as a planet face. (Consider the current French debate on headscarves for one.)

Over 100 years ago, in colonial India, a British colonel, Charles James Napier, was confronted with this kind of situation, when Hindu priests complained to him about the British ban on “sati” or the traditional burning alive of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre. His response, as recounted by his brother was:

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

I find myself, though I truly wish to respect other cultures’ customs, siding with the Colonel’s sentiments in the majority of today’s instances of women’s rights violations. “Culture” is not an excuse.

Thanks for stopping by,

Heather McC

PS. There aren’t too many examples on the planet today, but occasionally, the men need to have their rights respected by women. Balance, it’s all about balance!

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Posted in Empowering Women

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Unemployment and Entrepreneurs

Posted on January 26, 2012 | Leave a comment

Sometimes I just don’t know what to make of the numbers or, really, the lack of them. I’ve been using the World Bank’s figures for a while now for several of my indicators but was very disappointed when I checked yesterday and found that the unemployment figures have yet to be updated from 2009. So, off to Wikipedia, and their page on global unemployment, which largely seem to come from the CIA (perhaps unsurprisingly a rather good source of data). One good thing about these numbers is that there are more of them for more countries. One bad thing is that they aren’t always reliable. Also, data on unemployment for most of the countries on the African continent seems to be almost non-existent and I’m pretty sure there are people working there. (C’mon, World Bank, get your act together! Why can’t you or anyone else provide this data?!)

Anyway, putting aside my on-going (and sorry, probably boring) frustration with available, accurate data, I was surprised to see how slightly the numbers actually moved. Despite the media’s consistent declaration of an impending economic apocalypse, this doesn’t seem to be happening. Yes, many countries are down, and many people are out of work, but there are lots of people still working and increasingly, at least in the U.S., if you can’t find a job working for someone else, you can always create your own. (I am noticing this not just in the broader economy but also with my friends, who are starting up micro-crafts businesses on Etsy, delving into network marketing, and just generally hustling and bustling!)

One of the least appreciated (as well as most difficult) ways to really make a difference in the world is to help create jobs and foster the entrepreneurial spirit, not just in the U.S. but all across the world. One of my favorite “charity” websites is Kiva which is firmly rooted in this philosophy of helping people help themselves.  (There are more and more of these kinds of organizations, termed “social businesses” by the founder of micro-finance, Muhammad Yunus.)  Kiva allows people all over the world to lend very small amounts of money to entrepreneurs all over the world, helping get small businesses started. The money is then paid back and can be re-circulated to the next entrepreneur.

With the media’s usual focus on huge corporations, I am increasingly impressed by the numbers of smaller businesses that manage to not only spring up, but keep going, and even thrive. Maybe the lack of unemployment data just shows that the powers that be haven’t figured out how to show that lots of people are working, but in new and unconventional ways.

Thanks for stopping by,

Heather McC

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Posted in Good Work

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