British volunteers help plant rice in Bangladesh. Photo: Piers Brown (flickr)

Helping alleviate poverty while having an adventure in a developing country? Often, life-changing and highly educational experiences like these are usually luxuries for the wealthy. But they don’t have to be.

In the United States and Europe, it’s increasingly common for students and even families to spend a semester or a summer vacation volunteering in the villages, orphanages, or clinics of a developing country.

However, the associated expenses drastically narrow the volunteer pool. At a cost of about $3,000 plus airfare for a single month, volunteerism is usually regarded as a luxury for people in developed countries.

Voluntary Services Overseas, a UK-based charity, is working in the Philippines to change this.

According to an article from inquirer.net, VSO has sent more than 600 Filipino volunteers to other developing countries such as Nepal and Thailand.

"When it first started, people were saying, 'Why are we sending Filipinos out of the country? This is brain drain,'" VSO chief executive Marg Mayne told the Makati City-based newspaper. "But what happens is because they come back, they are making a difference in the Philippines because they become committed to the whole idea of fighting poverty."

The United Nations recognizes volunteerism as a powerful tool for turning people into global citizens. Programs like VSO make volunteerism attainable for ambitious citizens — no matter what their income may be.

Over one billion people live on less than one dollar a day, according to the U.N. But what can you actually buy with a dollar?

It seems like something that would vary across countries. Luckily, the World Food Programme recently released a series of videos in which it seeks to answer that question. Country specialists in Nepal, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Guatemala, Somalia, Kenya, and the Philippines each went to their local markets with the equivalent of about one U.S. dollar and attempted to put together a meal. Watch as Reem Nada visits a market in Alexandria, Egypt.

The shorts are entertaining, but present a rather bleak reality. Almost all of the investigators come up short nutritionally. In Nepal, Deepesh Das Shresta leaves the market holding a few small bananas and a loaf of white bread. Meat is categorically too expensive, and staying within budget means many investigators can’t purchase all of the components necessary to create the meals that are considered cultural staples. It appears that those living on less than a dollar a day are also living far below their daily caloric and nutrient requirements.

Feeding oneself on less than a dollar is tricky business under the best of circumstances. Even worse, the recent volatility of the price of staple foods such as rice has jumped three times since 2008, says the New York Times — meaning that dollar must now be stretched even further.

The rest of the videos can be found on the World Food Programme website. The videos for Ethiopia, Kenya, and the Philippines are listed separately.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.

A young girl in Nepal. Photo: Sam Grover (Flickr)

Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world. The average family scrapes by on $210 a year. So poor families often look to more drastic ways to earn money to get by. For some this means selling their daughters into domestic slavery for a mere $40 a year. Domestic slavery is illegal in Nepal, but the tradition still thrives in the country's western districts. These girls live in poor conditions, often working long hours and rarely having the opportunity to go to school. National Geographic recently posted a story on one of its blogs about the plight of these indentured girls and one organization's work to help them return home.

The Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation, or NYOF, has been working to eliminate domestic slavery in western Nepal since 2000. They certainly aren't the only group working on this problem - but they're using an inventive approach. NYOF volunteers travel to villages and offer parents a deal: if they don't sell their daughters into slavery, NYOF will give them a baby goat or pig.

In their first year 32 of 37 families accepted NYOF's offer. They'll also pay for school uniforms and school fees for that girl for several years to improve the likelihood that she won't be sold back into slavery. Since then, the NYOF and other organizations it has trained have brought over 10,000 girls home. And in one district slavery is gone. It costs the group about $100 per girl, per year to do this.

Many of the organization's most active volunteers are girls that were rescued from slavery though this program. Some of these girls run awareness campaigns to discourage parents from selling their daughters into domestic slavery. They also put on street plays and produce a weekly radio program to increase awareness within their community. (About two years ago PBS's NOW series profiled NYOF and showed footage of volunteers capturing large crowds with their street plays.)

Though slavery remains a problem in many areas of the world, the success of the NYOF shows just how far awareness and economic incentives can go to eradicate an age-old injustice.

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.

Are the people who've lived on this planet the longest the best-suited to protect it?

Liza O’Reilly thinks so.

She's a researcher with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy who spent last week in Alaska at a climate change summit with native peoples around the world. Participants from Borneo, Mexico, Kenya, Nepal traveled to attend … like the rest of us, they all recognize the earth is in peril. What they're saying is, "Let us help save it."

O'Reilly says it makes sense to take them up on their offer, in part because many indigenous groups are themselves affected by climate change. Not far from the conference site, even, the village of Newtok has lost 320 residents because of swollen rivers and melting permafrost.

Another reason for inviting indigenous peoples to the table is their strong spiritual connection with the earth, O'Reilly says. Because of this, they're more likely to come up with solutions that are sustainable over the long haul.

This very timeless wisdom recognizes [Indigenous peoples’] capacity to lead "developed" Nation/states, corporations, and other failed institutions and models out of the dark, wiping the soot out of their infirmed and capitalistic eyes to look at the Indigenous-based model of micro-energy, developed and controlled by the people.

So what would a climate change solution engineered by indigenous peoples look like? Well, it wouldn't involve massive-scale energy solutions like big dams and new nuclear power plants. Instead, it would curb the production of new fossil fuels and call on the various UN agencies to work with indigenous peoples to "address climate change impacts in their strategies and action plans."

Check out O'Reilly's posts on the Indigenous Peoples' Global Summit on Climate Change.

Photo: Sun Pictures / Lakshman (flickr)

Ever heard of a 13-year-old bank manager?

It’s not an uncommon sight at the Children’s Development Bank (CDB), a unique initiative by the Delhi-based NGO Butterflies that helps street children help themselves. CDB, founded in Delhi in 2001, offers street and working children the opportunity to invest in a different lifestyle.

Fear of theft and lack of future planning have often led working children to spend what little they earn on short-term pleasures, such as cigarettes or cinema tickets. By providing a safe place to hold money, however, CDB encourages them to start a savings habit.

CDB is particularly innovative in the way it is run. It works as a cooperative, in which children are both the owners and decision makers. Rules, membership standards and loan criteria are set by members who are all between the ages of eight and 18. The idea is for kids to "put money aside for themselves without worry that it will be lost or stolen, save for things that they need or want, such as clothes, (and) plan to improve themselves, by saving for education and training."

CDB now boasts more than 8,250 members and operates in 12 locations, including branches in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka.