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This blog is hosted by the Development Marketplace. It is a platform for debate and knowledge sharing on early stage development, innovation and social entrepreneurship. More »

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Solar Sister: Bringing a market based, gender inclusive, bottom up clean energy revolution to Africa

Submitted by Neha Misra on Fri, 06/17/2011 - 13:04

Solar Sister LogoAlmost 1.6 billion people on the planet don’t have access to electricity. And 70% of these are women and girls for whom the darkness is quite literal. Today, even though portable solar LED lighting technology is an affordable solution; lack of innovation in distribution channels has kept the products from being available in the rural markets where traditional supply chains simply do not exist.


The challenge is to marry technology innovation with a delivery system that is efficient, sustainable and scalable. Solar Sister is an innovative social enterprise addressing this weakest link through a market-based, gender inclusive, bottom-up solution to bring a new kind of clean energy revolution in Africa.


With an Avon-style women-driven business model, Solar Sister addresses both geographical access - making clean energy products available at the rural customer's doorstep; and cultural access - closing the gender-technology gap by including women as key players in the provision of technology solutions instead of as passive consumers of energy.


Development Marketplace in India supports the vision and ‘can-do’ spirit of social entrepreneurs

Submitted by Kirsten Spainhower on Wed, 05/04/2011 - 18:31

Satyan Mishra, founder of DrishteeDrishtee is a network of over 14,000 rural enterprises that provides villages in India with access to internet connections, consumer products and critical community services.

Brainchild of Indian national Satyan Mishra, the Drishtee model is perfecting a “last mile delivery system” to reach villages that governments are unable to.

Mishra’s success was due in part to the faith that Global Development Marketplace (DM) — a Bank sponsored partnership that provides grant funding to support testing and scaling up of innovative ideas — had in his idea. In 2003 he received a $68,100 from DM allowing him to transform a budding idea into reality and scale up into three states: Assam, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh.

“I am going to be the leader of my country.”

Submitted by Anita Ayers Henderlight on Mon, 01/24/2011 - 11:35

A U.S. congresswoman from Arizona was shot. The Hollywood Foreign Press was handing out Golden Globes to the entertainment industry. The White House was preparing for a visit from China’s president. The people of Southern Sudan were announcing preliminary results of a vote for independence from their Northern counterpart.

 All of these headline events are worthy of attention. One event that did not make a headline is the one that will forever be embedded in my memory. It’s a development worker’s dream come true. After years of advocating for the rights of young women and girls, of fundraising to make education accessible to females in a traditionally patriarchal society, and of dreaming about a world where girls feel free from oppression to express their opinions and beliefs with confidence, I received an important phone call.

Innovative tools to match seeds to the needs of women farmers in Ethiopia

Submitted by Ehsan Dulloo on Tue, 12/21/2010 - 14:10

Climate change poses a serious threat to future food security. Increases in temperatures and changes in rainfall patterns are expected to increase food shortages, especially in Africa. In response, governments and scientists are looking for ways to reduce the negative impacts of climate change on food production.

Ethiopia, which has a strong history of conserving its food crops, has partnered with the CGIAR-supported Bioversity International to implement a World Bank Development Marketplace 2009 winning project called Innovative Pilot Scheme Would Match Seeds to the Needs of Women Farmers. The project works to ensure farmers, particularly women farmers, will have an assured supply of climate-tolerant seeds for food production as climatic conditions change in the future.

Manav Seva Sansthan wins STAR Impact Award

Submitted by Kirsten Spainhower on Tue, 11/16/2010 - 16:41

Manav Seva Sansthan (MSS), 2008 Development  Marketplace winner, recently won the STAR Impact Award. The award recognizes and supports local organisations that  achieve excellence in the provision of services to disadvantaged children and that demonstrate effective management practices. Winners receive $100,000 in unrestricted funding, tailored consultancy support and media training.

Under the Development Marketplace project, MSS works to provide excluded women and their families with legal rights to land through a collective/group land  ownership rights model. The concept of collective land ownership for ensuring women control of land and building women’s leadership in agriculture based livelihood is unique in the Indian context. MSS is successfully carrying out “collective land and collective farming” with small farmers using Low External Input Sustainable Agriculture (LEISA) techniques.

The iPod for Development

Submitted by Kirsten Spainhower on Wed, 09/29/2010 - 12:48
Photo Courtesy of Lifeline EnergyThe Lifeplayer is being billed as the new iPod for development. Kristine Pearson Lifeline Energy CEO, believes that this device will enable rural populations to leap across the digital divide and access vital information in ways they could hardly have imagined.
 
