Sharon Chang, left, is the founder of an intitiative to become a talent agency for social innovators. Photo: bryanesque (Flickr)

It's an unlikely romance, fit for Hollywood: social change meets corporate marketing. Now, one of Tinseltown's most successful inventions is about to join the cast.

Enter the first social-entrepreneurship talent agent.

Meet Sharon Chang, founder of Yoxi.tv. The former chief creative director of 19 Entertainment, the company that produces American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance, Chang has jumped into nonprofit entrepreneurship with a totally original business model.

Yoxi, her startup, is a pro bono talent development agency for "social innovation rockstars" … sponsored by corporations looking to market themselves as do-gooders … that happens to be shooting its own "reality" show … in Liberia.

It's so complicated it just might work. A company like IBM, for example, might ask to sponsor a social innovator working on putting "big data" to use in the education sector. Yoxi might sift through their roster of promising entrepreneurs and suggest Heather Hiles of Rrripple, whose project is aligned with IBM’s brand interests. Yoxi would then use its media savvy to help Hiles and her ideas hit the big time—with IBM attaching its brand to reap marketing benefits and tap fresh ideas.

Last month, Chang explained to a Forbes columnist that she'd once toyed with a more conventional TV show along these lines, presumably an Apprentice-like contest for social innovators. But she concluded that the for-profit mass media model wasn't right for her mission:

I wanted to find fresh approaches to distribution. ...Even when you have a powerful story, it’s difficult to find an equally powerful channel. I don’t think employing celebrities should be the default and/or the only answer.

Yoxi's answer, at least for now, is to design a rigorous selection process for "social innovation rockstars"—their word for the sort of ambassadors who can catch the imagination of the public and push new ideas into the mainstream. People with great ideas and the charisma to match. Here's Yoxi spokeswoman Kasia Reterska, in an email to Global Envision:

Selection of SIRs [social innovation rockstars] happens via our research process where we rate about 14 metrics around a social entrepreneur. We measure typical attributes like the success of their organization, etc., but also focus on things like a person's charisma and media savvy. Like the notion of casting a TV show or play, we feel it's essential to find entrepreneurs who, along with a great idea, are passionate and effective communicators. These are the people who will stand out in the crowd and expedite their work in the social innovation space.

Brands can sponsor specific Rockstars. … We're just as focused on finding SIRs to help a brand via shared-value ideals as we are to harness influencers around a specific topic/entrepreneur.

In other words, Yoxi's goal is to recruit, package and promote a stable of fresh-faced innovators with useful ideas, then match each with a corporation that'd fund it in exchange for the marketing benefits. If it works, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Women farmers in Africa produce over 60 percent of all food crops. CIMMYT (flickr)

Women comprise 43 percent of the world’s farmers. In Africa, it’s 80 percent. Women plant, harvest, process and sell their crops, but men continue to dominate agricultural science and research. This may be about to change.

African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD) is trying to close the R&D gender gap. Their program fast-tracks female science careers in agriculture, empowering them to contribute more effectively to hunger and poverty alleviation in their own communities - a model that could be replicated internationally.

Although African women produce 60 to 80 percent of food crops, they receive significantly less (5% as of 2008) of the agricultural training and tools available to men, says the United Nations. A 2010-2011 research report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization shows that women could produce 20-30 percent more if they had equal access. This creates a subsequent increase in household income, health, and community food supply. The East Africa Report emphasizes that research is also pivotal in fostering innovation. Without a seat at the table, women cannot influence practices. Who better to innovate than the farmers themselves?

Nothing builds prosperity better than peace. And sometimes, a new study finds, nothing builds peace better than a few healthy arguments.

As crises and conflicts ebb, international groups are looking to create sustainable peace in places where peace has been the exception of late. One tactic is the promotion of civil society through education and reform campaigns. But is it possible to educate the violence out of a society?

Consider Liberia, which is still vulnerable five years after a 14-year civil war. The UN, in tandem with the Liberian government, has initiated a campaign to resolve current conflicts and prevent future ones by educating citizens on civic cooperation. Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) monitored the results in a robust 22-month study and produced some promising findings.

The campaign was conducted in three of Liberia’s counties most scarred by war and sought to educate citizens on their rights and those of others, to promote collective problem solving, and to encourage non-violent conflict resolution. Citizens went through eight days of workshops and were then asked to teach what they had learned to others in the community.

Afterward, IPA measured the impact of attending the workshops. Little impact was found on political participation, civic knowledge, and awareness of human rights. The study did, however, find a striking impact on the prevalence of disputes and their resolution.

More disputes occurred after the campaign than before, as neighbors were more prone to confront each other over grievances and assert their rights, but overall violence decreased and the propensity to resolve conflicts grew.

The number of overall violent outbreaks and the small sample size call into question the statistical significance of the results, but IPA found that communities that had undergone treatment were 59 percent less likely than untreated communities to experience violent disputes.

Since peace and prosperity often go hand in hand, such civic education programs may come to show that how well we live is a function of how well we get along.

Ben Osborn is a 2011 graduate of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Read his other contributions to Global Envision.

In 1978, the poor West African country of Liberia borrowed $6 million from a New York bank. The Liberian government promised to use the money to buy and develop an oil refinery, and to pay the money back in seven years.

Today it's not clear if either of those things ever happened.

