February 22nd, 2012
Aziza Umarova, UNDP in Uzbekistan
Less than a year ago, we teamed up with two enthusiastic young partners from the Uzbek anti-monopoly agency and helped create a web site where consumers can register their complaints.
National partners are fully supportive, and are maintaining the site in two languages (Uzbek and Russian), with updates on new legislation and regulations, success stories on the handling of consumer complaints, and a space for questions and answers.
In 2011 there were 6,700 paper based complaints, and since the launch of the web site in March 2011, 251 cases have been received and reviewed through the online system. In the last quarter of 2011 more than 130 complaints were received online.
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Tags: Aziza Umarova, consumer protection, consumer rights, ICT4D, ICTs, internet, online services, public services, Uzbekistan
Posted in Development 2.0, Governance, Human rights | No Comments »
February 20th, 2012
Justyna Krol, Public Relations Specialist, UNDP in Poland @justynakrol
After taking the train to Lublin, tomorrow I’ll be visiting one of our social enterprises which is also a café/bookstore.
Join me as I tweet photos and updates throughout the day. You can follow via Twitter Tuesday 21 February. If you’re not already, follow: @UNDP_Europe_CIS or me: @justynakrol #CoopLublin.
You’ll get a behind the scenes glimpse into how the café/bookstore works as a social enterprise, and who makes up the soul of “Spoldzielnia” in Lublin. I’ll be talking with our partners about how to better promote their work, and involve the local community. It is all extremely exciting and I want to share it with you!
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Tags: bookstore, cafe, employment, innovation, jobs, Justyna Krol, labour market, Lublin, people with disabilities, Poland, skills, social enterprise, social innovation, Twitter
Posted in Development 2.0, Poverty, Social inclusion | No Comments »
February 20th, 2012
Giulio Quaggiotto @gquaggiotto
Franz Kafka
A recent conversation with Jakub Wygnanski from Shipyard, the Unit for Social Innovation and Research in Poland, prompted me to take a second look at the Kafka Brigade UK website, which I had not visited in a while. The Kafka Brigade describes itself as “the first aid for bureaucratic breakdown” and focuses on action research to reduce red tape for citizens and businesses.
It struck me that their key principles, as described on the site (and copied below), could well be adopted, with some variation, by the development sector to inform the transition towards what Owen Barder has recently called “post bureaucratic aid” in a brilliant post on the results agenda. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: citizens, complexity, data, development 2.0, development 2.0 manifesto, Giulio Quaggiotto, innovation, Kafka Brigade, Kafka button, Kafka thermometer, Owen Barder, Poland, Shipyard, social innovation, UNDP
Posted in Development, Development 2.0 | No Comments »
February 17th, 2012
Clare Romanik
Tobacco Free Initiative, Tobacco Smoke Can Make You Impotent - Canada
Within 24 hours, I participated in an analytical discussion on scaling up local development initiatives, attended a presentation about why change is hard, and made some interesting connections.
Discussing the difficulty of change helped me understand what was missing from the development dilemma of scaling up. Change is hard because our emotional side needs to be excited and motivated to change. If we only appeal to people’s rational side we won’t convince them to change their behaviour.
Ten years ago, the noted psychologist Daniel Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for showing how irrationality and risky decision-making play into economics, including the stock market.
His new book will explore the tension between our separate systems of thinking – our slow and deliberative side and our intuitive side. If the economic world has acknowledged the role of psychological and, yes, even irrational behavior, why do development practitioners think our field can escape from this basic truth?
Since we’re in the business of human development, we need to admit that part of being human means that we are not always rational.
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Tags: change, Clare Romanik, communication, creativity, Daniel Kahneman, emotions, inspiration, intuition, Kyrgyzstan, marketing, psychology, rationality, scaling up, social marketing
Posted in Development | 1 Comment »
February 14th, 2012
Jens Wandel
Abdulla, a trainer with UNDP in Uzbekistan, shared his on the job experience living with a disability
I just returned from an inspiring meeting in Poland with Mohammed Yunus whose perspective on social businesses are still fermenting into ideas for action. For now, this blog covers another light bulb which ignited in Poland: genuine inclusion of people with disabilities.
Polish laws are strongly in favour of enriching the workplaces of people with disabilities. So much so that the burden of proof is on businesses to demonstrate results. If they demonstrate a diverse workforce, they can get a tax break. But only if they take action. This incentive is impressive and I saw in person how striking the results can be.
Businesses may need a legal kick, but soon they realize that their customers respect these efforts, and an inclusive business, like Biedronka (Polish retail), draw customers who are happier spending money on companies that care.
