Village women in parts of Andhra Pardesh, India are using a local radio station to educate their communities of best practices in health and farming. Photo: Kris Van de Vijver (flickr)

One of the most basic forms of technology — the radio — is helping women in rural parts of India's Andhra Pradesh educate other women in their communities.

Deccan Development Society (DDS), a grassroots non-profit based in Andhra Pardesh, works with some of the poorest communities with programs focused on health, education, food security and other methods of empowerment for women. Last October, DDS developed a community radio station that broadcasts daily interviews with local village women throughout the state.

Most of the women interviewed are poor, uneducated and illiterate. Many of them work in the fields or are involved in some form of manual labor in their villages. Despite their limitations, these women are able to use the radio to discuss their work and community issues that may help their peers. For example, discussions on which herbal medicines to use for livestock and efficient farming tools are helpful for other women in the village and surrounding areas. The women are paid for their contribution which allows them to feel a sense of empowerment by earning their own money.

BBC News documents the initiative by DDS and spoke to one of its founders, P.V. Satheesh who explained the benefits of the initiative.

The local radio station has helped women in the region become more confident…the idea was to get local voices to talk to the local people on issues that were close to their hearts. It is a means of asserting themselves in this rural setting, of finding a voice and putting themselves in greater control of their own destiny.

Tina in Philly makes her own laundry detergent and cuts washcloths out of old towels. Lisa in New York pays for everything in cash and leaves her card at home so she isn't tempted to use it if she doesn't really need to.

These helpful tips are a sign of the times, and contributed by readers of Living with Less, a mini-site created by the New York Times that is dedicated to sharing "the human side of the global recession." People post their recession-related tips, which range from the obscure to the obvious, as well as share their photos and stories.

What happens when tens of thousands of impoverished Africans sue one of Britain's biggest oil companies for sickening them with toxic waste?

In 2006, the British company Trafigura unloaded a ship full of untreated chemical slop at a household garbage dump in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire. Scores of people living nearby were diagnosed with poisoning, hundreds lost their livelihoods as trash-scavengers, and 17 died. Now, 30,000 residents are suing the oil trading company for exposing them to toxic sludge. The company paid for a clean-up and admitted to "neglecting its duty of care," but has denied responsibility for the poisonings. The trial starts this fall.

Al Jazeera chronicles this David-versus-Goliath tale of Britain's biggest-ever lawsuit in the first installment of Corporations on Trial, which covers five lawsuits that pit ordinary people against the world's most powerful and wealthy corporations.

The other shows are just as compelling: Yesterday, the program aired the story of why Native American villagers in Alaska are suing Exxon Mobil. Next week, learn why 40,000 Indonesians who fled their homes after a volcanic eruption blame a gas company for their troubles.

Pigs in a crowded sty in Wieckowice, Poland. Photo: Wojciech Grzedzinski for The International Herald Tribune. visionshare (flickr)

Pork is a staple of the Romanian diet, and the country has become one of the largest producers of pig products in Europe. But it's not necessarily Romanians who are profiting from the growing industry.

U.S. agribusiness giant Smithfield Foods has carved its way into Eastern Europe's pork market, tapping European Union farm subsidies to set up shop in countries like Poland and Romania. Since its arrival in 1999, the Virginia-based Fortune 500 company has swiftly become Romania's top pork producer.

Smithfield has upended traditional ways of doing farming in Romania, one of Europe's poorest countries. The New York Times reports that 90 percent of the country's small farmers have lost their jobs in the last six years. Many have been forced to leave home in search of construction jobs in other EU member states.

The impacts of Smithfield's empire can be tracked all the way to West Africa, where the company exports cheap pork scraps to markets in Liberia, Equatorial Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire. In these countries, frozen offal sells at half the price of local pork — a bargain for consumers that again comes at the expense of local farmers.

