SLOW Movement

NY Times: Site Diverts Shopping Money to Charities

December 13, 2009

Site Diverts Shopping Money to Charities

By STEPHANIE STROM

A new Web site lets people donate to charity the money they would have spent on, say, that $44.50 Henley sweater from the Gap — or, better yet, the $250,000 his-and-hers ICON aircraft that Neiman Marcus is selling this year.

BRAC USA, the American arm of a Bangladeshi development and aid organization, started the site, www.whatididnotbuy.org, on Thursday.

“What we’re trying to do,” said Susan Davis, the president and chief executive of BRAC USA, “is emphasize how much you could help accomplish with an amount of money that you might otherwise spend on something you or someone else might not really want or need.”

As of midday Friday, 89 people had contributed roughly $500 using the site, forgoing items like a blender, Champagne, power tools and a flat-screen television.

Lucy Bernholz, a nonprofit and philanthropic consultant, said she saw the new Web site as a reaction to the growth of embedded giving, in which companies promise to donate part of the proceeds from the sale of specific items. “Walgreens will no longer stand between me and my gift, which I like,” Ms. Bernholz said.

Churches often exhort their members to curtail consumption during the holidays and instead spend more on the needy, and the Dalio Family Foundation used to run advertisements that advocated charitable giving in lieu of holiday excess.

Jennifer Buffett, president of the NoVo Foundation, one of BRAC’s biggest supporters, said the foundation, based in New York, had decided to use e-cards and donate the $350 it spent on paper cards last year to support three teachers in southern Sudan. The foundation’s seven-member staff also decided that instead of buying one another Secret Santa gifts, they would put the money toward projects described on the new Web site.

“I’m so excited about the site,” Ms. Buffett said, noting that it had inspired her to swear off taxis and use the money she would have spent to support nonprofit causes. “I’m going to tell all my friends about it.”

She said she had no idea what her father-in-law, Warren E. Buffett, who is known for his off-the-rack suits, might choose not to buy.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FT: The FT seasonal appeal - Room to Read

The FT seasonal appeal: Room to Read

By David Pilling

Published: November 27 2009 16:58 | Last updated: November 27 2009 16:58

Asha studies on the floor of her bedroom

It was during the 1999 Maghi festival, whose revelries grip western Nepal in mid-January each year, that Asha Tharu’s parents sold her. Asha, who was then five years old, fetched $40. In return for the money, Asha was sent to work for a year as a bonded labourer at the house of her new owner in Gularia, a town near her village of Khairapur.

“I had to get up very early and I had to clean the pots, clean the rooms and wash the clothes,” recalls Asha, now a bright 15-year-old. “I worked all day and I didn’t get enough sleep.”

I have come along jolting, unmade roads from Nepalgunj in western Nepal to meet Asha at her sister-in-law’s hut, a rather beautiful dwelling of unbaked mustard-yellow bricks, more African in appearance than Asian. In the main living area are two large, exquisitely fashioned mud urns built into the walls for storing rice. In the unfurnished room where the family sleeps, Asha sits on the dirt floor and tells me about her new life. She says she is happy in school and that, on the weekends, she works in a brick factory, earning $1.30 for an eight-hour shift. That is enough to buy rice and to help her elder sister pay for school.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Reportage - Nov-24

More than anything, Asha remembers the petty slights she endured during her eight years of servitude, which ended last year when her “master” agreed to release her. “They would give me scraps. I used to feel very hurt by that, receiving the left-overs of guests or the elder family,” she says, glancing occasionally at the dusty ground outside the mud hut where she now lives. “Sometimes I’d get rotten food, or half-stomach food, not enough to stop my hunger,” she says. “They would hit me or shout at me if I dared complain.”

Until she was freed, Asha, an extraordinary young woman with beatific self-composure and a dazzling smile, was a so-called Kamlari girl. The Kamlari system, an extension of a wider caste-based practice of adult bonded labour, is a form of indentured servitude that persists even today on the flat plains of western Nepal, a world away from the beauty of the mountain peaks that draw tourists to this Himalayan republic.

“Bonded labourers work as housemaids or on farms,” says Reema Shrestha of Room to Read, the educational charity that, as part of its work in several poor countries, helps Nepal’s former Kamlari girls return to school. Room to Read, which the Financial Times is supporting in this year’s seasonal appeal, provides counselling and extra tuition designed to help the girls slot back into the educational system from which they have been excluded. It then supports them to ensure they don’t fall behind or, worse, slip back into the world of indentured labour. Those unfortunate enough to remain Kamlari are virtually assured a life of illiteracy and poverty. “Sometimes they are trafficked across the border into India and into the sex industry,” says Shrestha, who runs Room to Read’s education programme for girls in Nepal.

Asha prepares some food for her family

The Kamlari system is, theoretically, illegal but every year, during the Maghi revelries, parents continue to strike contracts to place their daughters in servitude for an annual fee of as little as $30. Most families don’t see their child again until the following Maghi festival when contracts are renewed or renegotiated.

Many parents have little choice since the owners of the fields where they live and work as sharecroppers threaten to turf them off the land, and into certain penury, if they do not comply.

“Some send their daughters because it is tradition,” says Shrestha. “They don’t think of it as a shameful thing.” If they are struggling to keep children fed at home, parents fool themselves into believing that a more prosperous master will give their daughters better food and, perhaps, even send them to school. It almost never works out that way.

While Asha was in servitude she went to school sporadically, if at all. Some of her masters kept her locked up. Others made her sleep outside. Occasionally she was enrolled in school but was rarely able to attend. “There wasn’t enough time to study because of all the housework,” she says. As much as the lack of tutoring, she regrets her lost childhood. “When I went to be a Kamlari, I didn’t get any time to play. I had only work. My master’s children went to school, but I had no one to play with.”

Now she does. Asha is attending classes thanks to a scholarship provided by Room to Read, which also builds schools and libraries. The scholarship pays for Asha’s school fees, textbooks, writing materials and her blue school uniform. Room to Read has so far helped some 800 of the estimated 20,000 Kamlari girls still forced to work in this part of Nepal. The charity runs specially created three- to nine-month catch-up courses to get the girls, many of whom have missed years of schooling, up to a minimum level. Asha is now studying in year seven, where most of the girls are 13, two years younger than her. But she is already excelling. With a flashing smile, and the assured style with which she relates both the tragedies and triumphs of her life, she says simply: “I find maths very easy. I am always the first to solve the problem.”

John Wood, 45, the founder of Room to Read, was a senior Microsoft director until he quit 10 years ago to start the charity. He says it is “ridiculously inexpensive” to place a girl such as Asha in school, an average of about $250 a year. When I catch up with him in Nepal, he has just been inspecting schools and libraries that his organisation built in the foothills of the Annapurna mountain range.

Tanned, unshaven and wearing khaki shorts – he forgot the FT was bringing a cameraman – he is clearly exhilarated by the progress he has seen since he established Room to Read.

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Literacy is key to improving prospects for the poorest

The Financial Times is delighted to be launching the 2009 seasonal appeal to readers. It is in support of Room to Read, which provides educational opportunities for some of the world’s poorest people.

Room to Read builds schools and libraries, publishes local language children’s books and supports girls’ education in south and south-east Asia and southern Africa.

David Pilling, the FT’s Asia editor, has travelled across the region taking a close look at Room to Read’s operations.

Over the next few weeks, he will report on aspects of the charity’s work in the weekday paper, in Weekend FT and on FT.com, which will also feature video reports and audio slideshows.

An important feature of the appeal is that three partners – Barclays Capital, Atlassian and Credit Suisse – have agreed to match readers’ donations up to £600,000 ($984,000) in all. These generous pledges mean readers can support the appeal knowing that their contributions will go twice as far.

The seasonal appeal, which runs until mid-January, has raised nearly £2.4m over the past three years for WaterAid and Camfed International.

Room to Read was chosen for 2009 in a vote of FT staff around the world. The FT believes literacy and access to education form one of the most powerful tools for promoting economic development. John Ridding, our chief executive, is on Room to Read’s board. We hope this appeal will not only raise vital funds for its work but increase awareness of the role education plays in raising living standards among the world’s poorest.

Lionel Barber

It was during a break from his relentless work schedule at Microsoft, when he was in charge of business development for greater China, that Wood first went trekking in Nepal. He was struck by the lack of educational opportunities: libraries without books and classrooms without teachers. What began as his fantasy of bringing books by yak to an individual school – he ended up hauling them up the mountain by donkey – took on a life of its own. Before he knew it, he had left Microsoft to begin a professional charity.

He built Room to Read to last. It would only construct schools or libraries if local communities were on board, a commitment it measured by a willingness to “co-invest” in projects, either in cash, labour or building materials. Even the impoverished parents of Kamlari girls, sharecroppers and subsistence farmers all, are encouraged to find money to pay for the hair ribbons worn by girls to school. “If you simply give stuff away, it is not valued. Nobody ever washes a rental car,” he says, quoting Michael Porter of Harvard Business School.

Room to Read’s model has allowed the charity to grow exponentially. In Nepal, for example, it has already brought rudimentary libraries to one in 10 schools, and it is on its way to achieving the same in Laos, another of the impoverished countries it supports. In the past 10 years, says Wood, who puts a running tally of projects at the foot of every e-mail he sends, Room to Read has built more than 750 schools, established 7,000 libraries containing 5m books, and funded nearly 7,000 long-term scholarships for girls.

From its single-country origins – the charity was originally called Books for Nepal – it has expanded to eight other locations, including Cambodia, where schools, teachers and libraries were systematically destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, as well as Vietnam, Laos, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Zambia and South Africa.

I had travelled to western Nepal from Kathmandu on a small prop plane operated by Yeti Airlines. From Nepalgunj, a town clogged with rubbish and lined with fetid open sewers, we lurched along heavily potholed roads, avoiding lumbering buffalo carts and three-wheeled rickshaws crammed with children on their way to school. After a couple of hours, I visited Man Bahadur Chhetri, whose Friends of Needy Children organisation shares tiny offices with Room to Read in Gulariya.

As well as poverty and a lack of land title, which obliges people to work as vulnerable sharecroppers, Chhetri attributes the Kamlari practice to a culture that undervalues women. Of the bidding process during the Maghi festival, Chhetri says: “Everywhere, we saw landlords and middlemen convincing parents to sell their daughters. It was like an auction for animals.”

Chhetri’s organisation has championed Kamlari girls, gaining the release of around 6,000. To persuade sometimes reluctant parents to take their daughters back, his organisation offers them a goat or a piglet, which they can later sell. The animals are used instead of cash so the fathers can’t spend the money on alcohol, he points out ruefully.

“After we have rescued them, we hand them into the care of Room to Read,” he says. “Most of the girls are happy to go to school. They feel free.”

The Kamlari system is so ingrained that it is not easy for an organisation such as Room to Read to have any influence. Yet, by educating girls, Wood says he hopes to break the cycle, one child at a time. “Our goal is to help parents and communities recognise the long-term pay-off to educating their daughters instead of focusing on the short-term monetary benefits of selling them into bonded labour,” he told me.

At nightfall, I am still talking to Asha as she prepares the food for her sister-in-law, who has been working in the fields, and her nephew and nieces. Now dressed in a pink salwar kurta with red trousers, she is bent over an open wood fire cooking a local type of gourd. The rice is already prepared. Later, she will study – for several hours, she says – by the light of a naked bulb.

It is time to take my leave of this remarkable teenager. On my way out I notice a goat tethered in the corner of the room. It is only later that it occurs to me to check where the goat came from. Sure enough, it had been an inducement to Asha’s family to take her back. Properly reared, it will one day be worth at least $60. Asha, you’ll recall, was sold for $40.

David Pilling is the FT’s Asia editor

To make a donation go to the Room to Read special page

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

NY Times: Lending Talent, and Money, on a Micro Scale

June 25, 2009

Small Business

Lending Talent, and Money, on a Micro Scale

By KATE MURPHY

Government agencies and international aid groups have long supported programs that train the world’s poor in how to start and run their own businesses. The training is seen as a way to end hunger and stabilize societies.

But interest in these programs has grown lately with the wider availability of microloans, or very small enterprise loans made to the poor. As with any start-up, these businesses are more likely to survive, advocates say, if the owners have basic operational skills.

“There’s been a realization in the microfinance community that loan recipients are more likely to succeed if they also receive business education,” said Bobbi L. Gray, research and evaluation specialist with Freedom From Hunger, a nonprofit organization in Davis, Calif., that provides financial education in developing countries.

Indeed, the nonprofit research group Innovations for Poverty Action in New Haven, Conn., published a paper in May that found that Peruvian villagers who had received microloans and had been randomly selected to receive business training performed significantly better than peers who had received loans and no financial education.

“Even those who reported having the least interest before getting the training had higher revenues,” said Dean Karlan, a professor of economics at Yale, a founder of Innovations and lead author of the study.

From Botswana to Bolivia, entrepreneurship training has resulted in thriving microenterprises — like soap makers, cocoa processors and handicraft exporters — that would not have existed otherwise. Some programs may gather villagers in huts and use multiple baskets to demonstrate how to allocate capital. Other programs may focus on established but struggling businesses, giving owners DVDs that cover topics like pricing and distribution.