The Lifeplayer is an oversized MP3 device that can be pre-loaded to hold 64GB of educational content. It can also download audio content from the internet or record live voice or radio programs for playback later. With a wireless solar panel and a hand-wound crank, the Lifeplayer can even be used to charge mobile phones.

Finding Beauty in Nepal's Third Gender

Submitted by Kirsten Spainhower on Mon, 08/23/2010 - 16:38
The winner (National HIV/AIDS Ambassador) Sandhya Lama with film maker Catherine Donaldson. Photo credit Vincent Claeson.
 
What creativity that emerged from a competition on reducing the HIV related stigma and discrimination! In 2008, the South Asia Region of the World Bank put out a call for proposals for innovative ideas that tackle stigma and discrimination associated with HIV. Proposals had to target vulnerable populations such as transgender, men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, sex workers, and people living with HIV and AIDS. From the resulting 1,000 submissions, 75 finalists were identified and 26 winning projects were awarded funds for an 18 month implementation period. Projects used numerous creative ways to decrease discrimination through the use of theater, songs, new businesses and even a beauty pageant! Whoa, a beauty pageant, in development? This made me stop in my tracks. I had to find out more.

Ethiopian woman farmer's message: 'Be on our side'

Submitted by Tom Grubisich on Thu, 07/08/2010 - 08:45

The future of Ethiopia’s drought-threatened agriculture is in the hands of the country’s resourceful women farmers, Development Marketplace 2009 winner Ehsan Dulloo says.

Dulloo calls the women Ethiopian agriculture's “primary seed custodians.”  They’re the ones who “have to confront significant uncertainty in the climate every year and regularly face food shortages as crops fail,” he says.  That’s why Dulloo and the Institute of Bioversity Conservation in Addis Ababa – where he is a scientist – developed the winning project Seeds for Needs.  (Participating farmer Bertukan Kebede is shown with daughter in photo from project workshop.)

Seeds for Needs aims to benefit 200 woman farmers who are running out of options on their subsistence plots in the increasingly dry highlands of eastern Ethiopia.  Through Seeds for Needs, the woman farmers will get access to new strains of seeds -- produced at gene banks -- that may prove more hardy than the traditional varieties of seeds the farmers have been using to overcome droughts that are more frequent and intense because of climate change.

How 'Big Data' Can Benefit the Public Good

Submitted by Aleem Walji on Sat, 03/06/2010 - 08:49

Patrick Svenburg, co-founder of Random Hacks of Kindness, tells "Developers for Development" audience: "There's no shortage of big ideas in the world.  It's the action part that's often lacking."

“Big Data” –- the billions upon trillions of bytes of digital information that are pumped into cyberspace every nanosecond –- has a single, secular mission: to keep growing. Now, software developers – the not-so-nerdy techies who keep Big Data growing at its feverish rate –- are striving to channel Big Data into the public good.

On Monday at the World Bank, developers came together with the development community -- in person and virtually through Skype video -- to figure out how to do that.

The entire "Developers for Development" can be seen on B-Span, the World Bank's webcasting service.

The afternoon event, which attracted an auditorium-ful of in-person visitors (many of them curious staffers from risk management and ICT at the World Bank) and many more via the live webcast that was offered in English, French, and Spanish, started with developers showing what's already been achieved since the first CrisisCamp about data and the public good was convened in Washington with CrisisCommons-World Bank co-sponsorship in June 2009.

The first demo was about the on-the-fly proliferation of CrisisCamps internationally in response to the earthquake that devastated Haiti in February.

Water and Poor People: No More Charity

Submitted by Tom Grubisich on Fri, 02/26/2010 - 09:35

When Ned Breslin, CEO for the international social company Water for People, talks, the effect can be like a splash of cold water on your face.  Development-speak is not his style.

Take this snippet from his new "Rethinking Hydro-Philanthropy" essay:

 

 

"Success will require less single-minded focus on the absolute number of people without access to water and sanitation facilities and more focus on the serious questions around long-term impact and sustainability. So that years after the cameras have left, the donor reports have been filed, and the press release circulated, the community is not forgotten."

"Sweat equity" from needy communities is not enough, Breslin argues.  "Up-front community contributions," he says, are essential to making new water -- and sanitation -- facilities sustainable.

Water for People won a US$200,000 Development Markektplace 2007 award for water facilities in Malawi, which Breslin, in this radio interview, says "has some of the worst water and sanitation problems in Africa."

Breslin's credo -- that water and sanitation in poor countries should not be viewed as a charity mission -- is being validated elsewhere.