08 March 2009

4 great talks for International Women's Day

To celebrate March 8, International Women's Day, we suggest these four TEDTalks gems from some amazing speakers -- artists, scientists and economists who think deeply about the role of women.

Author and activist Isabel Allende discusses women, creativity, feminism -- and the power of passionate thinkers and doers:

The former Finance Minister of Nigeria, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, talks about one key opportunity to grow African economies -- by investing in women and the businesses they start:

(For more, watch Jacqueline Novogratz >>)

Scientist Nalini Nadkarni explores the world of the forest canopy -- and shares her findings with the world below, through dance, art and bold partnerships. She's working to inspire the next generation of women scientists:

The wonderful Nellie McKay sings "Mother of Pearl" (with the immortal first line "Feminists don't have a sense of humor") and "If I Had You" from her sparkling set at TED2008:

Find these four and many more astonishing women (including the legendary primatologist Jane Goodall, oceanographers Sylvia Earle and Tierney Thys, games theorist Brenda Laurel, Zipcar inventor Robin Chase ... ) on TED.com >>

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05 October 2007

"Rock star" Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala named to World Bank

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (watch her TEDTalks from TED2007 and TEDGlobal07), the crusading economist and former Finance Minister of Nigeria, has been appointed a Managing Director of the World Bank.

Dr. Okonjo-Iweala will oversee the World Bank’s work in Africa, South Asia, and Europe and Central Asia. "Her commitment to the developing world is unparalleled," said Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank. She's been working with the Stolen Assets Recovery (StAR) initiative to help poor countries reclaim assets lost to corruption, and with Bono's DATA organization on historic debt-relief programs. Bono said of her last week, "She's the kind of leader we all want to work for." (And as Portfolio.com commented, she's as much a rock star as that Irish gentleman.)

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28 September 2007

Bono, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, local heroes honored

Last night at Philadelphia's National Constitution Center, Bono (watch his 2005 TEDTalk) and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (watch her TEDTalks) accepted the Liberty Medal, honoring Bono and DATA for their work in Africa. One of the local papers put together a fascinating section to go along with the event: "Philadelphia's Team Africa," profiling 10 locals in diverse fields -- teaching, health, entrepreneurial philanthropy -- working to build a stronger continent:

We have a 79-year-old nun who saves babies in Malawi and Uganda ... a middle-aged married couple from the Main Line whose day job is HIV/AIDS prevention in South Africa ... a 27-year-old Drexel MBA who's her own personal Small Business Administration, with microloans out to 18 small businesses in Kenya, Uganda, Togo and Ghana ....

It's an inspiring reminder of the thousands of ways to be involved. Doing business in Africa is a big part of that equation: Also mentioned is "City Hall's own division of international trade (who knew?) who helped broker $6 billion in imports from Africa last year."

Photo by CLEM MURRAY / Inquirer Staff Photographer

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21 September 2007

StAR: Helping poor countries get their money back

This week, the UN and the World Bank launched the Stolen Asset Recovery initiative, or StAR -- a plan to help poor countries recover funds stolen by corrupt leaders and stashed overseas. According to Reuters:

World Bank estimates that cross-border flow of global proceeds from criminal activities, corruption and tax evasion is between $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion.

Meanwhile, 25 percent of the gross domestic product of African states is lost to corruption every year at the cost of about $148 billion.

In her talk at TED2007 in Monterey, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala talks about such stolen national assets, and why recovering them has significance far beyond the money involved. Okonjo-Iweala knows the problem from the inside out: When she was the Finance Minister of Nigeria, she launched an unprecedented suit to recover funds that the dictator Sani Abacha had stashed overseas. After 5 years in court, the suit recovered $500 million from Swiss banks -- just a fraction of the estimated $3 billion to $5 billion that Abacha is believed to have stolen, according to AllAfrica.com.

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01 August 2007

Premiere: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala on reconciling aid and trade

After four days of intense discussion on aid versus trade at TEDGlobal 2007, it was up to Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the former Finance Minister of Nigeria, to sum it up. She asks for the discussion to continue, and to grow more sophisticated, more nuanced. And she brilliantly refocuses the concept of foreign aid: As she points out, most Western countries could not have been built without "aid" from Africa; their rapid development relied on Africa's natural and human resources. So when the US or the UK gives aid, she says, what they are really doing is giving back. (Recorded June 2007 in Arusha, Tanzania. Duration: 22:22.)