“My farm isn’t working,” said Cote d'Ivoire farmer Patrice Yao, who told the The New York Times that he owns 45 hogs compared to the 100 he had three years ago."The Europeans are sending all their cheap meat to our market."

As unemployment increases worldwide, countries are looking at ways to stop the bleeding. Spain, Japan and the Czech Republic have decided to pay unemployed immigrants to return to their homelands.

Spain is offering immigrants from outside Europe an average of $18,500 in unemployment benefits to leave. The government is hoping to lower its 17.4 percent unemployment rate, the highest in Europe. Those who take the deal get 40 percent up front, 60 percent once they arrive in their countries of origin. They can't reapply for work visas in Spain for three years.

Japan is offering a one-time payment of 300,000 yen (about $3,100) to South American factory workers of Japanese descent who buy a plane ticket home, plus an additional sum for each dependent. Immigrants taking the deal agree not to "return until economic and employment conditions improve." Japan's unemployment benefits pay nearly $2,100 per month. So, unemployed immigrants could theoretically make more money without a job in Japan than they would by taking the offer to leave.

The Czech government will provide unemployed non-EU citizens with a ticket home plus 500 Euros — more if the worker has young children, reports the Wall Street Journal. When the program started, there were no restrictions on when a worker could return. On April 1, however, the Czech Republic stopped issuing work visas for five countries including Mongolia, whose citizens represent two-thirds of those in the pay-to-leave program.

Impacts on unemployment have been negligible at best. The Czech Interior Ministry says that their program has been a success: it's filled nearly 65 percent of its 2,000-person quota. Still, that number is less than 1 percent of all unemployed workers. The 4,000 people who've accepted Spain's offer is far from the government's goal of 100,000. And fewer than 400 people have applied for the program in Japan.

It seems that many immigrants are choosing to weather the economic storm where they are. Their chances of gainful employment in the country they left must not be any better.

Photo: JelleS (flickr)

Why are so many people in France stashing their money in cows rather than the bank?

"It's a much better investment than real estate and much more tangible than the stock market," Pierre Marguerit tells the New York Times. Cows can offer a return of up to 5 percent, compared to less than 2 percent for a regular savings account.

Marguerit is the president of Gestel, a European company that helps investors buy and rent cows for investment purposes. Gestel's business has doubled this year. Around 37,000 cows are managed under some type of investment contract in Europe.

Cow investors can either board the cow on their own farm or chose to have the company's farmers take care of it until the investor chooses to sell. The return can average 3 to 5 percent — or more if the cow produces an offspring.

You can rent a cow, too, but that's more attractive for dairy farmers who lack the cash to purchase one. Regular folks are less likely to want to board and milk a cow themselves — although they clearly aren't averse to seeking offbeat ways to squeeze a little more return from their investments.

Displaced Tamil civilians fleeing their homes in north-eastern Sri Lanka, January 2009. Photo: trokilinochchi (flickr)

When the fighting ends, it's going to take a lot to rebuild the economy in Sri Lanka's war-ravaged northeast. Death, lost livelihoods and displacement — more than 200,000 people in the last few months — have become commonplace over the course of the island's 25-year civil war between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, otherwise known as the LTTE or simply "the Tigers."

Fishing and agriculture — the region's predominant economic sectors — have been hit the hardest. A lot of Sri Lanka's food — specifically rice, vegetables and fruit — used to be grown there. But with the war, not even the population can live off what's produced locally. The World Food Program, referring to the formerly Tiger-held areas in the north, has said "the entire population of the Vanni is facing a food crisis due to continuous displacement, crop failure and recent floods."

