Disaster Relief

With mobile phones spreading like wildfire in developing countries, they are becoming vital tools in the fight to improve health, educational and economic outcomes for aspiring families around the world (as we have pointed out in a variety of contexts). A recent World Economic Forum report, “Big Data, Big Impact: New Possibilities for International Development,” highlights some of the amazing potential and remaining challenges in the field.

As we approach the second anniversary of the devastating Haiti earthquake, which killed around 150,000 people and destroyed much of Port-au-Prince, there has been mixed progress.  About half of the rubble has been cleared (if that sounds slow, consider it took five years to remove far less rubble in Aceh after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami). About half a million people are still living in camps in Haiti -- but that is down from closer to 1.5 million two years ago. Meanwhile cholera, introduced by U.N.

The Green Bay Packers this year beat the Pittsburgh Steelers to win Super Bowl XLV in Arlington, Texas. In parts of the developing world, however, an alternate reality exists: "Pittsburgh Steelers: Super Bowl XLV Champions" appears emblazoned on T-shirts from Nicaragua to Zambia. The shirt wearers, of course, are not an international cadre of Steelers die-hards, but recipients of the many thousands of excess shirts the National Football League produced to anticipate the post-game merchandising frenzy.

On June 10th Dan Carpenter, The Freed Professor of Government at Harvard University and the author of Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA, Phil Longman, a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation and a Senior Research Fellow at Washington Monthly Magazine and Martha Derthick, Emeritus professor of American Politics at the University of Virginia met to discuss how politicians can learn from the FDA when regulating other sectors..

Three days after the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that sent Haiti from a developing nation to a flattened one, President Barack Obama addressed a statement directly to the people of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken, you will not be forgotten.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who cut short a trip to Southeast Asia and traveled to Haiti over the weekend, appeared with Haitian President René Préval to declare: “We will be here today, tomorrow and for the time ahead.” But one week after the earthquake that claimed up to 200,000 lives and destroyed the backbone of Haiti’s infra

Real(ish) time data sources

Never before have people donated money to disaster relief at the scale and speed and ease that they did on Wednesday in response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti. The reports I've seen show $7 million in text donations in 1 1/2 days.

Tens of millions in "old fashioned" online giving. Twitter and Facebook as news sources for millions of people.

I've been writing all day but needed to take a break, to write, about new ways that technology is being deployed to help Haiti. This post will catalog some of the more distinctive tech + philanthropy responses that I've heard about or seen. These are limited to tech examples because tech is the driver of change in philanthropy I'm trying to understand.

Schwartz Senior Fellow Peter Beinart has a provocative take on the United States' response to the earthquake in Haiti: "There’s a reason President Obama’s response to catastrophe has been so much better than Bush’s. It helps to believe in the power of government to aid lives."

WASHINGTON — Morgan E. O'Brien is used to jolting the wireless industry. Now the Nextel co-founder is back in the start-up business and again aiming to shake up the airwaves...

This time, the 62-year-old entrepreneur is pitching a controversial plan to transform public safety communications while also extending high-speed wireless Internet service to hard-to-reach rural areas.

His attempt to gain federal approval for his idea may be his biggest challenge yet. Supporters laud him as a visionary. Detractors brand him a profiteer...