Monthly Blog Archives: February 2012

The end of Apartheid brought an equalization of government spending across black and white students, the gap in educational quality and outcomes is still massive. To help address the problem, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation launched

The health benefits of deworming are proven and the implementation methodology for mass, school-based, urban health interventions has now been successfully modelled. Now it's time to expand on what we've learned.

On February 21, the government of Delhi kicked off a massive, school-based deworming effort to treat an estimated 3.5 million children. Our hope is that this effort serves as the catalyst for a more comprehensive school-based health program in Delhi, and that it becomes a model for other Indian cities seeking to embark on public health programs with the potential to help millions of children get healthier and stay in school.

Forbes India recently published a piece on what ails microfinance. The article, which reviews David Roodman and Jonathan Morduch's research on the industry, starts provocatively by challenging the assumption that microfinance is a force for good. But it seems to deliberately misrepresent – or at least wildly oversimplify – Roodman and Morduch’s findings.

In a recent story on “big data” in the New York Times, one true believer in its transformative power compares the way the microscope revolutionized the way people looked at the world in the 16th century. The microscope, says Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management,