Archive for the ‘International Development’ Category

Dr. Emma Hooper is a specialist in South Asia and the Middle East, currently Senior Research Fellow Associate at the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs (CIDOB) and Project Director of the policy research project “Sources of Tension in Afghanistan & Pakistan: A Regional Perspective”.

Despite its smoggy reputation, China is doing better than the United States. Much better.

By Ramez Naam

China is an environmental mess. Smog in Beijing is so bad it’s literally broken the air-quality index. In Shanghai, it’s at times turned the city into a scene from Blade Runner. (It almost matches the infamous Cleveland smog of the 1970s.) Meanwhile, thousands of dead pigs—cause of death not yet known—have been floating down a river that cuts through Shanghai and provides part of the region’s drinking water. More than half of China’s water is so polluted, in fact, that even treatment plants can’t make it safe to drink. And China is now responsible for almost half the world’s coal consumption. That coal burning not only contributes to climate change—it’s also saddled China with severe cases of acid rain, something the United States dealt with a generation ago.

All of that makes what I’m about to say sound even crazier: China may one day be the world’s leader in combating climate change. In almost every way you cut it, China is already taking a much more aggressive approach toward climate change than the United States is.

This is important for two reasons. First, China is seeing the world’s fastest growth in energy consumption and in CO₂ emissions. In the United States and Europe, by contrast, energy usage is nearly flat and CO₂ emissions are down. So China’s policies exert a huge lever on future CO₂ emissions. Second, one of the prime arguments against U.S. action on climate change has been that it doesn’t matter what the United States does if China isn’t on board.

Well, China already is on board in a number of ways that the United States isn’t. Consider the following:

1. China is launching a cap-and-trade plan.
In the United States, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade plan fizzled in the Senate in 2009. In China, meanwhile, authorities have moved forward with pilot cap-and-trade systems covering seven regions, including the manufacturing hub provinces of Guangdong and Hubei, as well as the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Chongqing, and Shenzhen. The first of those cap-and-trade systems, in Shenzhen, will start operation June 17. By 2020, the Chinese government plans to link those regional systems into a national carbon market. Just last month, the governments of China and Australia announced their intent to link the two countries’ carbon markets into a regional one. Read more…

As published in www.slate.com on May 8, 2013

Tomás Abadía, President and CEO of IADIC (International Advisors on Development, Investment & Commerce) on EU relations with Latin America (in Spanish).

Ansuya, which means learned woman in Sanskrit, was launched in the summer of 2012 in a slum in Mumbai, India, called Janupada. Aparna Bhat, current student of the IE Master in International Relations (MIR), implemented this idea with a small group of girls as students. With the help of some volunteers, Aparna taught the girls soft skills _ such as English, math or public speaking_ and hard skills_embroidery or fabric painting. This extracurricular learning process resulted in the making of cloth bags that were sold. The profit from the sales was given to the girls, with the aim to make them a bit more independent and empowered.

Three months later, when Aparna travelled to Spain, she was convinced that the MIR experience and the IE platform could help her develop further her idea. Here, she met another student from the MIR program, Sara Barragán Montes. Even though they came from completely different backgrounds, both share the same values, and decided to work together to formalize Ansuya and design a sustainable organization with a durable social impact based on both their experiences.

Ansuya is still a work in progress, but it is on the right path. The proof of this is that it won third place among 13 great social business ideas presented during the IE Impact Weekend, a contest organized by IE Net Impact Club along with IE Entrepreneurship Club, Venture Lab, Area 31, Emzingo and the HUB Madrid. The entire weekend involved a lot of hard work, but it was an experience that allowed Aparna and Sara to receive valuable feedback from other IE students, the judges and their mentor, Pablo Esteves from Emzingo.

From April 10^th  to April 17^th , two students from the current IE Master in International Relations intake went on a study trip to Ghana with the Financieros sin Fronteras (FsF) microfinance NGO. The two students will be working with the founder of FsF, Maria Luque, towards a final project on financial inclusion and gender equality in Ghana that they will present in July. This is some of the feedback the students had upon their return.

“The trip to Ghana to work on our thesis with Financieros Sin Fronteras was an enriching and valuable experience. We met with and interviewed state officials in charge of policy-making, executives from international organisations and institutions working at the grassroots level as well as people from the small towns and villages who are actually the target audience for micro-finance. Not only was it a great opportunity to research for our papers but we also had the opportunity to meet and interact with students from various Finance masters and get a sneak peek into the world of Consultancy.  It was our first time in Africa and we were pleasantly surprised at how different Ghana was from our stereotypical expectations. The experience of being immersed in a totally new and different culture with warm welcoming people was wonderful and we only wish we could have stayed much longer!”  –Naushita Jaising and Xuyang Ma