I have been taught to be skeptic. And this shiny vision of Girl Effect produces no different effect on me other then.. skepticism.

And this is why I don’t think giving women cows in developing world would not work to change the world completely:

• women in developing world are very much still dictated by religious, cultural and social norms which often includes an almost complete submission to the husband’s wishes and requests. What does this mean? It means if you give a cow to a woman and if she isn’t empowered enough to say NO to her husband, the cow will either be sold off to the market and the money used for gambling/drinking/start-up money to the man’s business which if it ends up failing brings the woman back to square one
• Similarly, if the system works in such a way that the woman receives some micro loan to buy the cow, the money might not even reach the market before the man has access to it.
• community based development that is gender bias towards women may in paper appear great but as all those theories of Gender in Development, Women and Development and most recently Gender Mainstreaming say, if you exclude men from participating in project design chances are the intended outcome will never materialize
• If micro loan is the way to go, Grameen Bank will still be the all glorified catchword even as we speak today. and if in fact Grameen Bank micro-credit system should have worked, there will no need for Buffett to hand over his $45 billion for this purpose.

With that said, hats off to Nike Foundation and Warren Buffett for producing an impressive and catchy marketing tool to spread the word on women disadvantaged status in the developing world (but don’t we already know that?). Perhaps are a time where the world is in dire need of any change, any replicated version of past development efforts is welcomed.

There are so many things worth blogging about today, at this very moment there are a number of ongoing development issues that i have been closely following, amongst others the rising food prices but more urgently the post-disaster situation in Myanmar at the moment.

The UN has for a while been under scrutiny of many critics in relation to the amount of ‘power’ it has to deliver aid relief, decisions making on the go-ahead with war and generally to effect change unto where it is needed most. This past week, I may perhaps agree with a few of them.

Aid-relief in the form of much needed food, medicine, and clean water are currently found ‘stuck’ at the borders of Thailand and Myanmar. UN’s Sec-Gen, Ban-Ki Moon seem to be doing something but that something does not appear to be significant enough to change the minds of military junta in Myanmar. According to Seth Mydans writing for International Herald Tribune -

Secretary General Ban Ki Moon urged the authorities to let aid into the country “without hindrance” and said the effect of further delay could be “truly catastrophic.”

Somehow the action word ‘urging’ seem to reinforce further UN’s helpless state and weak institution power to override the military juntas. I seriously think at a time like this, international relations must take backseat if it is in the name of reaching out and the saving the lives of those who are directly affected by the cyclone.

On the flip side, one can only imagine the amount of money that will eventually go towards aid-relief, post-disaster rebuilding projects in Myanmar. To NGOs and to the country offices of multilateral agencies stationed in the country. Like Maldives, as I have heard a first hand account today, aid when it is restricted to the hands of few who reigns the most power in decision making and public policies are the most unlikely to reach the bottom few, the poor and those living in hard-core poverty.

Money at the hands of the few, often whose education are the reason they are in such position, risks carelessness and corruption. The World Bank was once critiqued for its grandiose expenditures on first class flights and other frills that come with the job description. It is even more sad to discover that this is not limited to one multilateral agency.

With all this knowledge, it is not hard to finally figure out why in 2008, seven years away from the deadline to the 8 MDGs, we still see Bono fighting against a cause that never seems to rid of itself – poverty.

A former program director relayed on a message from his former student, there is an opening for an internship in development based in Kabul, Afghanistan for 2 months. I am tempted, and if only I can figure out what I could do to my ongoing degree in the 2 months that I am gone I would send in my application in a heartbeat. The prospect is exciting, though I wouldn’t have any inkling how I would eventually break the news to my parents. It is not the safety there that worries me so much, rather causing unnecessary worry to my parents.

An internship in Kabul would still be absolutely awesome.

On to the second topic, I just saw the much talked about ‘Fitna’ video on youtube. Of course such a movie is bound to provoke all sorts of reaction in my mind, for being a Muslim myself, I thought the portrayal of Islam and images used as representation of my beliefs was awful, disgusting, ethnocentric, and completely biased. I can sit here all night and write out all the debates that are going on in my head at the moment.

Yet when I saw one of the images of a man speaking segregating the differences between Jews and Muslims, it made me think of the causes of such a reaction. Could it be perhaps the classic story of the repressed retaliating against a supreme global power? Could it be an injustice undocumented towards Islam, and more closely his family that had resulted in this big insurgent of reaction.

It made me think, what had caused the woman to the voice that taught the 3 year old girl to think of Jews as apes and pigs. What drove her to do so? A reason that we can never understand or a mere blind faith of accepting what others told her when she was younger?

It made me think, development when left to reach such unequal heights becomes fertile breeding grounds for radical mentality. And do you blame them so? I don’t. Far from saying that it is okay to teach prejudices to 3 years children, I do not think the blame should be painted into such an ugly picture as that movie. There are other better ways to speak your mind, your opinions and your thoughts. Creating your own brand of prejudice is not one of them.

i have just came back from a trip to Sydney, and before that played host to a visiting friend who came from Melbourne. Development as a term, the thought of defining a developing country and a developed country has occurred to me is sometimes narrowly defined, and sometimes bogus-ly define. I’ll give you an example:

Melbourne friend: I have this co-worker who hails from America. He is so imbued with Americanism that he views everything else outside of America as Third World. The other day we were walking in front of the town hall in Melbourne and he said “you know, Australia is like a Third World country”

That’s the bogus definition.

Another was a conversation I overheard at the bus stop after doing my groceries. A university going boy talking to girl: And I went to all these Third World countries and they were all dirty and smelly and full of smoke. It was just bad.

That’s the narrow definition. And from the sound of it I didn’t think he had past anywhere further than his first year in Uni.

