Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid and one of Time's most influential people in 2009, posted this on twitter yesterday: "Villagers using mosquito nets as wedding gowns: Yet another unintended consequence of a 'good' deed."  As someone trained in policy from Harvard and economics from Oxford, she should know better.  As someone with an increasing amount of influence, she should really know better.

We shouldn't be using anecdotes as support for any policy formulation.  This one especially concerns...
Continue reading ...

Caveat: My boyfriend is the CEO and I am an investor in Aardvark.  Having said that, I have frustrated him to no end with my (hopefully constructive) criticism from the beginning ;).

There are a total of 3.5+B mobile and 1.6B Internet users worldwide.  These two numbers used to get us very excited about mobile opportunities at Google, especially in the Asia Pacific and Latin America team where I did strategy for two years.

But the fact of the matter is the vast majority of mobile phones are not...
Continue reading ...

My bed nets post has gotten me thinking more about the issue people are raising with the status quo of aid today - that it inhibits the ability of local capacity to develop and to find local solutions to the problem. 

There's a lot to be said for this argument.  Western NGOs sweeping in like white knights and moving on to the next development fad du jour, particularly when they wipe out local producers, leave developing countries without the capacity to solve their problems over the long term...
Continue reading ...

I'm just finishing up my first year of a two year master's degree in public administration and international development at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.  Though it has its faults, I feel pretty strongly that it's one of, if not the best, programs in international development out there.

Caveat:  that statement only applies if you are a very quantitative and analytical person (I studied physics and engineering once upon a time).  If you don't like math, I promise you will hate th...
Continue reading ...

I've been blogging when I travel for years now, but I felt it was important for me to have a separate blog dedicated to my experience in Liberia this summer.  Though I won't take off for Monrovia for over a month, there's already a lot to say about why i chose this internship, how it fits into my overall career goals, and what exactly I'll be doing there.  Not to mention the people I'm already connecting to and the meetings I'll be having in San Francisco in the coming weeks.  So with that, D...
Continue reading ...

Continue reading ...