“A good intervention doesn’t treat everyone the same,” said Bruce McNamer, chief executive of TechnoServe, a nonprofit group in Washington that has worked with entrepreneurs in developing countries since 1968 to expand their businesses and foster economic growth in their communities. “How you help depends on the circumstance.”

Mr. McNamer’s group, which works with the United States Agency for International Development and the State Department, provides free business consulting services and also sponsors business plan competitions to identify aspiring entrepreneurs in developing countries. “These are usually people who have started a business but they just don’t know how to get from point A to point B,” he said.

An example is a cooperative of 50 farmers in northern Nicaragua that four years ago was just getting by while cultivating coffee, he said. But the cooperative, with assistance from TechnoServe, turned to other crops, like the starchy staple malanga, that increased their profits. The cooperative now has 250 farmers and has opened its own packaging plant, which employs 80 people. The plant’s products are exported as far as Miami.

Teaching financial literacy and entrepreneurial skills is seen as particularly important to the reconstruction of war-torn regions like Afghanistan and Iraq. “It doesn’t matter if you build roads if one in four kids dies by age 5” because of illness or malnutrition, said Ross Paterson, a self-described business coach and retired Army officer in Keller, Tex.

He has been to Afghanistan 10 times in the last seven years to teach entrepreneurship. It is more important, he said, to give Afghans the ability to build businesses that will provide the income to sustain them.

Occasionally fearing for his safety because of the continued Afghan fighting, Mr. Paterson says he primarily teaches leadership skills by helping the local residents to recognize and successfully work with different personality types, whether colleagues or customers.

While Mr. Paterson’s courses last only a few weeks and are limited to those who speak fluent English, other organizations emphasize the importance of finding and training local people to teach business fundamentals.

“You need people who are going to be there for the long term and who know what really works on the ground,” said Fiona Macaulay, founder and president of Making Cents International, a 10-year-old nonprofit organization in Washington that creates entrepreneurship courses for the disadvantaged and trains the people who teach them.

Continuing mentorship and support are crucial to helping entrepreneurs succeed, Ms. Macaulay said. Her organization also offers networking opportunities for its students. “At a business fair in Jordan, for example, we were able to connect a woman who made cakes with a woman who made boxes to transport the cakes,” Ms. Macaulay said.

Many of those who teach entrepreneurship in remote and impoverished areas say the biggest hurdle is persuading students to believe that there are opportunities beyond, say, selling fruits or trinkets in an open-air market.

“I’d say getting them to identify new approaches and opportunities is the hardest part,” said Harsh Bhargava, a business consultant in McLean, Va., who with his wife, Aruna Bhargava, a sociology professor at Rutgers, started the nonprofit group I Create in 1997 to teach entrepreneurship in India, their native country.

He says many people I Create works with are so downtrodden they cannot envision another way of life. He discussed an Indian woman who was so abused by her husband and in-laws that she lacked the confidence even to look anyone in the face. After a local I Create trainer persuaded her to take an entrepreneurship course, she left her husband and started a grocery store.

Moreover, she successfully sued her husband and in-laws for the return of her dowry and for child support for her son. “She’s now studying to become a lawyer and hopes to work to protect women against dowry-related crimes,” Mr. Bhargava said. “It’s these kinds of stories that make what we do so gratifying.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FT: Soapbox - the rise of social enterprise

Soapbox: the rise of social enterprise

Published: June 14 2009 22:07 | Last updated: June 14 2009 22:07

By

Chip Feiss

Is it possible that a whole new, distinct fourth sector is developing right before our eyes? The modern business world has up to now comprised the private for profit, public/government and non-profit sectors. But today there is a blurring of the lines between these sectors. There is also a burgeoning global movement, known as social enterprise, which straddles all the other sectors.

But, first, if social enterprise is to become the new fourth sector it will need to overcome some structural challenges. The first is one of definition. The term “social enterprise” has been imbued with many different meanings and become associated with other catchphrases such as “sustainability”, “green” and “corporate social responsibility”.

I define it as a for-profit/non-profit or hybrid business, using private investment to work on common-good social problems.

Virtually daily there is news of another social enterprise initiative, as individuals and institutions such as business schools, where courses on social enterprise are among the most popular, explore alternative ways to create financial and social value. Those involved in launching these new enterprises clearly reject Milton Friedman’s perspective “that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits”.

Although experiencing a huge upsurge in interest and visibility globally, social enterprise is still in its nascent stages. Today it can be characterised as a fragmented sector filled with many small-scale enterprises struggling with scale. Growth and scalability are important concerns for all businesses but maybe more so for social enterprise, in that the scope of the social problem(s) it is trying to solve is so large.

Innovative work is being done to reach scale, including the development of corporate structures, tax policy that considers the social benefit delivered by social enterprises, the design of systems to measure social value and impact, the creation of social capital markets for improved financing of social enterprises and the development of funding sources and investment instruments.

The establishment of social enterprise as a distinct, flourishing sector faces many challenges, but history is encouraging. Concerns over income inequality, environmental degradation and social justice have prompted people to search for and experiment with new ways to do business.

The recognition by many people of the failure of business and public policy to deal with these issues adequately has led, among other things, to the global proliferation of non-profit organisations. They have doubled in number in the US alone in the past 15 years.

This same awareness motivated people to align their investments better with their values and gave birth to socially responsible investing, which has also seen dramatic growth. In the UK, funds invested with a socially responsible focus have grown from £1bn to £764bn ($1,260bn, €897bn) in 12 years. The opportunity for social enterprise is huge. The Monitor Group estimates that this could be a $500bn-a-year sector within five to 10 years.

There are, of course, those who question the efficacy of social enterprise, including US President Barack Obama’s economic adviser Larry Summers, who wrote: “It is hard in this world to do well. It is hard to do good. When I hear a claim that an institution is going to do both, I reach for my wallet. You should too.”

While I also believe it is hard to do well and/or good, I am encouraged by social enterprise, which appeals to a larger part of the human spirit and experience than some of the traditional business models.

Social enterprise is not meant to replace the other sectors but is another way of dealing with common social problems that have not been successfully addressed to date. Is it possible? When history collides with motivation and opportunity anything is possible.

Chip Feiss is a senior fellow at the Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School of Government

www.ft.com/soapbox

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: A fortune coined from cheerfulness

A fortune coined from cheerfulness

By Rebecca Knight

Published: May 19 2009 20:05 | Last updated: May 19 2009 20:05

When brothers Bert and John Jacobs were in their early 20s, they bought a beat-up old Plymouth Voyager minivan – nicknamed “the Enterprise” – stocked it full of T-shirts they had designed, and went on road trips up and down the east coast selling their wares on college campuses.

They covered their costs selling the shirts for about $10 apiece, but it was a meagre existence. They slept in the van, lived on peanut butter and jam sandwiches and every so often would scrounge to buy a pizza or rely on one of their customers to sneak them into a school cafeteria.

“People say, ‘Oh that must have been tough.’ But it wasn’t that tough, we were young and strong,” shrugs John, the younger by three years. “There was a hope it would lead to something big, but we were doing something we liked to do. We were selling our artwork, travelling, meeting new people, and watching the girls go by. On slow days, if the weather was decent, we’d toss around a Frisbee.”

Twenty years later, the Jacobs brothers are still hawking T-shirts and still playing Frisbee. As co-founders of Life is Good, a ­Boston-based apparel and accessories company that last year had sales of $120m, the Jacobses unapologetic­ally peddle a message of optimism and an appreciation for the small pleasures of life.

Most of its merchandise – the company offers more than 980 items, including dog beds, travel mugs and tyre covers – features the company emblem, a stick figure named Jake, enjoying a range of outdoor pastimes: swimming, camping, fishing and golfing, to name a few. The core slogan is “Life is Good” but other taglines include: “Take your sweet time”, “Spread good vibes” and “Do what you like, like what you do”.

Charitable efforts for families whose lives are not so good

As company chiefs, John and Bert Jacobs have perfected the playful approach to doing business. As philanthropists, however, they are very serious about their work.

The company’s charitable efforts began after September 11 2001. The brothers lost friends in the terrorist attacks on the twin towers and company morale was low. “It was hard to go to work at a place like Life is Good when employees were asking: ‘Is life not good?’” says Bert. The company designed American flag T-shirts and donated the profits to United Way on behalf of families whose loved ones died in the attacks.

The following year the brothers chose two family-focused causes: Camp Sunshine, a retreat for children with life-threatening diseases, and Project Joy, which offers play therapy to traumatised children.

They organised an outdoor festival with pie-eating contests, face painting and three-legged races. The Jacobs brothers view their festivals as the ultimate expression of the Life is Good brand. The events, often themed around pumpkins or watermelons, are free. They make money by selling food and T-shirts, and from donations. They have raised more than $4m for children’s charities.

The company has started its own foundation to distribute the money it raises and this year will hold a festival in Toronto, its first outside the US.

To cynical observers, this un­abashed message of cheerfulness may come across as trite. But the brothers – both of whom are six foot five and have a New England mountain-man look, with ruddy complexions and unruly heads of ginger hair – insist that this is a misinterpretation.

“The little things in life are the big things,” says Bert. “If you think you’ll be happier when you get that promotion or that two-car garage, you’re going to be waiting a long time.”

Adds John: “It’s not: life is great, or life is perfect, or life is easy. It’s not an exclamation point. It’s acknowledging that there is bad in the world, but don’t harp on it.”

The brothers grew up in Needham, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Their father worked in a machine shop; their mother was a homemaker who raised six children (they are the youngest siblings.) They lived in a small house with four bedrooms and describe their childhood as “happy chaos”.

“Despite having limited funds, Mom was always laughing and singing,” recalls Bert. “She is a big part of the inspiration for the brand.”

After college, the two began selling T-shirts at small-town street fairs and on college campuses, and supplemented their income by supply teaching. At first, selling the shirts, which featured abstract art or dancing figures, was just a bit of fun, a “financially accessible way to go into business”, according to John. “But we also wanted to communicate a message.”

During long days on the road, the two discussed bigger ideas. “We talked about the media inundating our culture with negative information. There’s no six o’clock news any more. There’s only the six o’clock murder report,” says Bert. “We wondered: is there something we could create that’s about what’s right with the world, rather than what was wrong? Could we create an icon that could be a symbol of optimism?”

In 1994, on a hiatus from one of their road trips, the Jacobses threw a keg party. At the time, they lived in a flat near Boston; their walls were covered with drawings and they encouraged guests to be as artistic as they wished.

The two noticed that their friends gravitated towards a simple sketch by John: a cartoon face wearing a black beret, a pair of sunglasses and a wide grin. Beneath the drawing, friends wrote things such as: “This guy has life figured out” and “My hero”.

They felt they were on to something but they needed more consumer research. Their solution: another kegger. They set up an easel in their living room and on it wrote 50 sample mottos for their cartoon figure. Once again they encouraged their friends to leave comments. “Life is good” was the clear winner.

The Jacobses printed 48 T-shirts with a picture of Jake and the winning motto. The next day they set up a booth at a street fair in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to Harvard and MIT. They sold out in 45 minutes.

“It was all different kinds of people who were buying them: skateboard punks, Harley-Davidson riders, suit-and-tie guys who worked in the financial district, schoolteachers. It was such a broad base,” says Bert.

“In five-and-a-half years of selling T-shirts, we hadn’t seen anything like it,” adds John. “Half-way through the pile, we looked at each other: it was scary. We’d finally found what we were looking for.”

After the initial success, the Jacobses took their idea direct to retailers and trade shows in New York City. They had done this before with previous T-shirt ventures but had had little success. This time, retailers were receptive.

They had found their niche, but had no idea how to run a business. They sent out shipments without invoices; they wrote orders on top of old pizza boxes in their flat; they did not even own a fax machine or a computer.

Kerrie Gross, a friend and neighbour who worked as a paralegal, helped computerise the brothers’ invoices and run their day-to-day operations. “We had a financial guy tell us we’d need to make $250,000 in sales in order to afford to hire an employee. He might as well have told us we’d need to make $50bn,” says John, because it seemed like such an impossibly large sum.

In its first year, the company made $260,000. They hired Ms Gross and a number of other friends who remain partners in the business, in which the Jacobses hold an 80 per cent stake. It earned $1.2m in 1997 and $2m in 1998. Today it has 4,500 distributors operating in 30 countries.

The brothers have no interest in selling their business, or taking it public. In the face of recession, they remain upbeat.

“Whether the economy is up or down, or whether we’re at war, people need optimism,” Bert says. “I think it was Churchill who said: ‘I am optimist. It does not seem to be much use being anything else’.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Washington Post: Cooked Rice Vocabulary Project

Cooked Rice Vocabulary Project
Making Freerice vocabulary learning more portable

Phil Shapiro
PC World
Sunday, May 17, 2009 4:19 AM

At my public library job I've been talking up the Freerice.com Web site to many elementary school and middle school students who visit the computer center where I work. The site donates rice to a United Nations food program when students click on the correct answers to multiple-choice vocabulary questions. I've been fascinated to see the different reactions students have to using this Web site. One second-grade girl loves Freerice.com, even though many of the vocabulary words are beyond a second-grade reading level. Some fourth-grade boys cannot get any questions correct at the easiest level of Freerice.com.

