OK, it may not be a free ride, but that might be just as well. Photo: Justin Russell (Flickr)

Funding self-sustaining poverty solutions means attaching strings. We all know it's for the best—but man, sometimes those funders can drive you crazy.

On the Center for Global Development's health policy blog, Victoria Fan and Rachel Silverman fill a deeply underserved niche in the poverty alleviation industry: satire.

The pair attempts to explain the differences among the world's leading global health donor institutions by imagining what they'd tell you if they were your parents and your grant application were a request for an automobile. A few highlights:

PEPFAR: Ok, we’ll buy you a new car, but we’re going with you to the dealership and it must be American-made. At least one seat must be devoted to abstinence and the delay of sexual debut. Before you drive the car, you must promise not to support prostitution. Each quarter, you must report how many miles you’ve driven with how many passengers, with a target of 1000 passenger-miles per month. ...

WHO: Sorry, we haven’t had a car budget in ten years. But we DO have a new set of guidelines on best practices for safe car driving, and a box full of old carfax vehicle reports that you’re welcome to look at any time. …

Gates Foundation: Of course, darling, we gave your boarding school plenty of money to buy a car. And since we’re on the Board, we’ll make sure they buy the right car. And you can drive it any time you want…as long as one of us is in the passenger seat to make sure you’re going the right way.

Global Fund: We’ve reviewed your proposal for a Range Rover and according to Consumer Reports it is a technically capable car for city driving. Here is a $70,000 check for you to go and buy the Range Rover, as discussed in your proposal.

There's a serious point here, of course: Parents attach strings to their gifts not to be nasty, but because they care deeply about the long-term outcomes of their disbursements.

None of which changes the timeless truth that sometimes parents just don't understand.

Lionel Messi, considered the world's top football player at the moment, takes aim at more than just the back of the net. Photo: prettyfriendship (flickr)

Many of us dream of bending it like Beckham. But star-quality soccer — football, to most of its 250 million players worldwide — is almost impossible without a healthy childhood.

That's why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with an assist from the 2011 UEFA Champions League victors FC Barcelona, is teaming up to draw attention to the importance that vaccines hold for the world's future football stars. They're taking aim at polio in particular, seeing the potential to eradicate the disease completely.

With millions of fans worldwide, FC Barcelona has the ability to reach global masses. There is benefit for FC Barcelona as well. In partnering with the Gates Foundation, FC Barcelona is capturing the hearts of a whole new market and adding a social edge to their organization.

Polio is an infectious viral disease, spread from human to human. The disease attacks the central nervous system, resulting in severe paralysis and disability or death. But the vaccine, which costs about 13 cents a dose, protects children from this devastating disease and keeps them in school and in the workforce.

The effects of polio are not only damaging for the individual, but for poor families and countries as well. Caring for polio-stricken family members taps already limited resources, and polio victims struggle to work and effectively contribute monetarily. As children have had access to the vaccine “cases of this devastating disease have fallen by 99 percent in the past 20 years,” according to the Gates Foundation.

If the vaccination of at-risk children can continue, the potential for complete elimination is in sight. But to reach this goal, so that every child has the chance to score, the fight must continue. And as the Gates Foundation says, “polio anywhere is a threat everywhere."

Everybody poops. This fact has proved to be a large problem in terms of maintaining the world's sanitation. Recently, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has turned it into something positive.

The foundation explains that 40 percent of the world's population has no contact with flush toilets. They are left to defecate in the open, bringing severe problems. For example, nearly 1.5 billion children die each year from diarrheal diseases.

On July 19, in Kigali, Rwanda, the foundation launched its new initiative to bring safe sanitation services to the world. Their plan begins with the toilet and $42 million to jump start the project. Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of the foundation’s Global Development Program, explains that the toilet has been the best invention for the world's sanitation. The only problem is that it's not accessible enough for everyone. "We need to reinvent the toilet," she says.

