During the holiday break, Socialbrite is updating and republishing some of our most popular posts. We noticed that Jolkona is prominently featured in Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen’s new book, “Giving 2.0.” Our regular publication schedule resumes Monday.

Imet Adnan Mahmud, co-founder and CEO of Jolkona, during Beth Kanter’s book signing party for “The Networked Nonprofit” at TechSoup Global — and was immediately impressed by his seriousness and dedication to helping great causes through one-to-one philanthropy.

Jolkona is at the bleeding edge of this phenomenon, which will become an increasingly important part of charitable giving in the years ahead, as young people in particular want transparency, interaction and accountability when supporting a cause.

Adnan says Jolkona is the first nonprofit “to give tangible feedback on your donation.” Kiva, which pioneered the technique, provides entrepreneurs with loans. And while nonprofits like charity:water and Global Giving often give updates on projects, Jolkona is positioning itself as a technology platform that enables one-to-one philanthropy for nonprofits of any size.

Watch, download or embed our interview on Vimeo

The year-old Jolkona — which means “drop of water” in Bengali (Adnan is a native of Bangladesh) — currently showcases 75 projects in 35 countries, including the United States.

Jolkona’s premise is simple but powerful: Support a library in Tibet that needs $50 to buy books, and you’ll get the list of the books purchased through your donation. Help people in Bangladesh and Myanmar get an artificial limb for $200 — $200! — and you’ll receive a before and after photo. In Iraq, you can save a girl from an honor killing for $120: You get the story of the girl you saved, though for security reasons they can’t supply a name or photo. And in the U.S., you can provide field trips to a classroom of disadvantaged children in Seattle.

Says Adnan: “If you ask any nonprofit, Do you want to tell your supporters how their money was used, they’ll all tell you, Yes I do. But they don’t because they’re strapped for resources. Jolkona decided to come in and provide that technical infrastructure.

“Our focus is on youth philanthropy,” he adds. “We’re focused on galvanizing this next generation of givers. We’ve seen the frustration of this generation — that they don’t know where their money is going to. … We want people to feel that their [donation] can make a difference.”

It does, and the Jolkona team has gone out of its way to provide transparency and dispel worries that surfaced after it was revealed that Kiva wasn’t being forthright about its donations process.

Jolkona is now accepting nonprofit partners, though there’s a waiting queue. “If you are doing great work and are committed to showing impact, we are your best partners” as a platform solution, Adnan says.

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The debut of The Hoop Fund from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Social enterprise offers virtuous circle around loans, production, connections in a ‘fair trade ecosystem’

Last night I got a first-hand look at the debut of The Hoop Fund, a new social enterprise (tagline: Lend. Produce. Enjoy.) with a terrific pedigree and promising future.

In short, The Hoop Fund enables participants to meet the makers of products we buy, invest in their businesses and become part of the prosperity of their communities.

More than 150 people packed into The Hub San Francisco last night for the “friends and family” debut of The Hoop Fund, founded by entrepreneur (and former journalist) Kevin Doyle Jones, the impresario behind the Social Capital Markets conference coming up Oct. 4-6 in San Francisco. Lots of familiar faces there — Gary Bolles, Sarah Kennon, Shannon Clark, Arabella Santiago — and I got to meet two of the principals behind The Hoop Fund: CEO Patrick Donohue and operations chief Maia Hirschbein.

The Hoop Fund is one of those ideas that you have to see in action to really appreciate. A slide presentation showing how it’s already making a difference in villages in Peru really drove home its message of entrepreneurial opportunities in the developing world. With the Hoop, you can support producers through a loan (I just made a $50 loan to Indigenous Designs), purchasing their fair trade products through a partnering brand, and then spreading the word to your own networks and community. Jones calls it a “fair trade ecosystem.”

Here’s a quick 2-minute video with Maia taken at the event — incidentally, my first-ever video taken with my new iPhone 4:

Watch, download, embed or share the video on Vimeo
Follow JoinTheHoop on Twitter (44 followers so far); hashtag is #thehoop
Like The Hoop on Facebook (91 fans so far)

The Hoop goes beyond what Kiva does

The idea is: Pick a project on www.jointhehoop.com and make your first loan. (“We want to prove that the Hoop will change the world through meaningful and powerful connections. Help us do that!” Maia says.) Next, share your action with your friends and help build the Hoop community.

Among the projects now open for investment:

Alter Eco
Medicinal plants garden project
Amount: $2,500
Length: 2 years
Location: Alto Huayabama, San Martin, Peru

Indigenous Designs
Purchase of handloom knitting machine
Amount: $1,400
Length: 18 months
Location: Arequipa, Peru

You can contribute in small amounts if you’d like — say, $25.

Yes, it’s similar in some ways to the brilliantly successful Kiva.org. Co-founder Donohue told me the Hoop seeks to fill the virtuous circle by answering the question, After you make your loan, then what? The Hoop connects you with the very cool brands that the funded small business people and farmers create or work with, and then it provides the social tools to help you spread the word to your friends and colleagues.

Really, it’s an exciting idea, and I’m jazzed to do whatever small part I can to help it along.

The post The Hoop Fund makes its debut appeared first on Socialbrite.

In “The White Man’s Burden – Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good,” William Easterly’s frustration at large-scale, top-down, bureaucracy-ridden development projects runs to an impressive 384 pages. While Easterly dedicates most of his book to markets, economics and the mechanics of international development itself, he talks little of information and communication technology (ICT). The index carries no reference to ‘computers,’ ‘ICT’ or even plain old ‘technology.’

But there is an entry for ‘cell phones.’