It occurred to me that without too much effort I could build some free multimedia learning materials that could help those fourth-grade boys have a positive experience with Freerice.com. I was sitting there at my job pondering this question when I received a phone call from a friend of mine, the mother of a twelfth-grade student here in Maryland. Maryland requires all graduating students to perform 75 hours of community service. This is a fabulous law that was put into effect in the early 1990s.

My friend's daughter, Sarah Behnia, was in need of 30 hours of volunteer work by the end of March, 2009, or she would not graduate high school. My friend asked me if I could help her daughter acquire those volunteer hours. As it happens, the Takoma Park Maryland Library, where I work, is qualified to give volunteer work hours for students who perform community service work at the library. So I told my friend, ?Send your daughter down to the library. I'm going to put her to work on a free educational learning materials project. I can guarantee you that your daughter will have some fun working on this project, will learn new skills and will create something very useful for our community.?

Sarah showed up at my place of work at 6 p.m., at the end of my shift. I sat her down at my MacBook and showed her how to use Screenflow, an excellent screencasting program for Macs. She quickly learned how to use Screenflow and was creating narrated screencasts of the correct answers for the easiest vocabulary levels of Freerice.com. We laughed a lot in the process of creating these screencasts. I was particularly focused on this community work not feeling too burdensome.

I then showed her how to export the screencasts using video and audio codecs that would let these screenplays play on older Macs and Windows that I like to place with families in the neighborhood.

At the end of the project, I decided to use iSquint, a free program, to compress these screencasts for viewing on iPods, Sony PSPs, and other portable media devices. I uploaded all these screencasts to the Internet Archive, which provides free Web hosting for such materials. You can view these screencasts online or download them all for offline viewing on computers or portable media players. (The download is a 151 MB zip file.)

Now members of my community--and other communities--can learn some Freerice.com vocabulary using this freely distributable, public-domain learning material. Using an iPod, they could even learn vocabulary while waiting for a bus in the morning, or riding the bus, or waiting at a doctor's office. The people who benefit from this project may never meet me or Sarah Behnia, and that's just fine with me. Creating something of value for others to use is what the Internet is all about. I am immensely grateful to John Breen, the inventor of Freerice.com, and this is my small way of saying thanks.

A couple of next steps in this Cooked Rice Vocabulary Project remain, and I could use the help of about 10 to 20 more people to work on those steps. These steps include: creating a spreadsheet with all of the synonyms in the Cooked Rice Vocabulary Project and then populating that spreadsheet with sample sentences illustrating use of the words. I'd also like to create a pure audio version of the Cooked Rice Vocabulary Project using Audacity. I'm thinking of using Zoho Projects to manage the next steps of this project. Does anyone know of a better Web management tool?

If you know how to use computers and would be interested in participating in those next steps, then send me an e-mail with the subject: Cooked Rice Vocabulary Project--and thanks in advance. You don't need to make any specific time commitment, but I'm looking for people who could volunteer about 4 hours per month (or more) for the next stages of this project.

Phil Shapiro

(The blogger works as the public geek at the Takoma Park Maryland Library and is an adjunct professor of education at American University. He can be reached at philshapiroblogger@gmail.com)

FT: A crash course in emerging technologies

Excerpt: What Singularity University can do with certainty is to create an atmosphere where people aren’t afraid to dream. You can’t pre-script innovation. You can create an environment where you bring together the best and brightest from disparate fields and very often interesting things will happen.

===

A crash course in emerging technologies

By David Gelles

Published: April 24 2009 11:27 | Last updated: April 24 2009 11:27

Singularity n. A point of infinite density and infinitesimal volume, at which space and time become infinitely distorted according to the theory of General Relativity. According to the big bang theory, a gravitational singularity existed at the beginning of the universe. Singularities are also believed to exist at the centre of black holes.
– The American Heritage Science Dictionary

In a spare one-room office at Nasa’s Silicon Valley campus, a small band of futurists is plotting to save the world. The means are not a revolutionary technology or a new world order (though both may be byproducts). Rather, a new, pseudo-academic institution called Singularity ­University is going to solve our grand challenges: poverty, hunger, energy scarcity and climate change. Among others. Through a combination of techno-optimism, wide-eyed idealism and belief in the perfectibility of human beings, these well-connected geeks are creating an institution meant to legitimise their most extreme thinking.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Reportage - Nov-24

Forgive them for dreaming big. We’re in, after all, the cradle of the personal computer industry, the neighbourhood that brought forth Hewlett-Packard, Apple and Intel. The Googleplex is just north of SU’s office, Yahoo’s campus just south. Nasa tests the wings of its spacecraft here. Stanford University is up the road. And the Singularity team has landed some of these titans as partners in its endeavour.

Nasa offers more than office space: it’s the host, and will grant access to its specialists and facilities. Pete Worden, the director at Nasa’s Silicon Valley-based Ames Research Centre, is an enthusiastic supporter and brought the university on campus. Meanwhile, Google, the first corporate partner, has contributed $250,000 – and Google co-founder Larry Page attended the first meeting on the university last autumn. As one Singularity staffer said: “Here in Silicon Valley, we’re at the centre of the vortex.”

On a crisp February morning, I made the 45-minute drive south from San Francisco to Ames, hoping to understand how Singularity University might change the world – and why it had backing from such an illustrious group of supporters. After passing through a heavily fortified guard booth, I steered into the heart of the Ames campus, a tranquil collection of sandy, Spanish colonial-style buildings with well-manicured lawns. The stateliest of these structures, topped with a bell tower, is the Lunar Sciences building, where (funnily enough) scientists study the moon. Singularity University is coming together on the ground floor.

. . .

The office has all the trappings of a technology start-up: frisbees and footballs scattered about, a corner full of free snacks and drinks, and a communal table around which all members of the team work. Salim Ismail (his blog’s title: “You’ve Got Ismail!”) is the school’s executive director and a veteran of several technology-based start-ups. Forty-something with a bald pate and an easy smile, Ismail describes himself as “passionate about business, entrepreneurship, technology, skiing, wine [and] tennis” with “a side hobby in metaphysics and philosophy”. In other words, he’s the archetypal Silicon Valley male.

The Singularity University’s founders at the Lunar Science Institute

Ismail and his team are scrambling to get ready for Singularity University’s first nine-week course, set to commence on June 29. More than 1,200 applicants have expressed interest in attending; 40 will be selected for the first term; $25,000 a person covers tuition, room and board. The inaugural class will be a mix of graduate students and businessmen and women with time to spare. Classes are eight hours a day, six days a week.

During the first three weeks of the programme, students will receive an introduction to the school’s 10 main areas of study, including artificial intelligence and robotics, biotechnology and bioinformatics, and futures studies and forecasting. In the same way that a liberal arts education delivers an overview of literature, history and social theory, Singularity University intends to give students a crash course in subjects such as neuroscience and “human enhancement”. The second three weeks of the programme will give students a chance to study, in-depth, a subject new to them. An expert in nanotechnology, for example, might take on energy and the environment. “The biggest innovations in the world happen when you cross two disparate fields,” Ismail says. “[Johannes] Kepler looked at the moon and the tides and thought they may be connected. Today, people are doing 3D ‘printing’ of human organs using stem cells.” Linking early astronomy to stem cell technology is a bit of a stretch, but sure, intellectual cross-pollination can spur on innovation.

Will this model really vary so vastly from ordinary higher education? “Unfortunately, today’s graduate education is very narrow,” says Peter Diamandis, one of the school’s founders and the chief executive of the X Prize Foundation – which administers multimillion-dollar prizes for advancements in space, automotive and genomics technologies. “You become an expert on a particular channel on a nerve cell. That’s great, it allows you to go down deep, but there’s no place that allows you to step back, look at the big issues, and think.”

During the final three weeks of the programme, students will reconvene and focus on “one of the big, hairy challenges facing mankind”, such as hunger, climate change or energy scarcity. One lead contender for the first year’s challenge was how to administer telemedicine in remote parts of the world – but that has been eclipsed by the vaguer, Miss America-esque question: “how can you positively impact one billion people in a decade?”

As part of my tour, Ismail takes me around the Ames campus, or at least those few parts of it we are allowed to enter. At the west end of the complex, Nasa’s kilometre-long wind tunnels (the largest in the world) test the aerodynamics of aircraft and spacecraft. Nearby, control centres support Nasa missions such as the Kepler project, which is searching for habitable planets beyond our solar system.

A former zeppelin hangar and retired aircraft at the Nasa Ames campus which houses the Singularity University

But beside these high-tech marvels stand some true technological relics, reminders of how quickly the future becomes the past. To the east, flanking a runway, are three gargantuan zeppelin hangars. The largest is a Modernist revival behemoth and one of the biggest freestanding structures in the world, decrepit after years of disuse. On the edge of these installations is a series of dilapidated offices; next to one, the nose of a retired military jet rusts in the California sun.

Singularity University was inspired by the success of the International Space University, founded in 1987 in Strasbourg, France – by Diamandis. Through a similar series of courses and projects, the ISU aims to prepare students for work in the space industries – everything from space engineering to space policy and law. What began as a quirky programme for aspiring astronauts has evolved into a well-respected, accredited institution. A few years ago, Diamandis and the inventor Ray Kurzweil, a longtime friend, wondered if they could do the same trick again, with a school educating students about emerging technologies. Using Kurzweil’s 2005 book The Singularity is Near as a sort of founding document, they got to work, and last year secured a lease at Nasa and a team of three full-time employees and 30 largely volunteer faculty members. It is set up as a non-profit-making organisation, with Kurzweil as the chancellor and Diamandis the executive director.

A few days before visiting Ames, I caught up with Diamandis at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel. Diamandis was attending the Cleantech Forum, a gathering of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists hoping to cash in on green technology. Diamandis also sees a market here – who doesn’t? – and hopes SU can contribute. Yet he may be a bit more extreme than his fellow forum-goers: technology won’t just solve our energy needs, Diamandis argues, but all the world’s problems. “People think there is always going to be hunger,” he said. “Well, no. That’s not true. There doesn’t always have to be hunger.” Rather, in the near future, nanobots – minuscule robots capable of performing exceptionally complex tasks – will be able quickly and cheaply to produce food from raw materials, say algae or dirt.

“What is food?” he pondered, lounging on a sofa in one of the hotel’s dining rooms. It was early in the morning, but Diamandis, a short, muscular man with wavy hair and eyes that fix on you like a tractor beam, declined coffee or breakfast. “It’s the rearrangement of atoms in a form the body can take in.” Design a machine that can rearrange dust into an apple, and voilà! – hunger is eradicated.

The term “the Singularity” was popularised by Kurzweil and is now a catchphrase, in tech circles at least. It describes “a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed”, according to The Singularity is Near, which has become a veritable bible among futurists. In it, Kurzweil speculates that by the middle of this century, artificial intelligence will surpass human intellect, and enhanced humans will work in concert with super-smart machines to manage the world’s resources.

Singularity University founder Ray Kurzweil believes that one day the world will be dominated by robots – perhaps successors to “QA” (for Question/Answer), pictured here, the new telepresence robot from Anybots

Kurzweil, a 61-year-old former whizz kid from New York City, has a rosy view of world domination by machines. Tiny robots will create abundant energy and food while reversing pollution and climate change. A technological utopia will ensue. Some critics – those who concede he might be right about technological change transforming the human experience – worry that smarter-than-human robots will turn on their creators, and that a malicious artificial intelligence will wipe out mankind (Kurzweil doesn’t rule out the possibility, but thinks it unlikely). Other critics read about his desire to achieve immortality (he takes hundreds of dietary supplements a day), or his questioning of whether the speed of light is an immutable limit (he thinks not), and decide they’d rather not engage in the argument.

And yet while a race of intelligent robots to rival humans is still the stuff of fantasy, machines are advancing at impressive speeds. Earlier this month, a robot at Aberystwyth University in Wales formulated a hypothesis about the genetics of bakers’ yeast – without intervention by its creators. Then, the robot carried out experiments to test its theory. Back at the Singularity offices, Ismail says: “This is going to happen in an increasing way, but how are we going to manage it? We need to be a step ahead of it. SU’s mandate is to understand and manage it in a more proactive way.”

Every year, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a Silicon Valley-based non-profit organisation, hosts a summit focused on the future. Mainstream academics, professionals, entrepreneurs and pundits attend. More mainstream yet, The Singularity is Near is now being made into a film (directed by Kurzweil – who also stars in it). But many people who preach the Singularity are involved with more controversial movements. Transhumanism, which aims to “extend human capabilities”, takes the Singularity as one of its intellectual pillars. Many “Singulartarians” are also advocates of cryonics, the process of freezing a recently deceased body in the hope that future medical technologies will be able to revive it. Kurzweil is signed up to be frozen at his death.

