Tiny Spark

Politico reporter Ken Vogel discovered that the Clinton Foundation has collected as much as $11.7 million in speaker fees from nonprofits. Some argue that celebrity appearances create buzz and more donations for nonprofits, but critics say the high price tags don’t produce worthwhile, measurable returns. Do big-name speakers add value to a charity's bottom line or are they just an “empty calorie high?”

A listener poses a moral dilemma regarding aid work; another weighs in on whether the business mindset can improve philanthropy.

Billionaire John Paulson recently gave $400 million to Harvard University. Critics say the money could have done more good elsewhere. Should large donations be scrutinized and debated? Or should we all just be thankful that Paulson is parting with $400 million at all?

How do you figure out exactly what people suffer and die from in every part of the world? Christopher Murray decided to try. His resulting Global Burden of Disease initiative ended up causing controversy among aid groups and large institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations.

Billions of aid dollars were devoted to reconstructing post-earthquake Haiti and fighting Ebola in West Africa. Economist Vijaya Ramachandran and journalist Amy Maxmen tried to track that spending. They found more questions and a lack of transparency.

Graduation season is here, but not all high school seniors are taking the direct route to college. In recent years, some 350 seniors have chosen to put higher education on hold for Global Citizen Year, which offers them year-long apprenticeships in Africa and Latin America. Founder Abby Falik says for most kids in America, college needs to wait.

Abby Falik says high school graduates should immerse themselves in year-long apprenticeships abroad before going to college; Falik's Global Citizen Year is their ticket.

Nepal continues to mourn the thousands who died after a massive earthquake. A global relief effort is now underway to assist more than a million people in need food assistance and other forms of relief. Our guest, Brian Tucker, says responding to crises in this way is shortsighted, costly and poor policy.

Seismologist Brian Tucker says we need to do more than help the victims of natural disasters; we need to prepare vulnerable communities before disaster strikes.

The Center for Effective Philanthropy's Phil Buchanan says nonprofits should push back when the business world says it has the answers to our big social problems.

“Folks sometimes forget that philanthropy is addressing the very problems that have defied market solutions or in some cases are the result of market failure," says Phil Buchanan, President of the Center for Effective Philanthropy. But sometimes that is overlooked or underestimated by the start-up world, according to Buchanan. “There's way too much ignorance about the sector," Buchanan tells us. "Particularly given what an important role it has played in this country, and the fact that our nonprofit sector, with all its flaws and all its faults, and all the ways it could be better, is the envy of the world."

A small percentage of the second-hand clothes we donate to charity actually end up on the store shelves of our local Salvation Army or Goodwill, according to our guest Andrew Brooks. Eventually the clothes end up in the hands of for-profit companies, which sell our old t-shirts and jeans to poor people halfway across the globe. Brooks' new book, Clothing Poverty - The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-hand Clothes, describes a multi-billion dollar industry rife with complications and even deceit.

Emily Troutman photographs and writes about people living in poverty across the globe. She's a freelancer and to help pay the bills, Troutman sometimes took lucrative commissions - up to a thousand dollars a day - photographing the work of aid groups. Her two years in post-quake Haiti were no exception. "For most of the freelancers I knew in Port-au-Prince, nonprofit gigs were a lifeline," Troutman writes in her blog Aid.Works. "I never wrote about the organizations I worked for and tried to keep a wall between those two parts of my life." That wall came crashing down earlier this year when USAID announced that it had suspended one of its biggest nonprofit contractors, International Relief and Development, from receiving additional federal contracts. USAID said investigators found “serious misconduct” in IRD's performance and the way it managed taxpayer funds. Troutman was especially disturbed by the allegations because IRD twice paid her to photograph its work in Haiti. "When the IRD scandal blew up, I

Nonprofit advisor Caroline Fiennes has a lot to say about how we assess charities. She used to run one herself. In those days, Fiennes tried figuring out whether her organization was achieving its goals but admits she wasn't always forthcoming about the findings. "When the results were good, we would share them," she tells us. "And when they weren't, we didn't." Fiennes suspects many charities do the same. Fiennes has now made it her mission to improve the quality of data produced by and about nonprofits. "Charities vary markedly in how good they are, so wouldn't it be a good idea if we could figure out which are the good ones, and get people to fund the good ones and to not fund the bad ones? It's hard to make evidence-based decisions if loads of the evidence is either missing, or bad quality, or you can't find it."

Adia Benton spent two years looking at HIV support groups in West Africa. What she saw unsettled her. "It calls into question what international programs like this do to people," she tells us. Benton is an assistant professor of medical anthropology at Brown University and author of the new book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone. Internationally funded HIV support groups often urge people to disclose their status. But Benton cautions that not everyone is comfortable going public with their illness. "A lot of it is about fundamental assumptions people make about Africa, which is that it's a community-oriented place where people do everything in the collective and for the collective good. But in fact there are people who are very private, and discretion is very much prized." The public health benefits of disclosure are clear: it reduces stigma and rates of transmission and can help HIV positive people to feel less alone. Even so, Benton found many HIV positive people had mixed

Carrboro High School in Carrboro North Carolina is an unlikely meeting place for leaders from the world of international aid and development. But over the years, global studies teacher Matt Cone has given his students face time with an impressive list of guests: from former USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah to Nobel Peace Prize winning economist Mohammed Yunus to First Lady Laura Bush. Most meetings between students and guests have taken place by Skype and speaker phone but last year, Cone's students flew to New York to meet with World Bank President Jim Yong Kim. Cone says his students, steeped in issues of economic development and international aid, were "thrilled" to meet Kim, as you can see from this selfie. "I wanted to teach a course where students had access to people who were trying to make a difference in the world," Cone said. "And I thought that if they got something that was different from a fairytale version they might actually become interested in being engaged citizens." It seems to be working

“It's confounding for doctors, for me, when you see that your idea of how a patient is doing is completely wrong, and deadly wrong,” says physician Joel Selanikio about his time treating Ebola patients in Lunsar, Sierra Leone. Looking to the future, he is optimistic about bringing down Ebola in West Africa but remains concerned about the bigger picture in the developing world – the broken systems such as government and healthcare. He describes his experiences with Tiny Spark.

Dayo Olopade discusses her new book The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa. The Nigerian-American journalist spent two years traveling across 17 nations in Sub-Saharan Africa. She comes away with a promising view of the continent. "I invite the world to reimagine all of the challenges that you hear about in Africa as an opportunity to innovate."

Nigerian-American journalist Dayo Olopade discusses her new book, The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa.

Diana Jue and Jackie Stenson wanted to figure out a way to bring high-quality products to the world's poor. So, they founded Essmart, a for-profit company that uses India's network of ubiquitous mom-and-pop shops to reach rural consumers.