Yale University has agreed to return most of the Inca artifacts it has housed since Professor Hiram Bingham “rediscovered” Machu Pichu and brought back over 4,000 pieces from the site. The collection includes items such as mummies, ceramics, and bones. Bingham “rediscovered” Machu Pichu back in 1911, bringing it to world attention.

Part of this new agreement has been to promote a traveling exhibit with the pieces, which will eventually find a permanent home at a local museum in Cuzco, Peru, scheduled to coincide with the centenary of Bingham’s “finding” of the site. It will also allow a few selected pieces to remain at Yale a while longer for further scientific research.

In the past a many other countries, and native people the world over have struggled to recover items that were taken during periods of colonization and dominance by foreign groups. During the 1990s the USA passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), requiring museums to inventory their collections and consider returning certain items, although this only applies to federally recognized indigenous groups.

The British Museum has had to deal with a number of cases concerning repatriation, but their response has usually been non-compliance with request from countries such as Egypt and Greece.

You can read more about this issue from an article in the BBC concerning the Yale-Machu Pichu case, or from an article in Suite 101 discussing whether repatriation is a passing fad or not. Wikipedia also has an entire index dedicated to repatriation, divided by cultures.

Share and Enjoy

For some years now more and more initiatives are being created to help out poor women develop industries and help communities pull themselves out of poverty. The main belief behind this approach is that lending money to women will be spread out more evenly throughout the community; in general women tend to invest in three areas, health, their children, and their home, all areas that in the long term will benefit the community at large.

A lot of the business that poor women want to develop require relatively small amounts of money to get started, which usually means that banks are not likely to consider them for regular loans, or will do so with conditions that are very unfavorable to them.

This concept of microlending was made popular by Bangladeshi banker and economist Muhammad Yunus (his website), who in 2006, was awarded a Nobel Peace Price with Grameen Bank for helping finance the poor.

Today there are is a growing number of institutions which strive to help promote women headed businesses, some of these are Women’s World Banking, WAM international (Women Advancing Microfinancing), Financial Women’s Association, and the UN’s IFAD (International Fund for Agriculture and Development) among many others.

You can read more about microlending to women from an article in the BBC.

Desde hace algunos años más y más iniciativas se están creando para ayudar a mujeres de bajos ingresos a desarrollar industrias y ayudar a que sus comunidades salgan de la pobreza. La creencia principal detrás de este enfoque es que cualquier dinero que se le presta a estas mujeres se extenderá más uniformemente en toda la comunidad, en general las mujeres tienden a invertir en tres áreas, la salud, sus hijos y su hogar, todas áreas que en el largo plazo beneficiarán la comunidad en general.

Muchas de las empresas que las mujeres pobres quieren desarrollar requieren cantidades relativamente pequeñas de dinero para empezar, cosa que normalmente significa que los bancos no consideran que para los préstamos regulares, o lo harían con condiciones desfavorables

Este concepto de los microcréditos se hizo popular por el banquero y economista de Bangladesh Muhammad Yunus (su página web), que en 2006, fue galardonado con un Precio Nobel de la Paz con el Grameen Bank para ayudar a financiar a los pobres.

Hoy en día hay un creciente número de instituciones que se esfuerzan por ayudar a promover empresas dirigidas por mujeres, algunas de ellas son Women’s World Banking, WAM internacional (Advancing Women microfinanciación), la Asociación Financiera de la Mujer, y el FIDA de las Naciones Unidas (Fondo Internacional de Desarrollo Agrícola) entre muchos otros.

Usted puede leer más acerca de microcréditos a las mujeres de un artículo de la BBC.

Share and Enjoy

Earlier this week UNESCO had a couple of additions to their World Heritage Site list. World Heritage Sites can include natural locations, buildings, monuments, and entire cities, and are believed to be of significant interest for humanity. In 1972, UNESCO created the program, initially know as the Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage, and it aimed at identifying significant sites, cataloging and conserve them for all our of enjoyment. On occasion this new status can obtain funds from the World Heritage Fund for preservation. As of last year there were a total of 830 designated sites.

This week the Sydney Opera House, built in 1973, and was declared a “great artistic monument accessible to society at large” by UNESCO, and India’s Red Fort Complex, completed in 1648 was said to include “all phases of Indian history from the Mughal period to independence”.

Other sites that to have been previously designated World Heritage Sites include the Iwami Ginzan Silver Mines on Honshu Island, Japan, Richtersveld mountainous desert region in South Africa, and Namibia’s Twyfelfontein. Click here for the complete list.

You can read more about this in the recent BBC article.

Share and Enjoy

Today Cape Verdians outside the island outnumber those who live on the island, and this dynamic which has been forming for years, even decades has transformed a nation and continues to redefine family and social ties. And yet Cape Verde is far from being the lone example of this new world order. Countries like Mexico and the Philippines, just to name two, also have very large populations abroad.

World wide it is estimated that 200 million people live outside their country of birth, and last year they send back about $300 billion dollars back home, nearly three times the world’s foreign aid budgets combines. And while having relatives abroad can help those who stay behind escape poverty, it also destroys families. Having a relative abroad can mean having the means to build a home, buy groceries and school supplied, but it also means that increasingly children are growing up with other relatives and friends of the family, instead of their parents.

