Think Bigg

Okay, loyal readers! This will be my last post for a couple of weeks as I’m off to check things out in Chennai, India.

After about 48 hours of travel, we will be landing in India to go to work at the Little Flock Children’s Home.

I will leave you with the words of one of my personal heroes, Bono, who spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast in February 2006:

Check Judaism. Check Islam. Check pretty much anyone.

I mean, God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill… I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial stuff… maybe, maybe not… But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor.

God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house… God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives… God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war… God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.

And if God is there, I know I will be just fine. See you when I return!

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Do you replate? If you’re looking for a new cause with minimal investment, perhaps you can get behind the movement at Replate.org!

What does it mean to replate? Basically, if you finish a meal at a restaurant with leftover food, you box up the leftovers and place them on top of the nearest trash bin or newspaper dispenser. Homeless folks can then take the food that would have otherwise gone to waste.

According to Replate.org,

We started this project because we noticed that people in West Coast cities and beyond were leaving their leftovers on top of (or next to) garbage cans when they couldn’t find someone to give them to. We thought this behavior was worth talking about, so we gave it a name.

If you’re in a city with a large homeless population, it seems like it might be a decent way to distribute extra food that would otherwise just go to waste.

What do you think — generous gesture or municipal health hazard? Either way, it’s a snappy conversation starter. “Do you replate?”

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We had a really interesting meeting this weekend with a guy who is raising money to build a sugarcane to ethanol facility in Mozambique.

Despite all of the gloom and doom news you see on television, Sub-Saharan Africa, with projected growth of 6.8 percent this year, is apparently the next “once in a lifetime” opportunity. At least according to Stephen Jennings, the billionaire founder of Moscow brokerage Renaissance Capital, who plans to double his investment in Africa to at least $1 billion this year.

According to Bloomberg,

“`If Russia was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, sub- Saharan Africa is a second once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said Jennings, 46, in an interview at his Moscow office May 23.

Jennings started Renaissance in 1995 with former bankers from Credit Suisse Group including Boris Jordan and the bank has since helped Russian companies raise more than $15 billion. The native New Zealander is looking to Africa as Russia’s benchmark stock index heads for the first decline in eight years and as competition increases from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

Africa’s longest expansion in more than three decades is fueling demand for capital from overseas. The International Monetary Fund last month raised its economic growth forecast for southern Africa to 6.8 percent this year from 5.7 percent in 2006, boosted by oil-exporting Angola and Nigeria.

Renaissance plans to open a Dubai office to help channel oil money from the Persian Gulf into Africa. Jennings, who already has offices in Nairobi, Kenya and Lagos, Nigeria wants to challenge China, the biggest foreign investor in the continent. Chinese President Hu Jintao vowed to boost investment and imports during a 12-day, eight-nation tour in February.

“`Africa is going through an enormous renaissance and unlike Russia in the 1990s, it’s not a matter of imagining that it might happen, it is happening,” Jennings said. “`With the exception of the Chinese, we will be one of the largest financial investors in the region. We have the ability and capacity to make quite big investments and bring in co- investors.”

For two more perspectives on the burgeoning ties between China and Africa, check out NPR’s take on the growing friendship.

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While there has been some recent criticism of its much touted potential to eliminate global poverty, there is no doubt that microfinance has empowered millions of impoverished people around the world by providing them access to the financial tools that traditional banks won’t offer.

To that end, the folks at Unitus are doing their part to fight global poverty by using a venture capital model to increase access to microfinance around the globe.

According to their website,

Unitus envisions a world where microfinance is available to every individual. We work toward this vision by accelerating the growth of the world’s highest-potential emerging microfinance institutions. We provide capital investments and capacity-building consulting, thus empowering these organizations to scale and provide life-changing financial services to dramatically more of the world’s working poor.

How can you help? Of course, you can always donate directly to Unitus.

Or every time you shop at Amazon.com, click through the Unitus website, and Unitus will receive a contribution for all the purchases you make within the following 24 hours at no additional cost to you! How easy is that?

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You’ve probably heard about the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders, which is designed to take the medical expertise of its volunteers out into the parts of world that need it most. It turns out that engineers have their own version!

Engineers Without Borders was established to partner with developing communities worldwide in order to improve their quality of life. The partnership works to implement sustainable engineering projects, while involving and training internationally responsible engineers and engineering students.

According to their website,

Whether you are an engineering student (undergraduate or graduate), a student in some other field of study, a professional engineer, university faculty, or not an engineer at all, EWB-USA offers you several great opportunities to become involved in building a better world one community at a time.

In 2005 alone, over 350 volunteers participated in EWB-USA projects, 250 of them university students. Their work improved the quality of life for 45,000 people around the world.

Search projects by region, departure date or type of project. And if you can’t go yourself, you can always donate to help someone else to go!

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