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	Country Online Development Gateways by Emily Kallaur   A farmer who knows current prices in a nearby market can negotiate a better deal from the middleman who purchases his crop. A nonprofit agency with access to government budget information can pressure a municipal government on how it spends for social services. A government official who understands the priorities and programs of another department can take steps to coordinate efforts.   With half of the world’s Internet users now in developing countries, the potential to share information and best practices for development, and to cooperate in the pursuit of common goals, is greater than ever before.   While increased access to information is an underlying principle of all Development Gateway’s work, two programs are directly about knowledge sharing at the grassroots level.   People from 200 countries use the Zunia online collaboration platform to find partners and practical resources in critical topics areas from HIV/AIDS response, to governance, to trade and development.   Country Gateway associates carry out the same mission at the local level, offering development information and knowledge exchange through their own Web sites, in addition to other services focused on e-government, e-learning and more.   Zunia is an online network that gives practical assistance to people working in development around the world: helping a water engineer in Niger teach villagers about the connection between contaminated water and disease; strengthening the effectiveness of a labor relations commission in Swaziland; or improving a library and information center in Vietnam.   Development Gateway has recently partnered with GlobalGiving, a non-profit that connects donors with non-profits around the world through their online marketplace.   Through the GlobalGiving website donors are able to connect with projects and regions, and support the communities and ideas they find important. The GlobalGiving team also works with local partners to collect feedback from ordinary citizens on both GlobalGiving and non-GlobalGiving affiliated projects.   The Development Gateway partners with locally owned Country Gateways in nearly 50 countries. Country Gateway Web sites also provide online and offline technical services for e-government, small enterprise support, e-learning, e-health, online community-building.   Simply click on a region for an overview of each Country Gateway and visit their Web sites to learn more. Visit the related web page
	Business and Human Rights: Achievements & Prospects by John Ruggie Carnegie Council - Policy Innovations   Oct 2008   Today we''re talking about "Business & Human Rights: Achievements and Prospects" with UN Special Representative John Ruggie, who will report on his work to date and the next steps for his project going forward.   Professor John Ruggie has been given a mandate to continue his work for an additional three years, having governments and companies and civil society work together to create a more clear standard of human rights that can be helpful for all the people and parties involved.   Professor John Ruggie: Just yesterday I reported to the UN General Assembly on an update on my mandate, which I hadn''t done before. My usual reporting arrangement is to the Human Rights Council in Geneva, but the Human Rights Council decided, in an attempt to increase the visibility of this issue further beyond simply the Human Rights Council purview, I should also report to the General Assembly, which I did. It was interesting and we had a great discussion.   I have a day job. I teach at Harvard. I teach, at the Kennedy School, courses called global governance, and I have an affiliated appointment at Harvard Law School, issues related to international law. I have taught at Berkeley and at Columbia for many years, and now at Harvard, but I have also worked inside the UN, the most extended period being during Kofi Annan''s first term in office, when he asked me to come and join him on a full-time basis to establish something that we ended up calling Strategic Planning, and an assistant secretary generalship for strategic planning was established.   Among other things I ended up working on was UN relations with the business community, which led to the creation of the UN Global Compact. I was responsible for trying to do something substantive with the accident of the millennial change, the year 2000. So we came up with the Millennium Development Goals.   On the principle that no good deed should go unpunished, after I left the UN and Kofi Annan was asked to find a special representative for business and human rights, he called me. You need to become my Special Representative for Business and Human Rights." And, not knowing any better, I said yes. That''s how I got involved in this.   What is it all about? To put it in very, very general terms, this is an ongoing process of international regime construction, or regime modification if you will. What this is all about is an attempt to strengthen the human rights regime so that it can become more effective in responding to human rights challenges that are posed by companies, not only transnational corporations but all companies—state-owned enterprises, publicly listed companies, national companies, international companies, big ones, small ones. There is no limit to this mandate. It is without bounds.   Now, the mandate has a history. Everything has a history. Before my time, while I was still full-time at the UN, a subsidiary body of what was then called the UN Human Rights Commission, the Subcommission on Human Rights, was drafting an instrument, a text that was called "The Norms on Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises with Regard to Human Rights," a document that was intended to someday, if not immediately, become a legally binding document that would impose on companies obligations directly under international law.   The obligations essentially were the same range of duties that states have adopted for themselves in the area of human rights, namely that companies would have the duty to respect, protect, promote, fulfill human rights, just as states do, the difference between the two being that states would have primary duties and companies would have secondary duties.   Secondly, the corporate duties were supposed to take hold inside something called corporate spheres of influence. So the companies would have these responsibilities within what were called their spheres of influence, an elastic concept that I had introduced into the Global Compact when we first started it as a sort of a metaphor to get companies thinking about human rights issues beyond the workplace..   * Visit the link below to access the complete transcript. Visit the related web page
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