March 2009

In the first week of March, I attended the 6th International Biofuels Conference in New Delhi. In this conference I learned of an entrepreneurial venture by a tiny village in India that left me amazed. The village is producing its own electricity to meet all its energy requirements!  

The Indian IT success story is known across the globe. In urban India, we pride ourselves in using the latest technology and most urban teenagers are gadget freaks. On the other hand, hundreds of villages do not even have electricity in my country. 

Almost a year ago I was on my way to one of the most wonderful adventures I have ever experienced. It happened with a youth initiative called COJDECA (an acronym that translates to the Youth Council for the Development of Cerro Alto), located in rural Guatemala. It was an opportunity to truly understand what youth empowerment is all about and its high potential to improve living conditions in, I would say, any country of the world. It was also an occasion to see how cooperation among people from different countries is a key factor for development.

For my last blog I got a very interesting comment:

“It is very well served to make motivational statements…..Equally clichéd are statements like someone has to begin somewhere- the fact is that little concrete is ever achieved.”

This is so very true. He/She was referring to my essay and I fear that sometimes I end up talking like our seasoned politicians! 

In his blog post below, Nate mentions the stark contrast in life expectancy rates between the developed and developing world. It reminded me of something I read recently in Duncan Green’s book From Poverty to Power. Green writes:

“From cradle to grave, a person’s life chances are dominated by the extraordinary levels of inequality that characterize the modern world. A girl born in Norway will almost certainly live to old age. If she is born in Sierra Leone, however, she has a one in four chance of dying before her fifth birthday. A Norwegian girl can expect to go to a good school, followed by university, and to be healthy and cared for right through old age. In Sierra Leone only two in three girls start school at all, and many more drop out along the way…Only one in four women is able to read and write. University is an impossible dream.”