Independent journalists aren't allowed into this region, so it's hard to get a good picture of the current state of the economy there. To get a little perspective I spoke with Gretchen Ansorge, a Mercy Corps program officer who worked in Trincomalee, a government-controlled district in a contested part of northeastern Sri Lanka, shortly after the 2004 tsunami. I asked her about the effects of the war on the economy:

The Tamil-controlled area didn’t have very much cross-border trade. These were remote areas that were difficult to travel to and from, and mostly all dependent on subsistence farming. I’m guessing that because these people have lost their plots of land due to displacements, don’t have access to other markets, and aren’t able to get out to sea and fish, this is probably having a strong effect on the economy in the former LTTE-controlled areas. Especially because Sri Lankans are largely dependent on fish as a staple. In the northeast, market linkages to other places weren’t as robust as in other regions, and so they had more limited access to goods outside of what they produced.

So what and how long is it going to take to rebuild the economy in the devastated northeast? Some say it could take up to two years for IDPs to even return to their homes. Families will require food assistance for a while, and Sri Lanka's agriculture and fishing industries will take time to recover. Some aid agencies already have plans for post-conflict rebuilding. The World Bank, for example, plans to rehabilitate wartime damage to soil, irrigation systems, rural roads, water and farms.

Mercy Corps' Ansorge, however, says the pressing question is how the government will respond. After years of virtually no infrastructure or financial support in the northeast from either the Tigers or the Sri Lankan government, these things will be essential for post-war rehabilitation:

More than anything, Tamils want a responsive government. Now that the Sri Lankan government has virtually succeeded in regaining control of the entire country, this is one of those moments when they can either choose to respond to these displacements and show their commitment to improving conditions in the majority-Tamil areas — by providing funding to the region and building infrastructure — or not.

Even after this war comes to a definitive end, it will be years before the northeast can wean itself off international aid and once again contribute to Sri Lanka's economic growth.

Rice is incredibly important for delta communities. Photo: Jeremy Barnicle/Mercy Corps

Mercy Corps has started an agency blog to give a glimpse into the work, thoughts and ideas of our team around the world. Here's a post I wrote yesterday that is really appropriate for Global Envision.

Farming communities in Myanmar's Irrawaddy Delta have always followed a cycle of debt. Each year, wealthy land owners would lend farmers money, tools and cattle needed to till the soil. After the harvest, the debt is repayed and the cycle continues.

Farming is important for delta communities. The Irrawaddy Delta produces more rice than any other region in the country. Nearly everyone is employed through rice production or the fishing industry.

So when Cyclone Nargis hit the delta about a year ago, the storm not only destroyed homes, fishing boats and agricultural fields, it destroyed livelihoods.

Nargis was the worst natural disaster Myanmar has ever experienced and racked up about $4 billion in damage. Some say the damage sustained in the Irrawaddy Delta was as bad as the Indian Ocean tsunami. Emergency aid from the UN, the government and NGOs has helped shelter and feed the thousands of survivors but there's still a lot of recovery work to be done.

Today, farmers looking to start over are caught in an incredibly frustrating situation: the wealthy land owners that used to lend money and tools lost everything as well, so now there is nobody to lend. Without cattle, tools and seeds, the farmers have little chance of ever getting ahead. Adding to the situation, prices for crops are down from past years. This leaves farming communities with few options, therefore trapping them in poverty.

I first learned about this debt trap in the Al Jazeera video below. The situation is so heartbreaking, but also too common in poverty-stricken communities. Mercy Corps has helped more than 7,000 families rebuild their rice paddies in the delta. We've also given more than 25,000 people small grants to help them earn an income, which in turn helps restart the local economy and helps free these communities from the cycle of debt.

Like many young people who dream of coming to the wealthy Gulf States to find work, 27-year-old Anesu Gamba came here to Dubai three years ago to escape Zimbabwe’s crippling poverty.

I met Anesu, a soft-spoken man with a round face, at the Department for Naturalization and Residency in Dubai. He went there to cancel the visit visa he requested for his brother because he could no longer afford the ticket. “I wanted him to come and enjoy Dubai, he was so excited,” Anesu said, gazing sadly at the ground.

