Archaeological sites are like open books, revealing to us the story of an era, a civilization, of trades and relationships between nations. These are the stories of our humanity and the roots of a nation’s cultural identity. They must be preserved.

Let us ACT now for the Heritage of Afghanistan and protect Mess Aynak, an ancient and vast Buddhist monastic ensemble under threat from a proposed copper mine. While economical development is necessary through the mining of precious minerals, it cannot become an additional tool for cultural destruction.

Help protect Mess Aynak’s treasures–please ask UNESCO to include Mess Aynak, Afghanistan on the List of Endangered Sites and the World Heritage List.
Protect Afghan Archaeological Sites, the case of Mess Aynak

Where to Find Fair Trade Gifts

Buying Fair Trade is a great way to reduce human trafficking and child labor in the production of consumer goods. The Fair Trade label means that certain strict environmental, social, and economic criteria were met in producing that item, and it’s the closest thing available to a slave-free guarantee. When we buy Fair Trade products, we send a powerful message to business owners that the fair treatment of workers is important. And as demand for Fair Trade products grows, so will the number of businesses who sell ethically-produced and Fair Trade products. That means fewer men, women, and children living in slavery to make your stuff. Check out these existing collections of places to shop for Fair Trade gifts:

• The Ultimate Fair Trade Holiday Gift Guide
• Give Fair Trade

Here are some additional places to get Fair Trade gifts this holiday season:

• Fair Trade Marketplace:  Everything from seasonal items to musical instruments, including a great selection of toys for kids.
• Fair Trade Shopping Network: Fun and festive collection of jewelry, clothing, handbags, and other accessories, plus home decor.
• Fair Trade Sports: Great for the athletic enthusiast, featuring sports equipment, clothes, and bags.
• Global Exchange: Chocolate, coffee and tea, gift baskets, accessories, jewelry, crafts, recycled products, and just about anything else you can think of.
• SERRV: Home decor, accessories, and delicious goodies, all available from their website or extensive online catalog.
• Ten Thousand Villages: Home decor, jewelry, accessories, recycled products, and clothing, all available online or from locations across the U.S. and Canada

These websites aren’t just great places to shop for gifts, they have have everything from Fair Trade coffee and chocolate to Fair Trade liquor and wine to help you celebrate holiday meals while celebrating freedom for farm workers around the world. Remember to look for the Fair Trade Federation logo, pictured above, on websites and products to make sure your purchase is Fair Trade certified.

No matter how you celebrate this time of year, remember that you have the opportunity to be part of the movement of socially responsible consumerism. And when you choose gifts that help end human trafficking, you make the holidays happier for those you love and people living in or recovering from slavery all over the world.

Where to Find Fair Trade Holiday Gifts

Why did this trouble LGBT activists? The reasons are many. First could be that PFOX believes that homosexuality and same-sex attraction can be cured, and have endorsed controversial “ex-gay” therapy programs that have been discredited and debunked by every major medical and psychological organization. It could also be that the guru of PFOX’s therapy program is an ex-gay honcho with ties to Uganda’s horrific “Kill the Gays” legislation, that would criminalize homosexuality with the death penalty or life imprisonment. Or it could be that the head of PFOX’s Speakers Bureau is a convicted felon who bilked poor communities out of lumps of money in a bond scheme.

With a reputation like that, one has to wonder what the World Bank was thinking when they approved PFOX as a qualified charity under its Community Connections Campaign. Moreover, as Truth Wins Out noted, it looked as if the World Bank bent the rules to allow PFOX to obtain charity status, since their Community Action Program is supposed to honor charities that have an active presence in Washington, D.C. PFOX most certainly does not, and their headquarters are more than 120 miles away.

Well, some good news. It looks as if the World Bank is thinking twice about their decision to add PFOX to the Community Connections Campaign. Earlier today, the World Bank issued a statement saying that they will not be giving any matching funds to PFOX, or any charities that are new with the Bank this year, effective today.

