How do you provide health care for the rural poor when medical professionals are scarce or unaffordable?
One emerging solution is to computerize medical knowledge. In 2007, Arogya Ghar captured the attention of the global health community when it was selected as one of the winners of the Development Marketplace global competition.
Hello Development Marketplace Community! I am writing to introduce myself. I am the manager for a Development Marketplace funded project called “Adding Value to Waste in the Cassava Processing-Goat Keeping Systems.” The project won funding in the 2008 Global competition. It is being implemented in Abeokuta Nigeria.
This entry is the kick-off for featured blog I will be submitting regularly every two weeks. I’ll be bringing to you updates on how the project is going: challenges, successes, bottlenecks and maybe even some unexpected turns and twists.
BP Agrawal is a double Development Marketplace winner. He won in 2006 with his Sustainable Rainwater Harvesting project and in 2007 with Walk-In Clinic for the Masses. This is being reposted on the occasion of Blog Action Day 2010.
Visit Sardarpura, a sleepy Indian village 150 km (93 miles) southwest of New Delhi. Women have gathered at the village square. They are tapping empty matkas (earthen water pots) to produce melodious beats. One is humming the “lament of bride": "Dhola thare desh men, moti marvan aant. Daroo milti mokali, paani ki koni chhant."
Oh, Beloved!
In your land
Not a drop of water
Brides have to fetch water from miles
It is hard to survive but for your love
Thus laments a bride.
Sudden commotion drowns the melody. Children start running in the dusty streets and yelling “Pani Aagayaa. Paani Aagayaa” (Water has come! Water has come!). Women wrapped in vibrant colors rush with their matkas resting on their waists. The water tanker had just arrived — after two weeks.
That is the perennial scarcity of drinking water in rural India!
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Mozambique’s weak socio-economic infrastructure and geographic location make the country particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Rain-fed agriculture is the main livelihood for subsistence farmers in this southeastern Africa country. But the resources farmers depend on are severely affected by the climate hazards of drought, flooding, and epidemic disease, and the outlook is for even more adverse impact. Moreover, the Government of Mozambique currently has neither the capacity nor the financial resources for an integrated adaptation strategy.
Helvetas (Swiss Association for International Cooperation), which has promoted rural development in rural Mozambique for more than 30 years, is working to close those gaps through activities concentrated in rural areas in the Northern Provinces of Cabo Delgado and Nampula. (Photo above shows Zero Emission Fridge seed storage silo that was Development Marketplace 2009 finalist and which subsequently won $2 million funding from European Commission Food Facility.) The Food Security and Value Chain (SAAN) project aims to contribute to increased livelihoods of semi-subsistence farmers and increased income from cash crop sales. To achieve its goals, SAAN promotes organizational and entrepreneurial capacity for improved productivity, post-harvest management, and processing and commercialization of agricultural produce.
Climate proofing of the Helvetas Mozambique Food Security and Value Chain (SAAN) project should decrease the vulnerability of farming families and increase their adaptation capacity. A Vulnerability Assessment and Evaluation of Adaptation Capacity (CVCA) in Cabo Delgado Province improved understanding of links between climate related risks, people’s livelihood, and project activities.
Development Marketplace 2006 winner SAR Technology keeps rolling up achievements in its successful fight against arsenic pollution of water. Shortly after being asked to participate in Development Marketplace's Innovation Fair: Moving Beyond Conflict in Cape Town in April, this pioneer in removing arsenic from groundwater in West Bengal, India, won the $75,000 2010 St. Andrews Prize for the Environment. (SAR's technology innovator Bhaskar Sengupta holds award in photo above.)
The St Andrews Prize, which is given by the University of St Andrews in Scotland and the international energy company ConocoPhillips, drew a record 302 entries from 73 countries.