Watch Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances, including her talk from this spring's TED2007 in Monterey, CA.

Read more about Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala on TED.com.

NEW: Read the transcript >>

New: Download this talk in high resolution >>

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07 June 2007

Day 4: reports from the bloggers

Two final sessions, "Leadership and Truth" and "Ideas Worth Spreading," brought together economists, activists and the president of Tanzania. And the big ideas keep coming.

Mweshi reports:

Salim Amin is asking every African and those interested in the continent to help his for-Africa by-Africa 24-hour news channel, A24, come to fruition. With 900 million people on the continent, we continue to look to international news channels to provide information about our continent. ...
... It’s time Africa got its own 24-hour news channel.

After Salim Amin comes Ory Okolloh, a lawyer, activist and blogger from Kenya (and yet another TEDGlobal blogger to take the stage). NETucation digests her remarks, which begin:

Africa is a continent full of contradictions. You’re Harvard educated and you’re coming here to tell us what to do?

James Shikwati is described onstage as "a one-man think tank libertarian economist" by TED curator Chris Anderson. NETucation quotes Shikwati:

We need to understand how the world works, how the world thinks. The Aid debate operates under the constrained position i.e. the African person is in a box, somebody else must free him. We need to focus on releasing the African mind.

Tanzanian president Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete closed the early-morning session with a talk on African governance as it works on the ground. Ethan Zuckerman reports on what he said:

In the past, leaders would march in, declare themselves President, dismiss the parliament. They’d declare a ‘revolutionary council’, but there’s no revolution there. This used to be the way the continent worked. We’re moving beyond this, and beyond the leaders who led us out of colonialism.

Starting the final session of TEDGlobal 2007, President Shikwati got back on stage for a wonderful announcement, as reported by Ethan:

Tanzanian President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete took the stage with Dr. Larry Brilliant of Google.org and Bruce McNeighbor of Technoserve. Dr. Brilliant announces his support for “Believe, Begin, Become,” a national business plan competition, modeled on the successful experiment Google and Technoserve operated this past year in Ghana.

Noah Samara got up to talk about how he built WorldSpace, the first satellite radio network -- in a case where, as NETucation reports:

... for the first time technology was launched in Africa before it was handed down to America.

Journalist Dele Olojede talked about a decision he had to make in 1994: cover the birth of the new South Africa, or cover the Rwandan genocide? Ethan reports:

He decided that he’d give anything to see Mandela see his dream through, and he missed the Rwanda story.
“It became clear this was not an ordinary Central African horror story,” Olejede tells us, “and perhaps my decision was not correct.” Out of a sense of penance, he became “obsessed with the idea of Rwanda, with understanding it,” and has been travelling there ever since.

Patrick Awuah left Microsoft (pointing out that "While he worked at Microsoft the revenue of the company group grew larger than the GDP of Ghana") to found a university at home in Ghana. NETucation reports on his talk:

A month after launching he received and email from a student, “I am thinking now.” Another student asked “Can we create a perfect society?” after they were issued a challenge to come up with their own honour codes. This has lead to a vigorous debate among the students on campus. For the first in the history of Ghana, a woman was elected to be president of student body. This is real hope.

The amazing Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Finance Minister of Nigeria, closed the session. In a week of refocusing the aid story, she made a brilliant point, says Ethan:

African entrepeneur Mo Ibrahim dreams of the moment when Africa is giving aid. “But we’re already doing it - the UK and the US could not have been built without African aid. The resources - including human resources - have made those countries what they are today.” So when those countries are willing to give something back, we need to take it, but we need to use it effectively.

NETucation quotes her further:

Aid has to be a facilitator, it can be catalytic. China says Nigeria needs infrastructure and discipline to succeed. Within the private sector maybe aid can be used as a money guarantee. Her punchline is to help women get more access to resources - the research and statistics of this speaks for itself.The final question is what you will do with aid, the government, the private sector and the African as an individual.

Soyapi reports via Twitter on the party that folllowed:

Vusi on stage at tedglobal2007. Will be joined by the other 2 lady musicians. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala just did the last talk.

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30 May 2007

TED.com's new discussion space: Africa: The Next Chapter

As the TED Conference team departs for Tanzania and TEDGlobal 2007, the TED.com team is beginning the conversation online, with our latest theme: Africa: The Next Chapter. We start with an observation: That while we're all familiar with Africa's challenges -- famine and disease, conflict and corruption -- it's less known that across the continent, change is afoot. A new generation of Africans -- entrepreneurial, optimistic, inventive, undaunted -- are shaping a very different future for the their homeland.

