Tiny Spark

A veteran humanitarian aid worker offers candid insights into the lessons he's learned - and the personal dilemmas he's faced - during a long career trying to do good across the globe.

Promo: Lessons from an Aid Worker by Tiny Spark

I recently watched a new documentary about inventor Dean Kamen. He's the guy who invented the Segway, that impressive but only moderately successful people mover. Well, Kamen is back with a new invention called the Slingshot; a high tech solution that promises to turn even the dirtiest water into clean drinking water. Given the world's water crisis, you'd think there would be enormous potential for this sort of device. But in the film, Kamen's technology is repeatedly rejected by potential partners, which include the World Bank and United Nations, according to the film's director. Frustrated and out of options, Kamen ends up turning to Coca Cola; a decision that has been met with some criticism. Kamen is quick to defend his partnership with the company, which, he explains in the film, has bottling operations is 206 nations. "That's more than the number of countries that are admitted into the United Nations!" Kamen explains. "We realized if we could partner with them, they could be the link that takes our

We speak to Dean Karlan, Yale economist and co-author of the book More Than Good Intentions. Karlan advocates evidence-based aid and has devoted his career to figuring out which programs work and why.

What Works? The Case for Evidence Based Aid by Tiny Spark

The Soccket: A Follow-Up Investigation by Tiny Spark

This story was originally broadcast on PRI's The World. In the latest installment of our Tracking Charity series, I travel to Senegal to spend time with some community health workers who have been working for a decade without pay. Our story explores the ethics and complexities about payment for volunteers who live in poverty.

Vanity Fair contributing editor, Nina Munk, decided to document a high-profile campaign to end extreme poverty. For six years, she followed celebrated economist Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Villages Project; a five-year campaign designed to eradicate poverty from a dozen African villages. "I thought to myself, if one of the most admired, most respected macro economists in the world believes that we can end poverty in our lifetime, I'm willing to follow him and watch what happens." Munk, a former Fortune magazine writer and Forbes editor, followed Sachs on his official trips to Africa. She visited and revisited two of the Millennium Villages sites, living among the people there, to see how the project was panning out on the ground. At first Munk saw real progress as the cash began flowing in to the villages. But later, she says all kinds of problems began to emerge. "In some ways," she told us, "everything that could go wrong, did go wrong." An interview with Nina Munk about her new book, The Idealist - Je

Here's what's up next on Tiny Spark.

Here's the first installment in a new series I'm producing with the public radio program The World. It's a global investigative project called Tracking Charity. In this story, we investigate a promising new technology designed to combat malaria. I visit the Africa nation of Malawi where, a decade on, serious problems are beginning to arise; ones that may have been avoidable. After the story, I speak with The World's host, Marco Werman, about the Tracking Charity series.

Promo of Tiny Spark's story on TOMS Shoes and whether giving away free shoes is good aid.

In this holiday edition of Tiny Spark, we explore what happens when someone refuses to accept the idea of a "lost cause" and instead gets down to the work of transforming a troubled life.

Jennifer Hemsley and her husband wanted to adopt a girl from Guatemala but they immediately suspected fraud. Jennifer feared the worst: that the infant might have been kidnapped. “We were very concerned that her mother might be looking for her,” Jennifer tells us. What ensued was a years-long quest in which Jennifer sought to uncover the truth about the origins of the girl she wanted to adopt. Tiny Spark looks at a seemingly good idea - international adoption - and its underside: fraud, corruption and child trafficking.

In our latest episode, Tiny Spark takes a look at the quality of care medical volunteers have provided in crisis zones. We discover that many volunteers who deployed to Haiti after the earthquake had never before worked in international humanitarian emergencies. Many had never practiced medicine in low-income nations. While these volunteers may have been well-intentioned, their lack of specialized training would sometimes have severe repercussions for patients.

TOMS founder, Blake Mycoskie, says there are millions of children around the world who are in need of shoes. He's based his entire business model on this premise. His for-profit company has enjoyed handsome gains by getting consumers to buy into his idea. In our story, we question whether Blake's assumption is accurate and if it is, whether giving children free shoes is the best solution. "It starts with a solution that we, or the donor, or the giver, thinks is appropriate," Laura Freschi of New York University tells us. "That is, 'We would like to give people shoes,' which, in my opinion, is backwards because the way it should really start is with the person receiving to say, 'Well, what is your priority? What is it that you need?'" We also look at TOMS' Giving Partners; non-profits the company works with to distribute its shoes to children around the globe. As I started to compile a spreadsheet on TOMS Giving Partners, I was surprised to see the number of Christian Evangelical groups that kept cropping u

When an earthquake struck Haiti, medical volunteers from around the globe flew in to try and help. Many arrived having worked in crisis zones before, others had received training in disaster medicine. But it appears that a number of well-intentioned medical volunteers arrived in Haiti having never worked outside their home countries. They had no training in disaster medicine nor experience working in so-called "low resource" settings. This caused problems. In our next installment of Tiny Spark, we look at the challenges medical volunteers faced in Haiti, the repercussions of poor medical decisions, and what the medical community is doing now to promote disaster training so that volunteers are better prepared the next time crisis strikes.