right now there is a six day round the clock radio marathon going on in sweden. the project is called musikhjälpen (the music help, or something) and has been running for 8 years straight. it basically is a charity programme where you wish a song and donate money for different causes every year. this year it's all about clean water and proper sanitation for children in slums around the world. my plan is to donate my profits for this week (right now 2000 dollars i think) on sunday. does anyone wanna join me (remembering no donation is too small or large)? if this is the case we could coordinate our donations using ihelp.se, labling it liquidpoker or something.
you can also follow the "show" at http://www.svtplay.se/video/901977/14-12-00-00 or http://www.musikhjalpen.se. right now we've reached 8 million SEK (like 1,2 million dollars i think) and we only have until sunday at 6 pm to break last year's record of 16 million SEK (2,4ish million dollars).
if you wanna know more about the project before doing anything, just let me know and i'll explain. if you don't believe the money will be headed in the right direction, you need to know that the initiator (radiohjälpen) has been around for 60+ years and they will be declaring where all the money went/is going for this year in march 2013.
Röda Korset (Swedish red cross) who recently got criticised for paying their leader, former right wing politician Bengt Westerberg, faaaar too much money.
Svenska Kyrkan (Church of Sweden) who is protestant and therefore not as crazy as most.
Kvinna till Kvinna (Women to Women) which is a feminist organisation that only helps women and is lead by some girl who've worked for Greenpeace and the European Union.
Action Aid which has been criticized for ignoring the problems of male children since they seem to think that only little girls rather then little boys are worthy of help. Not sure how serious that is.
A list of all the projects that got money last year can be fond here:
Other ones include Diakonia, which is a organisation funded by a lot of different Christian organisations and Erikshjälpen which is also religion. Apparently religion is really good for this. Overall it's almost only Christian and Feminist organisations so I, who am a atheist who believes that boys and girls should be helped the equal amount, can't endorse that. If I manage to make more then 30k€ this month (I'm just over 20k right now) I'll give 1k€ to something better, I think I have some ideas.
It's almost exclusivity to help girls. No one cares about the boys it seem.
good for transparency, dusty. imo it's very difficult to remove religion from this since it's so dominant in these kind of projects. that's pretty much how they make their money. that's also why i didn't end up donating last year. but this year they've been talking about the issues you present specifically, by inviting REAL knowledgeable people (not action aid etc.) who addressed the problems directly. by real knowledgeable people i mean the sort of people that go into the discussion and just say: "hey look, you're talking about girls but it's the same for boys. and you need to realize small time work is better than using the big organizations." maybe i'm just naive believing that people behind radiohjälpen listen to this information when deciding whom gets what.
also, this musikhjälpen thing has lead to so many interesting things. filippa reinfeldt (the politician in charge of health care issues in stockholm) auctioned a meal and discussion, which ended up being won by the nurses fighting for higher salaries.
Fair enough. And I agree on the religion issues. Considering the ridiciolus history of corruption among Swedish feminists I'm not touching that though.
Also, now that I've closed my tables, I feel that there are mostly politicians behind the projects that gets money there. I don't like that, I think that people from the private sector is far more suited to run this kind of stuff.
Also, as long as they do projects only for girls instead of for everyone without a motivation along the lines of "it's more effective because of X/Y/Z" (case in point would be some micro credit projects that figured out that women where more likely to not use their credit to get drunk, heh) I consider it almost as bad as saying "well, we'll help people but only if they're white".
considering his companies have been doing business with freeport-mcmoran i don't have much over for him. however what he says is a different thing and something that must be remembered. i don't think he's saying stop charity, stop compassion. he's just saying you need to do it the right way. and be weary of situations like the one he describes for his daughter. i think working for a solution where everyone has clean water matches perfectly fine. the question must be: will we (or the people we give money) accomplish anything? and that's the type of question to which you only know the answer afterwards. unfortunately.
regarding private sector: the biggest private receiver of Sida money is also the one where the most corruption and failed projects have been identified. however this is of course a half truth since there is only like one journalist in sweden who carries out investigations into these issues.
also, on girls vs boys: i believe katarina tomasevski has a pretty good and balanced idea when it comes to education. i'm not so sure about other issues.
Well stuff sponsored by Sida is by definition not private but I agree that private enterprises with government funding probably causes more crap in this world then almost anything else.
I also think, and it was like 7-8 years since I studied this, that SIDA has the current record for poisoning most people to death in Bangladesh or one of those countries when they tried to dig wells.
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United States. Dec 14 2012 20:53. Posts 8893
