Local Entrepreneurship Celebrated at the UN Commission on Sustainable Development
The 20 winners of the 2009 SEED Awards for Entrepreneurship in Sustainable Development were announced May 12, 2009 in New York. The international award recognizes innovation in local, environmentally-responsible and sustainable entrepreneurship. Twenty local initiatives from across the developing world received this year’s award. Together, the winners cover a diverse range of promising business models that will tackle poverty and environmental stewardship in areas such as water and waste management, sustainable energy, recycling, and fish farming.”The 2009 SEED Award winners are shining examples of the kinds of low carbon, innovation-led, recycling and green job enterprises shooting up across the globe—enterprises that echo to the multiple challenges of here and now, enterprises that with just a fraction of the bail-out billions and trillions could be the new Microsoft, Siemens, Tata, and Unilever – able to deliver tomorrowʼs economy today,” said Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UNEP.
The SEED Award is the flagship programme of the SEED Initiative, a partnership founded in 2002 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The SEED Awards identify, profile and support promising, locally-driven, start-up enterprises working in partnership in developing countries to improve livelihoods, tackle poverty, and manage natural resources sustainably. Rather than the traditional monetary prize, applicants compete for a package of individually-tailored capacity development– a suite of that will help the winners to grow their business idea and establish lasting partnerships across sectors. SEED develops learning resources for the broad community of social and environmental entrepreneurs, informs policy- and decision-makers, and aims to inspire innovative, entrepreneurial approaches to sustainable development. As well as the UNEP, UNDP, and IUCN, SEED’s partners include the governments of Germany, India, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States of America.
Competition for the 2009 SEED Awards was particularly fierce. Winners were selected by an international jury of sustainable development experts. Said Julia Marton-Lefèvre, Director General of IUCN: “This fourth round of SEED Awards demonstrates resoundingly that there are a vast number of innovative and practical ideas in the world about how to make sustainable development happen. These SEED winners were selected from more than 1100 applications from close to 100 countries worldwide, representing the collaborative efforts of about 5000 organizations from the private sector, non-governmental organizations, womenʼs groups, labour organizations, public authorities, international agencies and academia. Our hope is that with SEEDʼs support, they will grow and inspire similar initiatives elsewhere.”
Beyond the annual SEED Award, the SEED Initiative works to learn from the experiences of the individual start-ups to derive tools and guidance that can be helpful for all entrepreneurs who are aiming to deliver social and environmental benefits. The latest tool, a major on line resource developed by SEED in partnership with the International Institute for Sustainable Development and the Commission on Environmental Cooperation, was launched at the reception. Set up as a wiki, at www.entrepreneurstoolkit.org, this tool is designed so that social and environmental entrepreneurs around the world can write about their experience with setting up and running their businesses.
The 2009 SEED Award Winners:
- Bangladesh: “Solar conversion of traditional kerosene hurricane lamps”. A national NGO in partnership with a local NGO and a cooperative have developed an innovative device called “SuryaHurricane”, a low-cost solar lantern made from recycled parts of the conventional and much used kerosene lantern.
- Bangladesh: “Generating local economy through regenerating local resources”. A cooperation between a national NGO, a research institution and a small-sized business aims to avoid bio-diversity losses and degradation of the agricultural lands, by recycling waste from rice-growing for the production of cement that will be used in the production of low cost housing materials.
- Brazil: “One Million Cistern Program (P1MC)”. Local NGOs and local community associations have joined forces with the national government and international agencies to develop and build one million home cisterns to collect and store rain water in the semi-arid region, bringing access to potable water for poor rural families.
- Brazil: “The sustainable use of Amazonian seeds”. Regional development in the Brazilian Amazon is the aim of the partners, achieved by encouraging the organization of the local communities as a co-operative, and by transferring technologies and training the community in the production of oils made from Amazonian seeds, resulting in increased incomes for these communities.
- Brazil: “Eco-Amazon Piabas of Rio Negro”. A national NGO, a cooperative of small producers and public authorities are working together to build a niche market of specialty ornamental fishes and to introduce a fair trade system through socio-environmentally responsible fishing.
- Burkina Faso: “Nafore & Afrisolar energy kiosks”. A small business and international NGOs are cooperating to provide sustainable energy supply to poor communities by expanding the use of “Nafore”, a PV-based telephone charger, powered 100% on solar energy.
- Colombia: “Oro Verde® – Facilitating market access for artisan miners”. A national NGO and local community associations are engaged in an initiative to reverse environmental degradation and social exclusion produced by illegal and uncontrolled mechanized mining. A mining certification process and capacity building program have been created created. More than 1000 artisan mines are now following social and environmental criteria.
- Colombia: “Camarones Sostenibles del Golfo de Morrosquillo”. The partners of this project are a community-based organization, a local NGO and a small business which are aiming to establish a cooperative enterprise that includes families of traditional fishermen in the Morrosquillo Gulf, farming shrimp in a way which produces zero emissions.