E. F. Schumacher, a fellow economist and the man widely recognized as the father of the appropriate technology movement, spent a little more time in his books studying technology issues. His seminal 1973 book – “Small is Beautiful – The Study of Economics as if People Mattered” – reacted to the imposition of alien development concepts on Third World countries, and he warned early of the dangers and difficulties of advocating the same technological practices in entirely different societies and environments. Although his earlier work focused more on agri-technology and large-scale infrastructure projects (dam building was a favorite ‘intervention’ at the time), his theories could easily have been applied to ICTs – as they were in later years.

Things have come a long way since 1973. For a start, many of us now have mobile phones, the most rapidly adopted technology in history. In what amounts to little more than the blink of an eye, mobiles have given us a glimpse of their potential to help us solve some of the most pressing problems of our time. As the evidence mounts, I have one question: If mobiles truly are as revolutionary and empowering as they appear to be – particularly in the lives of some of the poorest members of society – then do we have a moral duty, in the ICT for Development (ICT4D) community at least, to see that they fulfill that potential?

You see, I’m a little worried. If we draw parallels between the concerns of Easterly and Schumacher and apply them to the application of mobile phones as a tool for social and economic development, there’s a danger that the development community may end up repeating the same mistakes of the past. We have a golden opportunity here that we can’t afford to miss.

But miss it we may. Since 2003 I’ve been working exclusively in the mobile space, and I’ve come to my own conclusions about where we need to be focusing more of our attention if we’re to take advantage of the opportunity ahead of us. Don’t get me wrong – we do need to be looking at the bigger picture – but there’s not room at the top for all of us.

I, for one, am more than happy to be working at the bottom. Not only do I find grassroots NGOs particularly lean and efficient (often with the scarcest of funding and resources), but they also tend to get less bogged down with procedure, politics and egos, and are often able to react far more quickly to changing environments than their larger counterparts. Being local, they also tend to have much greater context for their environments, and in activism terms they’re more likely to be able to operate under the radar of dictatorial regimes, meaning they can often engage a local and national populace in ways where larger organizations might struggle.

So, waving my grassroots NGO flag, I see a central problem of focus in the mobile applications space. Let me explain. If we take the “Long Tail ” concept first talked about by Chris Anderson and apply it to the mobile space, we get something like this. I call it “Social Mobile’s Long Tail”.

What it demonstrates is that our tendency to aim for sexy, large-scale, top-down, capital- and time-intensive mobile solutions simply results in the creation of tools which only the larger, more resource-rich NGOs are able to adopt and afford. Having worked with grassroots NGOs for over 15 years, I strongly believe that we need to seriously refocus some of our attention there to avoid developing our own NGO “digital divide.”

To do this we need to think about low-end, simple, appropriate mobile technology solutions which are easy to obtain, affordable, require as little technical expertise as possible, and are easy to copy and replicate. This is something I regularly write about, and it’s a challenge I’m more than happy to throw down to the developer community.

Low-hanging fruit

Another key problem that we have emerges as a symptom of the first. Because larger international development agencies, by their very nature, tend to preoccupy themselves with the bigger issues, they often inadvertently neglect the simple, easier-to-fix problems (the “low hanging fruit” as some people like to call it). The Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) are good examples of the kinds of targets which are far easier to miss than hit.

In mobile terms, using the technology to enhance basic communications is a classic “low hanging fruit”. After all, that’s what mobile phones do, and communication is fundamental to all NGO activities, particularly those working in the kinds of infrastructure-challenged environments often found in the developing world. Despite this, there are few tools available that take advantage of one of the most prolific mobile communication channels available to grassroots NGOs – the text message (or SMS).

Much of my own work with FrontlineSMS has sought to solve this fundamental problem, and in places such as Malawi – where Josh Nesbit, FrontlineSMS, a laptop and one hundred recycled mobile phones has helped revolutionise healthcare delivery to 250,000 rural Malawians – the benefits are loud and clear. In other countries, where activities of international aid organizations may be challenged or restricted by oppressive, dictatorial regimes, grassroots NGOs often manage to maintain operations and often provide the only voice for the people. In Zimbabwe, Kubatana.net have been using FrontlineSMS extensively to engage a population not only starved of jobs, a meaningful currency and a functioning democracy, but also news and information. In Afghanistan, an international NGO is using FrontlineSMS to provide security alerts to their staff and fieldworkers.
The software is seen as a crucial tool in helping keep people safe in one of the world’s most volatile environments. With a little will, what can be done in Zimbabwe and Afghanistan can be done anywhere where similar oppression exists.

In cases such as these – and there are many more – we need to stop simply talking about “what works” and start to get “what works” into the hands of the NGOs that need it the most. That’s a challenge that I’m happy to throw down to the ICT4D community. There’s only a certain amount of talking and critiquing we can, and should, do.

There are, of course, many issues and challenges – some technical, some cultural, others economic and geographical. The good news is that few are insurmountable, and we can remove many of them by simply empowering the very people we’re seeking to help. The emergence of home grown developer communities in an increasing number of African countries, for example, presents the greatest opportunity yet to unlock the social change potential of mobile technology. Small-scale, realistic, achievable, replicable, bottom-up development such as that championed by the likes of Easterly and Schumacher may hardly be revolutionary, but what would be is our acknowledgement of the mistakes of the past, and a co-ordinated effort to help us avoid making them all over again.

I spent the best part of my university years critiquing the efforts of those who went before me. Countless others have done the same. Looking to the future, how favourably will the students and academics of tomorrow reflect on our efforts? If the next 30 years aren’t to read like the last then we need to rethink our approach, and rethink it now.

This entry originally appeared at Kiwanja.net.

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