PSD Blog - The World Bank Group

Women and soccer: what have you done for me lately?

The 2010 Fifa World Cup in South Africa will generate the demand for service and tourism industries potentially benefiting local women entrepreneurs. First National Bank promised financial and know-how support.

The question is whether the boom in business activity can be sustained beyond the games.

Got game?

Can video and computer games help people manage their health? The Changemakers at the Ashoka Foundation think so. "Why Games Matter: A Prescription to Improve Health and Health Care" seeks innovation, along with a potential for social impact, and sustainability.

The rules are simple and the deadline is on September 26, 2007, coinciding with the release of the 2008 Doing Business report which will focus on gender.

Al Gore must be smiling

It seems that U.S. big business is doing its best to make up for any past rectitude on climate change. Barely a day goes by without another firm announcing a "green" initiative.

In back to back announcements this month, first Citigroup announced that it will shift $50 billion to investing and financing for projects that reduce global carbon emissions, then General Motors became the first US car maker to join the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a business coalition calling on the U.S. government to support a mandatory nationwide cap on global-warming pollution. GM Chief Executive Rick Wagoner announced that:

GM views the need to promote energy security and reduce greenhouse gas emissions as both a business necessity and an obligation to society.

Meanwhile, a company with more long standing green credentials, Starbucks Coffee, has partnered with environmental group Global Green USA to create Planet Green Game. At this new site players take on the mission of reducing CO2 emissions in the fictional town of Evergreen. If you feel up to the task, click here.

Funny money

Virtual money, when backed by trust in the guarantor, can function like any other currency. QQ coins are online tokens, created by Chinese Internet company Tencent, that can be sold for cash on the Web. The Wall Street Journal writes:

The trouble starts when a virtual currency that isn't backed by a trusted government, becomes linked to a real one that is through an exchange rate. Virtual currency brokers call that RMT, or real-money trade. When that happened to the QQ coin, it effectively turned into a parallel currency operation alongside the yuan, says Yipping Huang, the chief Asia economist of Citibank.

QQ coins, currently priced at $0.13, are no laughing matter for the Chinese authorities who fear that the real-money trade, estimated at $2 billion a year, may facilitate money laundering and even an emergence of underground economy.

Vote in Changemakers competition

One week left to vote in the current Changemakers competition - Entrepreneuring Peace: Innovations in Managing Group Conflict. A few entrants of note:

• Peacemaker, the serious game featured in the New York Times and PSD Blog last August.
• A proposed Palestinian Shippers' Council, to encourage Palestinian-Israeli private sector dialogue.
• Participatory theatre for conflict transformation in the Democratic Republic of Congo

(Disclosure/small world: in a strange twist of fate, Changemaker's executive director was my brother's best friend in college. Also, his name is Charlie Brown, and he really had a dog named Snoopy. That is all.)

A virtual trip to Haiti

Pienso points us to Ayiti, a new serious game about a family of five struggling to survive in Haiti. Yet again, I find myself dying of cholera.

Real world issues crash online party

Daniel Drezner points out how serious the virtual world has become. A real economist suggests that burgeoning virtual economies should be taxed. Does this imply that the government will provide virtual services to game-players? The campaign trail has already entered the virtual world, as a former Virginia governor held court on Second Life recently via an avatar.

Sweatshops have also invaded the online world, and I'm not talking about the cubicle farms of avatar-builders. Sim Sweatshop is the latest serious game to catch my eye (thanks Pienso), where you make sneakers for 50 cents an hour. Interesting timing, given the recent multinational huffing and puffing over China's proposed labor legislation.

Taxes, politicians, sweatshops. Anyone else miss Pong?

End-of-summer reading list

Ordered from short to long for your time-management convenience...

• Sachs for President? (and a nice bit of commentary from Gristmill)
• A would-be serious game is looking for volunteer designers: "Village is a multiplayer online real-time strategy game for the PC that immerses the player into the role of an entrepreneur building companies to bring prosperity to the villages of the third world"
• FastCompany explains how Timberland just raised the bar on Corporate Social Responsibility Reports
• A "born-again organic farmer" in Turkey helps hundreds in his poverty-stricken region
• Can good economics ever be good politics? Case study of India's power sector, a World Bank working paper on how the lack of political will often reflects rational political behavior
• Managing governments: Unilever in India and Turkey, 1950-1980, a Harvard Business School working paper on how the strategies of this global consumer products company enabled it to survive the postwar "era of confrontation" which deterred most other foreign firms from investing in India and Turkey

Scenarios: disaster response and the media

Strong Angel III (SA III) is a disaster response event/project/conference going on this week in San Diego. Blogging from the event is Sanjana Hattotuwa from ICT for Peacebuilding. He has several excellent posts up about how technology can/should be used in disasters, such as this one describing an audio interview with Internews regional director Mark Frohardt:

Speaking about new and traditional media, Mark emphasised the importance of disconnected traditional media such as FM radio and newspapers...he also said that we need to look at new and innovative ways to get messages out and in particular mentioned Microsoft FM radio enabled wrist watches (that at presently are first generation, somewhat unreliable for essential communications and not designed for humanitarian aid) that in the future could evolve into devices that could really help first response mechanisms work cohesively and collaboratively.

The title threw me at first (sounds a little too much like the Dark Angel TV show), but the event sounds fascinating. What exactly are they doing in San Diego? Addressing this scenario:

Two new serious games

Seems like every time I hear someone describing the development of African business, crumbling or nonexistent infrastructure is cited as a major limiting factor. Similarly, you can't talk about healthcare in Africa without mentioning the delivery systems on the ground. A new game, The Transaid Challenge, puts you behind the wheel of a four wheel drive and asks you to deliver health supplies to remote African villages. My problem was not so much with the potholes as with my (apparently very limited) hand-eye coordination.

You may have read about Peacemaker in the NYTimes recently, a game where you try to bring peace to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. YouTube has an excellent 3 minute video featuring the Carnegie Mellon team who created Peacemaker and images from the game. Timely and much more sophisticated than the other serious games we've written about.