This Sunday is Mother’s Day, and what better way to celebrate all the wonderful ways your mother has impacted your life than to give a gift that improves someone else’s.

With the NetHope Mother’s Day Gift Guide, we have arranged gifts from our 34 member organizations into four categories – business-savy, empowerment, eco-friendly and book-smarts – so you can choose to donate to something close to your mother’s heart. We listed the type of gift, member organization offering this option and approximate cost of the donation.

Happy Mother’s Day!

—the NetHope team

The worst drought and famine in more than 60 years has placed strain on humanitarian agencies working in Dadaab, Kenya and calls for better-coordinated relief efforts. The crisis has threatened the livelihood of 9.5 million people in the Horn of Africa since early 2011. Refugees from Somalia continue to arrive in Kenya by the tens of thousands, making the Dadaab complex now the world’s largest refugee camp ever with almost 500,000 counted and perhaps as many as 100,000 more unregistered. Responding aid organizations are stretched to their limits as they try and provide critical life-sustaining services such as food, housing, sanitation and medical relief to those in Dadaab. To make matters even more difficult, Somali-based terrorist organization al Shebaab recently escalated activities in and around the camps. Security has been heightened to ensure the safety of contractors, staff and refugees.
To answer the pressing challenges encountered by agencies working in the Dadaab camp, NetHope, Inveneo and Cisco came together to create a new collaboration network that enables humanitarian agencies to function better, to communicate better with other organizations and to better support operations.

As the events in the Egyptian Arab Spring demonstrate, social media is changing the world in both subtle and profound ways.  With 160 million people playing games on Facebook on a regular basis, many of them in the developing world, there is a natural intersection of games, social media and international development.  NetHope and USAID are working together to tap this huge potential of using social media games to address youth-related issues in the developing world and bring about measurable behavior change.

As a father of four, I am very familiar with remittances.  When my first son went off to college, I gave him an envelope of cash.  My second child got a monthly check in the mail from Mom and Dad.  Never one to wait for the mail my third child opened a joint account with us so I could make deposits locally and he could make withdrawals at the local bank branch on campus.  With my fourth, we moved to the world of interoperable ATMs; deposits and withdrawals then happened on any street in any city and even abroad.  Now, we are in the digital age and any transfers can be done online with immediate effect. 

I have been thinking a lot about this evolution in my own family as I watch the leading role remittances are playing in the growth of mobile money systems around the world.  M-Pesa was created initially to serve the market for remittances in Kenya.  M-Pesa now is used by over 15 million Kenyans and in 2011 Safaricom reported that value of transactions processed through the M-PESA platform was equivalent to 20% of Kenya’s GDP.  In Central America, Tigo Money makes remittances easy and even advertises its service on bags of Frito Lays chips sold in small markets around Guatemala as witnessed by Hamilton McNutt, a member of NetHope’s Payment Innovations team who traveled to Guatemala in March.

Last year was the costliest year in natural disasters that the world has ever seen. According to a report issued by global reinsurance firm Munich Re, world disasters in 2011 caused damages exceeding more than a third of a trillion dollars. And, experts at The World Bank predict that natural disasters will only get worse in the future, largely due to two powerful trends: burgeoning cities and a changing climate.

As the world prepares to cope with the high costs and other devastating effects of future earthquakes, tsunamis and more, it must find a better way to manage the chaotic environment that follows these disasters.

Global Philanthropy Forum’s President and co-Founder Jane Wales said in Forbes that new philanthropists want to affect positive social change by whatever means is most effective, most ethical and most enduring. They take on large problems and seek system-wide change.

The Global Philanthropy Forum is an invite-only event that brings together donors and social investors to enhance their work by connecting them to issues, effective strategies, potential partners and global agents of change. In a time when donors increasingly want to be efficient with their investments, the Forum presents a unique opportunity for learning and leverage.
So, why does NetHope attend something like Global Philanthropy Forum? The answer is easy: we’ve been asked by one of our partners to share the value of collaborative impact as a useful approach for meeting the demands of new philanthropy.

We at NetHope have been monitoring the situation following the two massive earthquakes that struck approx. 400km off the coast of Indonesia earlier today. Although the magnitude of the quakes was very high, they seem not to have caused any significant damage in countries around the epicenter. Local authorities in Indonesia have deployed advanced teams to the area closest to the EQ to assess the situation, but so far there are no reports of major damage.

Visualized statistics on the Facebook activity around NetHope

I have a confession to make… I will never be a techie. I will never be fascinated by how an appliance works, never be thrilled by opening something to see how it is wired, and never be carried away by software codes or new, integrated solutions.

I am fascinated by the art of information management though: how data is collected, collated, analysed and processed into information. When it comes to emergency response, we always endeavour to improve the quality of information to make more qualified decisions in disasters. In a rapidly changing emergency environment, information is rendered useless for decision-making if not disseminated at the right time to the right recipient in the right format.

As the conclusion of our “Where Are They Now?” blog series as well as in celebration of today’s NetHope Academy graduation in Haiti, we would like to feature a story from one of our interns graduating as part of our second Haiti Academy class: Gael A. Chrispin Beauboeuf.

I am the system manager for T-cash, Voilà’s mobile money service. I manage issues, troubleshoot any problems that face our team and make requests for new features that we need. T-cash allows Voilà customers to use their phone as wallet to exchange money—whether that means transferring it to their friends and family or using it to pay for food with a cooperating merchant. God blessed me, I am the first intern from my NetHope Academy class to secure a full-time job.