In the beginning, his new life in the Gulf was just as he had imagined. “In the first two years, I lived in a dream, I had friends, and I bought a car," said Anesu. He was also able to send money to his mother, father and younger brother in Zimbabwe, none of whom have jobs.

But last month, Anesu didn't send his family any money. He was among several laid off by the small public-relations company that hired him as a graphic designer. The company blamed the downsizing on the global economic downturn.

About a quarter of Zimbabwe's population has gone abroad, and together they send home anywhere from $360 million to $1 billion in remittances, reports the UN news agency, IRIN. These remittances are often credited for saving the country from complete collapse.

But the burden of supporting family members abroad is heavy for those in the Gulf. Many, like Anesu, have cut other costs to keep up the remittances. Anesu sold his car and moved into a shared apartment with three other migrants. “Sending money home is not an option, it’s an obligation," he told me. "I just can’t let my family down."

Finding a new job in Dubai isn't easy these days, but returning to Zimbabwe isn't very tempting. Less than 6 percent of people living in Zimbabwe are employed, the UN said recently. At its peak last year, inflation reached 231 million percent and Save the Children reports that more than 75 percent of the population lives in abject poverty.

Anesu thinks his chances of finding a job are better in Dubai. "I have one month to find a job after the cancellation of my visa," he said. "I came to Dubai with hopes and dreams. I will try my best to find a job, even as a waiter, a dishwasher, I don’t care. At the end, I don’t have many options, do I?"

Traffic in Brazil. Photo: Fernando Meyer (flickr)

Car sales are down just about everywhere. Brazil is no exception. Sales of passenger cars dropped by 10 percent in April, trucks and buses by a quarter. But one niche market seems to be doing just fine: armored cars.

High crime rates are the norm in Brazil's biggest cities. In Sao Paulo, where armed robbery of pedestrians and motorists is fairly common, resident Craig Bavington tells the New York Times, "It is not a question of if you are going to be assaulted, it is when it is going to happen."

Commuters in high-traffic areas are among the most susceptible. Motorists in congested cities such as Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Recife become sitting ducks for criminals. Having an armored car that can withstand a shot from a .44 magnum provides a sense of security. João Neves feels like he’s "inside a fortress" when he is driving in his armored 2005 Volkswagen Passat. (Other armored choices include Jeeps, Mercedes, and Chevys.)

Sales of armored vehicles in Brazil have increased more than threefold over the past decade. With roughly 120 manufacturers throughout the country, the average cost of an armored vehicle ranges between $22,000 and $55,000. Dealers offer payment plans that make armored vehicles even more enticing for middle-class families.

Brazilians seem to be putting their safety ahead of other spending priorities. Armored car sales are rising as the country experienced its worst quarter of economic growth on record. In Mr. Neves’ opinion, "Even though the crisis does exist, I consider my well-being and my security a priority."

Men smoking from a water pipe at an Instanbul cafe. John Picken (flickr)

Turkey is about to put the kibosh on smoking, joining the ranks of Ireland, Belgium and Spain with a countrywide ban on lighting up in enclosed public spaces. But can what some call a Western-influenced health trend actually stub out an activity so intrinsic to Turkish daily life?

The ban could hurt thousands of Turkish teahouses that dot the streets of Istanbul, according to The Atlantic. The men-only "nargiles" are more like community centers where people talk politics, play backgammon or relax with a water-pipe or cigarette. The Atlantic says that hundreds of nargiles have closed their doors in the midst of a hurting economy. Starting in July, teahouses would face a 5,000 lira ($2,800) fine if customers smoke inside.

Nearly a third of Turks are smokers, according to the Turkish Journal of Cancer — a figure that surpasses U.S. smokers (23 percent) but pales in comparison to countries like Chile (37 percent) and Cuba (40 percent).

