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A $450 house for only $5 a month – no interest paid.

Photo credit: International Network for Bamboo and Rattan (INBAR) What’s the catch? It seems too good to be true but a 2009 DM winner, International Network for Bamboo and Rattan (INBAR), has successfully developed a bamboo prototype and payment scheme that is affordable and appealing to the poor.

The project entitled "Elevated Bamboo Houses designed to Lift Communities above Flood Zones" is being implemented in Ecuador and it is already being considered a victory. Even before the project has completed its funding cycle with the DM, the European Commission and Common Fund for Commodities have contributed €1,647,959 and $2,007,300 respectively so the project can scale up.

The WB team were welcomed to Boromo (a province of Bales located two hours from Ouagadogou) by a team from Association La Voute Nubienne; a French non-governmental organization(NGO) with field offices in Burkina Faso. Their team is composed of 11 Burkinabes and a French team member, who trains masons to construct timber-free houses using the Nubian Vault technique.

A Nubian Vault house is made from locally available materials and is designed to use no wood. Because the ceiling is raised into a vault it keeps the living space significantly cooler than a typical box shaped house with a tin roof. This design originated from upper-Egypt and is a good example of south-south technology transfer.

The project, funded by the Development Marketplace, is a pilot that will test out a strategy to identify local champions and potential clients for the Nubian Vault houses.

Conversations after "Innovations in Development" Panel Innovations in development happen where traditional markets fail. The open discussion that followed the presentation I made on Monday to nearly 100 colleagues inside and outside the World Bank Group spurred the first of what I hope are many conversations on the role the World Bank Group and

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.

Adaptation to climate change presents a cluster of question marks for developing countries: What works, and where? How can different cost estimates be reconciled? How should adaptation be integrated with agriculture and other development that are increasingly threatened by flooding, drought, and rising sea levels?

Answers will be offered by top experts from the World Bank Environment Department's Climate Change Team in the special program "The Economics of Adaptation to Climate Change: The Global Report" on Tuesday, Jan. 12. The place is the World Bank "J" Building on 18th Street NW between G and H Streets, Room B1-080. This blog will do a followup on the program.

Presenters will be World Bank environmental economists Sergio Margulis and Urvashi Narain, who were lead authors of the widely quoted report "The Costs to Developing Countries of Adaptating to Climate Change: New Methods and Estimates." The report says the cost of adapting to an approximately 2° C warmer world by 2050 is in the range of US$75 billion to $100 billion a year between 2010 and 2050. The authors note the cost is about the same amount that developed countries now give in aid to developing countries.

"Fragile states" -- the subject of the next Global Development Marketplace competition -- can't be put in one box. Or two or even three boxes (i.e. in conflict, post-conflict, or threatened by conflict or political unrest). The World Bank chart below shows how fragile states that aren't "Heavily Indebted Poor Countries" (HIPCs) can compare favorably to non-fragile HIPCs based on key indicators such as poverty, school enrollment, and mortality rates for children under five years of age. The exception is in the poverty category in the "last available year" section of the chart where non-fragile HIPCs reverse the 1990-2006 average and perform better. (Some HIPCs have had their debt forgiven wholly or partially, while others have not yet advanced to either stage.)

The World Bank Data Visualization chart (below) in general mirrors the first chart's findings. It ranks a mix of fragile and non-fragile states by per-capita gross national income (horizontal axis) and per-capita gross domestic product (vertical axis). The highest-performing countries (green balls) are, right to left, upper-middle-income Gabon, South Africa, Mauritius, and Botswana, all of which are non-fragile and not heavily indebted. The next highest-performing countries (the cluster of blue [poorest countries] and red balls [lower-middle income countries]) include Côte d'Ivoire, Republic of Congo, Nigeria (biggest blue ball), and Liberia, all of which have been designated fragile but are not heavily indebted. (Nigeria is a special case. It was on the World Bank's and other fragile lists as recently as 2008, but off the World Bank's new "interim" "Harmonized List of Fragile Situations" published Nov. 17, 2009. But the World Bank's 2009 Worldwide Governance Indicators rank Nigeria as the third worst state for "political stability and lack of violence/terrorism," just below Afghanistan and Democratic Republic of the Congo.) Many of the blue balls at the lower ends of the two scales represent non-fragile but heavily indebted states.

