If you had the resources to accomplish something great in the world, what would you do? Legendary investor Warren Buffett posed this challenge to his son in 2006, when he announced he was leaving the bulk of his fortune to philanthropy. Howard G. Buffett set out to help the most vulnerable people on earth--nearly a billion individuals who lack basic food security. And Howard has given himself a deadline: 40 years to put more than $3 billion to work on this challenge. Howard learned this lesson through his passion for farming: each farmer can expect to have about 40 growing seasons, giving him just 40 chances to improve on every harvest. This lesson applies to all of us, because we all have about 40 productive years to do the best job we can, whatever our passions may be. This book captures Howard's journey around the world as he seeks out new approaches to ease the suffering of so many.--From publisher description.

Because I am a Girl is a global initiative from Plan International to end gender inequality, promote girls' rights and lift millions of girls out of poverty. This book illustrates the Because I am Girl call to change by telling stories of girls around the world.

Two Pulitzer Prize winners issue a call to arms against our era's most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women in the developing world. They show that a little help can transform the lives of women and girls abroad and that the key to economic progress lies in unleashing women's potential.

"BLOOD AND EARTH is a gripping account of the deadly link between slavery and environmental destruction. Kevin Bales is a social scientist, human rights activist, and journalist -- and he's also one of the world's leading experts on modern slavery. In his work he began to notice the connection between environmental decline and slavery: the two almost always went hand-in-hand, whether in the hellish gold mines of Ghana or the miraculously beautiful mangrove forests of Bangladesh. But why? He set off to find the answer on a fascinating and moving journey that took him into the lives of modern day slaves and along a supply chain that leads directly to the cell phones in our pockets. He found solutions that redeemed both the lives of the slaves in the world's most threatened places and the environments they live in. This is a clear-eyed, inspiring, and profoundly hopeful book that brings us dramatic stories from the world's environmental and human rights hotspots and offers solutions to our most pressing crises"--

We buy, who pays? is a documentary about Western companies producing clothes and shoes in developing countries. It shows us the problems with the working conditions, like low wages, forced overtime, health issues, child labour and chemicals destroying land and groundwater. What can be done to solve these problems? We visit factories in India and talk to suppliers, labourers, NGOs, and farmers who give their point of view. Do western companies take any responsibility? Leaders for HandM and other big Swedish companies answer the question.

Take an unforgettable journey with six actress / advocates and New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof to meet some of the most courageous individuals of our time, who are doing extraordinary work to empower women and girls everywhere. These are stories of heartbreaking challenge, dramatic transformation and enduring hope.

"In the 20th century, the U.S. government's effort to contain communism resulted in several disastrous conflicts: Vietnam, Cuba, Korea. Violence in Indonesia, and then interconnected slaughters across Latin America, arguably had a bigger hand in shaping today's world, but have been widely overlooked for one important reason: the secret CIA interventions were successful. In 1965, nearly one million unarmed civilians were killed in Indonesia with active U.S. assistance. This was the end of a decade-long attempt to stop the rise of the largest communist party outside the USSR and China. The resulting dictatorship buried the truth until this day, but the massacre shook the world. Left-wing movements radicalized, afraid of suffering the same fate as the unarmed Indonesians, and the world's committed anticommunists - especially in Brazil and Chile - learned from the mass murder, creating terror campaigns named after the Indonesian capital. In this bold and comprehensive new history, building on his reporting for the Washington Post in Southeast Asia, Vincent Bevins uses recently declassified documents, archival research, and countless of hours of interviews to reconstruct this chapter in world history and reveal a hidden legacy that spans the globe. For decades, it's been portrayed that much of the developing world passed naturally, and peacefully, into the US-led capitalist world system. But those who suffered through this process have long known differently"--

