Check out what over five years of Kiva microlending looks like:

The video was put together by Kiva’s staff, who cleverly termed it “Intercontinental Ballistic Finance.” It’s pretty neat to see how microfinance can cross geographical and political borders to connect far-flung parts of the globe.

As time passes, you see that more and more parts of the world join in the lending game. And it’s not just the Western world; loans come from cities all over, including Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai. You can also see through the nifty color-coding system that the types of loans come in waves: the screen flashes blue, red, and sometimes it’s a multicolored hodgepodge.

Kiva Microfunds is an American non-profit organization that allows anyone to make microloans to entrepreneurs around the world. The loans are then repaid over time. Since its launch in 2005, Kiva has loaned $241,348,975 to 625,153 people in 60 countries, and its repayment rate is 98.86 percent, and The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof included the organization in a 2010 list of the best ways that individuals can make a difference in the world.

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

For too many dads, hitting the village bar takes precedence over their child's education. Photo: andré thiel (flickr)

One source of poverty often overlooked is the manner in which the poor choose to spend their money. Many, particularly men, divert limited funds to buy beer, prostitutes, tobacco and other nonessential items, rather then invest in the education of their children.

The consequence of these poor financial decisions is that many children never receive the education they deserve, not due to lack of access, but because of unpaid tuition fees. Children are forced to drop out, repeat grades, or suffer expulsion, while their fathers hit the village bars for a few liters of beer.

These priorities are not limited to the developing world. The average American spends approximately 7 percent of their income on entertainment, alcohol, and tobacco, while spending only 1.9 percent on education, according to a 2008 survey conducted by the U.S Department of Labor. Though everyone, including the poor, deserve to engage in entertainment and the purchase of pleasure items, the lower a family’s income gets, the more devastating its effects on a families overall well-being become.

Investing more in education could be exactly what is needed to lift poor families and future generations out of poverty. Around the world, approximately 103.5 million primary school age children are not enrolled in school, with about 57 percent of these education deprived children being girls. The lack of an education, or an insufficient one, leads to fewer choices and opportunities later in life. Children who receive a well rounded education are provided with the skills to prevent disease, address issues of maternal health, and navigate the world efficiently with skills that will serve them their entire lives.

If families could redirect even a slight percentage of the money spent on tobacco or alcohol, and this applies to all families around the world, their situations could be transformed dramatically, says New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof. In addition, Kristof advocates that women take on greater responsibility for the household budget, as they have consistently been found to be more financially responsible than men and more apt to allocate funds towards family needs, rather then individual ones. Female monetary empowerment has long been advocated for, but day by day, the case grows stronger.

To hear Kristof’s thoughts on this somewhat controversial and overlooked subject, check out the video below.

More women than men work in food preparation, one of the job categories expected to grow most in the U.S over the next decade, according to the Atlantic. photo: Give2Tech (flickr)

Are women taking over the economy?

Recent statistics show women have come out ahead of men in the U.S. recession. The Newsweek article “Women Will Rule the World” even dubbed the economic crisis a “mancession” as men have accounted for two-thirds of the 11 million jobs lost thus far. Men’s unemployment rates have also climbed to 10 percent, compared to the rate for women which now hovers at 8 percent, wrote NPR.

The Atlantic article “The End of Men" explained that the U.S. economy is shifting away from male-dominated industries like manufacturing that rely on physical strength and less-skilled labor. Instead, there are more professions that emphasize social intelligence and communication skills, like teaching, nursing and service-based industries. The consequence? More jobs where women are equally or, some argue, more qualified than men.

The face of the economy is changing, suggests The Atlantic. For example, the number of women exceeded the number of men on U.S. payrolls this spring. Men have since regained the majority, reflecting seasonal employment dynamics that make men more likely to work in summer jobs like construction, explains Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times. These advancements and others could be more a product of women playing “catch-up” rather than “forging ahead” of men, Kristof argues.

The evidence, however, might suggest that women aren't just closing the gap.

Lately, women have dominated the roots of economic success – higher education. According to The Atlantic, women hold 60 percent of bachelors and masters degrees and are expected to lead the U.S. middle class in the future.

The importance of higher education is reinforced not only by the decline of industries that rely on less-skilled, manual labor in the U.S., but also by the results of the latest recession. Workers with higher levels of education were far less hard-hit by the downturn, with unemployment rates around half the national average, explained David Leonhardt in his New York Times blog.

Women are more present in the workforce than they were in the past and their potential to revive the economy may be crucial. The Atlantic revealed that women outnumber men in all but two of the 15 job types that are expected to grow most over the next decade. These range from nursing to food preparation. Newsweek, alongside others, has touted female entrepreneurship as the possible key to future economic growth and recovery. In the U.S. alone, female-led firms grew by 20 percent versus an overall firm average growth of 7 percent.