According to the World Bank:

For this year’s Community Connections Campaign, Bank-matching funds will be provided to those organizations that have, through prior participation, established a track record of support with staff. Organizations that have come on the list this year will not be offered matching funds in this year’s campaign, though the Bank will match any contribution that has been made to this latter group prior to today, November 15 2010. We will review the new organizations after one year, to see if they have the staff and community support to warrant a match in the FY12 campaign.

So what does that mean? Well, it means that World Bank employees could list PFOX down as a place where they want to give money this year, but that the World Bank won’t match those contributions. It also means that next year PFOX would have to prove that it merited a place on the Community Connection Campaign’s list. Here’s hoping by then that the World Bank can be convinced that organizations that work toward “curing” gay people, and that have dubious ties to harsh anti-gay legislation, don’t count as charities.

Is this a good move by the World Bank? Undoubtedly. But it also proves that their policy has some gaping holes in it, if an organization like PFOX was able to squeak through the charity-approval process. As one LGBT World Bank staffer told Amanda Hess earlier today, in outrage, “If a charitable association supporting female genital mutilation, a pro-life organization or an association claiming it can turn black people white had wiggled its way in the CCC, The Bank’s management would have removed it immediately and issued an apology.”

Today’s statement from the World Bank doesn’t count so much as an apology, but it should mean that PFOX’s future as a legitimate charity with the Bank’s Community Connections Campaign is seriously in question, as it should be.

Photo credit: acameronhuff

World Bank Pulls Back from Support of Ex-Gay Therapy

X-rays, you say? Nope… Antibiotics? Nope… Germ theory? Wrong again.

The answer, according to the British Medical Journal, is toilets, or a sanitation facility that “ensures hygienic separation of human excrement from human contact.”

1.5 million children have died from sanitation-related illnesses so far this year and the Acumen Fund, a non-profit that seeks to find creative solutions to global poverty, has launched an inventive international competition to tackle the ‘human excrement problem’.

Doo, doo, in other words… crap, poo, shit, number two. Whatever you want to call it, 2.5 billion people on this earth (2 out of 5) are doing the deed in the outdoors, in unhygienic, shared facilities, or in open latrines so gross we’d all prefer to talk about the weather or somehow avoid the subject.

“And that’s the problem,” the Acumen Fund writes in their promotional material for the contest. “Nobody wants to think about sanitation, so we don’t talk about sanitation. We’ve gotten good at talking about malaria, AIDS, disaster relief, global warming, cancer, safe drinking water, and even investing in girls. But, nobody wants to talk about sanitation. The issue is far from sexy. It’s gross. It’s uncomfortable. It’s funny.”

The contest, ‘Sanitation is Sexy’, calls on artists, designers, videographers, advertisers and creative types all over the world to submit solutions to this sanitation crises by November 21. “Use your creative genius to show the world that the lack of basic sanitation is one of the most critical issues facing the developing world today,” the contest banner reads.

Potential solutions are quite open ended: a contestant’s submission (all you gotta do is email your idea) can be as simple as a photo documenting any physical objects or service they have created.

Suggestion include: The most retweetable tweet of all time, guerrilla marketing or public art, an iconic print ad or poster, a story or essay, a game-changing video that will put sanitation on the map, or anything unexpected.

James Wu, the Acumen Fund’s curator of the contest, told Change.org that he hopes it will “help shed light on the issue of sanitation with a much broader community beyond the development world.”

Winning submissions will be featured by the competition sponsors, including Design Observer, GOOD Magazine and YouTube. The winning video submissions will be featured on YouTube’s homepage for 24 hours.

The inspiration for the project came from MacKenzie Fegan’s project “Sewers.” She has since been asked to join the judging panel for the competition, which includes: Daniel Burka, Director of Design at Tiny Speck; William Drenttel, the Editorial Director of Design Observer; the writer Steven Johnson and David Kurla, Founder and CEO of Ecotact, which builds clean public toilets in Kenya.

Readers should also check out Acumen, a hip organization that seeks to milk the power of creativity to better the world. The “Sanitation is Sexy” initiative is the first in a series of challenges based on using ingenuity and inventiveness for social change. Sign up for notifications of future challenges here.

