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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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What’s the Secret Sauce for Scaling Up?

Submitted by Myra Valenzuela on Wed, 07/13/2011 - 10:12

How can one go to scale? This is the continuous challenge that confronts all successful social entrepreneurs. For Grupo EOZ in Mexico, there were a few key elements behind their answer: a combination of funding, partnerships and publicity, much of it due to its participation in a national TV competition called Iniciativa México.


From August to November 2010, 50 finalists from a pool of 47,000 initial applicants were featured weekly on the national TV competition.

The World Challenge is Back!

Submitted by Dougg Jimenez on Wed, 06/01/2011 - 16:59

2 Weeks left to nominate and win US$20,000!


 


The World Challenge LogoFor the 7th consecutive year the World Challenge is searching for grassroots community projects that promote sustainable development through innovation and original thinking. Their mission is simple: to reward small businesses which have found solutions to some of the world's most pressing problems.


If you have what it takes, they would like to hear from you. Please check their website and fill in an application form. You have until the 19th of June, at midnight. Their judging panel will select the best 12 entries to be filmed by BBC World News and featured in a special ad series in Newsweek magazine.

How Do You Do? My Name Is Kola!

Submitted by Kolawole Adebayo on Tue, 11/23/2010 - 16:21

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.

But first I wanted to tell you a little more about myself. I am Kokawole Adebayo. My nickname is Kola and I was born in a Yoruba (southwest Nigeria) family, third of  twenty-one children in a polygamous family with nine mothers. I am a Muslim man married to a Christian woman (Anthonia Folasade) for ten years now and we have two daughters (‘Tiola and Kosoba).

My primary education was at Ibadan and Ode-Remo. I went to University at Abeokuta (Nigeria) on a Commonwealth Scholarship at the University of Reading (United Kingdom) to complete a PhD in Agricultural Extension and Rural Development.

I am currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Agriculture, Abeokuta. I have worked for 23 years as an extension officer, rural development expert and lecturer. My professional interests include uptake and dissemination of agricultural innovations in smallholder farming systems, management and sustainable funding of agricultural development as well as rural livelihoods and management of the environment.

Check out more about me on my LinkedIn profile where I connect with others in the Development Marketplace Community in the Development Marketplace LinkedIn group! More the week after next about the goals of the project. Stay tuned!!

How DM Project in India Filled Empty Water Pots

Submitted by BP Agrawal on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 13:55

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!

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 Development Marketplace finalist helps climate-proof struggling farmers in Mozambique

Submitted by Christian Steiner on Wed, 05/26/2010 - 11:40

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 Honors Earth Day

Submitted by Tom Grubisich on Mon, 04/26/2010 - 13:04

Sustainable development has been one of Development Marketplace's themes since its beginning 10 years ago.  It's hard to count all the DM winners and finalists who have come forward with innovative "green" ideas that they wanted to share.  Just a few examples:

One of the winners in DM2007 -- themed "Health, Nutrition, Population" -- was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-sponsored project to develop clean-burning cooking charcoal from agricultural waste.  Haiti's traditional cooking fuel often comes from wood.  But wood burning produces high pollution that is a cause of widespread respiratory disease.  Substituting charcoal for cooking not only improves the health of Haitian families, but also means fewer trees -- a major protection against soil erosion -- are cut down.

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.