Recovery Rediscovery Redesign

 

KIva

 

 

<img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2443/3781297446_794b984739.jpg">
Ta ka Floating Market in Ratchaburu Thailand

 

VMA: Tell me about a moment of deep happiness for you in the desert.

MAA: It happens every day, two hours before sunset. The heat decreases, there is still no cold air, and men and animals slowly return to the compound, and their profiles are painted against a sky that is pink, blue, red, yellow, green.

VMA: That sounds fascinating.

MAA: It's a magical moment. We all get into the tents and we boil tea. Sitting in silence we listen to the sound of the boiling water. We are immersed in calmness, with our the heart beating to the rhythm of the boiling water, potta potta potta......

VMA: How peaceful.

MAA: Yes...here you have watches; there, we have time.

from LIM News Interview with by Victor-M. Amela with Moussa Ag Assarid, a journalist and member of the Touareg tribe in Africa.

 

The Feast All Day Streams http://alldaybuffet.stream57.com/thefeast/

"The Feast" is a cross-disciplinary series of programs addressing social innovation and new ways to make the world a better place. Our secret sauce lies in a healthy combination of passion, creativity, and entrepreneurship to shift the way things are done - thereby changing individuals, industries, and ultimately the world.

An open exchange of ideas across industries and society is necessary to produce lasting, sustainable, meaningful change. "The Feast" brings together the world's leading creative entrepreneurs, revolutionaries, radicals, doers and thinkers to inspire more action, share best practices, and create valuable connections that will change the world.

 

 

A fiery new brand of social entrepreneur is addressing the crisis of global poverty by hacking into the holy grail of capitalism. They are organizing around the mission of wresting power from international aid organizations and transnationals and returning it to the people.

 

corporations seeking to create new markets addressing the needs of the billions of poor people living at the bottom of the economic pyramid can — and should — use that effort to drive sustainability and innovation within their own ranks. The primary lesson, said Mr. Prahalad in a recent telephone interview with Green Inc., is learning to “do more with less.” 

 

 

http://envisiongood.tv/envisiongood-live

 

"Social entrepreneurs identify resources where people only see problems,” says David Bornstein, author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas.

“They view the villagers as the solution, not the passive beneficiary. They begin with the assumption of competence and unleash resources in the communities they're serving."

 New social business models focus on producing products at significantly less cost, engaging experts in R&D, using donation funds to cover initial start-up costs, and localizing the business so that it is owned and operated within the community it serves.

The lifework of MacArthur Fellowship recipient & Genius David Green has been dedicated  to providing affordable, accessible and financially self-sustaining health care and medical technology throughout the developing world. Through the Seva Foundation, Green in 1992, partnered with India’s Aurolab to develop an affordable intraocular lens for cataract patients. Aurolab provides intraocular lenses to poor cataract patients at a cost of $4 - $6. (In contract, US manufactures lenses at a cost of $100-$150.)

 

Green says when he first started working in global health issues, he didn’t even know what a cataract was. His motivator was the billions of people desperately in need of affordable health and what he could do to change the system.What motivates him, he says, is analagous to Chinese accupunture: the redirection of enery from where it is most focused to where it is most needed.

 

Compassionate capitalism, he says is all about “human will and the motivation to serve and to be transformative, to change the pretty screwed up paradigm that we exist in now.”


doesn’t work with companies; he works with individuals. Individuals with extreme technical competence and with deep rooted integrity.

http://www.lemelson.org/programs2/detail.php?id=818
His most recent project, Conversion Sound,
is based upon three concepts:  wealthy clients pay higer prices to subsidize the lower price of hearing aids to poorer clients; battery prices are lowered through use of a solar or crank-powered battery charger; and non-medical personnel are trained to fit hearing aids in a little over an hour. Additionally, custom molds are manufactured on site utlizing an instant mold making processs. Partners in this operation include Grameen Health in Bangledesh,

 

<a href="http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/20/small_change_does_microlending_actually_fight_poverty/?page=1">Small changes: Does microcredit really help the worlds poor</a>



Barefoot Engineers


India’s barefoot guru Bunker Roy was labeled an upstart when he blasted the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals as “a recipe for disaster.”

In 2005, Roy’s Barefoot College invested $100,000 to bring ten semi-literate Afghans to India where they trained for six months to become barefoot solar engineers. They returned home with 120 solar units, enough to power five villages.

Compare that, Roy says, to the $250,000 cost to set up one Millennium Village.

 Launched 30 years ago, Barefoot College is a successful model of decentralized discovery learning. Students - Roy affectionately calls them "washouts, copouts, and dropouts" - bring their experience and skill to bear on real life problems. Assisted by local mentors, they assume careers in rainwater harvesting, midwifery, education, health care, computer programming or solar engineering.  No diplomas. No formal education.


