Great read on philanthropy and impact

I'm a big fan of Michael Hobbes. Okay, I've only ever read two things that he's written, but they've both been spot on. You should go read his recent piece How Mark Zuckerberg Should Give Away $45 Billion. A couple of the money quotes:

$45 billion, as a former Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grantee put it, is "a 1,000-pound gorilla." You don't give away that much money without changing the places and institutions and people you give it to, sometimes for the worse.

They told me about their own [failed philanthropic efforts]: Promising ideas scaled into oblivion, donations that disappeared into corrupt governments, groupthink disguised as insight. But they also told me about projects that worked, that scaled, that matched the ambitions of the new philanthropy while avoiding its blind spots. And it turns out that some of the best ideas are the ones Zuckerberg is the least likely to hear in Silicon Valley. 

Most legacy foundations pay consultants millions of dollars to study and re-study problems before they give grants toward solving them. The Ford Foundation spends nearly $1 for every $4 it gives away. In 2013, the Rockefeller Foundation’s largest grant recipient (other than its offshoot, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors), was Dalberg Global Development Advisors, a consulting firm.

The whole piece is a ten minute read and I really encourage you to go and check it out. Also, you should read this other piece by Michael Hobbes from 2014 - International Development Is Broken. Here Are Two Ways to Fix It.

I'm back!

So I didn't manage a single post in the last two months, for two very different reasons. In December, it was because there was very little to write about. I thought about writing about my new bike (I probably will write that post sometime--suffice it to say, I like riding my bike around here) and my adventures trying to spot license plates from each of India's states (I probably won't write that one--I'm at 22 out of 36, and the last 14 will take a long time if I don't travel to India's northeast and nearby islands), but in general, things were rather unremarkable. Part of that was due to the fact that most of December I was waiting for two different government bureaucracies to come through for me.

On January 3, the first one finally came through and I got the documentation needed to apply for my Pakistani visa. That set in motion the second reason that I wasn't blogging, which was that for the month of January, I was in Pakistan for IDDS Lahore, where there was so much going on that I didn't have time to sit down and blog.

Now I'm back in Bangalore, so over the next several days, I'll try to share most of my adventures. In the meantime, one of the participants had a great take on the summit, so I'll just leave that here.