Syndicate content

Poverty

...And the Egypt Development Marketplace 2013 Grantees Are....

Dougg Jimenez's picture

Egypt DM 2013 GranteesAlmost two months ago the announcement was made about the World Bank, IFC and partners providing grants of 1.25 million via the Egypt DM. Since that announcement, many have been contacting us via various channels to find out who the actual 34 grantees are? Well here is your answer! Below please find the 34 selected grantees institutions, with links to their websites and social channels when available. They are broken down by governorate, with a very small blurb about each one. Why so little information? Well, most of these organizations speak Arabic only and therefor their information is only available in Arabic. We are working on translating all related documents, and while that takes time, we hope to have full pages on our website for each one of them later in September. We also hope to do feature stories here in our blog for some if not all the grantees, stay tuned!

ASSYUT

Community Development Association in Al Ezzeyya: Recycling agricultural residues and animal waste into compost and high value organic fertilizers, to manage waste, decrease environment hazards, and increase productivityof the agricultural land.
Friends Association for the Disabled and Community Development at Sadfa: Improving livelihood through supporting modernization, quality management and marketing of beehives and their honey production.
Alhayah Erada for Sustainable Development: Revival  of kilim/wool weaving to generate income and create employment for women of the Beni Addiat village.
Community Development Association in Badary: Hand-processing and packaging of pomegranate fruit to increase income for young girls and youth through introducing quality and marketing to new local and export markets.

Furniture from Palm Trees, Honey Production and Bringing back “Ferka” Weaving

Hartwig Schafer's picture

How we support agribusiness and handicrafts sector in Upper Egypt

Mr. Hartwig Schafer, Country Director for the World Bank meets Egypt DM Grantees.Last week I met 35 entrepreneurs from Assyut, Aswan, Beni Seouf, Cairo, Fayoum, Giza, Luxor , Minya, Qena, Sharkeyya, Sohag. Some of these names aren’t familiar and there is a reason for that…

They had just been awarded 25,000 dollars each through the Egypt Development Marketplace (DM) competition because their businesses have potential to grow, and create jobs for some of the most vulnerable and marginalized people in Upper Egypt.

I was struck by the new innovative ideas for example using palm trees to produce handicrafts and high quality affordable furniture. But also by the revival of local industries such as the ancient Upper Egyptian carpet weaving produced by ferka, not only generating income for marginalized girls and women, but also renewing pride in Egypt’s remarkable culture and heritage. Whether producing local honey, or adding value to products through food processing of tomato paste, olive oil or dairy products specifically for low-income families, these businesses had deserved their cash reward.

Egypt Development Marketplace Awards Grants!

Dougg Jimenez's picture

The Egypt Development Marketplace 2013 grantees, partners and DM team.Thirty-five organizations will be awarded $800,000 by the Egypt Development Marketplace (DM) funded by The World Bank Group (WBG) and its local and international partners. Each of the grantees will receive $25,000 to scale up their business model that would generate employment in the agriculture and handicraft sectors. Winning organizations will beshowcased at a DM sponsored event. A number of financial institutions, social entrepreneurs, investors, development organizations, and government officials will also participate in the event to bring attention to organizations implementing innovative solutions to unemployment in the country.

Overwhelming response to “Call for Proposal”

The call for proposals was launched in November and closed in January. At closing, 180 proposals from 171 organizations were submitted for funding. Preference was given to projects implemented in Upper Egypt and the majority of proposals were for projects in Minya. Applicants comprised the following types of organizations: 89 percent were Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs), 7 percent were private companies and 4 percent were foundations.

From its conception, the Egypt DM has been designed to surface and build the skills of organizations creating jobs in the country, primarily in the poorest areas with an emphasis on Upper Egypt. To generate interest in the competition and to ensure organizations operating in targeted areas applied, outreach events were held in Assyut, Qena, Aswan, and Minya. As a follow up, skill-building workshops in business planning were held for each of the 70 finalists to ensure high quality proposals were submitted.

Three Kids in a Garage

Aleem Walji's picture

Last week, Aleem Walji participated in GE’s global conference, ‘Disrupt or Be Disrupted’. He has written an entry that is being featured in The World Bank's "Let's Talk Development" blog. Below is an excerpt:

Photo credit: Let's talk Development BlogHow do you ‘disrupt’ your business from the core by building on your strengths and leveraging your assets? Jeff Immelt, GE’s CEO talked about the fear of losing too many engineers and scientists who don’t ‘fit corporate culture’ but proceed to found billion dollar businesses (Sergei Brin started at GE). It reminded me of a session at the Indian School of Business led by a senior Google Executive where he said that it’s not Microsoft, Facebook, or Twitter that keeps him up at night, it’s ‘three kids in a garage’. Hewlett Packard, Apple, Google, and Groupon, all started small, learned fast from failure, took risks nobody was willing to take, and then fundamentally disrupted business models and industries.

For the full blog entry, click here.

Follow Aleem Walji on Twitter!

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

Kirsten Spainhower's picture

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.

Disseminating Innovations in the Health Market

Maria Belenky's picture

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.

Development 2.0 Brought to You by Social Entrepreneurs

Parvathi Menon's picture

We traveled an hour outside of Jaipur to Laporiya village, in the Jaipur District. One of the 41353 villages across 32 Districts of Rajasthan that depends largely on agriculture and dairy for sustenance.

The total cultivated area of the state encompasses about 20 million hectares and out of this only 20% of the land is irrigated. Ground water level is available only at a depth of 30 to 61m. Yet with minimum inputs, the agricultural sector of the state accounts for 22.5 per cent of the State economy.

India DM team in Jaipur, Udaipur, Bhubaneshwar and Patna

Parvathi Menon's picture

The process for the India Development Marketplace 2011 has been designed to be highly interactive and provide several opportunities for direct engagement between your organization and the India DM team. This process was designed with a particular focus on ensuring that we can facilitate organizations to complete the application forms – as well as seek first hand insights on what would be relevant elements of the support and technical assistance needed to grow and scale sustainable social impact models over a 2 year period.

With that in mind, the Teams from Innovation Alchemy are traveling across the 3 States of Rajasthan, Bihar and Orissa (Odisha) to meet and interact with a diverse set of social enterprises who are potentially applying for the India DM 2011 grant.

India Development Marketplace 2011 – OPEN

Parvathi Menon's picture

As Process Partners for the India Development Marketplace 2011, (India DM) one of the exciting things our team at Innovation Alchemy is doing is to help seek and surface interesting Social Enterprises that are working on tough social challenges, and building sustainable models to solve them.

A rigorous assessment process with a panel of independent expert assessors and jury will help the India DM 2011 program arrive at 13 winners who will each get funded with $ 50,000 over 24 months to effectively scale their SE models.

The call for entries has just been launched on December 10th  2010 and Applications can be submitted online before 23rd January 2011. As this process moves forward we will be traveling across the Target states of Bihar, Rajasthan and Orissa to meet and engage with the social impact community – to help eligible organizations apply for the competitive grant available under the India DM. More on that soon.

Scaling Innovation: Development Marketplace & World Bank Collaborate in Nigeria

Kolawole Adebayo's picture

Now that I’ve introduced myself in my last blog, I want to tell you more about my DM2008 project called “Using cassava wastes to feed goats.” The project has created a new market linking cassava producers and goat keepers through the introduction of a simple drying technology that turns cassava waste into goat feed. As a result, the project is increasing farming incomes and reducing carbon dioxide wastes by eliminating the need to burn cassava waste.

Pages