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Tags: disability, equality, inclusive, Jens Wandel, Mohammed Yunus, Poland, social business, Tajikistan, UNDP, United Nations, web accessibility
Posted in Development, Human rights, Social inclusion | 2 Comments »
February 8th, 2012
Milica Begovic
Did you know that Montenegro is mentioned in Dante’s Inferno? It turns out that in a small northern town located on the river banks of the UNESCO protected river Tara, 13th Century King Uros II “earned” a place in the eighth circle of hell for manufacturing replicas of Venetian coins and passing them off as his own.
There are many more hidden gems (both natural and cultural) in the country’s northern region, which is also the most underdeveloped. And yet, while Montenegro gets some 1.5 million visitors a year (and this number is growing), only five to seven percent of them venture to the country’s north.
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Tags: community activism, economic policy, ecotourism, entrepreneurship, environmental policy, foursquare, Internet access, local development, marketing, Milica Begovic, Montenegro, Tara River, tourism, UNESCO, wifi
Posted in Development, Development 2.0, Environment, Poverty, Social inclusion | 7 Comments »
February 8th, 2012
Soraya Soemadiredja, UNDP in Uzbekistan
Community-based ecotourism is currently the hot topic in UNDP’s Local Government Support Project office in Uzbekistan. We see it as a key part of supporting and empowering regional and local development, particularly in the regions of Djizak and Namangan.
One of the most exciting activities of the joint project between the Cabinet of Ministers and UNDP is the opening of the ski resort in Zaamin for another season.
Through research and training and the first development of a branding and marketing strategy for a tourism zone in Uzbekistan, we want to boost development and tourism in the Djizak region.
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Tags: development, Djizak, ecotourism, entertainment, forest, infrastructure, internet, investment, local development, Namangan, skiing, Soraya Soemadiredja, tourism, UNESCO world heritage, Uzbekistan, zaamin
Posted in Development, Environment, Poverty | No Comments »
February 7th, 2012
Danièle Gelz, Aid for Trade project manager
Saving heritage tree varieties in Kyrgyzstan
A farmer since 1992, Avazbek Chotbaev has implemented 21 agricultural projects and teaches market economy basics to farmers.
When I asked people where I could find Mr. Chotbaev, 56, locals told me his nickname was “the person who has brought life to the desert.” Few people believed that a fruit nursery could be successful in Kyrgyzstan: dry soil, hot climate – bad conditions in general. But not for Mr. Chotbaev.
Avazbek Joldoshevich told me what his father, a WWII veteran, used to tell him: “A good man leaves an orchard behind him.”
And now, a green orchard spreads out over 30 hectares of land. Briars, peach trees, plum trees, poplars, willows, cedars, you can find everything here – around 3,000 specimens in total.
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Tags: agriculture, aid for trade, apricots, Avazbek Chotbaev, Batken, Danièle Gelz, drip irrigation, heritage, Kyrgyzstan, varieties
Posted in Environment, Poverty | No Comments »
February 3rd, 2012
Afterwards, we’ll have a debate called: Does money have sex? Budget sensitivity to gender equality and the social economy.
Follow along with live tweets from
@Barbogalvankova and join the debate – the
event hashtag is #gendercheck
Tags: budgeting, film, gender equality, GenderCheck, labour market, Piotr Krosniak, Poland, social economy, social policy, Twitter, Warsaw
Posted in Gender equality | No Comments »
February 1st, 2012
Francesco Checchi
Real time map of trends on Twitter
As anticipated in a previous post (Social media for anticorruption? Exploring experiences in the former Soviet block), we have been putting quite a lot of thought into the use of social media for anticorruption in our region.
How can we use social media to capitalize on existing efforts by ordinary citizens and NGOs to enhance accountability of public institutions? How can we harness the amount of information concerning corruption scandals and maladministration shared on the Internet by the independent websites, media and bloggers? How can we move beyond the hype of well publicized cases to get into the mechanics of what works and doesn’t work?
We quickly came to the conclusion that the most useful contribution we could make to the debate was to provide some in-depth case studies focusing on the experiences of those who are working “in the trenches” – from the Georgian version of FixMyStreet to Moldova’s crowdsourcing platform Alerte.md, from an in-depth look at the work of celebrated Russian blogger Alexey Navalny to the use of Ushahidi to monitor elections in Kyrgyzstan.
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Tags: accountability, Alexey Navalny, anticorruption, citizen reporting, corruption, crowd-to-community, crowdsourcing, elections, fixmystreet, Francesco Checchi, Georgia, information sharing, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, public administration, social media, transparency, Ushahidi
Posted in Anticorruption, Development 2.0, Governance, Social inclusion | 2 Comments »