The potential for female entrepreneurship to affect growth may be especially true in the developing world, where female education levels, wage rates and health indicators have even more room for improvement. Newsweek explored statistics from the Women’s Learning Partnership, which claim that “for every year beyond fourth grade girls attend school, a country’s wages rise by 20 percent, and the child-mortality rate dips by 10 percent.”

What does this all mean for the U.S. economy? Overall, it seems less about women catching up or taking over and more about their ability to drive the economy. But women's increasing presence in higher education, the workforce and entrepreneurial ventures, both in the U.S. and around the world, arguably positions them at the forefront of economic growth.

The money that men spend while socializing in cafes, in some cases, prevents them from meeting their families' basic needs. Photo: Dave Blume (Flicker)

Is it mean to suggest that poor people may be responsible for their own poverty? New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof is willing to risk that label. He recently suggested that the poor could often improve their situations dramatically just by budgeting:

Look, I don’t want to be an unctuous party-pooper. But I’ve seen too many children dying of malaria for want of a bed net that the father tells me is unaffordable, even as he spends larger sums on liquor. If we want Mr. Obamza’s children to get an education and sleep under a bed net — well, the simplest option is for their dad to spend fewer evenings in the bar.

And Kristof isn't the only one that thinks this. Two economists at M.I.T. reportedly found that the poor spend roughly two percent of their income on their children's education and anywhere from 4 to 8 percent on alcohol and tobacco. Sodas, festivals and prostitutes are also popular ways to blow a paycheck.

However, Kristof does present a few solutions to help the poor cope with their daily expenses, such as microsavings programs that give women more control over the family budget. The most helpful aspect of this article, however, is the refreshingly honest tone it brings to the discussion on development and poverty.

An estimated 8.4 million payroll jobs were lost during the recession. Photo: wools (flickr)

What's most effective in helping people climb out of poverty? Jobs and education, according to New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, who cites several recent studies by economists.

Quality youth education programs targeting youth pay off immediately and in the long run — especially those that focus on ninth-grade students, considered a critical juncture for at-risk youth. And jobs are important because they boost entire families.

But as Kristof points out, both employment and school funding have been severely affected by the economic crisis, "harming the two most effective stairways out of poverty." In response, Kristof is calling for a greater commitment.

This wave of research suggests that there’s no magic bullet, that helping people is hard, and that even when pilot programs succeed they can be difficult to scale up. But evidence also suggests that we increasingly have the tools to chip away at poverty. We know what to do if we just can summon the political will.

Economist Jeffrey Sachs spearheaded the Millennium Village Project to create sustainable economies in villages in sub-Saharan Africa. Photo: kevin813 (flickr)

If you had millions in cash and a team of some of the most brilliant minds in development, could you transform a poor African village's extreme poverty to a viable economy in five years?

The Millennium Village Project (MVP) is trying to do just that. It is the ambitious, high-profile development initiative spearheaded by economist Jeffrey Sachs in 2004. Today the Millennium Village Project operates in 13 sites across sub-Saharan Africa. Each site has tailored projects aimed at improving health, education, agriculture, infrastructure, and commercial business, and relies heavily on local participation. According to their website, MVP says that by 2011 their role will shift from financing and implementing projects, to a more advisory one.

Jeff Marlow, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, recently visited one MVP site comprised of 11 rural villages in the Koraro region of Ethiopia. While he was there he wrote about his experience for the Nicholas Kristof's On the Ground blog.

Of the several posts he wrote, the "Sustainability Factor" was by far the most interesting to me. The MVP acknowledges that sustainability is crucial to success, but these villages aren't self-sufficient despite several years of support. Though Marlow found that huge gains were made in education and health, economic sustainability remains elusive:

What began as a five year initiative to end extreme poverty and send the Millennium Villages on their way toward further economic development has now ballooned into at least a 10-year program with no clear end in sight....

It’s hard to deny that the quality of life in Koraro has increased substantially: disease rates have plummeted, crop yields have gone up, and children are attending school at unprecedented levels. Does this mean the Project will accomplish its lofty goals and, as Sachs puts it, “end the dependency on help and create the kind of breakthroughs that will have a transformative effect on the world”? ...The Project faces fundamentally different challenges in scaling up and moving out than it has seemingly overcome in raising crop yields and cutting disease rates.

It looks like the millions in cash, brilliant minds, and local determination haven't succeeded in creating sustainable economic growth for these 11 villages. Maybe another five years will make the difference? We can only hope so.

Helping or hurting? NATO delivers aid in Afghanistan. Photo: Isafmedia (flickr)

How can you best fight global poverty? Academics, journalists, economists and sometimes even celebrities have been vigorously discussing this question for years, with big names like Jeffery Sachs, William Easterly, Dambisa Moyo, and Bono weighing in on the question of whether or not development aid actually helps the poor.