Weeks before it went to Cape Town, SAR won the 2010 Asian Water Industry Management Award at an event in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
In November 2009 SAR's Development Marketplace-financed arsenic removal program in West Bengal was selected as one of the "12 Cases of Cleanup & Success" in the World's Most Polluted Places Report by Blackwell's Institute. That same month, Sengupta, Senior Lecturer at Queens University of Belfast who developed SAR's technology, received the Dhirubhai Ambani Award given by the Institute of Chemical Engineers.
One of the cardinal rules of development aid -- the new cardinal rule -- is, Don't just “deliver” assistance, but instead make sure it's "accepted.” DM2009 competition winner Sarstoon Temash Institute for Indigenous Management (SATIIM) has been following that not-always-embraced rule since the community-based nonprofit indigenous environmental organization was formed in southern Belize in 1997.
SATIIM’s mission is "to safeguard the ecological integrity of the Sarstoon-Temash region and employ its resources in an environmentally sound manner for the economic, social, cultural, and spiritual well-being of its indigenous people.” For SATIIM, this isn't just window-dressing verbiage.
The Q’eqchi Maya Indigenous People of Crique Sarco in southern Belize have been active participants in SATIIM programs to rescue the region's rich but endangered 13 forest ecosystems while collaborating with the Q’eqchi to reduce poverty by creating jobs and also delivering a range of social, health, educational, cultural, and civic benefits.
As SATIIM awaits the arrival of its DM2009 grant of US$200,000, it is already involving
the Q’eqchi in the forest-management/community betterment project that will be financed. With its long history of working with the Q’eqchi in Crique Sarco, SATIIM knows the total tapestry of the community –- as shown in this richly informative report to the DM Blog by SATIIM technical coordinator Lynette Gomez (photo at left), with the help of SATIIM Executive Director, DM project leader, and Maya activist Gregory Ch'oc:
The 40 Indigenous Peoples of the North, Siberia, and Far East in Russia have had to struggle mightily -- not only against a hostile environment but also what they see as sometimes arbitrary governmental action. But they're making fresh progress, according to this emailed report from DM2009 winner Rodion Sulyandziga (holding award in photo at right), Director of the Center for Support of Indigenous Peoples of the North (CSIPN), which has spearheaded recognition and -- more important practically -- enforcement of Indigenous Peoples' rights:
"On April 14-15 in Moscow the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON) -- the umbrella organization that includes CSIPN -- will be hosting (in partnership with the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation) the Arctic Indigenous Leaders Summit, with the main focus on climate change in the Arctic. The participants are international experts, academia, Arctic states, regional governments, business, and Indigenous Peoples. The Summit will create a good basis for our future activities and networking. It's vital for us to involve federal, regional governments, and business from the scratch.
"We are also invited to the high-level international meeting "The Arctic: Territory of Dialogue" on April 22-23 under Russian Premier Putin to make a presentation on behalf of Indigenous Peoples. This is a good progress."
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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.
When Ned Breslin, CE
O 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.
There is a laser-like focus on the capacity of developing countries to respond effectively to the steep challenges of their Millennium Development Goals and .png)
Ethiopian farmer, with his children, shows newly irrigated crop to extension agent.
destructive climate change. Capacity gaps are relentlessly pinpointed. Sometimes national governments themselves provide the toughest evaluations, like this one from Bangladesh's Ministry of Environment and Forest on the country's climate adaptation action program:
"...institutional capacity including human resource quality [is] weak and poor and needs substantial improvement if the challenges of climate change are to be faced squarely....A lack of awareness, both of the potential gravity and the extent of the problem as well as possible actions that could be taken, is the foremost [barrier]. This lack of awareness exists at all levels from national level policy makers to sectoral and local level officials as well as amongst civil society and the most vulnerable communities themselves...."
There are, to be sure, capacity gaps in Bangladesh and other developing countries, and identifying what and where they are is the first step in closing them. But there are also "bright spots" and, perhaps more important, underlying strengths, especially at the local level across all developing countries that can be masked by the emphasis on gaps.
