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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?
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The project implementation of lighting for the Kondh tribes, was one speckled with many a issue. There were issues with production of light to the maintenance and user fee collection.
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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.
Communication is not just about communicating, at least not in the development context. My personal experiences, where I applied communication in a number of projects in different areas, such as agriculture, environment, rural development, etc., confirm what is cited also in relevant studies. Many of the failures in the development context can be attributed to two major factors: the lack of or insufficient involvement of stakeholders from the beginning of the initiative and the lack of or insufficient use of communication in the project activities.
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."
Rural Africa Water Development Project (RAWDP), a Nigerian NGO, is currently promoting the Mor-sand filter in the restive oil rich Niger Delta region. The Mor-sand Filter, an improved adaptation of the slow-sand filter, integrates the combination of coagulation and filtration as effective processes for the reduction of the concentration of microorganisms in water.
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.
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As a past DM winner (2005), I’ve had the privilege of working with the DM Team and have very much enjoyed the experience of implementing our DM project. Tropical Forest Trust was successful in winning a DM grant for a project that aimed to implement new and really innovative ways of involving indigenous Pygmy communities in decisions around forest management that impact their lives.
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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.
