Koidu Town, center of Sierra Leone’s diamond mining industry. Photo credit: Matthew Genasci, Revenue Watch Institute.
Making a Nation's Wealth
Work for its People
Developing nations with vast natural resources so often fail to provide for the basic needs of their citizens that economists have given the phenomenon a name: “the resource curse.”
While academics debate the reasons why, the nonprofit Revenue Watch Institute is working to do something about it. Revenue Watch, a Hewlett Foundation grantee, has launched projects in more than twenty resource-rich countries in the developing world to improve the transparency and accountability of their governments and encourage the effective management of their oil, gas, and minerals.
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As the main characters in The Forgotten World computer game, these four friends embark on a road trip across America. Photo credit: Coastline Community College.
Games Come of Age as a Learning Tool
A group of Chinese friends travels to the United States in search of an abducted alien. Their quest takes them on a road trip across the country, where they talk to local people for clues to its whereabouts. The fate of the universe may hang in the balance—and you can help.
But never mind aliens. The real goal of this adventure is to learn English.
This quest is the premise of an innovative, online learning game that Coastline Community College in Fountain Valley, California, is developing with the support of more than $2.6 million from the Hewlett Foundation. Read more...
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“Foundations” is a series of informal question-and-answer sessions with employees and others affiliated with The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to give them an opportunity to explain their work.
Tom Steinbach, an officer with the Foundation’s Environment Program, manages grants to promote conservation in western North America. Here he offers an overview of that work and explains how it is changing.
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The numbers are daunting. Nearly one-third of all teen girls in the United States become pregnant at least once by the time they are twenty years old, and one-half of all pregnancies nationwide are unplanned. It’s statistics like those that this spring prompted The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, a Hewlett grantee, to launch Pregnant Pause, a blog with the self-described goal of stimulating conversation, debate—whatever it takes—to get teens and young people talking and thinking about reproductive issues.
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The Foundation welcomes new employees Cristina Kinney, Paul Rosenberg, Leanne Sedowski, and Em Warren.
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