Posts Tagged "poverty"
Worlds Collide
(Gosh, that was all getting a bit emo there for a minute wasn’t it? Like a fleeting return to my early naughties LiveJournal days. What’s needed here is some decent deconstruction to chase the melancholy away. I know just the thing…) The tourists arrived in two open top safari cars, the sound of the over-powered 4×4 engines practically drowned out by the flickering of camera shutters...
Read MoreElephant in the Room
At the end of September world leaders from around the globe met in New York to discuss the progress that had (and hadn’t) been made towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – the set of eight international development targets agreed by all 192 United Nations member states in 2000 and that outline the ambitious overall target of the eradication of extreme poverty by the year...
Read MoreTown Mouse, Country Mouse
A subsistence fisher in Iloilo It is estimated that 44% of the population of the Philippines live on less than $2 a day, and that 80% of the poor live in rural areas of the country. Every year, thousands of these rural poor move to the cities in search of employment, improved living conditions and a better life for themselves and their families. Bing Bing, a subsistence farmer I met in Zambales...
Read MoreMicro-mythbusting
A Sari Sari store run by two microfinance clients, both PWDs Travelling to Iloilo at the beginning of the month in order to conduct an assessment of a microfinance programme that targets people with disabilities as clients, I was required to undertake a bit of a crash course in microfinance theory. Microfinance – the provision of small loans (and other financial services) to the poor to enable...
Read MoreHalo Halo
Halo Halo “Halo halo” was the first Tagalog term I learned, some thirty minutes or so after I stepped off the plane into the heat of Manila two weeks ago. It means, literally, “mix mix”, and is commonly used here to describe a frozen milk dessert with banana, coconut and some garish, unidentified green and purple stuff mixed in. However, I think its an apt term for my first impressions of...
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