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.
When the size of “remittances” – money sent home by people working outside their home countries, to fund schooling and health care for their families and to help build community facilities – became clear a few years ago, politicians from both “sending” and “receiving” countries began to realize they needed to work together. They have now had two interesting conferences to begin thinking about how to create “circular” migration, which both supports “sending” country economies and meets labour force needs in “receiving” countries.
This recognition that migration, remittances, and employment are all connected is important in finding solutions that work. Looking at these issues as if they are each independent (the “silo” approach) means solutions in one area impact the others, often in ways that are not so productive. The “wall” being built being Mexico and the US, for example, is costing the same amount of money that some scholars think could be raised if illegal migrants in the US were given the chance to become “legal”.
So I was heartened to see this excellent opinion piece in the New York Times, written by Jennifer Gordon, a professor of labor and immigration law at Fordham Law School. It is called Workers Without Borders, and appears in the March 9, 2009 edition of the NY Times. Prof. Gordon notes that “the current system hurts wages and working conditions – for everyone.”
She notes, as an example of an interconnected policy approach, how the EU dealt with an influx of workers when the EU was expanded:
Migrant mobility has been tried with success in the European Union. When the Union expanded in 2004 to include eight Eastern European countries, workers in Western Europe feared a flood of job seekers who would drive down wages. In Britain, for example, the volume of newcomers from countries like Poland was staggering. Instead of the prediction of roughly 50,000 migrants in four years, more than a million arrived.
Yet, as far as economists can tell, the influx did not take a serious toll on native workers’ wages or employment. (Of course, what happens in the global downturn remains to be seen.) Migrants who were not trapped in exploitative jobs flocked to areas that needed workers and shunned the intense competition of big cities. And when job opportunities grew in Poland or shrank in Britain, fully half went home again.
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: Livelihoods | Tags: agriculture, donor policy, food aid, self-sufficiency
The international community must stop treating food like a commodity and instead focus on increasing the ability of countries to feed themselves, former US president Bill Clinton told a United Nations gathering on October 16, World Food Day. The Associated Press reports that he said “we all blew it” by treating food crops “like color TVs” instead of a vital commodity for the world’s poor.
“Food is not a commodity like others,” Clinton said. “We should go back to a policy of maximum food self-sufficiency. It is crazy for us to think we can develop countries around the world without increasing their ability to feed themselves.” He said food aid from wealthy nations could bolster agriculture in poor countries. Canada, for example, requires that 50% of its aid go as cash — not as Canadian grain — to buy crops grown locally in Africa and other recipient countries. U.S. law, however, requires that almost all U.S. aid be American-grown food, which benefits U.S. farmers but undercuts local food crops.
Bush proposed earlier this year that 25% of future U.S. aid be given in cash. “A bipartisan coalition (in Congress) defeated him,” Clinton said. “He was right and both parties that defeated him were wrong.” Clinton also criticized the heavy U.S. reliance on corn to produce ethanol, which increased demand for the crop and helped drive up grain prices worldwide.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the gathering that prices on some food items are “500% higher than normal” in Haiti and Ethiopia, for example. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates the number of undernourished people worldwide rose to 923 million last year.
Responding to Clinton’s suggestions for an increase in fair-trade provisions, direct marketing schemes and other policies designed to level the playing field between agricultural producers in developed countries and small farmers in developing countries, FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf stressed the need for “new international relations” that would guarantee adequate incomes for farmers of developed countries, without penalizing the farmers of developing countries. He proposed a World Summit on Food Security to be held during the first half of 2009, to reach consensus to eradicate hunger from the world.
Filed under: Livelihoods | Tags: agriculture, food aid, international development
Probably because I’m Irish by birth, I have always enjoyed eating potatoes. My father, who grew up in Belfast, used to call mashed potatoes “champ” and always welcomed seeing it on his plate. So I have been interested in the UN’s attempts to bring more attention to the potato as a way of improving food security in much of the world. The recent food price crisis looks to make the potato a star, once again, which is fitting as 2008 is the International Year of the Potato.
The New York Times reports that while 10 years ago, potatoes were mostly grown and eaten in Europe and the Americas, China and India now are first and third in global potato production and in 2005, for the first time, developing countries produced most of the world’s potatoes. Potatoes are now the second most important calorie source in Rwanda, after cassavas, and potato growing and eating is rapidly increasing in Nigeria and Egypt.
There are many good reasons for this expansion. A medium potato, boiled with the skin on, provides about 100 calories, 26 grams of carbohydrates, zero cholesterol, about 4 grams of protein, 3 grams of fibre, about half the daily adult requirement of vitamin C, as well as significant amounts of iron, potassium, zinc, thiamin, niacin and vitamin B6 and such essential trace elements as manganese, chromium, selenium and molybdenum. It takes less water and energy to grow potatoes than wheat, and potatoes mature quickly. They aren’t used to produce biofuels and, when grain prices rose dramatically, potato prices stayed stable – they aren’t traded on world financial markets because they are heavy and do not transport well, the Times notes.
Encouraging greater potato production and consumption thus means encouraging local potato production – and that helps to support a major shift in international food aid that will help developing countries in ways that food aid has not done in the past. Earlier this year, when food prices skyrocketed, the World Food Program began to focus on buying food locally for its food aid programs. This paradigm shift is helping to support the growth of local economies in the developing world, and the new potato promotion strategy seems likely to do the same thing.
The Times quotes FAO expert NeBambi Lutaladio as saying that: “Increasingly, the potato is being seen as a vital food-security crop and a substitute for costly grain imports. Potato consumption is expanding strongly in developing countries, where potato is an increasingly important source of food, employment and income.” Since 2004, the International Potato Center (CIP) in Peru has been working on a 10-year research program “aimed squarely at contributing to the achievement of selected targets of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)” by improving the livelihoods of the poor.
The current food price crisis has brought attention to this mandate in a new way. CIP director Dr. Pamela Anderson told the Times that until recently, she was most commonly asked for her favourite potato recipe. “Now the food system is so fragile that people have stopped laughing. People are asking, ‘How can potatoes help solve the problem?’ And she believes the answer is twofold: planting potatoes gives food security, and it strengthens the local economy in ways that sending in food aid from outside does not do.
“The potato has come a long way since it was blamed for causing everything from lust to leprosy, yet many misconceptions—and a lack of information—still surround the crop,” Dr. Anderson says in an article entitled Let them eat potatoes. “We firmly believe that this healthy tuber will increasingly play a vital role in alleviating hunger and improving the livelihoods and health of different populations around the world. In this way we can contribute to achieving fair, healthy and sustainable human development.”
One example of how it can do that is the Peruvian potato project T’ikapapa, which won The World Challenge 2007. T’ikapapa is a marketing social concept that enables resource-poor farmers from the Andean highlands to sell their distinctly labeled native potato crop in Lima’s supermarkets.
”Snarewear is wearable art with a mission. The necklaces, bracelets, earrings and decorative pieces not only make a fashion statement, but a statement for conservation as well” - Dale Lewis
With stockpiles of over 40,000 wire snares recovered from illegal hunters and poachers in the Luangwa Valley of Zambia, COMACO (Community Markets for Conservation) explored alternative uses for the snares. A Zambian traditional Jeweller, Misozi Kadewele, helped find a solution – turning the snares into jewellery, made by local women. The group designs and creates necklaces, bracelets, anklets and decorative pieces, using wires handpicked from a pile of snares, with seeds from local trees as beads.
As well as increasing income opportunities and food security for the group and the community at large, Snarewear has raised awareness on better livelihood skills as alternatives to poaching.
