The Press Room contains a selection of news articles written about GIFT’s work. It includes footage from news channels across the world and televised interviews with Chandran Nair and other members of the GIFT team talking about globalisation, consumption and leadership in Asia.
It also includes press releases published by GIFT about each of our programmes and project partners from the past five years to the present day.
For Asians, whose numbers will soon reach 5 billion, western living standards are simply out of reach. Chandran Nair demonstrates his points with drastic figures: an iPad should cost 5,000 Euro. Currently in Europe and North America a t-shirt is priced at most one tenth of its real value. For most goods, both the depletion of natural resources and a fair salary of workers ought to be factored in the prices.
Far too often young people are misled into believing they are entrepreneurs because they have a good idea, want to explore the possibilities of making it commercial and creating a business around it. This has now reached a stage where many believe that entrepreneurship is about turning a good idea into a money making machine, a process that emphasizes a network of interested investors and well planned exit strategies. Not only is the reality very different but a more cautious and humble approach which puts "making meaning" in tandem with "making money" may serve aspiring young entrepreneurs better.
At the press conference for The Other Hundred, SCMP reporter, Joanna Chiu asks the judges about skewed perceptions and stereotypes of the poor in China and Hong Kong.
On 24th April, The Other Hundred Project Manager, Tingting Peng, and jury member, Ruth Eichhorn, chatted to Crystal Kwok of RTHK Radio 3 about the goals and ambitions of the initiative and in particular, how it can be used to stimulate interesting discussions on women's issues around the world.
Kim Taylor from ABC Radio Australia interviewed Chandran Nair on the inspiration behind The Other Hundred and what the project hopes to achieve.
INCLUDED Founder and Executive Director, Jonathan Hursh, has received the Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2013 award from the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, an integral community of the World Economic Forum. Jonathan was recognized as an “outstanding leader” by the Schwab Foundation, for his pioneering work with migrants living in slums. INCLUDED was a project partner of the 3rd annual Global Leaders Module (GLM) organised by Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and facilitated by GIFT in July 2011 in Beijing.
Chandran Nair identified three principles that should inform policies in the Asian continent. The first is that, if resources are limited, we should make economic activity subservient to maintaining the vitality of these resources. The second principle is that collective welfare should take precedence over individual rights. The third is that we should re-price resources, to reflect their importance for collective well-being.
In an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of the most influential publications in Germany, Chandran Nair talked about the necessity of leadership in the form a strong government in today’s resource-strapped world. He severed the usual association between a strong state and an authoritarian state in the collective European memory. Germany’s current government-led approach to switch to renewable energy is one example of a strong state. Chandran emphasised the priorities of the 21st century: the right and access to toilets, electricity, clean water, safe food, and education. The current consumption-driven growth model based on resource exploitation and cost externalisation is not a sustainable one, Nair said. With rapid global population growth, in Asia in particular, the whole world has to come to this realisation: the party is over. Asia needs to rethink and reshape its role in the future of capitalism.
“If you want to protect the air quality and health of billions of people in Asia, you have to place restrictions on car owners. Besides price mechanisms to tax gasoline and CO2 or high parking fees and tolls, you have to think about car-free zones by banning cars too,“ says Chandran Nair.
Scholars believe it to be the world’s largest treasury of ancient Buddhist texts. The sheer immensity of the collection held in the National Library of Mongolia has prevented a proper tally to date.
