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.

Accused genocidaire Omar al-Bashir, who is the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, was welcomed to Kenya last Friday, in contravention of Kenya’s obligation to arrest him. Dignitaries from a number of different countries were invited to witness the signing into effect of Kenya’s new constitution, and the welcome shown to al-Bashir seems to send a clear signal that people in power in Kenya intend to continue to regard themselves as being above the law.

The International Criminal Court is currently investigating a number of crimes that were committed in Kenya in 2008 in the wake of disputed elections. After Kenya’s parliament prevaricated for more than a year over how those responsible for perpetrating the crimes were to be tried, or whether they were to be held to account at all, responsibility for conducting the trials was handed over to the International Criminal Court.

It has been speculated that Kenya’s leadership as a whole does not want anyone to be held accountable for the post-election atrocities. There has been a long history of immunity with senior political figures not being held accountable for embezzlement, murder or any other types of crimes. The latest incident with al-Bashir suggests that the forthcoming International Criminal Court proceedings will not be met with co-operation.

On this day 175 years ago, a group of people from the schooner Enterprize disembarked near the mouth of the Yarra River to start a settlement. The Enterprize was owned by John Pascoe Fawkner, a Tasmania publican who was the son of a convict and had himself spent some time in jail. Fawkner did not arrive until two months after the settlement began because he was detained in Launceston because of seasickness and money owed to creditors.

The new settlement was known as Bearbrass, which is thought to have been a mispronunciation of the aboriginal name Birrarung. Fawkner’s party was joined by a rival group of settlers financed by John Batman, who had previously “purchased” 600,000 acres of land from the Aboriginals in exchange for a range of trinkets. Batman’s group included William Buckley, who had escaped from a convict settlement at Sorrento some 32 years previously then lived with a group of Aboriginal people who mistook him for a recently deceased relative returned from the dead.

The settlement of Bearbrass was renamed Melbourne two years later, in honour of the then British Prime Minister, the Viscount Melbourne. After another ten years, Queen Victoria issued letters patent declaring Melbourne to be a city, and four years after that, in the same year that the gold rush commenced, the colony of Victoria became a separate colony from that of New South Wales. Three decades later, the city was the richest in the world and the second largest in the British Empire.

In the fourteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul says: “If lifeless things which make sounds, such as pipes or harps, do not produce distinct sounds, how would anyone know what music is being played? If the trumpet makes an uncertain sound, who will prepare for war? Likewise, unless you speak words which are easy to understand, how will people know what you are saying? You would be talking into space.”

Paul specifically encourages people not to speak in tongues in church unless someone interprets the message, so that the listeners will understand clearly what is being said. Most contemporary Western churches do not have big problems with too many people speaking in tongues, but many of them do have problems because of a failure to communicate the gospel message clearly, instead producing uncertain, indistinct sounds.

In order to help people understand how the gospel message relates to their everyday lives, it is helpful to refer to elements of contemporary culture. However, in many churches the gospel message gets squeezed out as a result of the desire to be seen as relevant or to avoid offending anyone, or because the church becomes ritualised so that ceremonies are performed but the meaning is lost.

Our daily encounters with others are the arenas in which our relationship with God becomes incarnate, and most of us need a little help in this area, according to James Bryan Smith in his book The Good and Beautiful Community: Following the Spirit, Extending Grace, Demonstrating Love. The book attempts to offer ways in which followers of Jesus can have healthy relationships and become blessings to the world around them.

As the King James Bible asserts, Christians are a “peculiar” people, or at least they should be. They should obey earthly laws but live by higher laws. They should be living lives that are so winsome that others want to have what they have. They should live in a hopeful, serving, Christ-centred, reconciling, encouraging, generous, worshipping community. To help readers work towards this, the author provides soul training exercises at the end of each chapter.

I tend to regard spiritual disciplines are something that is good for me, rather than something I find exciting. Nonetheless as I read the book I found myself resonating with and attracted to the “good and beautiful community” that the author portrays. The soul training exercises may not suit the theological inclinations of all readers, but the essential characteristics of the Christian community that the book describes are compelling.

In the past 60 years, many Asian countries have defied economic logic and ascended to the forefront of the global economy. Business correspondent Michael Schuman gives his explanation for this in his book The Miracle: The Epic Story of Asia’s Quest for Wealth. To read my full review of the book, please visit my business blog.

This is the fifteenth in a series of posts discussing themes from The Trouble With Aid by Jonathan Glennie. In chapter 7 the book speculates on the future of aid. The author says that, as the rest of the book has demonstrated, aid has had a series of profound and often unforeseen consequences in Africa. Not enough people have taken these problems into consideration in their analyses, and this needs to change.

The author suggests that once the full range of effects of aid are taken into account, more people will agree that it is time to begin reducing aid to most countries in Africa while at the same time starting to fund development from other sources. The impacts of aid that really matter, the ones linked to policy choices and institutions, are, according to the author, unlikely to improve with more aid and will probably get worse.

While the book’s pessimistic outlook seems reasonable based on historical data, it does not seem to account for the more recent success of African economies. Aid to many African countries has been increasing over the past decade, and if the author’s analysis is correct this should have resulted in the economies of those countries going backwards. Instead, most African countries have been experiencing moderate levels of economic growth since 2000. In my view this growth is probably attributable not to aid but to the introduction of new technologies, particularly mobile phones, in a manner affordable to Africans.

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.

A court in Thailand has recently ordered the extradition of suspected arms dealer Viktor Bout to the United States. Bout was an officer in the Soviet Union’s armed forces, and became a businessman after the collapse of the Soviet Union, using surplus Soviet craft to run an international air freight business. It is alleged that he was not too fussy about the cargo he accepted, so that his business became a major supplier of weapons to fuel civil wars in Africa.

It has been speculated that Bout could be an interesting witness at the trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor at the International Criminal Court. Taylor is accused of dealing in blood diamonds from Sierra Leone to fund the rebel forces there which committed acts of unspeakable barbarity on the people of Sierra Leone. Bout is alleged to have supplied arms to Taylor in exchange for blood diamonds.

Liberia is only one of numerous conflict zones in which Bout is alleged to have supplied arms. He is alleged to have supplied illegal arms to the UNITA rebel group in Angola, provided transportation services for al Qaeda in Afghanistan, delivered weapons to various armed groups in the Second Congo War, and provided transportation services to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Now Bout, who is often called the Merchant of Death, seems likely to face trial in the US for providing support to terrorist organisations.

Last Tuesday the Republic of Gabon celebrated the 50th anniversary of its independence from France. Gabon is located on the western coast of Africa, bordering Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon and the Republic of Congo. First visited by Europeans in the 15th Century, the country became a French colony in 1885 and remained a part of French Equatorial Africa until granted independence on 17th August 1960.

Although international pressures forced France to grant the country independence, France continued to protect its financial and political interests in the country by funding the election campaign of the pro-French Léon M’ba, who was elected first president in 1961, with Omar Bongo Ondimba as vice president. M’ba was an authoritarian ruler, suppressing the press and political opponents. An army coup in 1964, which sought to restore parliamentary democracy, was defeated by the intervention of French paratroopers.

M’ba died in 1967 and was succeeded by Bongo, who remained president until his death in 2009, after which his son Ali Ben Bongo became president. Although the country’s governance record has been poor, governance in many other African countries is far worse. Gabon has a substantial income from offshore oil and it exports manganese, iron and wood, so that it is one of the richest countries in Africa in terms of income per person.