The 44 developing countries represented among the hundred DM2009 finalists produce very modest amounts of carbon dioxide (the major man-made source of global warming) on a per-capita basis. The World Bank data visualization (above) divides the 44 countries into low income (green balls), lower-middle income (orange), and upper-middle income (blue). For comparison, the high-income U.S. is represented by the purple ball in the upper-right-hand corner.

The vertical axis shows emissions per capita in metric tons among finalist countries. A group of Sub-Saharan African nations -- represented by the green balls at the far left -- produce the lowest per-capita emissions -- as low as a fractional .10 metric tons. Russia -- the highest blue ball -- has the highest CO2 emission rate among finalist countries -- 10.5 tons. The U.S. rate is 19.5 tons. Per-capita emissions by India -- the largest orange ball -- are among the finalists' lowest rates, although the South Asian county is a major emitter overall because it is so populous.

Climate change's adverse affects, including drought, flooding, and rising sea levels, will hit developing countries the hardest, and that includes their economies as well as people (particularly the poor and other vulnerable) and natural resources. The effects are already being felt. The horizontal axis of the chart shows gross domestic product per capita in finalist countries. Many countries' per-capita GDP is already precariously low -- below $500 -- and some others, including India's, aren't much higher.

The DM2009 finalist projects' triple objectives are to protect people at the community level -- particularly the most vulnerable -- and the natural resources on which they depend, and energize generally faltering rural economies.

This World Bank data visualization shows how the lowest-income countries compare with the highest-income ones on carbon-dioxide emissions (the main man-made contributor to global warming) and energy use. The lowest-income countries -- blue, purple, and pink balls -- are clustered at the low end of both axes. CO2 emissions per capita are visualised horizontally and energy use, vertically. The highest-income countries -- orange -- are at the higher end of both axes.

The big purple ball in the lower-left-hand corner is Bangladesh, the most populous of the 49 Least Developed Countries. It's per-capita CO2 emissions are .030 metric tons and its energy use per capita is the equivalent of 160.5 kilograms of oil. By comparison, the U.S. -- the biggest orange ball toward the upper-right-hand corner -- produces 19.50 tons of CO2 per capita --- 65 times Bangladesh's - and its energy use is the equivalent of 7,760 kilograms of oil -- 48 times Bangladesh's.

The size of each ball reflects the population of the country it represents.

The visualization also includes the fast-growing middle-ncome countries of China (the biggest pink ball), India (the biggest purple ball southwest of China), Brazil (the green ball to the left of China), and the Russian Federation (the blue ball in the middle of all the smaller orange balls). All those countries are becoming major emitters of CO2.

Development Marketplace awards to winners range up to $200,000 -- to cover what is called "early-stage" or seed development of projects. But after that period -- usually one or two years -- any project, no matter how promising it looks, has to find new funding.

DM2009 juror Tran Triet of Vietnam, a DM2003 winner, talked about projects that seek to transform a community both environmentally and economically -- the ambitious aim of many of the DM proposals, winners and non-winners alike. At the panel on "Taking an Idea to Scale," Dr. Tran said: "A long-term commitment is needed. The social agenda takes time to happen. The normal [Development Marketplace] funding cycle of one or two years would be too short to bring about changes."

Juror Fred Onduri, who is chair of the Least Developed Countries Expert Group with the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change as well as head of the Policy and Planning Department of the Ugandan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, says two years "is not enough." He thinks the national governments of the countries where the winning projects would be developed should fund them in the out years.

Ideas, anyone?

There are two ways to respond to climate change – adaptation and mitigation. The responses are not an either/or. Both are necessary. Adaptation, as early as the short term, can cushion people and places against the impacts of extreme weather, including drought, heat waves, flooding, and rising sea levels. Mitigation, over time, can slow down manmade global warming, which has been identified by many scientific studies as a major cause of extreme weather.

Industry

A $450 house for only $5 a month – no interest paid.

Training the Burkinabe in Building Timber-Free Housing Alternatives

Innovation Happens When Traditional Markets Fail

How 'Big Data' Can Benefit the Public Good

Economics of Climate Adaptation: An Expert Examination

Fragile States Are Hard to Lump Together

DM2009 Finalists Rank Far Down as CO2 Emitters

A Graphic View of the Wide Split in Copenhagen

DM2009 Winners Face More Funding Hurdles

Adaptation and Mitigation – The Difference

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