Belfast Blogs.com

Everyone over a certain age (let's say 30) can recall the harrowing impact of Michael Buerk's first reports of a famine in Ethiopia in 1984.The sheer biblical images of starving black children - their hollow eyes pleading for food to placate their empty, distended bellies, their ribs stretching their thin skins, their limbs shrivelled to mere bones and skin - shocked the West in our relative affluence.What followed was Band Aid, Live Aid, and the growth of global consciousness in relation to the appalling poverty suffered on the African continent.Since then, charities have reported 'donation fatigue' and the diminishing returns of shock footage of African carnage or disaster. Mass rape and child slavery in Darfur barely stirs us now. Burma is flooded, and we can barely bother to put a...

Norway has set quotas on the number of female directors companies must have. The bar is set at a minimum of 40%.As a result, many companies have been forced to decide which of their serving directors to sack in order to bring in female replacements.Which is fine, if you have female staff you can promote who know the firm's business, or can identify female business talent who could bring useful skills to the table. Certainly, the Norwegians are claiming that the quota system has bred success.But what they mean is that it has bred success for that small coterie of qualified women who are now cleaning up with boardroom appointments. It remains unproven whether individual businesses have benefited at all.No one's bothered to do the research to find out. After all, negative conclusions might...