Two years after the loan, the Liberian government was overthrown in a coup, which later led to a 14-year civil war. Meanwhile, the loan was bought and sold several times, according to allAfrica.com.

But now two investment funds say they hold the note and are entitled to $20 million from the current government of Liberia — a claim upheld by a London court. Today Liberia is led by a democratic government whose president is working with the IMF and World Bank to settle old debts. The Guardian says Liberia struck deals with most of its private-sector creditors, but these two funds are refusing to settle, demanding full payment through the courts.

A representative for the Jubilee Debt Campaign, a coalition fighting for debt relief for the world's poorest countries, accuses funds like these of "profiting from poverty."

As Al-Jazeera's Barbara Serra reports:

So-called vulture funds have been condemned by several governments for preying on the world's poorest states. They buy up the debt of near-bankrupt nations at a cheap price from financial institutions. They then sue those nations in international courts for the full value of the debt, plus steep levels of interest and penalty charges. Every year, developed countries spend billions of dollars to help pay off the debts of poorer nations, but vulture funds siphon off that money for themselves.

Even the lawyer for Liberia says this is a moral issue as well as a legal one. Get the full scoop from this Al-Jazeera video:

By the summer of 2008, the price of rice had increased five times from the average price in 2005. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

The following post is from One Table, a Mercy Corps campaign to fight world hunger by investing in the world's women.

Today almost a billion people worldwide are unable to buy or grow enough food to avoid malnutrition. That's 120 million more than were hungry in 2006.

What happened? Basically, the world saw dramatic spikes in food prices. But there were many underlying causes of what's known as the global food crisis:

• Drought and other climate-related problems that resulted in smaller harvests
• Changing diets — rise of the middle class in India and China and an increased demand for food, especially meat, which requires large amounts of grain to raise
• Diversion of crops from food production to the production of biofuels
• High fuel prices during 2008 — if it costs more to transport food, prices go up
• Declining investments in agricultural productivity — total agriculture development aid to poor countries plunged from $8 billion in 1984 to $3.4 billion in 2004. At the same time, the developing world's cities have been ballooning with people who do not grow any of their food
• Export bans and restrictions last year in several major grain-producing countries like China as governments sought to lower food prices for their own citizens, with the result of reducing the global supply on hand.

While food prices have come down from their highs of 2008, they remain substantially above historic levels. Many economists feel this trend, which most severely affects those who can least afford it, is likely to continue for some time.

The economic, health and societal costs of the global food crisis have been severe. One of the first things Mercy Corps did to figure out how and where to direct our efforts was to survey the communities where we work. We discovered that within communities Mercy Corps serves, roughly 70 percent of income is spent on food, and 80 percent of the population had been affected by rising food prices over the past year. The survey also confirmed something we already suspected: that families were coping with higher prices by eating fewer meals, selling off household belongings, going into debt and removing children from school so that they can work.

In addition to being a record year for food prices, it's also been a record year for our food security team, allowing Mercy Corps to aggressively respond to this crisis. We now have 17 programs in 13 countries designed specifically to respond to this on-going problem. Through support from donors including USAID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Gap Foundation, the Hunger Site, and private individuals, our Food Crisis Response employs a strategy designed to ensure that the groundwork for increased prosperity in the future is laid — even while addressing the immediate problem of accessing sufficient food.

Food distributions, much of which are specifically targeted to improve child nutrition, are taking place in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, in the Central African Republic, India, Indonesia, Liberia, Nepal, Niger, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Uganda and again Zimbabwe, Mercy Corps is helping hungry households to access food by providing employment opportunities, agricultural training and inputs (such as seeds and tools), and helping people establish and grow small businesses.

Combined, these programs are reaching almost 1.5 million individuals who have been directly impacted by higher food prices. Overall, Mercy Corps’ Crisis Response will lead to a sustainable increase in income for these people, leading in turn to greater food security over the long-term.

A new UN Food and Agriculture Organization report predicts that rising food prices will soon begin to slow. However the BBC decidedly reports that cheap food is a thing of the past:

[Food] prices will level off at a far higher average level than seen before the crisis erupted. The long era of cheap food is over.

The sharp rise in food prices over the past year have been felt all over the world but are particularly painful for the poor in developing countries. The World Bank recently estimated that higher food prices and food scarcity could force 100 million people to become impoverished. In response, The World Bank is allocating $1.2 billion for increased food aid. At least $200 million is designated for grants targeting "high risk" countries including Liberia, Haiti and Djibouti.

Photo: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps

Liberia lacks doctors, teachers, lawyers, electricians ... but they may have too many cooks.

Why? To help provide jobs following the end of Liberia's long and costly civil war, many international humanitarian agencies began delivering skills trainings to women. The most commonly taught skill? Baking, of course.

But there just aren't enough jobs for all the newly trained pastry makers. So women who learned to make wedding cakes and fancy foreign pastries are now selling two-cent donuts on the street. And foreign-owned companies (mostly Lebanese) continue to dominate the pastry making business.

In the rush to help Liberia, it appears that well-intended job trainings did not reflect market demand. The problem goes beyond baking. Other aid organizations continue to train women in the art of tie-dying. But unless Liberia's demand for tie-dyed shirts and sarongs reflects 1960s America, they may be wasting their time.