In a world where developed countries have growing elderly populations, and it is increasingly common for both parents to work outside the home, immigrants provide necessary labor to keep these economies running. In turn immigrants are able to work, and help their own back home. But being raised by others is not the only drawback of this system. Nations with large populations abroad also experience brain drain, thus almost guarantying that their own situation at home is not likely to improve.

Interestingly, nations who tend to export people and tend to be large recipients of immigrants from other nations who might be escaping even worse poverty, or other hardship.

You can read more about this through this article in the NYT.

Share and Enjoy

Kiva means “unity” in Swahili, but it is also a fascinating new way to help empower people in the developing world. After working in East Africa, two Stanford business students created Kiva.org in 2006, to promote one-on-one relations between lenders in the developed world and new entrepreneurs in the developing world. The site allows people to lend money, interest free, to others starting business. The site not only eliminated high lending fees, but also the usual bureaucracy involved in such transactions.

Kiva works by allowing you to lend as little as $25 through your credit card. This money will be loaned to the project of your choice and after the agreed upon time your loan will be paid back. At this time you can either withdraw your money, or reinvest it. Since internet is not always available, Kiva works with local organizations that help find potential borrowers, and helps direct the loans, or with international organization such as Mercy Corps.

Kiva’s marketing has continued to take advantage of the internet, and partners with giants such as Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Paypal, Starbucks, and YouTube, among others to promote the organization and the work they do. Kiva also sponsors fellows who will commit to spending at least 10 weeks in a host country,while getting to know the culture, and conducting interviews which will then be hosted on the organization’s website.

You can read a blog about the organization, and the projects it helps fund here. Carol Pucci of the Seattle Times also wrote an article about her experience with Kiva in funding a project in Bulgaria.

A similar project is run by Globalgiving.com, who connects donors to recipients.

Share and Enjoy

This morning the BBC has an article about the first all-female UN peacekeeping troop. The group is comprised of 105 Indian women, who have been based in Liberia for the last 6 months. The group was initially set up as an experiment, and it was gone so well that their mission has been extended to a full year.

The women who make up this troop were selected from all over India and have been trained in drug raids, law enforcement, and crowd control among other things. It is also hoped that their presence will encourage local women to join local law enforcement groups. There is a push to bring more women into law enforcement in hopes to curb down sexual assault and exploitation, as well as helping local women feel safer.

Women in UN peacekeeping troops have been woefully underrepresented. In 2006 women made up only 4% of all peacekeeping troops. The UN currently encourages women to become involved in peacekeeping; here are a few highlighted stories.

Women have been making their mark as soldieries elsewhere around the world. Spain’s arms forces are currently 15% women, the Chinese island of Xisha also host an all women trope. Still it’s really too bad that so many of these articles focus not on the merit and ability of these women, but on their ability to add to the beautiful scenery (Israel recently had the “lovely idea” of having women soldiers pose in their underwear for Maxim magazine in order to boost the country’s image abroad!), or focus on how much these women miss their families (as if any soldier station abroad won’t miss their family).

The Christian Science Monitor has another article on the matter.

Image from Grewal, Shabnam. “All girl UN squad a success”, BBC, June 21, 2007.

Share and Enjoy

This weekend I was in Philly to see the Tutankhamen exhibit at the Franklin Institute Science Museum. My mom saw this exhibit when it toured the USA back in the 1970s and she still raves about it today, so we met-up and saw the exhibit together.

I had read a good amount about the exhibit for a paper I wrote a while back and found out that this time around the exhibit was being promoted more as a rock concert than a cultural event. This was very much the case. The exhibit is surrounded by a lot of fanfare, and lots of publicity. It is being hosted by a partnership between the L.A. based Anschultz Entertainment Group (AEG) (better known for promoting rock concerts), Egypt’s Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, and National Geographic.

While it might be another 30 years before we are able to see world treasure such as Tutankhamen, this exhibit wasn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. My mom says that the first time around there were a lot more objects, and that while the museum was crowded, one could still enjoy the exhibit and see things in a leisurely manner. This time some of the more famous pieces were missing, including Tutankhamen himself along with his many sarcophagus, and seeing the pieces was challenging in the overly crowded rooms. I also saw a guy in a wheel chair who probably spend the entire time looking at people’s backs since he wasn’t able to get up close to the cases because there were so many people there. These short-comings might give credence to some of the criticism that has surrounded the exhibit, among them the challenge that AEG has outsourced museum curatorial jobs to others outside the field.

The Egyptian Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Dr. Zahi Hawass explains that Egypt has a wealth of treasures that need to be preserved, not all as flashy as Tutankhamen, so the motivation behind the exhibit is to raise much needed funds to help with this preservation initiative.

In interviews, several Egyptologist said that most of what Dr. Hawass was doing for their field was long overdue, things as simple as installing air conditioning at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. He has instituted zoning around major antiquity sites and built visitor centers to prevent further degradation. He also has plans to build a regional museum in Egypt, including a sprawling new structure besides the pyramids (Waxman, 2005).

