Dan Pallotta has posted some interesting observations about charitable giving on his Harvard Business Review blog. Dan says that charitable giving in the US has been approximately 2% of GDP since 1970, and many humanitarian organisations proceed on the assumption that the rate of American generosity is fixed. However, a significant minority of people give away 10% of their income or more, suggesting that the overall amount of giving could be higher if the rest of the population could be persuaded to become equally generous.

According to an international comparison published by the Charities Aid Foundation in 2006, Australians gave 0.69% of GDP in charitable donations, compared with 1.67% for Americans and 0.14% for French people. Perhaps there is less felt need for charity in countries which have more extensive social security provided by the Government. According to Dan’s figures, religious Americans donated 3.5 times as much to charities overall, not just to religious institutions.

All of these facts lead to Dan’s assertion that charitable organisations need to invest a higher proportion of their funds in marketing in order to generate more income. This is obviously difficult advice to follow because of the popular perception that it is not ethical for such organisations to use donors’ funds for marketing. I wonder, though, whether something other than marketing may be a primary trigger for people’s generosity.

In a recent analysis of 163 economies conducted by British firm Maplecroft in conjunction with the World Food Program, 36 out of the 50 countries in Africa have been found to be at a high risk of food insecurity. Afghanistan is rated as the most food-insecure country in the world, followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Eritrea and Sudan. Nine of the top ten countries are located in Africa.

The reasons for food insecurity in these countries include extreme weather, climate change, poor infrastructure, armed conflicts, and high levels of poverty. Other African countries facing high levels of food insecurity include Ethiopia, Angola, Liberia, Chad and Zimbabwe. Niger and Burkina Faso have been facing cycles of floods and droughts, and Niger is currently struggling with a famine affecting half of its population.

The ready availability of food on world markets has been reduced this year by poor harvests in Russia and floods in Canada. Russia has temporarily ceased all wheat exports, and Canada’s wheat production has been reduced by a quarter. As a result Egypt’s food supplies are under threat, as Egypt is the world’s largest importer of wheat. Wheat prices have been rising, but they are not expected to result in a repeat of the world food crisis which occurred three years ago.

Dan Redding posted some interesting thoughts about the future of the Internet in a Smashing Magazine article last week. One possibility is that the Internet may have to become less open, in order to combat the increasing amounts and sophistication of malware and spam that are threatening to choke out useful content. Perhaps hardware which accesses the Internet will increasingly run vendor-specific software which is less vulnerable to attack but which limits the freedom and innovation which has thus far propelled the evolution of the Internet.

There has been much talk in recent days about Net neutrality. At present, anyone can build a website which is as public and accessible as anyone else’s. However, some companies are planning to set up “pay tiers” the speed at which a visitor accesses a website is dependent on how much money the website owner has paid. Large media companies would be able to afford to have the fastest websites, thereby using their financial strength to attract customers, while less well-heeled website owners would be stuck in the slow lane.

Google Maps already allows us to zoom in on neighbourhoods and buildings. In the future perhaps this will be taken further and we will be able to see 3D renderings and track the location of almost everything. Perhaps this will result in the real world and the Second Life-type of virtual world becoming very close to the same thing. Redding’s article contains quite a number of even more mind-bending ideas.

In an interview filmed at the TEDGlobal conference last month, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks explained the way in which WikiLeaks is publishing information which governments do not wish to be generally known. This is good news for those who want to see more transparency and accountability in government, but bad news for those who are wanting to protect state secrets. As a result of modern technology, in the future secrets will be harder to keep.

Some years ago the Kenyan government commissioned a report into the corrupt dealings of the former president, but then decided to use it as a bargaining tool, rather than releasing it publicly. WikiLeaks obtained a copy of the document from an anonymous source and published it, resulting in a serious loss of credibility for the Kenyan government. More recently, WikiLeaks caused great controversy by releasing video footage of a US helicopter gunship in Iraq killing innocent civilians, thereby creating calls for greater accountability in the US military.

One of the difficulties with publishing secret information is that there can be good reasons for it to be secret. For example, in general a person is entitled to have his or her medical records kept confidential. Also, sometimes the disclosure of secrets can endanger the lives of others. Assange says that his organisation takes appropriate steps to protect the privacy and safety of individuals. Nevertheless, we have to trust that WikiLeaks will do the right thing, as there is no-one keeping them in line.

Today Kenyans vote in a referendum to determine whether a new constitution will be accepted. There have been passionate rallies both for and against the new constitution, and an article by Gitau Warigi in this week’s East African explains some of the reasoning behind the “No” campaign. Daniel arap Moi, who was president of Kenya from 1978 to 2002, is one of the leaders of the campaign, as is William Ruto, a member of parliament from the Rift Valley.

According to Warigi, the provisions of the new constitution threaten the power base of the Kalenjin members of parliament from the Rift Valley. When Moi was in power, he used gerrymandering to create a number of constituencies in the Rift Valley in a way that increased his influence and control over the course of national politics. The new constitution does not explicitly change the constituencies and districts, but it sets in place mechanisms which will erode their effect.