Diamandis takes great pains to say that the school is a stand-alone ­venture, not affiliated with any of the other books, groups or events that also claim the Singularity moniker. “The term ‘singularity’, for me, is a catch-all phrase meaning that we’re dealing with exponentially growing technologies that have huge and powerful implications for humanity,” he tells me. “I am not promoting or predicting what people might call ‘The Singularity’.” Ismail and his team also try to distance themselves from the diehard Singulartarians, despite their many overlapping affiliations.

The week I visited Singularity University’s offices, technology seemed to have let down both Nasa and Google. On the Tuesday, a Nasa satellite meant to study global carbon dioxide emissions failed to reach orbit, scuttling the $278m mission – just when the government institution needed to persuade the new US president of its merits. The next day, Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, experienced a two-hour outage in the middle of the European workday, disrupting productivity and calling into question an increasing reliance on web services.

Technology, as if people outside Silicon Valley need reminding, remains unreliable, and machines, even when running smoothly, remain subject to human error. Bill McKibben, an environmentalist who has spoken out against rapid technological change, told me he was reserving judgment on Singularity University until it was under way. But he seemed sceptical of its ability to effect serious change. He said its success would largely depend on whether “the students who end up there want to solve actual human problems, which can sometimes benefit from technology, usually in tandem with lots of other changes. Or if they are sci-fi, afraid-of-dying types dreaming of the next big score to be made.”

. . .

McKibben also cautions against overlooking ethical concerns amid the heady frenzy of innovation that Singularity University hopes to cultivate. “It’s important to have real, meaningful debates before we cross important lines – germline genetic manipulation, for instance,” he said. “The technical ability to do this stuff confers no special insight on whether it should be done. I trust the visceral revulsion against ‘designer babies’ more than the smooth assurances of the boosters of the sleek future.”

McKibben is certainly not alone in his reservations – and since Singularity University was first announced to great fanfare this winter, both Google and Nasa seem to have begun shying away from their involvement with the school. Worden, the director of the Ames center, one of the University’s founders and the man who got it housed on Nasa’s campus, turned down repeated requests to be interviewed for this piece. In fact, no one from Nasa would speak on the record about Singularity University.

Google, meanwhile, denied repeated requests for an on-the-record interview with a spokesperson. Finally, after encouragement from the SU team, the company offered up Chris DiBona, a specialist in open-source computing and Google’s point person for dealings with the school. DiBona seemed excited about the opportunity to work with an interdisciplinary group. He felt like his speciality, network computing, really could help deliver telemedicine in remote parts of the world. But even DiBona was mindful of the university’s strange pedigree. “Some of the stuff feels very science fiction to me,” he said. “But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s an idealism that speaks well of the university. When you try to work on the future, you’re going to be wrong sometimes. A little zaniness goes a long way.”

For all the sci-fi overtones, the projects that come out of Singularity University will be well-intentioned, and it seems unlikely that any malicious artificial intelligence will be designed in the halls of Ames Research Center – or at least in SU’s corner. When pressed, Ismail backed away from the assertion that Singularity University would be delivering deployment-ready solutions to problems like hunger and energy scarcity. “If we do nothing else,” he says, “just to bring people up to speed on all these advances is an accomplishment and a full-time job.”

What Singularity University can do with certainty, he says, is create an atmosphere where people aren’t afraid to dream. “You can’t pre-script innovation,” he said. “You can create an environment where you bring together the best and brightest from disparate fields and very often interesting things will happen.” But that begs a question: is Silicon Valley a place where anyone is really afraid to dream big? Must you pay $25,000 for the privilege? The big dreamers, it seems, may be the Singularity University team, hitching a ride on a popular catchphrase and harnessing it to corporate funding, government aid and a steady revenue stream from wealthy students.

Before I left Ames, Ismail loaded me up with swag. He gave me a calendar from Nasa showing pictures of the cosmos, a copy of The Singularity Is Near signed by Kurzweil, and a handful of Singularity University refrigerator magnets – a refreshingly simple technology, reliable, very human, and timeless.

David Gelles is a reporter in the FT’s San Francisco bureau

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

BusinessWeek: Making a Profit and a Difference

Social Entrepreneurs April 3, 2009, 3:00PM EST text size: TT

Making a Profit and a Difference

As the economy reels, enterprising individuals who apply business practices to solving societal problems are gaining support from public and private sectors

By Stacy Perman

Social entrepreneurs—enterprising individuals who apply business practices to solving societal problems, such as pollution, poor nutrition, and poverty—are now 30,000 strong and growing, according to B Lab, a nonprofit organization that certifies these purpose-driven companies. Together, they represent some $40 billion in revenue.

The idea of blending a social mission with business is not new. One of the founding forces behind the movement, the Ashoka Foundation, since its inception 1981 has granted multiyear living stipends to support more than 2,000 fellows dedicated to finding answers to a host of social ills through business ventures. Indeed, the concept of building a profitable business model in which doing good is an intrinsic part of the business and not just a philanthropic sideline has been gaining ground in recent years. Sally Osberg, president and chief executive of the Skoll Foundation in Palo Alto, Calif., another guiding force within the social venture community, says the number of institutes, universities, and organizations that are now tapping into social entrepreneurship has mushroomed since former eBay (EBAY) President Jeff Skoll established the foundation in 1999.

Now, as the economy reels, both the government and the private sector are looking for inventive ways to bring back prosperity, and many are counting on these entrepreneurs as a powerful tool for change. "Social entrepreneurship correlates to this growing realization that entrepreneurs are the key to a vibrant economy and to solutions that are badly needed," says Osberg. It's not all pie in the sky, says Bo Fishback, vice-president for entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Mo. "Many social entrepreneurs have shown they can accomplish their mission," he says. "They can deliver on the social good and report a cash flow."

Not surprising, then, that they've caught the attention of such venture capitalists as those at Acumen Fund, a nonprofit that invests in companies that try to alleviate poverty, and Bay Area Equity Fund, which backs businesses aiming to make social or environmental improvements to San Francisco's needier neighborhoods. (See these additional resources for entrepreneurs seeking funding sources that back social ventures.) President Obama has even suggested starting a new government agency to help socially conscious startups gain more access to venture capital.

Who You Like Best

In January, we asked readers, staffers, and members of the social venture community to nominate candidates whose trailblazing companies, in operation for at least a year, aimed to turn a profit while tackling social ills. The 200-plus nominations we received included such entrepreneurs as Alex Mittal, whose Philadelphia-based Innova Materials makes antimicrobial products for private industry, then uses revenues from these efforts to develop water purification systems for the developing world. Kirsten Tobey and Kristin Richmond, founders of Revolution Foods, deliver nutritious lunches to more than 100 schools (that's 20,000 meals a day) in low-income areas in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Rachel Sterne, another social entrepreneur, encourages those living under repressive regimes to post their own reportage at her profit-sharing Web site, Groundreport.com. You can take a look at each of the 25 ventures we profiled in our slide show, then vote for the business you feel holds the most promise.

Some attribute social models pioneered by small outfits to the social responsibility efforts espoused by large corporations. For instance, about three years ago, Wal-Mart Stores (WMT), the world's biggest retailer, launched a program to promote sustainability, urging its many vendors to produce ecofriendly products while encouraging its consumers to buy them. General Electric (GE) made its green mark manufacturing high-efficiency incandescent light bulbs, and such manufacturing giants as Clorox (CLX) have begun to roll out their own lines of "green" cleaning products. In March, Cadbury (CBY), manufacturer of England's top-selling chocolate bar, announced a deal to use 15,000 tons of Fair Trade certified cocoa from Ghana by the end of this summer for its popular Dairy Milk bar. The company said the move would improve the standard of living of thousands of Ghanaians by tripling the sales of cocoa farmers there.

One of this year's finalists, Daniel Lubetzky, founder of $25 million Peaceworks, which works as a catalyst for peace by encouraging joint snack-food ventures among people of different backgrounds in volatile regions around the world, says it is not enough to impose an artificial business model on a social issue. Lubetzky, who was awarded a $1 million grant from the Skoll Foundation in 2008, says that doing good alone will not ensure success. "I had an earlier company that totally tanked," he says. "I didn't understand the product line well, but I was passionate about the mission. The failure taught me that one can't advance a social mission if the business model doesn't sell. You can't just sell a social mission. You still have to come up with the best product with the best prices." Given the current economic climate, that rings particularly true.

For a look at all 25 businesses, flip through this slide show. More elements of this special report are available in the related-items box on the upper right side of this page.

Perman is a staff writer for BusinessWeek in New York. 

===

Do-Gooders Who Spread the Dough 

Greyston Bakery, which provides job opportunities for the "unemployable" gives 100% of its profits to the Greyston Foundation, which supports numerous community development projects in Yonkers, N.Y.

Fortune: Products for the other 3 billion

Products for the other 3 billion

A new breed of idealistic technologist is building ultracheap baby incubators, medicine dispensers, and solar-powered lamps. Welcome to entrepreneurship circa 2009.

By Michael V. Copeland, senior writer

April 1, 2009: 11:44 AM ET

(Fortune Magazine) -- Jim Patell is perhaps the only member of the faculty at Stanford Graduate School of Business to come to class sporting police-issue cargo pants with a black Benchmade knife clipped to the right front pocket.

Patell differs from his B-school peers in another way too: Instead of teaching in a lecture hall filled with diligent students typing away on laptops, he operates out of Stanford's design school, where he teaches a class called Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability. His classroom looks a bit like your typical high school wood shop crossed with the lobby of the United Nations. Whiteboards are covered with scenes of village life and subsistence farming in Ethiopia, India, Nepal, Rwanda, and parts of Southeast Asia.

The pictures are a reminder of the class mission: to teach a new generation of entrepreneurs to use their business and engineering smarts to design and sell products - profitably - for the developing world.

No mere do-gooders

Two such budding entrepreneurs are Nedjip Tozun and Sam Goldman, founders of D.light Design. D.light makes cheap, solar-powered lights to replace the kerosene and diesel lamps so common in the developing countries of Asia and Africa. Tozun and Goldman met in Patell's class in 2006 and quickly connected over their mutual passion for helping the poorest communities tap into basics, like light, that the developed world takes for granted.

For smart, ambitious students of Tozun and Goldman's generation (they are both 29 years old) professional success and saving the planet aren't mutually exclusive. Patell's class is supercompetitive; people regularly are turned away because there's not enough space. Some of the students - a mix of would-be MBAs, engineers, and designers - truly are do-gooders, but a fair number think building good, cheap products is a skill any corporation would value.

"General Electric is not dumb - it looks at these markets too," says Seth Silverman, a civil and environmental engineering graduate student in the class who focuses on technologies for Ethiopia. "But these environments are so hard to work in that its attention is spent elsewhere. We can fill that gap, with an approach that goes beyond a fast profit motive."

Often that approach involves combining cutting-edge technology with widely available products that are moving down the cost curve. D.light, for example, marries next-generation light-emitting diodes (LEDs), proprietary power-management tools, and increasingly cheap solar panels.

As a result, D.light is able to offer poor communities an affordable alternative to kerosene, which is ubiquitous but hazardous. The quality of the light isn't good, it emits pollutants, and it's just plain dangerous. "You travel around these villages, and everyone has a story of a child being burned or a house destroyed by fire," says Tozun, speaking by phone from his office in Shenzhen, China. "And yet in some places we found that people were spending 15% to 20% of their income on light." The world's poor spend about $38 billion a year on kerosene for lighting, according to the International Finance Corp.

The D.light lamps sell for about $25, steep for someone earning $1 per day, but the D.light team quickly found that the quality of light was so good that people with the D.light lamps were able to do more work at night and increase their income. Two families in New Keringa, a village of 47 families in southern India, took the plunge on D.light lamps. Says Tozun: "All of a sudden the two families were able to work at night," mostly weaving banana leaves into plates. "Their average monthly income increased from $12 to $18, and they could save the time spent traveling to buy more kerosene." Within a few days the entire village had sprung for the lights. "These people are great customers if you give them a clear value proposition," Tozun says.

Empowering would-be customers is one of the mantras of Patell's class. Each year some students, like Goldman and Tozun, take their ideas and try to build businesses. Patell doesn't expect every student to start a company, but he does demand that every product in the class offer poor consumers tools for their own microenterprises. "We want to design things so that a farmer can decide to leave his farm and support his family selling water pumps or drip-irrigation tubing," Patell says. "We want things to be sold at a price that covers the cost of manufacturing and distribution."

The next cellphone

Capitalists in Silicon Valley are starting to take notice of the projects coming out of the Stanford course. In November, D.light secured $6 million in funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Garage Technology Ventures, among other venture capital firms, to ramp up production and get its lamps into markets, initially in India and Africa.

At first $6 million doesn't seem like a lot of money. And selling $25 solar lights in the developing world is not typical for firms like Draper Fisher Jurvetson, best known for backing Hotmail and Skype. But the financiers think D.light can model itself after another successful enterprise in the developing world: the cellphone industry. Device manufacturers - Nokia (NOK) in particular - are selling millions of handsets in rural parts of India, China, and Africa, places that in many cases don't have centralized electricity. But even some of the poorest of the poor will pony up several months' salary for the benefits of connectivity.