The first film to expose the nefarious lending of billions of dollars by multinational banks and international financial institutions to brutal dictators throughout the world. The Debt of Dictators is the first film to expose the nefarious lending of billions of dollars by multinational banks and international financial institutions to brutal dictators throughout the world. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, asserts that transnational banks "know the price of everything, but have no values". Debt of Dictators reveals the impoverishment resulting from the odious debts incurred to multinational lending institutions by these dictators. The film transports viewers to Argentina, South Africa, and the Philippines, where they come face to face with those suffering from the sacrifice of essential social services in order to repay these illegitimate debts. The film begins in the slums of Buenos Aires, where the poor and starving are seen digging through trash, searching for food. While Argentina used to be the seventh riches country in the world, today nearly 50% of the population lives below the poverty line and close to sixty children die from poverty related causes everyday. One reason for this is the $168 billion in foreign debt accrued by the military junta that came to power in the 1976 coup. More than 70,000 people were brutally tortured, killed, or disappeared during this rule. In spite of this, major banks and lending institutions lined up to offer loans to the military leaders, increasing the Argentine debt by 600%. Today the Argentine government pays more in interest to service these loans than it does on health, education, and welfare combined. The filmmakers next go inside today's South Africa and find conditions of abject poverty, worsened by debt incurred by the Apartheid regime, largely to prop up the apartheid machinery. When Nelson Mandela marched out of prison in 1990, the international banks presented him with a bill for $21 billion. The present South African government is determined to repay these debts in order to continue to attract foreign investment. Since 1994 the South African government has spent more than 500 billion rand servicing foreign debt and more than five times as much as on essential services. Furthermore, the privatization of essential services required by international lending agencies such as the IMF has exponentially raised prices, thereby restricting access to essentials such as water and electricity by the nation's poor. Finally, the viewer is transported to the slums of Manila, where children who cannot afford to go to school are shown peddling trinkets in the town market. They live in shacks with no water or electricity, lacking even basic health services. After Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1976, imprisoning, torturing, and killing more than 30,000 in the process, lending institutions still lined up to offer loans, resulting in the more than $56 billion in foreign debt currently owed by the Philippines. Most of the money was spent personally enriching Marcos and his cronies for commissioning projects in exchange for kickbacks, which were useless, and often never completed. 70% of the Philippine population now lives below the poverty line and nearly 1/3 of all children suffer from malnutrition. One third of the national budget has been allocated to service this debt, largely to avoid investigation which might reveal the 'disappearance' of the borrowed funds into the pockets of those previously aligned with Marcos' regime, which are still in the Congress. The film makes clear that multinational lending institutions systematically subverted human rights and democratic principles to profits and the imposition of neo-liberal economic policies. As activists, including representatives of the Jubilee Campaign, vehemently argue in the film, the time has come to forgive these unjust debts in order to ameliorate the suffering of the world's poor, who are unwitting victims of the relationships fostered by corrupt dictators and the institutions that profited from their rule. "We pressure poor countries to repay their debts. But many such loans were taken out by autocrats who used it to repress dissent and to build personal wealth in the West. This stirring film shows the effects of forcing poor populations to foot the bill for their own oppression." - Thomas Pogge, Columbia University, author of World Poverty and Human Rights "We loaned hundreds of billions of dollars to illegitimate regimes, then facilitated the flow of trillions of dollars of corrupt and tax-evading money out of these same countries, and now have the audacity to tell the next generation of poor people that they have to pay off their debts in order to be creditworthy in the future. The arrogance of this position is breathtaking. The Debt of Dictators gets squarely into the moral dimensions of this issue." - Raymond Baker, Capitalism's Achilles Heel. "The Debt of Dictators is an important addition to the debt campaigner's toolkit. The film takes a sometimes difficult concept -- odious debt -- and clearly shows how this debt was accrued. Most importantly, it profiles the vibrant, creative social movements and grassroots groups campaigning for debt cancellation. At the American Friends Service Committee, we use the film regularly to complement our grassroots education activities." - Imani Countess, Director, AFSC National Life over Debt Campaign.

Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World is the first documentary to deeply explore the lives of gay and lesbian people in non-western cultures. Traveling to five different continents, we hear the heartbreaking and triumphant stories of gays and lesbians from Egypt, Honduras, Kenya, Thailand and elsewhere, where most occurrences of oppression receive no media coverage at all. By sharing the personal stories coming out of developing nations, Dangerous Living sheds light on an emerging global movement striving to end discrimination and violence against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people. "Be inspired, be very inspired!" - London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. "Tear-wrenchingly powerful." - Citypages.com. Awards: WINNER! Audience Award, Best Feature: Barcelona GLBT International Festival WINNER! Audience Award, Best Documentary: Hartford Alternatives Festival. OFFICIAL SELECTION: International Film Festival on Human Rights, Geneva.