Open Source Homeland

There are some things that only government can do, All hail Malawi.

Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts – New York Times
But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling more corn to the World Food Program of the United Nations than any other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe.

In Malawi itself, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen sharply. In October, the United Nations Children’s Fund sent three tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished children, to Uganda instead. “We will not be able to use it” Juan Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef’s deputy representative in Malawi, said jubilantly.

Farmers explain Malawi’s extraordinary turnaround — one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa — with one word: fertilizer.

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

Nicholas D. Kristof, one of my favorite NYT writers, wrote an article yesterday called “You, Too, Can Be a Banker to the Poor“, where he describes his experience with kiva.org, a website that “lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world“. Couple key points that are relevant to anyone using the internet to build applications that interface with people in the developing world:

Forging Real Connections Between Real People Makes People Safer

Direct financing by American to solid, market-economy type people with live in frenemy countries is a good idea. The children of loan partners are less likely to hate you, no?

Economic Relationships Provide Dignity For All Parties

Instead of handouts.

Lightweight Technology, Coupled with Offline Followup, Gets Things Done

Simple shopping cart, lots of due diligence (including a check of the Terrorist Exclusion List), no big time commitment.

Do Offline Things Offline and Online Things Online

When launching something like this, you’ve got to be like water— flow where you can, flow around where you can’t.

Mr. Abdul Satar said he didn’t know what the Internet was, and he had certainly never been online. But Kiva works with a local lender affiliated with Mercy Corps, and that group finds borrowers and vets them. The local group, Ariana Financial Services, has only Afghan employees and is run by Storai Sadat, a dynamic young woman who was in her second year of medical school when the Taliban came to power and ended education for women.

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Microfinance institutions typically focusing on lending to women, to give them more status and more opportunities. Ms. Sadat’s group does lend mostly to women, but it’s been difficult to connect some female borrowers with donors on Kiva — because many Afghans would be horrified at the thought of taking a woman’s photograph, let alone posting on the Internet.