 The school is funded by income generated by the services it provides to over 1000 villages. In a 2003 report, UNESCO reported barefoot professionals have become confident enough to talk shop with professionally trained experts.


 Barefoot’s Afghanistan project exemplifies the power of its model. Seven men and three women learned how to construct, install and repair solar units. One month after returning home, they brought power to 124 homes in five villages. Communities pay the engineers for ongoing repair and maintenance, collecting enough funds over five years to replace batteries.


To date, the ‘barefoot approach’ has brought solar power to 19 Ethiopian villages and over 500 villages in India. Two Cameroon women are currently in training.

At latest count, 1,000 Barefoot employees are working in 20 sites in India, with a client base of 500,000. The organization recently received $615,000 in seed money to expand its program in poor communities around the world.

 

In San Francisco, the Pacific Vision Foundation is piloting a new model of specialty clinic that is designed to be able to accept and treat paying patients and non-paying patients exactly the same: offer the same procedures, by the same doctors, under the same roof, while maintaining sustainable profit margins. While seemingly implausible in the U.S., this model, which is being developed with support from the Pioneer portfolio, has hundreds of successful examples overseas.

 

Enter the "BIg Guns

E&Co

 

E+Co, a mission-driven clean energy investor in developing countries, is working to implement strategies that enable Wall Street investors to put capital to work in developing countries through the carbon markets.  Unlike more traditional carbon finance developers, however, E+Co strives to ensure that dollars flowing from carbon credits make it to the bottom of the pyramid.  To that end, the organization recently announced that it has successfully registered two energy efficient cookstove projects with the Gold Standard, a Swiss-based non-profit that serves as a governing body for Verified Emissions Reductions (VERs).  These are among the first such projects ever registered with the Gold Standard.

Energy efficient cookstoves are important for a number of reasons.  First, they are 40% more efficient than traditional stoves, thus significantly reducing the amount of charcoal that is used for cooking.  The stoves also reduce indoor air pollution, which is one of the leading causes of death in developing countries: according to the World Health Organization, one person dies of indoor air pollution every 20 seconds, and more people in the developing world die from indoor air pollution than from malaria.

 

 

Because of the triple bottom line benefits associated with energy efficient cookstoves, E+Co has long invested in companies that manufacture and sell the products, particularly in West Africa.  Now, two of its investee-enterprises, Katene in Mali and Toyola in Ghana, have successfully completed the validation process, the carbon credits are registered and awaiting sale.

"More than any carbon project, cookstoves address most directly health and poverty at the bottom of the pyramid," says E+Co Carbon Finance Manager, Erik Wurster.  "What we want to do is get more money flowing down to the local cookstove manufacturers, enabling them to drop the price of stoves and make more stoves accessible to more people.  This, in turn, greatly reduces the amount of soot and other particulates that are released into the air.  When burned in poorly ventilated conditions in primitive stoves, solid fuels such as wood and charcoal have a tremendously harmful public health impact and are a leading cause of respiratory illness in developing countries," Wurster notes.

It took E+Co over two years to complete the application and registration process.  The benefit of the arduous process, though, is that it offers needed transparency and confidence to a new and abstract commodities market, which is critical for this market to thrive.  Wurster acknowledges, "E+Co learned valuable lessons from this experience and is leading the way in terms of developing carbon credits from cookstoves.  We are among a short list of organizations who know how to develop these types of projects.  And, we know how to do it well."

E+Co anticipates that these two stove projects will generate an enormous amount of carbon dioxide emissions reductions over the next several years.  These reductions will be sold on the market as carbon credits.  Entrepreneurs will see a significant slice of the carbon revenues in the form of cash, which is then used to grow their business.  E+Co will continue to work with other companies in its portfolio to develop carbon credits.

As for COP 15, it is this type of cash-in-hand transfer to developing countries that will bring them to the table to discuss emissions reductions. Wurster notes, "E+Co does not really engage in crafting policy, we're not a think tank or a lobbying group.  We are doers.  We develop and implement sound business strategies for the bottom of the pyramid. Yet, we are optimistic that demonstrating the benefit of these projects can improve the upcoming climate talks.  Perhaps in a small way, this achievement shows how capital can be used to curb greenhouse gas emissions, improve public health, and perhaps most importantly, offer ingredients for an equitable climate change treaty post-2012 in which all countries benefit."

windpowered waterpumps

In countless villages throughout the developing world, women and children spend large portions of their days collecting water. Often traveling more than 3 kilometers in each direction to collect unclean water for cooking, cleaning, drinking and bathing, villagers who lack connection to national water systems loose time and health in pursuit of water

Below is the first of a series of interviews with two of the project’s leaders: David Roe, who trained as a lawyer and has 30 years of experience in public interest strategy and environmental and human rights advocacy; and David Green, an Ashoka fellow, vice-president and a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” award, who helped to create an eye care model in southern India that has been replicated in several other countries. Check back over the next three days to find out what needs to happen for this model to work in the U.S., what opportunities could emerge through health reform, and the potential for replication in other locations and other forms of care.a short term study conducted by an MIT evidence based which ....... Yunas says the long term effects of microlending not ...