While this effort is certainly much needed, a tricky situation has been created whereby the hosting museums are needing to charge significantly higher admission prices than usual in an effort to brake even, since the Egyptian government must make 10 million per stop before the museum makes a penny. The Egyptian government claims that all the hosting museums made money during the first tour, while they made none, although this is contested.

I guess some balance needs to be found by which poor nations with treasures of importance to the world should be able to access needed funds for preservation and promoting education, but doing so in a way that doesn’t limit the amount of people who can see them because they have been priced out of the market. Treasures like Tutankhamen, in a way, belong to all of humanity and should be accessible to everyone, not just those with deep pockets.

Image info here.

Share and Enjoy

A new technology is emerging in Zimbabwe, one that uses cell phone messages to exchange currency for goods. Mukuru.com is a company that has set up a system by which you can order fuel for friends and family in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Today, as people immigrate in search for opportunities, and are often force to leave behind children and relatives, this new service allows those abroad to continue helping back home, while reducing the amount of red tape involved. The site allows you to buy gasoline (prices are British pounds), and the relative back home will receive a text message with a coupon to pick up it up.

Similar sites are also starting to emerge for other basic goods. Zimland.com allows you to buy groceries, while Zimbuyer.com goes even further, by offering groceries, as well as furniture and even generators for family members back home.

These sites seem to be catching on rather quickly in Zimbabwe, not only for their convenience, but also because they provide an alternative to costly money wires; an important issues, since the Zimbabwean government has been cracking down on the back market and unregulated foreign currency exchanges.

I think this is a very ingenious alternative, and I can see if catching on in other developing countries that have large communities abroad.

Read more about this in a BBC article.

Image info here.

Share and Enjoy

Room to Read is an amazing nonprofit organization founded by John Wood, a former executive at Microsoft who had his life flipped upside down after traveling to Nepal. On this trip Wood realized that books are very scarce in many corners of the world, and while at a local school a man commented that maybe Wood might return some day with books. This simple comment stayed with him, and indeed he did return, not just once, but repeatedly, and with books, lots of them.

Today this simple idea of bringing books to people who need them has become a major organization dedicated to bringing not only libraries, but educational opportunities to people in need. Room to Read began in Nepal, but has expanded into Cambodia, India, Laos, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and South Africa. Room to Read has also started granting scholarships for girls to attend school, creating opportunities for young girls who might otherwise never have gotten a chance to attend school. The organization has also branched into publishing, printing books with local, relevant stories and in bilingual editions. They are also working on creating computer & language labs. The idea is to narrow the digital divide, and to help children become world players by being able to engage the world both in their native language as well as in English.

Room to Reads success has likely come from Wood’s endless dedication to this mission, as much as to the fact that he has surrounded himself with highly motivated people and has worked hard to keep the organization’s overhead costs as low as possible. In the coming years they hope to begin working in Latin America, and continue expanding in Asia.

John Wood has written a book recounting his story of how this organization came to be; “Leaving Microsoft to Change the World.”

Share and Enjoy

Yesterday I attended a fascinating lecture on eIFL which is an independent consortium for library consortia. Basically what it does is help libraries in the developing world access online journals and other material by pooling their resources (eIFL doesn’t work with individual libraries) and in this way be able to effectively negotiate with publishers and vendors to make their products available at deeply discounted prices, i.e the consortia model.

eIFL began in 1999 as an initiative from the Open Society Institute, which in the 1990s was working in Central and Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union to promote library development and modernization. A large absence was notices when it came to electronic resources, mostly due to the high costs of these. This is eIFL realm, and they are successful while negotiating with these vendors, because although they are asking for huge discounts on their material, in return they will deliver access to future markets and a strong library community. Some of the countries working with eIFL began with very little clout in their own countries, yet over the years have been able to receive more funding from their local governments, and thus are able to purchase more electronic subscriptions and pay some money for them.

eIFL is addressing issues of access, not only by working with vendors and publishers, but also by being active participants with organizations such as the World Intellectual Property Organization, and the A2K (the global Access to Knowledge campaign), since they are equally interested in changing our perceptions of copyright laws, and how making information freely available will benefit us all.

This organization also promote the use of opensource software which has allowed numerable libraries with financial difficulties make use of old computers for which they could no longer afford licensing. Such was the case when the helped Birzeit University in Palestine make a number of old computers, usable once more. They also are also developing “Library -in-a-Box” project, which helps libraries create digital libraries with little or no programming.

Other issues that are gradually being address are the lack of library training in certain countries, poor connectivity and bandwidth, lack of coordination from donors, and finding resources to enable some of the librarians in developing countries to travel to the various international library associations meetings to personally voice their case.

Currently eIFL works in 50 countries in three continents, although there is a big absence in all of the Americas. This is partially due because they want follow through with the commitments they already have, before making new ones. Yet in the mean time they are trying to encourage mentor relationships between the countries already participating in the program, and those who want to become new members.

Note: The eIFL website is currently under constructions, so you might want to look at their old website.

Share and Enjoy