- Cook Islands: “Innovative inland oyster aquafarming”. A local business in partnership with a national NGO is farming oysters under controlled conditions in an environmentally friendly and wholly sustainable manner. Farming fish provides relief from subsistence fishing of the over-harvested lagoons in the region as well as new food security and income generation to communities involved.
- Kenya: “MakaaZingira” produces FSC certified charcoal for conservation and livelihood creation. A national NGO, a community-based organisation and a small business network aim to establish a sustainable eco-charcoal production model, helping small scale farmers to replace unsustainable practices while also bringing social benefits.
- Kenya: “Integrated plastics recovery and recycling flagship project”. A project carried out by a large and a small business in partnership with a national NGO, aiming to offer the most viable option to recycling of dirty polythenes into plastic poles. It works to improve and strengthen livelihood assets for poor and marginalised youth and women.
- Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia: “Sunny Money – solar micro-franchising”. International NGOs and community-based organisations in Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia have created a micro-franchise named Sunny Money, which recruits, trains and supports a growing network of solar entrepreneurs in East Africa, especially deaf and disabled people, helping them build and sell solar kits to power lights, radios and mobile phones.
- Mozambique: “The clean energy initiative”. This project aims to provide rural electrification using sustainable energy, generating local employment and promoting entrepreneurial skills, by offering capacity building in the manufacture, installation and maintenance of micro wind turbines. The partners of this project are local small businesses and an academic institution.
- Niger: “Almodo”. A partnership between a small business and a research institution is developing a sustainable self-financing solid waste management system that contributes to improving living conditions of the poorest population, in collaboration with a women’s group that collects solid waste in poor urban areas of Niger’s three biggest cities.
- Panama: “Planting Empowerment”. An initiative involving a small business in partnership with a community-based organization and an international agency is leveraging private capital to increase conservation and provide sustainable livelihood opportunities to the local population as the same time as improving natural resource conservation in fragile environmental areas.
- South Africa, Namibia and Botswana: “Biocultural protocols – community approaches to Access and Benefit Sharing”. Civil society organizations have mobilized efforts to develop bio-cultural protocols with different local indigenous communities which will help to provide a model whereby local communities can share the benefits if local resources and expertise are developed for market purposes.
- Sri Lanka: “Solar energy, education & fishing”. National and international NGOs, with the cooperation of public authorities, are working to expand the use of an alternative lighting system in rural villages, through the replacement of kerosene lamps with solar panels.
- Tanzania: “KOLCAFE – Smallholder coffee revenue enhancement”. This initiative, involving national NGOs and a local research institution, aims to empower coffee farmers and increase coffee production by improving agronomic practices and adding value through building product processing infrastructure and selling products directly to export markets.
- Thailand: “Carbon bank and village development”. This innovative initiative of national NGOs and an academic institution aims to encourage, support and enhance community-based indigenous forestry through carbon credit trading to enable successful climate change adaptation and socioeconomic development for local communities and biodiversity conservation.
- Zimbabwe: “Bridge to the World”. A small business, a research institution and an association of small-scale women farmers together are facing the challenge of improving rural livelihoods and reversing severe land degradation through innovative organic farming of essential oils, made from the indigenous Tarchonanthus camphoratus bush.
It is so heartening to see how Africans approach technology innovation. They are focused, not just on finding solutions to basic problems such as providing lighting, but on making it possible for Africans themselves to implement those ideas.
Lebone Solutions, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is working to bring light to poor and remote African communities through a microbial fuel cell that uses waste and dirt to make small amounts of energy, Cate Doty reports in the International Herald Tribune Nov. 11, 2008.
“You can just literally make energy from dirt,” said Aviva Presser, a graduate student at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “And there’s a lot of dirt in Africa.”
Presser is one of the founders of Lebone Solutions, which is being financed by a $200,000 World Bank grant and private investments. Lebone’s idea is a microbial fuel cell, a battery that makes a small amount of energy out of materials like manure, graphite cloth and soil, which are common to African households.
As waste decomposes, it produces electrons that stick to an electrode, like a piece of graphite, that then creates enough of a charge to power a small lamp or cellphone.
“It can be made by people with minimal training,” Presser said. “It doesn’t take a massive investment.”
Presser founded Lebone, which means “light stick” in Sotho language, with fellow Harvard classmate Hugo Van Vuuren. Both grew up in Africa, and their class project involved looking at sustainable lighting technologies for the continent. Last summer, they piloted the technology in a small Tanzanian village, Leguruki, where six families used the batteries for three hours a night. Over the next two years, in Namibia, they will see if more easily available materials, like chicken wire, will create electricity.
Lebone hopes that as the technology becomes more refined, each household will be able to build a battery at a one-time cost of no more than $15.
