Posts categorized under Development

11 October 2009 ~ 1 Comment

A love of reading

I saw this as my friend Jordan’s status on his gmail account today: “Today, educational funding favors programs that teach kids how to read, rather than why to read.”  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112312561 and i wanted to pass it on because it relates a lot to the work PEPY is doing.  When we decided to partner with a […]

Continue Reading

05 October 2009 ~ 6 Comments

The Social Venture “Scalability” Model

Are there any “scalable” & profitable social ventures?  There is talk of “social ventures” being our saviors from the likes of the non-profit world.  Do they REALLY exist?  Or are they mostly hybrid models which still rely heavily on their non-profit arms in order to succeed at scale? It is VERY hard to find examples […]

Continue Reading

30 September 2009 ~ 0 Comments

Are PEPY Programs “Sustainable”? Part 1 of 2

What is this “sustainability” thing all about?  It is a word that gets thrown around so often by NGOs, donors, and most people working in development, yet what is means in the reality of our day to day decisions is less often understood.  I wrote part one of a two part look at PEPY and […]

Continue Reading

10 September 2009 ~ 5 Comments

OLPC: The $100 laptop DOES have potential

When I first read this post by Alanna Shaikh, I was too busy to write, so I passed it on internally to all those at PEPY, because I know that so many of us would disagree with her. I can’t see the comments on the page, because maybe they have been hidden, but supposedly there […]

Continue Reading

26 August 2009 ~ 2 Comments

Lesson Learned: Why we shouldn’t give things away (or sell them for cheaper than they really are!)

I just read this post “9 Reasons Not To Give Things Away” and I agree with it. It relates back to my earlier post discussing how a group working in the same area as us in Cambodia subsidized water filters and thereby destroyed the market for the product (and negatively effected water filter use/health). I […]

Continue Reading

21 August 2009 ~ 2 Comments

NGOs, show me your failures!

Another post inspired from the Tales from the Hood blog, this one about honesty and NGO propaganda. A comment from Mo-ha-med (below) is something I really agree with: I’m particularly curious about a remark of yours about how the PR dept needs to communicate things in a certain way and that we shouldn’t “believe our […]

Continue Reading

13 August 2009 ~ 1 Comment

1000% increase

Wow! Check it out! We gave out 106 bikes year year for the fourth installment of our Bike-to-School Program. This year, we have nearly 100% increase in students graduating from grade six since we started PEPY and nearly 1000% increase in the number of kids completing grade seven. A huge factor in that is that […]

Continue Reading