The whole of the Rift Valley will no longer be governed from a regional power centre in Eldoret; instead, it will be broken into semi-autonomous counties which report to the central government in Nairobi. The new constitution further specifies that, when new parliamentary constituencies are created, there must be a proportionate balance between size and population.

“Africa is turning the corner… it is on the path of an economic rebound,” according to World Bank vice president Obiageli Ezekwesili. Whereas many other continents and countries have ageing populations and shrinking labour forces, Africa has a youthful, expanding labour force. It also has an improving technology base, a diversifying agricultural sector, and increasingly is becoming home to middle-class consumers.

African urbanisation has been growing. Thirty years ago only 28% of the African population lived in cities; the figure now is around 40%; and within the next 20 years it is expected to increase to 50%. The continent has 500 million people of working age, and that number is expected to increase to 1.1 billion within 30 years. By then the number of people in Africa’s workforce will exceed the number of people in either India’s or China’s workforce.

Most of the $60 billion that has been made in private investments in Africa in the past 10 years has gone into the Information and Communications Technology sector, helping to bring Africa closer to the rest of the world, making knowledge easier to access, enabling access to finance, and making markets more efficient. All these factors point to huge economic potential in Africa, if only the continent’s leaders can seize the opportunities for the benefit of all.

In the past, if you wanted to see the future of education, you would go to Finland, according to researcher Charles Leadbeater in a TED talk given in April. Finland has amazing educational systems, but people from other countries struggle to imagine how they might apply lessons from Finland. Instead of looking only at the very best, you can often find radical innovation in places which have huge demand and not enough resources for traditional high-cost solutions to work.

Accordingly, Leadbeater went to the slums of Rio, Nairobi and India, where they have some of the fastest-growing young populations in the world. Young people in Rio are gaining access to education through donated computers in community centres. The one technology that spans rich and poor in places like Kibera is the mobile phone. The recipes for learning being created by social entrepreneurs in these locations look nothing like school.

The idea of a curriculum is irrelevant in this type of setting. You need to start education with things that make a difference to the students in their settings. Education needs to have a short-term payoff, and it also needs to be intrinsically interesting. You have to engage people before you can teach them. We need a global wave of social entrepreneurship to create highly motivating low-cost ways to learn at scale in the developing world.

In 1960, there were 1 billion people in the industrialised world and 2 billion people in the developing world, according to Hans Rosling in a talk given at TED@Cannes last month. The large gap between the industrialised world and the developing world led to a mindset that the world consists of the West and the Rest, but it is now time to upgrade that taxonomy. In the past 50 years, some 4 billion people have been added to the world’s population – the world’s population has more than doubled.

The 1 billion in the West have continued to increase in wealth. The most successful 1 billion of the developing countries have become the emerging economies. There are still 2 billion people at the bottom of the pile who are struggling to find enough money for basic necessities, but there are now 3 billion people in the middle who are also becoming part of emerging economies. The distance between the poorest and the richest is wider than ever.

What is going to happen by 2050? The most successful emerging economies will catch up with the West. If appropriate technology is created in response to climate change, the middle 3 billion will also grow wealthier. Because of population growth, the bottom 2 billion will become 4 billion. Population growth will continue unless the countries at the bottom can higher rates of child survival, because there is a strong correlation between child survival rates and decreased birth rates.

Africa might be the poorest continent in the world in terms of the income of its citizens, but it is one of the richest when it comes to potential wealth-creating resources. Known extractable energy resources including oil, natural gas, coal and uranium, are worth more than $13 trillion at current prices. Although droughts and famines are now common, Africa has the potential to produce vastly increased agricultural crops if modern agricultural techniques are adopted.

Investment in Africa is therefore a potentially attractive proposition. However, there are significant sovereign risks arising from political instability, corruption and insecurity, that also make investing in some parts of Africa a highly risky proposition in the eyes of most investors. China is less risk-averse than many investors, and, with its interests both in selling Chinese goods to Africans and acquiring mineral resources from Africa, it has recently become Africa’s biggest trading partner.

Most African countries are expecting their economies to grow by between 1% and 5% this year, with higher rates of growth next year. While energy and mining are obvious candidates for rapid growth, other potential high-growth sectors include tourism, agriculture, forestry, fisheries and water. Tourism currently attracts around $50 billion per year, and that figure is expected to increase four-fold to $200 billion.

While most of the developed world enjoys a high level of food security, many Africans remain dependent on favourable weather and political conditions. In south-eastern Sudan, many thousands of people have been forced by the threat of violence to move into an area which is already suffering severe food shortages as a result of crop failures. Rain has now fallen, but it will be several months before the next crop grows.

Meanwhile, several countries in West Africa are expecting famine as a result of poor harvests caused by erratic rainfall. Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal and northern Nigeria are expected to be the countries most affected. Crop failures are attributable both to the absence of rainfall when needed and to destruction caused by torrential rainfall. The problems have been exacerbated by locusts.

Most African famines are predictable and, at least theoretically, preventable. Significantly higher crop yields could be obtained by using more productive farming practices, but this would require substantial hard-to-introduce cultural change. Improved logistical practices would ensure that surpluses were available to cover food needs in the event of crop shortfalls. Improved infrastructure would reduce the cost of production, making food more affordable.