Eventually, Lebone wants to create a new business model for energy distribution in Africa, helping to funnel fuel cells and other technologies tested in Africa to distributors there, rather than reducing developed technologies to meet African needs.
Filed under: governance, innovation | Tags: aid, humanitarian agencies, information technology
I was fascinated to learn today about a non-profit IT consortium called NetHope that is facilitating collaboration among humanitarian agencies when tsunamis and earthquakes wipe out existing communication systems. Private business has grown dramatically over the past two decades because it invested in technology infrastructure, says NetHope CEO Bill Brindley. Now NetHope is bringing those same advanced information technology approaches to emergency relief, human development and conservation programs in more than 180 countries.
“Our member agencies will always be resource-constrained by comparison, so we need to find new ways to close the gap and ensure that humanitarian workers and the people they serve have access to appropriate technologies for the often extreme and challenging conditions in the developing world,” Brindley says. Given that NetHope’s 25 member groups now represent “more than $33 billion in program spending on humanitarian and conservation initiatives and employ more than 300,000 people across the developing world”, new technologies can dramatically improve the overall impact of the humanitarian sector’s work.
A story entitled NetHope bringing technology to humanitarian efforts, by Julie Bick, in the International Herald Tribune Nov. 11, 2008, shows NetHope’s impact after the 2004 tsunami:
Rui Lopes’s first impression of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, after the 2004 tsunami was chaos. Bone-jarringly rough roads led to a hastily assembled field office, where Lopes, the senior technical director of Save the Children, learned that the communications infrastructure, along with just about everything else, had been destroyed. Aside from a few satellite phones and even fewer working mobile phones, the area was isolated as relief workers scrambled to assess the security situation and address the vast humanitarian needs.
On the ground, Lopes unpacked a contraption made of circuits, chips and wires, pointed it at the sky and rolled out a solar mat, which turns sunlight into energy, to power it up. Aid workers plugged their laptops into the device, which offered the first stable Internet connection since the disaster had hit a week earlier.Assessment reports and supply requests streamed out. Photographs went to news outlets to help spread awareness of the situation. Plans to coordinate agencies came in from abroad.
A third generation model of this Network Relief Kit was used by relief workers in Bangladesh after cyclone Sidr killed and displaced thousands of people last November. The workers called it “hope in a box or an angel on the broadband airwaves”, says Paula Musich in an article entitled NetHope Brings Fast Links to Disaster Relief that appeared Dec. 21, 2007 in the specialized IT publication eweek.com.
Thanks to refinements in the third generation of the NRK, relief workers were able to quickly establish voice and data communications, despite power being out to the Ganges Delta area for days after the typhoon hit….The NRK, which can fit in a backpack, includes a solar power kit that allows it to operate without having access to a vehicle battery. It weighs about four pounds and connects satellite phones as well as laptops to a satellite network that covers the globe.
NetHope, which was co-founded in 2001 by Dipak Basu, Cisco’s first fellow, and Ed Granger-Happ, CIO of Save the Children, has just wrapped up its biannual member summit in Geneva with a lot of good news including funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and continuing support from Microsoft.
“We started NetHope eight years ago with the idea that a collaborative approach to developing and delivering technology solutions to common problems throughout the NGO sector would make the most sense for our member agencies and for the corporate and foundation partners whose support of our work has been so critical,” says Granger-Happ. “The new support from Rockefeller Foundation and the increased support from Microsoft represent an important endorsement of the NetHope approach, including the premise that technology can be a core lever for dramatically improving the overall impact of the humanitarian sector’s work.”
NetHope’s unique business model allows member NGO IT professionals to share their technology resources and expertise in order to create the scale needed to reach and positively impact the more than 3 billion underserved people and communities in the most remote areas of the world.
Filed under: innovation | Tags: Africa, innovation, livelihood, universities
Another story I’m working on for Hopebuilding wiki:
MIT researcher Dr. Nathan Eagle says the future of the mobile phone lies in developing countries, not in the developed world, and specifically in Africa, where mobile phone use is growing by 65% annually. He is living in Kenya, where he is involved with a variety of amazing projects, including:
“EPROM, part of the Program for Developmental Entrepreneurship aims to foster mobile phone-related research and entrepreneurship. Key activities include:
- the development of new applications for mobile phone users worldwide
- academic research using mobile phones
- the creation of a widely applicable mobile phone programming curriculum
Today’s mobile phones are designed to meet Western needs. Subscribers in developing countries, however, now represent the majority of mobile phone users worldwide. We believe the adoption of new technologies and services within this vast, emerging market will drive innovation and help shape the future of the mobile phone.” EPROM is teaching mobile phone programming within computer science departments in universities across East Africa.
Arguing that there will always be tasks that humans can do better than computers, Dr. Eagle developed a way that allows billions of mobile phone subscribers to earn small amounts of money by doing short text-based tasks using his txteagle system, which distributes and collates this work via SMS.