"Fortunes have been made on the back of that cellphone business," says Bill Reichert, managing director of Garage Technology Ventures. "A decade ago you wouldn't have imagined you could target these populations, but there is real business opportunity in introducing the right technologies."

Reichert believes that D.light's lamps are just the beginning: The company could expand into other solar-powered devices, even the energy business. "Is it a billion-dollar business? Probably not," Reichert admits. But could D.light become a well-run, profitable enterprise? That's absolutely the goal of Patell's class: D.light and its counterparts are out to improve lives and make money. If they also happen to enrich their investors, that's icing on the cake.  

FT: Community approach to create a dream farm enterprise

Community approach to create a dream farm enterprise

By Annie Counsell

Published: March 28 2009 02:00 | Last updated: March 28 2009 02:00

For some people, running their own business is a dream. For others, it is a mission. In Tim Waygood's case, it is both.

Nestled in the rolling hills and fields of North Hertfordshire, Church Farm's 175 acres are piloting an "Agrarian Renaissance" - a far-reaching project to create a traditional, mixed, sustainable and high-welfare food and farming system. Waygood enthusiastically describes it as a "place for wildlife, beauty, diversity, community and people, as well as a place to produce authentic local food".

Still in its infancy - the cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, geese and ducks arrived just a year ago and the organic gardens and new orchards have yet to bear fruit - the farm buzzes with human activity and the livestock graze contentedly. Schoolchildren arrive to feed the chickens and pigs, located near the bucolic village centre of Ardeley with its historic church, thatched cottages, pond and village stall selling the farm's eggs.

On first appearances, it seems to be a rural idyll, but much more lies behind the scenes. Waygood was driven to establish the project - along with other like-minded locals, family members, friends, and backing from organisations (such as the Royal Veterinary College) - "to build a sustainable, resilient source of great food for us and the community". He says: "Sustainable means drastically reducing fossil fuel inputs from farm to fork, by creating a diversified, localised food system."

Waygood wants to involve households and investors to help create a secure, affordable, sustainable lifestyle which is an alternative to supermarket dependence.

He is passionate about finding an alternative to agribusiness, supermarkets and the corporate food industry. "I am dreaming with my eyes open," he says. "Things can happen, and there is room and enough money in the food chain for us. Tesco, for example, has to pay for HR (human resources) departments and run huge offices. It also incurs massive freight costs. The wheat cost of a loaf of bread - at farm gate prices - is only five pence. We can compete."

Waygood is a social entrepreneur - and one part of his big picture is already taking shape.

"Agrarian Renaissance exists to create replicable models and therefore create change," he says. The furthest forward is "Rural Care" which involves former drug addicts, mentally ill patients and the disabled who come to the farm for work/therapy and interaction, as well as imbibing the whole picture of nature and wildlife.

This generates income from Social Services, engages people in the project, provides positive benefits and contributes to the community as a whole.

"With care farming, this is one example of a win-win model and an early success," he says. "We intend to lower the entrance hurdle for other farmers, growers and/or therapists from £50,000- £100,000 to £5,000-£20,000 to set up.

"This division has become cash positive after four months and we expect it to provide an income of between £15,000 and £20,000 for others who take up this 'social franchise'. Work is in progress, but we will not be rolling this out until late summer."

"Overall, we have invested over £800,000 to date, financed by remortgaging my house, cashing in all Peps and Isas and a bank loan. We aim to raise up to £20m over the coming 25 months," he adds.

Rural care

Support needs	Clients per supervisor	Pricing per day (£)	Pricing per hour (£)	Group size/daily
Low	4	57	12	228
Medium	3	87	18	261
High	1	142	29	142
Average	2.7	95	19	210
Source: FT research

The figures look daunting, but Waygood has a background of success and a hard-nosed business instinct. He jokes that he managed to get a degree in agriculture from Reading University by not being there. "I was known as the 'ghost'," he says.

While doing a paper on "rural diversification", Waygood was busy putting it all into practice, hence not attending lectures. He established MotivAction - a team-building/corporate entertainment company on the farm premises that his grandfather took on in 1958 - Church Farm.

Waygood says that it took from 1987 to 1994 to make a profit, but then turnover went from £2m to £10m in a few years as people bungee- jumped on board. The venture even included Russian cosmonauts.

A stint at Harvard Business School and, later, a bout of pneumonia changed Waygood's outlook. Sweating and crawling to the bathroom, he thought "what if I had only two more years to live? Setting a self-imposed deadline of two years, Waygood said: "I want do something for my children. I want to say I have done something."

So Agrarian Renaissance was born in 2007.

Waygood's mission is to reduce carbon inputs - "we are eating oil and nitrates" he says. "Taxpayers are paying to clean up the mess."

The first year has not been easy - but people, investors and other interests are buying in. However, future projects are much more capital intensive.

"The returns to myself and others as major investors and lenders to the enterprise are capped - loans, for instance, are capped at 4 per cent above base rate," says Waygood.

"We are recruiting and looking for a 'magnificent seven' team of interested investors and entrepreneurs to help create and prove viable, sustainable and ecological alternatives to the existing supermarket/agri-business mono-culture."

Local food success offsets sales fall

Early indications from retailers have suggested that the huge annual sales growth enjoyed by organic foods for 15 years may be coming to an end. Organic food represents 2 per cent of the UK’s food market, with sales of about £1.7bn.

Sales of organic produce soared by 26 per cent a year on average between 1993 and 2008, but this is set to fall to 7.5 per cent in 2009, according to Mintel, the market researcher. However, that rate of growth is still more than double that of the general food market, organic proponents point out. Three out of every four households in the UK now buy some organic food, according to the Soil Association.

In 2002, only 30 per cent of all organic products were supplied by the UK. But by 2005, the Soil Association estimated that approximately 66 per cent of all organic primary produce sold by multiple retailers was sourced in the UK, demonstrating that more and more people are now beginning to appreciate the value and quality available in the organic marketplace.

Only 4 per cent of UK farmland is run organically and organic food represents 2 per cent of the UK’s food market.

Nevertheless, sales of locally produced food have been doing well as supermarkets have promoted them as a healthy, and environmentally sound option. Consumers are aware of the difference between local and organic, but perceive better value in locally produced food.

UK farmers can also look to the fall in sterling for some cheer. Its depreciation against the euro has made many agricultural imports more expensive compared with homegrown food.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

BusinessWeek: Innovation Trickles in a New Direction

See also: Fast Company - How Innovations from Developing Nations Trickle-Up to the West

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Innovation March 11, 2009, 3:36PM EST text size: TT

Innovation Trickles in a New Direction

Products traditionally are created in rich nations and repackaged for emerging ones. But General Electric, Nokia, and others are reversing the process

By Reena Jana

This month, General Electric's (GE) health-care division will begin marketing a first-of-its-kind electrocardiograph machine in the U.S. Although packed with the latest technology, the battery-powered device weighs just six pounds, half as much as the smallest ECG machine currently for sale. It will retail for a mere $2,500, an 80% markdown from products with similar capabilities. But what really distinguishes the MAC 800 is its lineage. The machine is basically the same field model that GE Healthcare developed for doctors in India and China in 2008.

As such, the diagnostic tool exemplifies a way of thinking that may be ideally suited to dealing with the widening recession: creating entry-level goods for emerging markets and then quickly and cheaply repackaging them for sale in rich nations, where customers are increasingly hungry for bargains. The term for this new approach is trickle-up innovation.

The process turns conventional product development on its head. Over the years, multinationals have prospered by turning out premium-priced products for the world's affluent. Rather than also designing products for poorer people elsewhere, many businesses found they could simply pass yesteryear's models down, as if they were unloading fleets of used cars. Lately, big companies such as Microsoft (MSFT), Nokia (NOK), and Procter & Gamble (PG) are discovering that they can profit by targeting the world's masses first. And they can score again by selling these low-priced products elsewhere.

Topsy-Turvy Tack

"The dominant logic holds that innovation comes from the U.S., goes to Europe and Japan, then gravitates to poor countries," says C.K. Prahalad, a strategy professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and author of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits. "But now we're starting to see a reversal of that flow."

This topsy-turvy approach could even stir demand in markets that seem tapped out. GE Healthcare dominates the market for big-ticket diagnostic machines, selling 34% of ECG machines now used in hospitals and clinics in the U.S. While some of these customers may also buy a MAC 800, the smaller, cheaper machine will be pitched to a new set of medical professionals—primary-care doctors, rural clinics, and visiting nurses—who need a device they can easily tote or simply can't afford the pricier models. The company projects first-year sales of $2.5 million in the U.S.

That's a revenue rivulet for GE, which boasted a record $182.5 billion in sales in 2008. But the company needs every extra dime to meet Chief Executive Jeffrey R. Immelt's pledge to return to double-digit growth by 2010 and rescue GE's shredded stock, which has fallen 80% from its 52-week high. To conserve cash, the company just slashed its dividend by two-thirds, the first reduction since the Great Depression.

The idea to bring the MAC 800 to the U.S. trickled up from inside GE Healthcare. Last June, Veronica Chew, a GE Healthcare global project manager, had just finished doing market testing in China for the MAC 800. After returning to Waukesha, Wis., where GE Healthcare's U.S. operation is based, she started telling her customers about the new device. After a nurse at a clinic in nearby Menomonee Falls said she could use such a machine, Chew tipped off the executive team of GE Healthcare Clinical Systems. The company began holding focus groups across the U.S. last fall to help it decide whether it made sense to adapt the MAC 800 for the U.S.

Who Wants a Yugo?

In the past, developing an ECG machine from scratch took GE Healthcare up to five years and cost as much as $2 million. By merely adding a few new features to the Chinese prototype—USB, ethernet, and telephone ports so patient readings can be uploaded—the company slashed its U.S. development costs to $225,000 while shrinking the time to market to a few months. The MAC 800 could become a prototype for other parts of GE, says Vice-Chairman John Rice, CEO of GE's Technology Infrastructure group. "Often, the trap is thinking that innovation is about making the next iPod or BlackBerry. But maybe it's a simpler, lower-cost version of those. The innovation in all of our businesses now is bringing costs down."

Selling emerging-market hand-me-ups in the U.S. or Western Europe carries risks. The biggest is that the less-expensive products may cannibalize sales of higher-priced goods with bigger markups. Philips Electronics (PHG), for example, is intrigued by the concept of taking low-cost, solar-powered lighting it designed for Ghana and marketing it throughout the developed world. But CEO Gerard J. Kleisterlee has held off to protect Philips' existing product line. His concern, he says, is "hurting margins if you go too far down."

Also, low-priced offerings for lower-income regions often carry a stigma. Even a quarter of a century after the Yugo was introduced as the cheapest car in the U.S., the brand name remains synonymous with shoddy materials and workmanship, and is a reminder that quality is as important as price in industrialized nations. "The Yugo example has stopped so many people from doing this," says Harold Sirkin, a senior partner at management consultants Boston Consulting Group and co-author of Globality: Competing with Everyone from Everywhere for Everything. "The key is that these products need to be what the U.S. market wants."

sending innovation managers abroad

Still, the success of basic products in Asia and Africa and the collapse of the Western consumer are prompting more companies to try their hand at trickle-up innovation. Nokia recently researched how young people in Ghana and Morocco share handsets to listen communally to conversations. The company's aim was not only to come up with a more practical phone for Africa but also to work out where to put powerful speakers in the 5800 Express phones released in the U.S. in late February, enabling owners to share MP3 music and YouTube (GOOG) videos with others. "There has been a pull from emerging markets as much as a push into them," says Alastair Curtis, chief designer at Nokia.

Other companies are creating formal processes to streamline ways to borrow from emerging markets. In February, Xerox (XRX) hired two researchers the company calls "innovation managers" who will hunt for inventions and products from Indian startups that Xerox might adapt for North America. And Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) is using its research lab in India to see how it can migrate Web-interface applications for mobile phones in Asia and Africa to developed markets.

At Microsoft, 15-year company veteran Amit Mital heads a similar effort. The impetus was a realization that its Windows XP Starter Edition might have wider applications. The software had always been intended for tech-unsavvy customers in poor areas of the world with low-end PCs. Microsoft now is incorporating the Starter Edition's simplified "help" menu, with its easy-to-follow how-to videos, into future U.S. editions of its Windows operating system.

Some makers of consumer goods are finding new markets for their developing-world products, too. For Nestlé (NSRGY), it was taking its Maggi brand dried noodles—a popular, low-fat meal created for rural Pakistan and India that sells for about 20¢ a serving—and repositioning it in 2008 as a budget-friendly health food in Australia and New Zealand. For P&G, it was expanding the customer base of its Vicks Honey Cough cold-remedy syrup beyond Mexico to Western Europe and the U.S.

As GE Healthcare has found with its MAC 800, though, trickle-up innovation requires balance—retaining emerging-world prices while winning over customers spoiled by an abundance of options. To reduce both its weight and cost, the new ECG machine does not have a built-in keyboard. Instead it has a large, 12-­button keypad like those used to send text messages on mobile phones. "It's risky," says Michael J. Barber, chief technology officer of GE Healthcare. "But it's an exciting and challenging trade-off."