Shout out to James Wu, the competition’s curator and an avid reader of the Change.org Human Rights blog, for contacting us.

Photo credit: The Acumen Fund

“Sanitation is Sexy”: Turning Poop into Action

World Social Project

Many young girls and boys in the country’s growing sex industry are forced to sell their services by by pimps, and sometimes even their parents. The BBC’s Chris Rogers headed to Brazil to investigate, and found many young kids selling sex because of their parents’ demands and families’ needs. He encountered one 13-year-old girl, Pia, who was forced into prostitution to support her mother’s (and her own) crack cocaine addiction, and two other young boys — dressed as girls — who used their earnings to buy food for their hungry and impoverished families. And their stories are not uncommon; many desperate kids, teens, and young women from Brazil’s favelas are left with no choice but to enter the prostitution industry, and others are forced into it with the typical promises of money, a better life, and happiness.

According to UNICEF, there are an estimated 250,000 child prostitutes in Brazil, and that number is growing. Sex tourists from all over the world, particularly the United States and Africa, head to that country for the promise of cheap, pleasurable sex in the countless “love motels” that can be purchased by the hour. Classy.

But Brazil is scheduled to host the World Cup in 2014, and I wonder if we are going to have the same issues and concerns about the safety of the country’s young and vulnerable when we start to gear up for the largest sporting event in the world. It will be up to Brazil’s police force to crack down on forced prostitution, trafficking, and other forms of exploitation long before talk of the World Cup even begins.

So how have they been doing so far?

According to Chris Rogers, some cities, like Ceara — which is set to be one of the World Cup’s host towns — have begun scaring away the sex tourists that used to frequent the region. Driving through in armed cars, showing off AK-47s, and looking altogether bad-ass, the government is sending a clear message. Or trying to. Rather than decreasing the instances of abuse in the country, though, they are just pushing the sex tourism hotspots to other cities, like Recife. And when the sex is young, fresh, cheap, and available in one of the world’s most naturally beautiful and magnificent regions, what’s going to stop the foreigners from heading south for a leisurely and pleasurable vacation?

Photo credit: Eliezer Borges

Brazil’s Child Sex Tourism Industry Is on the Rise

Obama Signs Legislation to Label Conflict Minerals: There is a growing awareness of the fact that many of our modern electronics include minerals mined in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo. New legislation passed recently means that companies are now obligated to provide information about whether they’re using parts derived from minerals that come from these places, and if so, what they’re doing to ensure that they obtained legal and with regard to human rights.

A Mobile Payment Trifecta in Kenya: Erik Hersman is one of the leading voices in the story of Africa’s mobile tech renaissance. In this piece , Hersman talks about three mobile payment companies showing how Kenya is actually arguably getting out ahead of many startups coming out of America and Europe that are working on these high-potential areas.

Idiocy and brilliance of American policy toward entrepreneurs: A nice simple piece about the irony of our immigration policy by tech blogger Robert Scoble. He points out how, on the one hand, the US creates a space safe for failure — the necessary prerequisite for an entrepreneurial culture. Yet on the other, we make it immensely hard for talented people from around the world to settle and work here.

Why Every Social Entrepreneur Should Be Paying Attention to SKS & Unitus: I haven’t spent as much time with the Unitus shut down and the SKS (microfinance) IPO as I should, in large part because I’m still wrapping my head around what I think they mean. This post does a nice job connecting many of the dots, however, and links to a follow up, as well.

Are Most VCs Dinosaurs Who Need to Hurry Up and Die?: The venture capital space is in the midst of a rationalization period, in which the model is trying to adjust to the reality that startups are starting for less, and exiting earlier through buyouts. This week, leading angel investor Dave McClure launched his own seed fund “500 Startups,” and launched a shot across the bow of the traditional VCs. This post looks at both sides.

Photo credit: Scott Kinmartin

Weekend Entrepreneur Links: Mobile Payments, Dino VCs