September 2008

Twenty-two project winners collected their crystal awards and grant checks in the 2008 Global Development Marketplace: Sustainable Agriculture for Development competition this morning.

Subhas Managuli made it to the finalists' circle, buthis Best Practices Foundation proposal to improve livestock health for 2,000 small farmers in 20 villages in India didn't make the final cut that produced the 22 winners who were announced Friday morning.

"The idea is good, and I'll try to pitch it to other agencies," Managuli said as the closing ceremony wound up in the Atrium.  "I'm not going to give up. Absolutely."

Three DM2008 jurors who are past grant winners are sharing their well-learned lessons with the hundred finalists.

Take 2006 winner Florence Cassassuce (in photo at right), who brought her water-purifying UV-light bucket to 900 villagers on the rural outskirts of La Paz in Baja California, Mexcio. Cassassuce, implementing her project with the advice of World Bank Senior Environmental Specialist Ricardo Hernandez Murillo, installed 3,500 buckets toward the goal of 6,00, ahead of schedule. But the original buckets didn't always work well, especially in the field, and improvements had to be made with better, and faster, plastic-injection manufacturing.

Among the 36 jurors for the DM2008 grant competition was Thomas Pomeroy, a former USDA bilateral trade director in key regions of the world who now consults in Sub-Saharan Africa. We did this mini-interview with Pomeroy:

 Q. As part of Team 10, you looked at 12 agribusiness proposals. What was your major criterion in scoring them?

Oscar Chemerinski, Director of the Agribusiness Department at the International Finance Corp. -- the commercial development arm of the World Bank Group -- gave this mini-interview at DM2008:

Q. What's your reaction to what you see on the floor among the booths of the hundred finalists?

Ricardo Hernandez Murillo, Senior Environmental Specialist with the World Bank in Mexico, is the winner of the DM2008 Project Advisor Award.

Global Development Marketplace 2008 kicked off this morning with a warm welcome by Katherine Sierra, Vice President of Sustainable Development at the World Bank, to the 100 finalists representing 42 countries and event visitors.

Monique Barbut, CEO and Chairwoman of the Global Environment Facility -- the largest funder of projects to improve the global environment and one of the funders of Development Markektplace 2008 -- talked about GEF's role in the grant competition.

Q. GEF deals with multimillion-dollar programs. DM2008's projects are in the $200,000 or less range. Why are they important to GEF?

I was greatly excited when the DM team suggested that I join the blog and share my experiences on the subject of ‘Lighting for the poor” and the Development Marketplace. Though I had extensive juvenile experience with making simple lights (that often used to fail) and installing them on a very limited scale in the villages of India, my ability to make a professional light and reach a large number of beneficiaries started with the DM award in 2006.

Less-developed countries need many things – but, in most cases, nothing greater or more urgent than productive agriculture. Most of the world’s poorest people -- the 2.6 billion who try to survive on less than $2 a day – are family farmers whose small plots are unproductive and generally cut off from growing export markets. If these families could make the leap from subsistence to market-driven farming, world poverty would decline exponentially. It’s a big "if."

Hi, I am Bart Weetjens, a social entrepreneur, and founder of the organization APOPO, with a vision of appropriate technologies to enhance the impact of humanitarian detection tasks. Basically we teach African communities how to train "HeroRATS", giant African pouched rats that are trained to save human lives by detecting landmines and diseases. In 2003, I was a DM winner.

Welcome to the blog!  Over the next several weeks I’ll be raising issues related to linking communities to markets and what some of us are doing to help them.  You know, about 10 years ago, I sent out an email to a mailing list of about 200 staff asking what they were doing to link rural communities to markets.  I got one response, which asked “Do you mean roads?”  We’ve come a long way in our thinking and in our practice since then.

When I was asked to be one the blogger for the Development Marketplace I accepted without being too sure what was expected from me. I was told I should write something about communication, since this is not only my professional field, but something I am passionate about, I decided to start with two blogs about two key challenges that I have been facing and dealing with in the last few years of my professional life.

I am really looking forward to the conclusion of the Development Market Place in September. I enjoyed working with World Bank Group (WBG) and external colleagues judging in a previous round and the opportunity to interact personally with the finalists excites me.