Jana is the Innovation Dept. editor for BusinessWeek.

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Innovation March 31, 2009, 3:34PM EST text size: TT

P&G's Trickle-Up Success: Sweet as Honey

Vicks Cough Syrup with Honey started out as a Latin American product, but Procter & Gamble saw an opportunity to offer it in richer markets

By Reena Jana

A new over-the-counter medicine from Vicks that has become popular in Switzerland in the past year isn't as new as it seems. The product, Vicks Cough Syrup with Honey, is really just the latest version of an elixir that Vicks parent Procter & Gamble (PG) initially created for lower-income consumers in Mexico­ and then "trickled up" to richer lands.

The term applies to a new corporate strategy of creating products for consumers in emerging markets and then repackaging them for developed-world customers. Before, these affluent consumers in the U.S. and Western Europe could afford the latest and greatest in everything. Now, with much of their wealth vanished, they're happy to settle for bargains.

The multinationals, too, are learning they can make their dollars stretch further by selling Third World goods around the globe, since it requires less money for research and development. "It's very expensive and time-consuming to come up with new ideas­—great ideas are scarce," says David Dintenfass, Vicks' global marketing director.

A Preference for Homeopathic Remedies

P&G isn't the only big name pushing hand-me-ups. Other practitioners of trickle-up innovation include General Electric (GE), Microsoft (MSFT), Nestlé, and Nokia (NOK). What's unique about P&G's Honey Cough, as it's also called, is that it has moved around the globe in more than one direction.

Honey Cough originated in 2003 in P&G's labs in Caracas, Venezuela, which creates products for all of Latin America. Market researchers found that Latin American shoppers tended to prefer homeopathic remedies for coughs and colds. So they set out to create a medicine using natural honey rather than artificial flavors typically used. P&G introduced the syrup in Mexico first, under the label VickMiel, and then in other Latin American markets such as Brazil.

P&G wagered that the product could appeal to parts of the U.S. that have large Hispanic populations. In 2005, the company rebranded it as Vicks Casero for sale in California and Texas, at a price slightly less than Vicks' mainstay product, Vicks Formula 44. P&G won't release sales figures, but within the first year of its release the Cincinnati company boosted distribution to 27% more outlets.

Big Sales in Europe

Figuring that natural ingredients could appeal to even wider groups, P&G took the product to other markets where research indicated that homeopathic cold medicines are popular. In the past two years, the company has been marketing the product in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, as well as Switzerland, and plans to add other Western European countries to the roster. Dintenfass says that Honey Cough has raised P&G's dollar share in Western Europe's cough-medicine segment since it was introduced in 2006, though he declines to be specific.

Western Europe isn't the last destination for iterations of Honey Cough. If P&G's current market research in the greater U.S. shows that mainstream American shoppers will buy Honey Cough, P&G will repackage it and market it nationwide, not just as Vicks Casero in Latino markets.

Developing and marketing a new product for each nation or ethnic group could take half a decade, says Dintenfass. Trickle-up innovation "can take years out of a process," he adds. Indeed, with each rollout, P&G has needed to do little more than make adjustments for each nation's health regulations.

At a time when companies are looking to speed product offerings while dealing with shrinking budgets and cash-strapped consumers, P&G's experience with its Honey Cough line show how an international product portfolio can be tapped quickly and cheaply. "Many of the business solutions America needs for the next 50 years could be found in emerging markets," says Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and chief innovation consultant at General Electric. That is, if American companies learn how to go against the flow.

Jana is the Innovation Dept. editor for BusinessWeek.

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Trickle-Up Innovation

By Kiyoshi Togashi

Bargain-Hungry Marketplaces

By Reena Jana

Procter & Gamble (PG) and other multinationals are taking low-cost products initially developed for emerging markets and adapting them for bargain-hungry audiences in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia. In the past, corporations stripped away features to offer them at low prices to people in developing countries, often adding details based on local research on user habits and needs. Now the opposite process, called "trickle-up innovation," is happening. Here's a look at trickle-up in action.

Procter & Gamble/vick.com

VickMiel: Natural Cough Syrup

This over-the-counter cough syrup was created for Mexican consumers in 2003. It was developed in P&G's research lab in Caracas, Venezuela, and contains natural honey instead of synthetic honey flavor. The product was designed to appeal to Mexicans who favor homeopathic cures over chemical-based drugstore products. That demographic was identified by P&G's market research in the region.

Procter & Gamble

The Renaming: Vicks Casero

Realizing the cultural cachet of VickMiel's real honey ingredient could appeal to other consumers in the region, the company later rolled out the product in other Latin American and South American countries. In 2005 it began selling it in pockets of the U.S. with large Latino populations, such as Texas and California, under a new name, Vicks Casero.

Procter & Gamble

Vicks Honey Cough

Homeopathic cures are also popular with Western European consumers. So in 2006, P&G rolled out the honey-based cough medicine in Germany. In the past two years it has added other nations such as Britain, France, and Switzerland.

Matthew Gilson

GE Healthcare MAC 400

In early 2008, GE Healthcare launched the MAC 400, GE's first portable ECG that was designed in India for the fast-growing local market there. The company simplified elements of its earlier, 65-lb. devices made for U.S. hospitals by shrinking its case to the size of a fax machine and removing features such as keyboard and screen. The smaller MAC 400 costs only $1,500, vs. $15,000 for its U.S. predecessor. This trickle-down innovation trickled back up again when GE Healthcare decided to sell the unit in Germany as well.

GE Healthcare

GE Healthcare MAC 800, China

In late 2008, GE Healthcare launched a more sophisticated version of the MAC 400, called the MAC 800, for hospitals in rural China. The $3,000 machine offers features such as an innovative, space-saving keyboard that's based on a cell-phone keypad. Doctors "type" information as cell-phone users might send text messages—by pressing keys two or three times to select a letter.

Matthew Gilson

GE Healthcare MAC 800, U.S.

After hearing existing U.S. clients say they sought a cheaper, more portable ECG machine, GE Healthcare did market research among 50 U.S. hospital clients in the fall of 2008. The company found most of those surveyed would trade keyboard capability for sharp imaging at a lower price, and GE Healthcare adjusted the Chinese MAC 800 for U.S. audiences, including a new market of private physician practices and smaller clinics. It became available in March 2009.

Michael Rubenstein/Redux

Maggi Noodles, South Asia

Nestlé offers inexpensive instant noodles in India and Pakistan under its Maggi brand. The line includes dried noodles that are engineered to taste as if they were fried, while they have a whole-wheat flavor that is popular in South Asia.

Nestle

Maggi Noodles, Australia/New Zealand

Nestlé realized it could market its Maggi noodles as cheap, whole-grain health food in developed-world markets. Last year, it began offering them in Australia and New Zealand.

Getty Images

XO laptop computer

Released in 2007, the small, energy-efficient XO laptop computer was one of the most visible prototypes of so-called "netbooks," or cheap mini-PCs with fewer features than full-size notebook computers. They were intended initially for poor children in emerging nations who could use them to surf the Internet.

Dell

Dell Inspiron Mini 9

In 2008 major PC makers such as Dell began rolling out their own versions of netbooks, intended not for developing markets but for mainstream audiences in developed nations. The smaller form factor was inspired by machines such as the XO, and their lower prices—often as low as $300—appeal to budget-conscious consumers.

Nokia

Nokia Research in Africa

Nokia researches how people in emerging nations share phones, such as the best-selling, 1100 series of devices created for developing-world consumers. The company then uses the information as inspiration for new features for developed-world users.

Nokia

Nokia Express Music 5800, U.S.

The Express Music 5800 phone, released in the U.S. in late February, features powerful speakers that can blast music and the audio of online videos so owners can share them with their friends. Nokia placed the speakers according to observations the company's researchers had made in Africa, which helped them understand how best to design a phone for sharing.

FT: Fighters of climate change

Fighters of climate change

By Ed Crooks

Published: March 18 2009 20:42 | Last updated: March 18 2009 20:42

From a solar-powered cardboard cooker for Africa to a giant industrial microwave that locks underground carbon sucked from the atmosphere by vegetation, innovation and ingenuity still offer hope that it is not too late to tackle climate change.

That at least is the encouragement offered by the five varied finalists in the FT Climate Change Challenge.

The competition, organised by Forum for the Future, the not-for-profit sustainable development group, and backed by Hewlett-Packard, the information technology company, aims is to raise the profile of innovations that can be both commercially successful and bring about material reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Financial Times readers, having been invited to nominate entries over the past few months, now have the chance to vote online for the winner, who will receive a prize of $75,000.

The credit crunch and economic downturn have undoubtedly dealt a blow to investment in environmental technologies such as renewable energy, with smaller companies often the hardest hit. At the same time, however, “green stimulus” plans in the US, the European Union and elsewhere point to a political resolve to tackling climate change. The downturn, many now say, offers opportunities to restructure economies and put them on a path to lower carbon dioxide emissions.

As Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, puts it: “It is clearly more difficult to raise money now, but a lot of the ideas we have been looking at are going to save money as well as greenhouse gas emissions.

“There are things we can do that will both help us get through the recession and change industry structures to put in place the low-carbon economy that we need to create if we are to avert the threat of climate change.”

Against that background, the outlook for our five finalists is challenging, certainly, but not discouraging. Nearly 300 entries were submitted. A few were grandiose, large-scale projects, but the majority were highly practical ideas that have realistic hopes of being converted into successful commercial applications relatively quickly.

Alas, many highly promising ideas did not make the final shortlist: among them, a proposal to use mobile telephone texts to arrange shared taxi rides in London, and an idea for solar-powered internet centres for Africa.

The five chosen were the ones that seemed to offer the greatest potential for growth in the eyes of the panel of judges: entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson; Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change; Mark Hurd, chairman and chief executive of HP; Sir Terry Leahy, chief executive of Tesco; Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Leon Sandler, executive director of the Deshpande Center for technological innovation at MIT; Jonathon Porritt, founder of Forum for the Future; and Lionel Barber, editor of the FT.

The finalists are:

Carbonscape

A New Zealand company that has developed a machine to turn biomass such as agricultural waste into carbon-rich material, locking up the carbon that would otherwise enter the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The material, known as biochar, could also be used as fertiliser or fuel.

Mr Barber commented: “Carbonscape has the potential to be an efficient and effective solution to the problem of rising greenhouse gas levels. Its feasibility has been proven and it could have a truly global impact.”

ADEF

A US company founded by a former truck salesman, which has a $50 wheel cover for heavy trucks called the Deflektor. It is estimated to reduce fuel consumption by 2 per cent, giving a very quick return on the investment.

Sir Richard commented: “I cannot see a world without trucks. This simple idea could make a huge difference.”

Kyoto Energy

A Kenyan company selling $5 solar cookers made of cardboard and acrylic. The cookers, which have recently gone into production in Nairobi, fight both deforestation in Africa and the health problems caused by cooking on wood fires.

Sir Terry said: “As well as reducing carbon emissions and deforestation, this cheap and simple idea could save people in developing countries time and money.”

Neem Biotech

A British company producing a feed additive called Mootral, to be fed to cows and sheep to reduce their flatulence. Farm animals make a significant contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and are attracting increasing interest from policymakers.

Sir Terry praised “a novel idea with the potential to have a real impact inreducing carbon emissions from the food chain”. Sir Richard was also impressed: “Can they stop cows farting and save the planet?”

Loughborough University

British academics have designed ceiling tiles that can cool rooms, to be used alongside or instead of conventional air-conditioning systems.

Air conditioning accounts for a significant proportion of electricity use, particularly in the US, and is growing rapidly in the developing world: reducing its demand for power could make a real difference to energy consumption.

Ms Claussen said: “This design will be well received by investors in the heating and ventilation industry.”

On FT.com, you can read more about the companies and the competition, and vote for your favourite idea. While the contest organisers hope all five entries will prosper, the key criteria is to identify the idea that most deserves to grow, but needs the extra push that the publicity of winning would give it – the one, perhaps, you would choose to invest your own money in. Voting closes on April 1 and the results will be announced in the FT on April 3.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Fast Company: How Innovations from Developing Nations Trickle-Up to the West

How Innovations from Developing Nations Trickle-Up to the West

By: Michael FitzgeraldTue Feb 3, 2009 at 6:38 PM

A funny thing has happened on the way to globalization: Innovation now trickles up from emerging to advanced economies. And it may be the way of the future.

Group Danone got creative in Bangladesh, given the country's lack of refrigeration. It built localized microplants and outfitted salespeople with cooler bags. | Photograph by Tom Haley/Sipa Press

We know how innovation works. We get iPhones; those less fortunate overseas get whatever we dropped in the recycling bin on our way out of the Apple Store. We get Gore-Tex; they get 2007 New England Patriots 19-0 T-shirts. We get the Wii; they play rock-paper-scissors. We get collateralized-debt obligations ... well, we can't win them all.

