World Water Week: The Health of Water

Monday, March 22 was World Water Day and this whole week has been designated as World Water Week.  Each year the week focuses on a different aspect of freshwater.  This year the focus is on the quality of freshwater around the world, but particularly in developing countries.  This week is not only on raising awareness about the scarcity of clean water in some nations, but also on raising awareness about how something small, such as drinking tap water rather than bottled water, can have a huge impact on both water resources and climate change!

UNICEF’s Tap Project has been held this week at campuses across the country.  The campaign asks participating restaurants to ask for $1 from patrons for the tap water (that is normally free).  This $1 is donated to UNICEF for use in efforts to bring clean water and sanitation to people all over the world.

The Blue Sweater: The Secret to Success is Failure

A friend of mine recommended this book to me a while back, but I never got around to it.  Today it showed up on William Easterly’s Aid Watch.  Sound like a good winter break read to me!  =)

Post by Laura Freschi, Aid Watch

When Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of the Acumen Fund (and author of The Blue Sweater), was in her early twenties, she turned down a promotion on Wall Street and went to the Cote d’Ivoire to open a new branch of the African Development Bank focused on microfinance for women. But the West African women she was supposed to work with shunned her. They talked about her derisively in her presence, letting her know exactly what they thought of an untested, unmarried, American woman with poor French skills being sent to lead them. They intimidated her, locked her out of the office, and (Novogratz suspects) actually gave her food poisoning to scare her away. It worked.

On her next assignment, in Nairobi, she spent hundreds of hours analyzing the loan portfolio of a young microfinance organization. Presenting her results, she recommended a drastic restructuring. A week later, she found her handwritten report had been “lost,” and all her work destroyed.

Any other 24-year-old might have gone home. For Novogratz, these heartbreaking episodes led to some profound revelations:

“I wanted to help,” she writes, “but that didn’t matter to anyone but me.” “Donors could convince themselves to give to nonperforming organizations based on a few good stories. The world needed something better than that.”