23 January 2009

Muhammad Yunus' 3 ways to save the developing world

Via the Daily Beast : An excerpt from "Creating a World Without Poverty," by Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of Grameen Bank. In this essay, Yunus offers three thoughts about how luckier countries can help the developing world during this credit crisis, when gains of the past few years are being erased. The key: social business.
Read the essay >>

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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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