I am always interested in practical ways that most people can contribute to defeating global poverty. It seems like so often the ideas coming our way are so indirect … through one or more intermediary whom you give money to and then it passes down the chain and trust that it actually benefits the needy recipient.

Africa@home (modelled after SETI@home) is a collaboration between the Swiss Tropical Institute, CERN and a group of universities to develop a long-term model of malaria epidemiology which can be used to test different ways of combatting the disease. You can donate extra cycles on your PC to help solve malaria at MalariaControl.net. In fact, they have had so much interest that they’ve temporarily stopped accepting computer cycle donations!

I think that this kind of response demonstrates a desire for people to help out with what they have. I hope that this will encourage other grid computing projects to help defeat poverty!

Please post comment if you have other sources for this type of program.