A Nigerian Sultan Helps Gates Rethink His Polio Strategy

In 2000, the picture of polio around the world looked pretty good: just 1,000 cases were reported that year. Bill Gates saw this as an opportunity: a chance to invest a little bit of his money and not just control a disease, but eradicate it.

Last year, though, that rosy picture looked both bleak and expensive. As Bruce Aylward of the World Health Organization said, “There’s no way to sugar-coat the past 12 months.” During 2009, we saw a resurgence of polio in 20 countries — many of which had previously eradicated the disease.

The Gates/WHO strategy to fight polio was based on the success of the 1979 smallpox vaccine campaign. In this campaign, though Bangladesh was seen as a last stronghold of the disease, the virus was finally eliminated when a policy of forced vaccination was implemented (which many consider a human-rights abuse). The polio campaign used a similarly simple playbook: vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate. And for awhile, it seemed that strategy might work. Now, though, it’s failing. Like the case of smallpox, polio is still deeply entrenched in one place: Nigeria. The country made up half of the world’s polio cases last year, in part due to rumors that have circulated about how the vaccine induces sterility, and in part because of the risk of Vaccine-Associated Paralytic Poliomyelitis, which causes paralysis in about one in a million people who receive the oral polio vaccine.

That’s where the Sultan of Sokoto, ruler of 70 million Muslims living in northern Nigeria, comes in.

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For Feel-Good, Do-Good Media, Click Here

Dowser.org is only a few weeks old, but the site — a magazine-like blog, or a blogged magazine? Whatever it is, it’s very 2.0 — is already home to some fascinating conversation focused on solution-oriented approaches to social issues. It’s like sitting in on an Echoing Green retreat, but with more multimedia.

Founder Daniel Bornstein has long been an fan of social entrepreneurs, as they’ve come to be called. He’s written books about the Grameen Bank and Ashoka fellows. Dowser continues what seems to be his personal commission to bring the good news to many. The site translates for the wider world inside-baseball questions filled with boring bureaucratic vocabulary like “capacity building” and “service delivery.”

The standard blog stuff comes through the “News and Ideas” section, and there’s a nice “Multimedia” tab that highlights stuff with moving pictures and sound. There’s also an “Interviews” tab where Dowser writers sit down with creative thinkers to talk about problems known and unknown. Check out, for instance, the latest interview: Elizabeth Sharpf, who figured out that lots of girls drop out of school when they start having to deal with menstruation. She Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE) to bring low-cost sanitary napkins to places like Rwanda to help curb the problem.

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Yemen: More Than a Global Security Threat

Why is the U.S. pledging to back a foreign military whose special operations forces have been accused of egregious human rights abuses?

Earlier this month, the U.S. promised to help the Yemeni military beef up its special operations forces. The Pentagon has been offering Yemeni security forces handouts all year: In February, for example, the Pentagon appropriated $150 million in military assistance for Yemen — an $83 million dollar increase over the previous year. Unfortunately, very little was offered to explain what would become of such a large chunk of change. (All that in addition to the Obama administration’s recent decision to sanction the targeting of Anwar Al-Awlaki, an American cleric residing in Yemen. )

Such funds, it’s been reported, are intended to help the country target Al Qaeda. But we’re talking about Yemen here, a country that ranks 111th on the 2009 U.N. Human Poverty Index. It’s a country that’s received far less U.S. aid than most in the region. When it comes to Yemen, it seems the U.S. sees little more than a security threat.

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What the Rise of Brand America Means

It seems that nothing’s immune from the horse race these days. Including America’s reputation: are we up, or are we down?

Well, for those of you keeping score, a recent BBC poll showing that people in other countries increasingly see the U.S. positively should have the development community counting its stars.

There’s plenty of room for speculation over what this poll means. According to the BBC, for the first time since 2005 (when the poll began), “America’s influence in the world is now seen as more positive than negative.” But while many of us have been waiting for this day since America’s reputation first took a nose-dive, what is the real significance here?

For groups working to combat global poverty, it’s an important milestone. It’s hard to work in communities that overwhelmingly distrust or dislike you. The news that U.S. is no longer seen with overriding skepticism might seem like a small thing to celebrate, but it means that some countries that have viewed us with doubt could become future partners. Work to alleviate poverty can amplify this positive feedback loop, helping strengthen new and lasting relationships.

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Bono Stumbles Upon a Good Point on Microfinance

I’m not a big fan of Bono’s new gig as a contributing columnist over at the Times (mostly because I find him to be a much better singer than writer), though I will give credit to anyone who can use “doppelganger” and “Mike Tyson” in the same sentence. Still, though, buried in his Sunday New York Times piece is an important reference to a not-so-sexy discussion that’s heating up in the development community right now.

Bono is generally good at knowing what his reader wants. He doesn’t disappoint this time either, giving a play-by-play of his trek across southern and eastern Africa and revealing that he likes to consider Nelson Mandela his boss. But the part I wanted to hear more about took up all of 38 words.

It’s the story of a meeting with Mozambique’s former prime minister, Luisa Diogo, and a group of women who were concerned about excessive interest rates on microloans — that is, small loans to the poor that are intended to stimulate entrepreneurship. Their complaint, as we wrote about last week, is one that’s being mirrored across the developing world. As more and more traditional finance institutions see the potential for profit in microfinance, squeezing out smaller microfinance groups, we can only expect these (justified) protestations to grow.

Fortunately, momentum to reform microfinance has been building.

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