A lecturer from one of my subjects who hails from Tobago and Trinidad uses the word “developing countries”, “less developed countries” and “underdeveloped countries” interchangeably to mean countries that are other than the EU’s, North Americas, the Asian Tigers and Australia/NZ. I thought it was a little too simplistic of her at the level in which she is lecturing.

I quite like Andre Gunder Frank and the terms he uses in his discussions of the dependency theory; “metropolis” and “satellite” which are less discriminating and degrading than merely pointing at a country and saying “hey you, you are underdeveloped. let’s do something about this”

To me it’s like pointing to a stranger on the road and going “hey you are ugly!” right to their face. So do you blame ministries and local councils for being defensive when someone like Jeffrey Sachs drops by “less than 48 hours” and starts giving you a list of do’s and dont’s?

Yes, exactly.

I think as with the term ‘development’ (which one can go on for days debating about what it really means) LDCs, MDCs and all the other variations has lost its meaning. Barr the fact there are other cold, hard, rational way of drawing this division like through GDPs and other economic growth measures, I really do think it’s about time we do away with such condescending terms and re-evaluate the use of it in development.

in around a week from now I will make that dreaded 10 hours flight plus transit over in two airports before getting back into the motion of a student life.

this is my final year as full-time university student. i intend to keep it that way. if I am ever meant to get a PhD that can wait when I have crow’s feet around my eyes.

Thanks to my trip to Colombo, my love of my country has grown by two-fold. despite the bad drivers, and potholes that can kill your rims, I have come to recognized that peace and stability are two things that should not be taken for granted in any country that you are from.

Thanks to the office retreat, I realize office politics are often inescapable. Even if you are in an industry that vows to save the world.

I would love to talk about the upcoming elections, the dissolving of the cabinet, the who’s who in the running elections but the interest hasn’t quite peaked yet.

Maybe I’m just not politically savvy enough to be politically opinionated about something…

Especially hearing this Caucasian man say “I have barely been here more than 48 hours…” and followed by a half hours worth of speech on how Sabah should be best developed.

OK so first of all, yes I agree with 3/4 of the stuff he had to say (“you must ensure this beautiful place does not turn into a palm oil island”) but his method of deliverance irks all the respect I had previously had for him.

What he has to say is nothing new. I can bet you my bottom dollar that everybody knew what the issue is in Sabah and so what he said was not new, it wasn’t like we just discovered migrants were flooding the borders yesterday.

But it was his method of deliverance that made all the respect for him vanish. Yes he is a smart man and yes he may be doing good and his intentions are nonetheless good. But why do we need a famous figure and Western in origins to tell the locals what the problem is.

If those same words came from a Malaysian, how effective would the message be?

Makes you wonder doesn’t it? It has been over 50 years after we see the last of the British colonials pack up their bags and leave and yet we still salivate at their every single punctuations in their sentences.

Today I stumbled upon a website that assist interested and qualified volunteers from this particular developed nation for placings in international development projects at developing countries. The criteria stated at the application page “Must be [country X] nationals or Permanent Residence”

Perhaps in some sense the whole entire thing was created to focus on giving opportunities to its ‘own people’. Yet it still comes back to the whole idea of ‘we know better than you’ thinking. It’s fair to think in a way that knowledge transfer can only naturally go one way (developed to developing, smart to the less smart) But what about people who fits neither of those criteria? those who come from developing nations themselves and want to learn the ropes so their own countries develop competitively too?

Opportunities are obviously abound elsewhere, but I just hate the fact that often times it goes unrealized that like it or not, the remnants of colonialism still remains especially in the thinking of development

I saw this photo in a national newspaper today after lunchtime. But it didn’t come with a newsfeed, so I jumped onto Google and did a simple search of “mud cookies” because that is what you see in that photo. A woman collecting dried mud cookies to be sold at the nearest market in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. Food prices are rising, thanks to the rising oil prices worldwide. That is not a suprise to anyone who has been keeping up with the news in the recent months. So intricate and interconnected are we in this world that for those who may benefit from the hike in oil prices, they are people on the opposite end who has to resort to dirt to stave off their hunger.

What are we doing wrong? Why are there still people mixing dirt, shortening and salt to make a decent meal?

But Jonathan Katz of International Business Times wrote:

“The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.”

Which got me thinking, maybe perhaps in our world eating dirt is something that requires a lot of imagination. Eating dirt is unthinkable.

But maybe for those in Haiti, it’s as normal as Malaysians having nasi lemak for breakfast. No?

There is always that question of what lead the people to choose dirt over other nutritional items like rice, maize and fruits. Perhaps unavailability of such kind of food in the region, which makes you think further, well that can’t be the problem, you can go to Singapore and dine on freshly flown fish from Japan caught on the same day.

And so there could only point to one thing. Purchasing power. Or the lack thereof. It’s not like we are not doing anything about hunger and poverty. There is the “Make Poverty History” campaign and the Global Fund which I was told in November last year had a total of $16b to go around. So then what are we still doing wrong to have people eat dirt, given our belief from their lack of choices, to keep themselves alive?

Of course, in an ideal world I would be worldly and capable of talking about global political issues like it lives at the tip of my fingertips. In this world, my posts will probably be confined to South-East Asia, the country from which I am from and the country that I happen to live in at the moment, and perhaps the country that I happen to visit at that time.

For a while now it has intrigued me the amount of influence and discussion some blogs can generate. How does a blog make it big? How does someone like jeff ooi make so many people, even teenagers want to quote him and sound cool? How can some opinions of a person caused him/her to get in trouble with the authorities and perhaps spend a night or two in the lock-up? I don’t know the exact answers to these, but what I do know is that all of them have something important to say and they are saying it.

.. and so here goes, my important 2 cents for the world