Writer and well-known humanitarian and development aid advocate Nicholas Kristof succinctly and candidly summarized the debate last week in an essay for the New York Times Book Review. (See my post "What a Marshall Plan Could Do For Africa" for more on the aid debate.)

Acknowledging that all sides have some cogent points, Kristof admits that "doing good is harder than it looks." But he's still an advocate of development aid:

The upshot is that we can now see that there are many aid programs that work very well. We don’t need to distract ourselves with theoretical questions about aid [...]. The new synthesis should embrace specific interventions that all sides agree have merit, while also borrowing from an important insight of the aid critics: trade is usually preferable to aid.

In other words, markets are irreplaceable in achieving certain goals, and humanitarian projects are important for others. Free trade won't automatically build schools, and building schools won't automatically create jobs.

The two can go hand in hand to create a better future.

Zahria, a 35-year-old mother of five, took out a loan from Afghanistan’s Mercy Corps-supported Ariana Financial Services to begin an almond-selling business. Photo: Miguel Samper/Mercy Corps

Our work to lend to the so-called "unbankable" is noted in September's O Magazine in a bit about Half the Sky. (The "O," of course, stands for Oprah.)

Mercy Corps-sponsored microfinance institutions reach more than 244,000 clients. Many of those are women in Afghanistan, where we founded Ariana Financial Services, a woman-led agency that has lent more than $11 million to 45,000 clients to date — nearly 75 percent of them women.

Mercy Corps is among several other organizations — including Hellen Keller International and American Assistance for Cambodia — mentioned in Half the Sky and noted in the O Magazine list for "Three Things You Can Do To Empower Women."

The article, unfortunately, isn't available online. But you can find it in the September issue of O, which is already at your local grocery-store or bookstore newsstand.

This piece was originally posted on One Table.

Early childhood education could be the best way to raise a nation's collective I.Q. Photo: horizontal.integration (flickr)

Are we simply born with a predetermined IQ, or can it go up or down depending on what happens to us in life? This question of nature versus nurture is explored in a recent study that shows kids raised in poverty have statistically lower IQ's than middle- or upper-middle-class children.

A high IQ doesn't just translate to intellect, writes New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. It also means a better chance of succeeding in life. Several studies show that intensive early childhood education programs can raise children's IQ's over time.

So to close the intelligence gap, Kristof says U.S. parents and policymakers should fund school-based intervention programs in low-income communities.

The implication of this new research on intelligence is that the economic-stimulus package should also be an intellectual-stimulus program. By my calculation, if we were to push early childhood education and bolster schools in poor neighborhoods, we just might be able to raise the United States collective IQ by as much as one billion points.

Sweatshop labor. Photo: Marissa Orton (flickr)

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a piece this week that turns the conventional wisdom about sweatshops on its head.

Kristof sympathizes with those who do not like sweatshops and certainly does not want to see sweatshop-like conditions become the norm worldwide, but he points out that, in underdeveloped countries, sweatshops are often the most promising economic opportunity available. Particularly in times of economic distress, "one of the best hopes for the poorest countries would be to build their manufacturing industries." While anti-sweatshop campaigns are well-intentioned, in Kristof's opinion they end up destroying opportunities for the very people they attempt to protect.

Photo: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps

South Sudan is so far away and so deep in the shadow of the crisis in Darfur that few would give the region a second thought. It borders one of continental Africa’s largest oil reserves but is one of the poorest regions in the world as a result of the two decades’ long civil war, waged between North and South Sudan. The war ended in 2005 with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), but Sudan’s President Omar Al-Bashir, who is from the North, is slowly pulling out of that agreement. His armies, without reason or provocation, have begun creating conflicts in the south. New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof recently visited the region, where he examined signs of Khartoum's renewed interest in controlling the area through violence if necessary.

We think about Darfur as almost synonymous with Sudan these days, forgetting other parts of the country, where the conflict has left communities destitute and vulnerable. The limited media coverage tends to only focus on Darfur and the hope for successful execution of the CPA to resolve the crisis.

What we don't hear is that what is brewing in South Sudan might easily lead to the reawakening of a deep conflict that haunted the country for decades.

Kristof writes;

"Although people speak of renewed 'war,' the violence is more likely to resemble what happens in a stockyard. If it is like the last time, government-sponsored Arab militias will slaughter civilians so as to terrorize local populations and drive them far away from oil wells."

With such strong words, I expected to find coverage of this issue with ease – and was surprise to note that, except for a briefing published in March by International Crisis Group, [a few weeks after my original post], the growing violence in South Sudan is not being reported. I almost want to believe that Mr. Kristof has made a mistake – except he was there, not me.