Innovation has always been about people in rich nations getting the latest stuff and the rest of the world getting our castoffs as our markets scale and prices come down. So why is Nokia looking to use Kenya to debut a free classifieds service (think a mobile-phone version of Craigslist), complete with a first-ever feature that lets people shop using voice commands to browse for goods? And why are Western banks seeking ideas from India's ICICI when its average deposits are one-tenth of those in the West?

The answer is that the traditional model of developing new products is quietly reversing course. Call it "trickle-up innovation," where ideas take shape in developing markets first, then work their way back to the West. "If it's radically innovative and reduces costs, it's going to get looked at and will accelerate," says Michael Chui, the consultant doing heavy lifting on a McKinsey Technology Initiative report on this subject that includes more than 100 PowerPoint slides crammed with examples. As the credit crunch forces frugality on companies everywhere, it should turbocharge the shift toward developing markets.

Nokia, for one, has for several years seen most of its growth come from the developing world, so it was quick to notice when poor Kenyans started using their cell phones for banking as well as paying for things. "People aren't saying, 'Give me the Web-based version of this,' " says Jonathan Ledlie, the Nokia researcher developing Mosoko (mo for "mobile," soko from the Swahili for "market"). "They've never used a Web version."

Ledlie's friends in the United States all tell him they'd love to use Mosoko, which is expected to debut in April. But Ledlie is skeptical. "I tell them, 'Oh, c'mon, you'd just look at some mashup of Craigslist over Google Maps.' " There's a growing graveyard of companies that tried to get Americans to embrace cell-phone payments. Ever hear of MobileLime or Black Lab Mobile? Exactly. In Kenya, Mosoko's competition is for-sale signs hammered up on posts or pricey classified ads.

The need to innovate in global markets is already changing the strategy at firms such as Infosys. Ten years ago, most of its technology was meant for the developed world, says Infosys COO S.D. "Shibu" Shibulal. Last July, when the company unveiled cutting-edge data tracking for retailers called ShoppingTrip360, it first tested the technology with an Indian one.

Shibulal is a fan of trying out innovations in emerging markets -- he calls them "blank slates" -- in part because it doesn't cost so much if an idea fails. He learned that the hard way during the 1990s Internet boom, when an Infosys spin-off, OnMobile, tried and failed to sell U.S. wireless carriers on plug-and-play services such as mobile-advertising support and ringtones. OnMobile pulled back to India, where it became the largest provider of such services and is now expanding internationally. "It's inevitable," Shibulal says, that "innovation will start moving both ways."

Even from Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations on the planet. France's Groupe Danone started a joint venture there with microfinance pioneer Grameen Bank. As part of the business plan, it agreed to build local microplants that produced one one-hundredth of the yogurt of a standard Danone facility, in part due to the lack of refrigerated storage. The microplants produced yogurt almost as cheaply as the larger ones. "It was a big surprise," says Emmanuel Marchant, deputy general manager of danone.communities, which operates its social business ventures. "It has inspired a plant in Indonesia, which we've already built. Now we're talking about other business markets where the plant could be adopted." Lessons from operating in Bangladesh have also helped Danone launch Ecopack, a low-cost yogurt line, in France. Marchant eventually expects Danone to mainstream other ideas first tried in Bangladesh.

A similar example might come from Indian banks, where transactions are about one-tenth of the typical U.S. bank's. India's ICICI operates profitably in such a climate, thanks to its highly efficient systems. Suddenly cash-starved U.S. financial firms are looking to ICICI -- and the substantial number of lower-income consumers in their own backyard -- and asking, "How is it that companies in emerging markets can serve these customers and we can't?" says McKinsey's James Manyika.

Innovation won't always trickle up, of course. At Nokia, Ledlie isn't sure something like Mosoko will ever break through the West's cluttered retail market. But he's confident that Nokia has a proving ground for voice recognition in a sales application. And, Ledlie says, "there's trickling sideways." If it works in Kenya, it should work in other developing markets where cell-phone penetration far exceeds desktop Internet, such as Mexico. Harold L. Sirkin, coauthor of 2008's Globality: Competing With Everyone From Everywhere for Everything, cites some successful "sideways" examples, including Brazil's Natura, a cosmetics firm that bested Western companies on its home turf and has expanded throughout Latin America and now Europe, and China's Goodbaby, which has 28% of the U.S. stroller market.

The emerging world, then, is no longer a dumping ground for trailing-edge technology. Brace yourself for the next wave of immigrants: ideas.

FT: Crafted with care

Crafted with care

By Hettie Judah

Published: March 14 2009 00:26 | Last updated: March 14 2009 00:26

Hella Jongerius works with an Indian embroiderer

Out of strength, sometimes, comes sweetness. Nine years ago, when Ikea, the Swedish furniture company, was being challenged over the use of child labour, its executives decided that instead of distancing themselves from the issue they should engage with it. After discussions with a number of charities they entered into a long-term commitment to Unicef entailing financial support to date of $180m.

The Ikea Social Initiative initially focused on development, health and education work in the eastern Uttar Pradesh area of India, with a particular remit to move women towards economic empowerment. More than 20,000 women in 500 villages were involved and, nine years down the line, some have opened tea shops, others flour mills, while 2,000 are employed as embroiderers making items for an important western corporation: Ikea itself.

“We got the idea that we could produce some products to show that ... they can help themselves,” says Marianne Barner, head of the initiative. In 2005 the company sent two designers to India to work with the women and develop a suitable homeware for them to manufacture and this resulted in a series of cushion covers called Grindtorp. This month it is launching a set of folk-story wall hangings drawn up by Dutch designer Hella Jongerius, produced by 200 women who were recently taught the embroidery skills to make them. “This is run as a normal business; they are subcontracted to a supplier of ours,” Barner says. “The products have been very well received. They have a story behind them and I think that appeals to people.”

Ikea is not the big first furniture company to explore the coincidence of ethics and aesthetics that developing-world, artisan products can bring to their offering. For more than 30 years non-governmental organisation Aid to Artisans has helped manufacturers and designers build non-exploitative working relationships with workers from Africa to Asia. Recently it helped US homeware chain West Elm to create an ethical business framework for the production and acquisition of khadi (hand-woven) silk from India and it has been such a success that the company has upped its demand for the second order from $40,000 to $70,000.

According to Aid to Artisans’ marketing director Colleen Pendleton, there is now a genuine blossoming of interest in traditional skills and materials. “I think that because consumers are feeling so vulnerable they want to demonstrate through their buying power that they care,” she says. “There’s a drive toward simplicity. Artisan products make a statement about keeping uniqueness alive, about cultural richness, about not losing ourselves. There’s a resonance for consumers.”

This goes beyond ethics, says Dutch-born designer Tord Boontje, whose work has always been marked by an interest in folk iconography. “Fifty years ago there were a lot more handmade products in the shops. Now people are starting to realise that clean, modern design has become plastic and bland and anonymous; that we lost something,” he says.

In 2004, the same year Artecnica launched Boontje’s multi-award winning Midsummer Light, he began working with a women’s collective in Brazil called Coopa-Roca. The collaboration resulted in a lampshade design – Come Rain Come Shine – that featured traditional embroidery and rope-work set around a circular metal frame and Boontje asked Artecnica to produce it commercially.

This was not without precedent; the year before the California-based company had sent students from Design Academy Eindhoven to work with craftspeople in Brazil. But attempts to turn the resulting pieces into commercially viable products had failed. “The prices were really high and we weren’t the kind of company that could demand that,” recalls Artecnica’s art director, Tahmineh Javanbakht. “The market wasn’t ready for it. And the artisans weren’t really set up; they didn’t have the logistics for something as simple as getting boxes or filling out commercial invoices.”

Still, by the time Boontje approached them, executives felt they knew the pitfalls to avoid and were ready to give such a scheme another try, this time with the draw of a big-name designer to help push the idea along. As it happened the lamps were so successful that they formed the basis of Artecnica’s Design with Conscience range, which now includes pieces by Jongerius, Fernando and Humberto Campana and Stephen Burks, as well as Boontje, all developed with and made by artisans in South Africa, Vietnam and Central and South America.

Boontje’s latest collection for the label is Witches’ Kitchen, a kitchenware set based on traditional Colombian black clay pots, imprinted with local leaves and flowers and reworked for the modern market. For example, since the pots are now more likely to be placed in an oven than hung over an open fire, he changed the handles to make them easier to carry.

“When we started, people were sceptical; they said the project was only for a hippy, niche market,” Javanbakht says. But “three years ago it was unthinkable that certain people would trade in an SUV for a small hybrid car; now gas prices have changed that. Five years ago whole-food was a very niche market; now Wholefoods is one of the most formidable chains in America. With awareness comes interest.”

“It’s really time that we look outside of Europe for inspiration and for business development,” adds Burks, who is based in New York. “There doesn’t have to be any type of division. The way that I live and the products that I’m interested in all have diverse origins; I might have a Danish sofa and a British shelving unit and tons of little items with more personality ... If we travel the world we realise that it is full of people making things in different ways.”

Cappellini vase

Burks first worked with South African artisans in 2005 on a series of patchwork-covered vases for Missoni. Two years later, through Aid to Artisans and Artecnica, he created TaTu, a wire table that breaks down into a bowl, a tray and a basket. And, last year, with Cappellini, he launched a new range called Cappellini Love, the first collection of which includes tables made from shredded magazines and vases and bowls made from mosaic tiles and silicone, produced and developed with a women’s community centre, also in South Africa.

He says he sees a rich future in such collaborations because they make business as well as ethical sense. “In the high-end design world, where the distribution numbers aren’t as high as in mass design, there’s a possible fit between what can be made by hand and what can be distributed in a certain market,” he explains.

Giulio Cappellini, founder of the eponymous Italian furniture company, agrees. “Today it’s not so interesting to present a new shape; it’s easier to give a new appeal to old shapes with artisanal materials,” he says. In addition to the Love range with Burks, he has invited two Indian artisans to re-work classic pieces by designers such as Tom Dixon and Jasper Morrison from the company’s existing collection. “We can apply the spirit of contemporary design to the spirit of artisanal production in countries that are not producing design.”

The allure of such projects is also tied to the disappearance of affordable master artisans in Europe. Where Cappellini is taking a creative approach, others have simply been forced to outsource; last year it was reported that porcelain manufacturer Royal Copenhagen was moving almost all of its production to Thailand.

Meanwhile, in the developing world, the issues are somewhat flipped on their heads. South African designer Haldane Martin says, for example, that while conscience plays a large role in his work, the main reason he experiments with local craft techniques is the lack of modern manufacturing options available to him. “I’m not averse to high technology but we don’t have a lot of access to it here,” he explains. “I don’t think that low technology is the answer to the world’s problems – we can’t go backwards – but I have found a niche where we can look at old technologies and present them in a different context.”

He has also discovered first-hand how important real commercial applications are in keeping traditional skills alive. For his Zulu Mama chair, which marries an indigenous weaving technique to a contemporary stainless steel base, he had to create a separate business to train the workers who now make the piece for an international market. But the benefits – both social and financial – have been significant. “We’re still a tiny business but it does create a bit of national pride. The products have a global design vocabulary but they come with a local flavour. We’re showing the rest of the world that we can make beautiful objects.”

Mabeo chair

Indeed, one hopes that eventually it will be more developing world entrepreneurs who harness their own compatriots’ talent, rather than NGO or corporate sponsors. “It would make a bigger impact if we as African producers and craftspeople were able to organise ourselves into private businesses,” acknowledges furniture producer Peter Mabeo, speaking from his studio in Gaborone, Botswana.

Yet, like Martin, he has already made a start. Armed with only a basic drafting qualification, in 1997 he launched his business making bespoke pieces for the local hospitality industry but, as the production standards and skills in his workshop evolved, he decided to solicit a European or North American partner for a series of products that were “reflective of Botswana but applicable anywhere”.

In 2006 he launched a collection designed by Toronto-based Patty Johnson that is now distributed by US retailer Design Within Reach. “It has exceeded our expectations,” he says. “We’re coming from kind of humble beginnings and we’ve made an impact internationally using basic machinery and craftsmen without formal training.”

His company is now working on other, similar projects and he’s confident that such collaborations can effect powerful change. “This is a different environment,” he says. “It requires patience and innovation. But designers” – and, he should perhaps add, the corporate executives who employ them – “are very practical people.”

Hella Jongerius talks about her new Ikea collection

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

ST: Sharing the art of living better

Home> Prime News> Story

March 10, 2009

RECESSION HEROES

 

Sharing the art of living better

 

Han Kian Teng employs people struggling without jobs; his credo: Give back to society

By Wong Kim Hoh, Senior Writer
		Mr Han (centre) hires those whom no one else will give a chance, like (clockwise from left) Mr Hong, an older worker; Bangladeshi national Gonbar, who lost his job in the slump; and Madam Cai, a low-income housewife. -- ST PHOTO: LIM WUI LIANG

 

MRS Cindy Han, 38, was not quite sure how to react when her husband brought home a Bangladeshi man two months ago.

'He said that the man had lost his job, and had no place to go. So he fed the man, gave him clothes and also gave him a job. And he's been staying with us since,' said the hairdresser.

'That's my husband for you,' she added, with a mixture of resignation and approval.