According to the National Coalition on Tobacco and Health, Turks are spending nearly $20 million a year on tobacco. The result: $30 billion in health care costs and 100,000 deaths a year from smoking-related illnesses

Some Turks are worried the new law will extinguish teahouses, which are viewed as emblematic of the country's traditional culture. Murat Ağaoğlu, head of the Turkish Association of Teahouses, finds it hard to imagine sitting in a teahouse and not being able to light up. He says the law should be modified to allow smoking in designated areas. "Many of our members worry about the future of their business," says Ağaoğlu. "How are they supposed to stop people from smoking?"

Faruk Taş, an Istanbul teahouse owner, echoes this argument. “Where are these people going to smoke?” he asks. “I can understand banning cigarettes, but this is a water-pipe garden. This is in our culture.”

Lebanon’s banking system has helped ease the pressures of the financial crisis within the nation. Photo: thriol (flickr)

Lebanon’s economy grew by 9 percent last year, one of seven nations to show positive economic growth in the midst of a worldwide financial turndown.

This figure is especially surprising when you consider the amount of economic hardship Lebanon has endured recently — including attacks from Israel, strife between the nation’s two political parties, ongoing civil conflict, few natural resources, and a national debt of almost $46 billion.

Lebanon’s economic security has primarily come from its risk-averse banking sector. In 2007, the country’s chief banker, Riad Salameh, advised Lebanon’s commercial banks to "get out of all international investments related to the international markets." Conflict also contributed to what Salameh described to the BBC as the banking industry's "conservative reflex":

The system we created has been tested against wars, against instability, against political assassinations. And our sector would be much more developed if Lebanon did not have political and security risks, but it has also induced us to have a conservative reflex because we were always getting ready for the worst case scenario.

Lebanon isn't going to get through the global economic crisis unscathed — the economy is expected to grow by 3 to 4 percent this year. Still, due to its conservative banking sector, the Lebanese economy is in better shape than most.

I don't think anyone would say it's easy to tell someone they no longer have a job. Especially Shelly Polum, an executive with Ram Tool, a small tool-and-die-cast manufacturer in Grafton, Wisconsin. In an audio slide show on the New York Times website, Shelly reflects on the emotional toll of saying to people she's worked with for years: "I'm laying you off."

A Mongolian herder at work. The drop in demand for cashmere made from the soft fibers of Mongolian goats is putting many herders out of work. Photo: Smee (flickr)

The global economic downturn seems to be hitting every corner of the world — including the Gobi desert in Mongolia. A steep drop in demand for cashmere and wool made from the soft fibers of Mongolian goats are putting the country's nomadic herders out of work, according to a Wall Street Journal article.

The implications of the drop in demand for cashmere are very real in Mongolia. The Wall Street Journal reports that about a quarter of the population earns a living off of raising animals. Borrowing more than they could afford, many herders were living off credit from banks, who themselves put too much faith in the price for cashmere. Over-leveraged herders are now being forced to sell their tents or livestock to pay off their debts.

Purevdelger Budkhuu, a 38-year-old widow, sold all of her 128 goats to pay back her $1,270 loan to the bank. Budkhuu moved to the city with her two children in hopes of finding other work but has yet to find a job.

”I don’t know what to do. I can’t go back to the countryside because I have no animals...and I can’t stay here because I can’t find a job.”

Many New Yorkers line up for a tasty and inexpensive snack at one of the city's many street carts. Photo: btorzyn (flickr)

Job losses in New York City has created a black market in a commodity you might not expect: street vending permits.

In a city with rising unemployment —the rate was 8.1 percent in March, nearly twice the rate of a year earlier — some New Yorkers are turning to street vending to make ends meet, Jennifer 8. Lee reports in City Room, a The New York Times blog.

A black market has developed because New York City caps the number of vending permits it issues, and nowadays far more people want to be street vendors than there are permits available.

Some of the city's existing permit holders have realized the potential profits in selling their permits. The going price of one is about $8,000 to $12,000, Lee notes. Sales have been brisk: "[A]bout two-thirds of permits are not even used by the original owner," she writes.