Ingenious solutions are being applied to tackle some of the toughest health and infrastructure problems. Businesses are being launched that can transform the lives of millions. New communication technologies allow ideas and information to spread, enabling markets -- and governments -- to be more efficient. The numbers suggest that real growth is on the way ... A new Africa beckons.

Next week, we hold our first conference in Africa (also titled "Africa: The Next Chapter") to learn all we can about the profound changes sweeping the continent. Thought leaders from across Africa will gather with counterparts from the west in hopes of building new and lasting collaborations. But the meeting in real time is only the beginning: It's the conversations and connections that continue online which will have even deeper reverberations.

Though the talks from TEDGlobal won't be online till midsummer, we've started the conversation off with several relevant talks from TEDs past, including Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the pioneering Nigerian Finance Minister, who captures the zeitgeist of the moment with a talk on rethinking the African economy. It dovetails nicely with Jacqueline Novogratz, who promotes a new approach to philanthropy, based on investment rather than traditional aid. Both those thoughts were echoed by Ashraf Ghani, former Finance Minister of Afghanistan, whose rousing talk on his country's future resonates with this theme, despite geographical distance. And then there's Bono, whose memorable 2005 TED Prize acceptance speech was the original inspiration for the conference (though many there may disagree with his approach).

Click here to go to TED.com's new Theme, Africa: The Next Chapter >>

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30 May 2007

Three powerful talks from TED2007

This week we're posting three of the most-talked-about talks from TED2007 -- Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, John Doerr and Blaise Aguera y Arcas' remarkable demo of Seadragon/Microsoft Photosynth.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the former Finance Minister for Nigeria (and the first woman to hold that job), argues for investment -- rather than aid -- as the means to help Africa. Okonjo-Iweala will also speak at next week's TEDGlobal conference in Arusha, Tanzania. John Doerr, legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist, has turned his investment focus from high tech to greentech -- because his daughter asked him to. Blaise Aguera y Arcas, software architect for Microsoft and architect of Seadragon, put Microsoft's jaw-dropping Photosynth software through its paces in a demo that had TED2007 abuzz. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, CA.)

NEW: Read the transcripts >>

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09 March 2007

TED2007: Sketchblogging the conference

Lorna Herf is an illustrator and designer from Los Angeles attending TED and she's been blogging on lornamatic in a pretty original and compelling way - she's sketchblogging the conference. Check out her blog. Here are her "notes" from four speakers: Carolyn Porco (session 1), John Doerr (session 3), Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (session 3) and Michael Pollan (session 5):

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09 March 2007

TED2007: Day two wrap-up

Quotes of the day:

Former US president Bill Clinton, TEDprize 2007 winner: "Help me in creating a better future for Rwanda by assisting my foundation, in partnership with the Rwandan government, to build a sustainable, high quality rural health system for the whole country, that can then be a model for other countries. We have a chance here to prove that a country that almost slaughtered itself out of existence (while none of us, most of all me, did anything to help) can practice reconciliation, reorganize itself, focus on tomorrow and provide comprehensive healthcare to its citizens."

News photographer James Nachtwey, TEDprize 2007 winner: "I am a witness and I want my testimony to be honest and uncensored. I also want it to be powerful and eloquent and do justice to the people I'm photographing."

Biologist E.O. Wilson, TEDprize 2007 winner: "I've come on a special mission on behalf of my constituency, the millions of trillions of insects and other small creatures, to make a plea for them. Please keep in mind that if we would wipe out insects from the planet - which we are trying hard to do - the rest of life would disappear within a few months."

Author Michael Pollan: "Looking at the world from other species' point of view is a cure for human self-importance."

Former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold: "I have this picture up on my computer screen, and a woman comes up and asks whether that's a Jackson Pollock painting, but no, it's a picture of penguin shit on rocks."

VC John Doerr: "I'm scared. I don't think we're gonna make it." (About climate change)

Former Nigerian Finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: "There is an Africa that you don't hear often about, the Africa that's changing, the Africa of people that are taking their destiny into their hands."

TED Media Director June Cohen: "The newest digital technologies are returning us to the most ancient form of media — one in which a natural order is restored; our individual stories take center stage, with the rest of the world as a backdrop."

Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig: "We have to recognize they kids different from us. We watch TV, they make TV. It is technology that has made them different."

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