Partnering with the U.S. Agency for International Development, the initiative will support the United Nations’ 2015 Millennium Development Goals with the Sanitation For All project, aiming to reduce the amount of people living without basic sanitation by 50 percent. Together, they will find ways to build hygienic, water conserving, and human waste recycling toilets that can be built and sustained at a low cost. One such initiative is the Reinventing the Toilet Challenge, where Universities around the world race to develop a toilet without pipes, sewer connection or electricity for less than 5 cents a day.

With a reinvented toilet, the possibilities are endless. It will reduce exposure to disease and keep kids in school — ultimately boosting local economies with healthier workers and much lower health care costs. The human waste can become fertilizer and fuel for local communities, and even fresh drinking water. The Reinventing the Toilet Challenge is showing us that human waste really isn’t waste at all.

Cell phone technology has changed the economic landscape in many parts of the world. Now it might shape health care as well. Photo: Lisa Hoashi/Mercy Corps

Diagnosing diseases, running blood work and monitoring brain activity -- yup, there will be an app for that. And unlike Angry Birds, it might save lives.

One such project uses a polarized laser in a phone’s camera to find traces of malaria in the blood. Another stops the parasite before it even reaches the host: the program uses sound waves at resonant frequencies that cause nearby mosquitoes to vibrate uncontrollably and temporarily lose the ability to fly.

These projects prove that phones that simply send and receive calls are a thing of the past, and no one understands this better than Bill Gates. Under Gates’ program Grand Challenges in Global Health, applications that improve health are on the fast track from concept to reality. While these apps could be used anywhere, they would focus primarily on areas where medical tools or trained personnel are unavailable. Most of the programs are years away from completion, Fast Company Magazine reports, but the health benefits and cost savings they would bring could be worth the wait.

Another project funded by Grand Challenges would create an inexpensive near-infrared camera attachment that could monitor the brain activity of infants who have experienced a head injury. This application would then alert users of any dangerous brain swelling. Also in development is an app that would allow smartphones to scan medical documents into central databases.

But the Gates Foundation is not the only organization supporting smartphone developments for the global good. The X Prize Foundation has created a prize incentive for the development of a 2G phone-network-based education system. This would allow anyone with access to a cell phone to listen to educational lessons and lectures and interact through text messages.

These applications are still a ways off. Even if they are completed, they may never be an appropriate technology for the developing world. Physical location, parts availability, infrastructure, and even culture can stop a new technology from being adopted. Currently, smartphones are inaccessible to many parts of the world, particularly those targeted by the X Prize and Gates Foundation. But only a few years ago, the same could be said about mobile phones. Now, an estimated 4.6 billion subscriptions exist worldwide.

While it might be hard to imagine smartphones functioning in places where most housing is still made from mud, even these challenges are being addressed; Gates is funding a project that uses the metabolic outputs of microorganisms in soil to charge cell phones. Welcome to the future.

The information from the soil map could help this Tanzanian woman farm with better fertilzers and increase her harvest. Photo: vredeseilanden (flickr)

We have elevation maps, weather maps, and population maps. So why not soil maps? It may be the key to the food security of an entire continent.

Africa has the most depleted soils on earth. A major problem is a lack of information on how to care and maintain land. What type of fertilizer should be used? How much? With which soil type? When should I rotate my crops? How long should I rest my land? Without the answers to these and other questions, the soil is degrading over time, losing nutrients with every harvest, with every harvest getting smaller and smaller. A soil map can answer these questions and, hopefully, help to reverse the trend.

The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) is mapping the soil of all 42 countries of sub-Sahara Africa as the first step to building a global map online. The soil map will be created using soil samples and satellite imagery, which will allow for detailed and precise prescriptions for small farmers and their lands. Outreach workers and farmers associations will be trained on how to use the map and translate the information to farmers on their land.

It’s a four-year, $18-million program paid for by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).

This program has the power to revolutionize agriculture in Africa. Nteranya Sanginga, director of CIAT's Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility Institute has said that "[w]ith accurate soil maps, we find farmers can increase their yields by around 60 percent, and sometimes double." Sounds like a plan for success worth mapping.