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Massive Change Radio was broadcast on the University of Toronto’s CIUT 89.5 FM from September 2003 to June 2004. Created and hosted by Jennifer Leonard, co-author with Bruce Mau of Massive Change (Phaidon Press, 2004) and former Institute without Boundaries team member, the entire season of multidisciplinary interviews is archived for download.

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Since the Millennium Development Goals were put forth as a global challenge, how well have we rallied together to meet the needs of the world’s poor?
These goals were set in September 2000 at the Millennium Assembly of the United Nations. In fact, most of them were recycled from commitments at international gatherings during the 1990s. Some countries are making progress but the stunning and sad fact is that the very poorest countries in the world, in general, are falling further and further behind in meeting those goals; and the rich countries that promised to help them to do more have really lost attention, I’m afraid, and are focusing so much on issues of terrorism, war and peace, and their own internal issues, that they’re just not paying the attention that they promised to global poverty.

This is necessarily a contract between the rich and the poor, isn’t it?
When the goals were set at the Millennium Assembly and then followed up in several important gatherings in which the United States was the key participant, such as at the International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002, which President Bush attended, the rich and the poor countries said, “We have to do this together.” The rich countries acknowledged that the impoverished countries could not fight disease on their own or solve the problems of hunger on their own. They would need help - a lot more help than they receive today. This commitment was put in a very specific promise: the rich countries would make concrete efforts towards raising their development assistance to 0.7% of their GNP. But despite this promise, the situation is worsening throughout Africa and in many other impoverished regions of the world. I think it is really a terrible mistake on the part of the rich world not to be paying more attention to this. It hurts us in the end by contributing to global instability.

When you look at the numbers, however, it appears as though we have a real shot at ending poverty sometime soon.
Well, the crazy thing about all of this is that you’d think we’d be paying more attention to these life and death issues. There are millions of children dying every year of readily preventable or treatable conditions, like the nearly one million children dying of measles, even though there’s a vaccine to stop it. There are nearly three million children dying of malaria, even though we have medicines that cure malaria. So you have this stunning challenge, but at the same time there are very specific, relatively straightforward interventions in a lot of cases that could address these problems. Poverty reduction is not rocket science, but the gap between where we are and what we could do if we fulfilled our promises is stunning. (more…)

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Describe the sense of urgency you feel right now with respect to the HIV/AIDS crisis in Zimbabwe?
It’s very hard to describe the magnitude of the epidemic in a country like Zimbabwe unless you’ve been there. It’s staggering. Everywhere you look, there it is. There are cottage industries that build coffins. There are orphan feeding programs, virtually everywhere. If you go into the hospitals, there’s complete overcrowding. There’s no one that I work with there who hasn’t been touched by it somehow. It’s completely common that when someone’s not around, they’re attending a funeral. About one-third of the population is infected, and it cuts across all socioeconomic levels.

You founded the Women’s Global Health Imperative (WGHI) in 2001. What is its main objective?
Our main objective is to deal with HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections and even unintended pregnancy in the context of addressing our over-arching theme: gender disparities and gender inequities, and how that gender imbalance places women at greater risk for HIV, other sexually transmitted infections, and unintended pregnancy. We have two major areas of research right now. The first is exploring women controlled methods of prevention of these outcomes. Male condoms, when used correctly and consistently, are the most effective way to prevent HIV transmission heterosexually. The problem with male condoms is that men control their use and, insofar as a woman would have control over when her male partner uses condoms, it requires negotiation and willingness on his part. So we’re looking at methods that women might be able to control, such as microbicides and the diaphragm - methods that women can use themselves without having to rely on negotiating with their male partner. The other way we’re looking at gender and vulnerability to HIV is by way of economic intervention. Our hypothesis is that if you can provide young women with economic opportunity and make them economically independent, then they will be less reliant on sexual partners, particularly older sexual partners, for material goods and, in some cases, even survival.

Who is part of the WGHI network?
In Zimbabwe, our major collaborators are with the University of Zimbabwe and the medical school. In India, our major collaborator is Samuha, a non-governmental organization. In Mexico our major collaborator is the National Institute for Public Health, in Cuernavaca. In the U.S., we are an institution based in San Francisco, and we collaborate with many community groups. Most of our work here is done in what’s called the Mission District in San Francisco, where there are a lot of Latino immigrants. (more…)

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When it comes to poverty reduction, what role does Information and Communications Technology (ICT) play?
There are innumerable ways in which ICT can be applied to deliver better services to poor people, whether it’s telemedicine, using ICT to bring medical care to people in remote areas, or e-schools, using ICT to enhance the delivery of curricula to remote areas. There is a wide variety of practical applications, and I’m referring to actual examples in a growing number of countries where these applications have been put into practice with great effect. The most important general contribution that the emerging information society can provide to people everywhere, however, including the poor, is access to knowledge and an empowerment mechanism by which they can themselves take hold of their own lives and seek to improve them.

In January 2004, the UNDP and Microsoft jointly put out a press release announcing a partnership. What has developed as a result?
This is something that will build over time. I think that the synergy between UNDP ICT and Microsoft results from our respective global vocations, but unlike Microsoft we look for highly differentiated solutions to problems at the country level and within countries at the local level. In other words, we eschew the idea of there being a single solution for every problem. Now, you might say that is contrary to the Microsoft idea, which is complete uniformity in their software applications. But no, we’re helping Microsoft identify areas in which their standard software applications can actually be applied in specific organizational or other contexts. I think that we’ve learned a lot from each other so far. Concretely, we are building this partnership in a few countries, such as Morocco and Mozambique, and we hope to spread this outward.
But let me also say that we have certainly not decided that all the software solutions for the developing countries are going to be based on Microsoft technology. We are very keen to encourage countries and organizations and individuals within them to make their own choice of the best software solution. In Afghanistan, for example, we identified telecenters that could be empowered with free Microsoft software, while at the same time educating people about the advantages in other contexts of open source technologies. As I say, we look at different solutions to different problems. Where we can work with Microsoft and see that their product can bring an advantage to a particular situation, then we’d be delighted to help them find an opportunity. On the other hand, we look for other solutions, many of which include the rivals to Microsoft. Chief among them is the open source non-proprietary software.

As with countries like Bulgaria and Brazil, which tend to favor free and open source software.
I was about to mention Bulgaria as a good example of a country which, for its own reasons, has decided that in much of its public sector it wants to go for an open source solution. And we’ve been ready to help them on that. We try to be non-conflictual about it. We believe in using partnerships to the advantage of our clients. And this doesn’t mean that we have a single standard solution. That doesn’t mean to say that we are going to be inviting all of our program countries around the world to use Microsoft exclusively just because we have a global arrangement with them. We will be fairly opportunistic and see where it is that countries find Microsoft to be an advantage and where they don’t. (more…)