    The lower cost lenses are subsidized with income from revenues generated from higher income customers.
    PI’s financial and resource partners include Schwab Foundation, Acumen Fund (Rockefeller and Cisco Foundations), World Bank Development Marketplace and Ashoka.

    Green says when he first started working in global health issues, he didn’t even know what a cataract was. His motivator was the billions of people desperately in need of affordable health and what he could do to change the system.

    Compassionate capitalism, he says is all about “human will and the motivation to serve and to be transformative, to change the pretty screwd up paradigm that we exist in now.”

    Stuart L. Hart, one of the head honchos in the endeavor to merge sustainable development with business strategies, defines social capitalism as a horizontal collaborative system involving small companies and individuals in a mutually beneficial community.

    “This model is much less competitive than the corporate model in which large organizations vie for absolute power,” says Hart, author of Capitalism at the Crossroads.

    What corporations bring to the development table, he says, is an innate ability at “marshalling resources behind an idea, at creating organizations that operate both efficiently and effectively. They apply sound management tools and discipline, and they demand results.”

    These tenets are by no means a novel concept. For the past 30 years, poverty pioneers have been working with community based paradigms for sustainable development. They take on poverty in a multipronged assault, using microfinance and collateral-free credit; focusing on empowering women, entrepreneurship and upward mobility; and reinvesting revenue in development.

    A recent report by the Global Development Research Center states that global microfinance has been growing at a rate of 30% annually, with 13 million borrowers worldwide and $7 billion in outstanding loans.  Set interest rates and repayment schedules are implicit in the formula, with some firms holding onto interest as revenue and others reinvesting profits

 But there is little doubt that the award of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize to Bangladesh economist Dr. Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank are playing no small part.

 

The Bonsai Model
    Dr. Yunus tells us the poor are very much like bonsai trees. “When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a flowerpot, you get a replica of the tallest tree, only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted, only the soil-base that is too inadequate.”

    Crack open that flowerpot, he says, and poverty will soon be a thing of the past, unleashing enormous energy and creativity of the poor.

 

 

    A Gourmet Chocolate Torte, the first ever Fair Trade Cake, landed California-based Rubicon Bakery at the top of Fast Company’s 2007 Top 20 Social Capitalists list.

    Rubicon, in partnership with TransFair USA - the only third-party certifier of Fair Trade products for the U.S – introduced the first Fair Trade Certified™ cake in grocery stores last November.

    Since 2004, Fast Company has worked with the global consulting firm Monitor Group to identify organizations that are most successfully using corporate tactics to reshape the reality of the global economy. Rubicon, who has made the list every year, shares this honor with such diverse winners as Kickstart, SEED Foundation, Calvert Social Investment Foundation, TransFair USA, Grameen Foundation and WITNESS.

    "Our Social Capitalist Awards winners have forged partnerships that blur commerce and charity, challenging our assumptions about making a profit and making a difference," said Mark Vamos, editor of Fast Company. "Their alliances help big business bring conscience to commerce, changing old-style capitalism as we know it."

    Rubicon’s bakery sales help over 35,000 marginalized people find jobs, housing and training.

 

 

 

‘creative destruction’ in the global marketplace

 

NYU’s Professor Hart predicts a process of . A new breed of stakeholders and social entrepreneurs are using “beyond greening” strategies and tapping into undeveloped markets with emerging technologies.

    “Capitalism cannot afford to ignore sustainability,” he says.

    Green believes social businesses sorely need assistance in attracting investment in social enterprises.  And Dr. Yunus says he has the answer. He is calling for the creation of a social stock market.

     His visionary market is only open to those interested in owning and trading shares in social businesses. Participating investors match their money to a mission, maintain the investment and feed dividends back into their chosen projects. Needless to say, the market would need a social business version of the Wall Street Journal.

    Yunus likes to compare globalization to a hundred-lane highway criss-crossing the world. New rules are needed to ensure the poor have equal access to the fast tracks. He has no problem maneuvering through the traffic generated by transnational trucks  … so long as his rickshaws aren’t jostled off the road.

KIVA - Kiva's Field Partners

Kiva's mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.

Kiva is the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs around the globe.

 

The Solar Power Archive Wikihttp://solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/The_Solar_Cooking_Archive_Wiki

BioEnergy Lists http://www.bioenergylists.org/

 

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Why are these women carrying cooking stoves on their heads?

 

http://www.bioenergylists.org/aidugandasixbricks10_07