She is married to Mr Han Kian Teng, 38, founder of Hans Art Gallere, which operates 22 centres all over Singapore offering art lessons and workshops on woodcraft.

To Bangladeshi Prosenjid Golab Gonbar, 23, his boss of two months is a 'very, very, very kind man' who has given him, and his family back home, a lifeline during this recession.

Like many other Bangladeshis, Mr Gonbar had borrowed heavily to come to work in Singapore. He arrived in March last year and earned $18 a day as a general worker in a construction company.

But when contracts started drying up because of the downturn, his employers told him he had to go.

Mr Gonbar faced the bleak prospect of returning home with his debt still unpaid.

Desperate, he turned to Mr Han, whom he had got to know when he worked on the painting and renovation of some of the firm's outlets.

Mr Han remembered him, as the young man's industry and humility had made an impression. He got Mr Gonbar a new work permit, and now pays him more than $700 a month to pack, paint and do other odd jobs.

That is a bit more than what he was earning at the construction company.

Mr Han said: 'He is very conscientious, he always makes himself useful.'

He laughed bashfully when asked why he decided to house and feed his worker too.

'His situation is quite pitiful. He needs to send a lot of money back home,' he said.

'Anyway, there's space at home and it doesn't cost us much to share our meals with him; we just need to cook more rice.'

The artist-entrepreneur, who lives with his wife and his parents in a terrace house in Sembawang, credits his parents with instilling in him the need to give back to society.

'To me, everyone is the same, whether you are rich or poor. I just want to do the right thing, and help if it's within my means to do so.'

Mr Gonbar is not the only one being offered some respite from the recession, thanks to the artist with a soft spot for the elderly, the poor and the marginalised.

Mr Han reckons that life, already tough for these folks in ordinary times, will be especially rough during a downturn.

That explains why, in the last 12 months, he has worked with various agencies including community development councils, to employ more than a dozen low-income housewives, former convicts, as well as senior citizens and retirees who could not find jobs. They make up more than half of the 46 staff on his payroll.

This is how his employment scheme works. Candidates first undergo intensive training over several days in painting and craft-work.

Mr Han - who receives no funding from the Government - does not charge for these workshops. Instead, he pays the trainees a daily allowance of $25.

'Many of these people, especially the low-income housewives, need to eat and feed their children.'

Those with creative aptitude and good art skills are then deployed to one of his centres to supervise or teach.

The rest are offered work ranging from varnishing, painting or assembling on a full or part-time basis.

Wages vary, from $25 to $45 daily. Those employed full-time also get Central Provident Fund contributions.

'I'm very upfront. I tell them what I can afford, and they will decide if what I am offering is fair. I do not short-change them.

'I know some of them have complicated backgrounds so I try to be flexible and accommodate their requests,' said Mr Han, who allows some of the low-income housewives to bring their children to work.

He readily admits that it would be a lot more cost-effective and logistically less complicated to hire regular, younger, staff.

'But that's not giving back to society. When I set up Han's Art, I was very clear that it would not just be about money,' said the only child of a retired seaman and a housewife.

Each of his outlets is run by individual partners, all of whom are his former students.

The company makes its money from the workshops and lessons it conducts, as well the sale of its handicraft items.

Profits, he says, are not great.

He let on: 'Some months, we are even in the red. But we always manage.'

Then he added: 'How much can you take with you when you die anyway?'

Mr Han spent three years studying art in Paris after completing his national service in the mid-1980s.

He returned and worked at a number of jobs, from Ikea sales assistant to chief designer at an interior design firm, before setting up Han's Art in 2000.

'Our tagline is 'Art for everyone'. I wanted it to be a business which not only promotes art but also helps the community,' said the unassuming man, who has also conducted free art workshops for prison inmates, teenage delinquents and HIV patients.

'I don't want to just hire, I want to give second chances and instil some confidence. Poverty has made some of these people so unsure of themselves.'

He added: 'I can't describe the feeling when you know you've really made a difference in someone's life.'

Madam Cai Kim Hua, 35, certainly found her stride at Han's Art.

The native of China's Hainan province married a Singaporean hawker two years ago but found it hard to get a job to supplement her husband's meagre income.

Together with a small group of low-income housewives, she was referred to Mr Han by one of his staff who does volunteer work.

Mr Han noticed her artistic bent and trained her to become an art instructor. Not only has she become more confident, but she has also picked up some English.

Working about five hours each day six days a week, she earns more than $800 a month, enough to send some money home to her family in Hainan.

Another employee, Mr Patrick Hong, 58, says he lost count of the number of job applications he sent out before he joined Han's Art six months ago.

'People don't give senior citizens a chance, they think we cannot contribute to society,' the former communications officer with an oil giant lamented in impeccable English.

'But Mr Han accepts anybody who wishes to learn,' said Mr Hong who now teaches craftwork at several outlets.

With a quiet smile, Mr Han likens his set-up and his community work to a big installation art piece.

'I'm an artist. I use all sorts of mediums - paints, crayons - but my new medium will be human beings.

'I want this to be a masterpiece. I want to paint it with laughter, tears, happiness and sadness. I want this to be something which a lot of people can see, and use, and benefit from.'

He says he is far from done.

'But when I'm finished, it will make me, and a lot of people, very happy.'

kimhoh@sph.com.sg

===

'Art can change lives'

 

MR HAN Kian Teng fervently believes that the creative process of art can heal, motivate and improve the quality of life.

'One of my teachers in Paris was an art therapist. We would have long talks and he would lend me books on how to use art to boost confidence and develop character,' said the artist who studied at the Victorian School of Fine Arts, a small arts college in Paris in the 1990s.

 

Mr Han wanted to impart what he had learnt and got his opportunity when the principal of the Kaki Bukit Prison School approached him to help raise funds several years ago.

'I told her that I could give her a cheque for a few hundred dollars this year but if she approached me again after that, I might not entertain her.'

He added: 'I said it was better that I taught the inmates the skills of raising funds so that they could do it without asking people for money.'

He then started conducting free art workshops for the school's inmates. Word spread and soon he was conducting similar workshops for several marginalised groups such as inmates at Changi Prison as well as HIV patients at the Communicable Diseases Centre.

His contributions have earned him awards of appreciation from both the Singapore Prison Service and the Yellow Ribbon Project (YRP).

YRP's secretariat Leonie Tan said: 'Mr Han was one of the judges for our Yellow Ribbon Art Competition 2008 and he also assisted us to successfully put together a Community Exhibition at the Marina Square last year. His passion and dedication would go a long way to inspire more Singaporeans to take greater ownership in helping ex-offenders stay crime-free.'

A beautiful piece of art results, Mr Han says, when a person works at it with the right attitude, patience, responsibility and passion.

At Changi Prison where he has been conducting free weekly workshops for the last two years, he takes the opportunity to teach prisoners about responsibility.

'I tell them their actions affect not just themselves but their loved ones. I remind them that some of their wives and children lead very hard lives outside because of what they have done.'

Mr Han has a gameplan to realise his company's tagline 'Art for everyone'.

'We're starting with people who can help themselves. That's why I'm training and hiring low-income housewives; I want them to inspire other housewives.'

He added: 'I want it to be a network: the young can help the old and vice versa, the healthy can help the sick, the retirees can help the senior citizens.

'Art is empowering. It can change lives.'

===

Artist-entrepreneur has a soft spot

 

MR HAN Kian Teng, 38, is the founder of Hans Art Gallere, which operates 22 arts and craft outlets throughout the island.

Trained in Paris, the only child of a retired seaman and housewife has a soft spot for the marginalised, including ex-convicts, low-income housewives and retirees.

Mr Han - who has been holding free art workshops for prisoners, HIV patients and delinquents in the last few years - believes that art can empower, motivate and change lives.

Married to a hairdresser, he set up Hans Art as an extension of his community work and has stepped up efforts to hire the less fortunate during the downturn.

===

Do you know a Recession Hero?

 

LAST week, we started the Recession Heroes series with the story of Mr Ho Ah Chuan, a training and human resource veteran who helps out-of-work people identify their strengths for free. More than 50 readers wrote in seeking his advice, and half a dozen more volunteered to help Mr Ho in his community service.

Now in Dallas, Texas, on a business trip, Mr Ho told The Straits Times that he has acknowledged all e-mails sent to him and would follow up 'on every one of them after I get home on March 16'. He welcomes others who need help with their careers to write to him at acho2005@gmail.com.

Do you know a recession hero, someone who is going the extra mile and working selflessly to help, support or improve the lives of people affected by these trying times?

If you do know someone extra special, tell us who he is. Write to us at sthero@sph.com.sg

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.

Privacy Statement & Condition of Access

FT: A bright idea that helped India's poor

A bright idea that helped India’s poor

By Amy Kazmin

Published: February 24 2009 22:42 | Last updated: February 24 2009 22:42

Harish Hande’s first installation of solar-powered lights in a rural Indian home was a stealth operation. The founder of Selco India, then a 26-year-old engineer, believed passionately that millions of Indians living in darkness at night could have their lives transformed by solar technology. But he needed a customer who could afford to pay the high up-front costs of solar lights and testify to their merits.

In September 1994 Mr Hande asked a wealthy betel nut farmer in the southern state of Karnataka for permission to install the lights in his house. The farmer, who had never heard of solar energy, refused. But Mr Hande sensed the farmer’s elderly mother, who had listened attentively, was intrigued.

A few days later, Mr Hande returned while the farmer was away and – with the mother’s connivance – surreptitiously installed the lights. Returning a week later, he was greeted ecstatically by the farmer, who handed over the Rs15,000 ($300, €240, £210) payment.

Since then, Selco has sold solar lights to about 95,000 village households, and to schools, orphanages and religious institutions.

Given the hundreds of millions of Indians still dependent on sooty kerosene lamps for light each night, such figures are modest. Yet after years spent educating rural consumers and lenders about solar power – and battling with foreign shareholders focused more on profit than on social impact – Mr Hande is poised for a dramatic expansion of Selco’s operations.

In recent months, the company has received $1.4m in equity financing from the Good Energies Foundation, the Lemelson Foundation and E+Co – all social investors supporting the effort to develop a solar energy business to cater to the rural poor.

Mr Hande’s target is to sell solar lights to 200,000 more rural families within the next four years, a significant jump in pace. But he regards other aspects of Selco’s model of social enterprise as equally important. The company’s technicians, for instance, provide regular after-sales service, checking each installation twice a year, and aim to respond to breakdowns within 24 hours.

“We know that our contribution in terms of numbers will be tiny, but what we want to do is show a path that others can follow,” he says.

The seeds of Selco were planted on a trip to the Dominican Republic, while Mr Hande was pursuing graduate studies in energy engin­eering at the Center for Sustainable Energy at the University of Massachusetts. “I saw these very poor people using solar lighting,” he recalls. “In India, people were less poor or equally poor. And if people there were using solar, why couldn’t we?”

Soon afterwards, Mr Hande contacted Neville Williams, who founded the non-profit Solar Electric Light Fund (Self) to promote solar energy in developing countries. In 1993, Self received a $40,000 grant from the US-based Rockefeller Brothers Fund to install solar lights in 100 rural Indian houses and invited Mr Hande, who was still working on his studies, to run the project.

Sustainable repayments: why solar light sales need the right loans

An engineer from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Harish Hande was writing his PhD thesis, “Rural Electrification in India: Does Solar Make Sense?”, even as he started to turn his theorising into practical action.

Dealing with India’s rural poor is traditionally the preserve of government or non-profit charities – or rapacious money-lenders ready to step in with emergency loans at extortionate interest rates.

But after two years of research in rural villages in India and Sri Lanka, Mr Hande was convinced the poor would pay for solar lights, in spite of their hefty cost, if they could obtain affordable loans with repayment schedules that reflected their cash flow. “If you create appropriate financing and appropriate products, the people will pay,” he says.

Much of Mr Hande’s energy has gone into persuading rural loan officers in state banks to provide credit to families to buy solar lights. But he remains awed by villagers’ willingness to spend the equivalent of a full year’s income on his product.

“Think how much time we take to make a decision to spend a whole year’s salary,” he says. “But the poor are willing to pay.”

But Mr Hande was concerned about the long-run servicing of the lights, which he felt only a company could guarantee. Bringing the $40,000 grant into India also proved complicated, given New Delhi’s then strict capital controls.

So he obtained a single solar lighting system on credit from Tata BP Solar, an Indian solar panel manufacturer. He sold that system to the betel nut farmer, raising his first cash. “We were desperate for money,” he says. “We had got one system on credit, but I knew we couldn’t get more than that.”

For the next 2½ gruelling years, Mr Hande travelled across rural Karnataka by bus, explaining how solar lighting worked and installing systems – obtained on credit, with the grant money, which was still stuck in the US, as a guarantee – in the homes of wealthier farmers, who could afford them.

He also pleaded with rural bank officials to lend money to poorer families wanting to buy the lights, which cost at least Rs10,000. “It was hand to mouth,” he says. “I had to create the seeds of faith in rural areas that this technology works.”

After Mr Hande had personally installed 400 solar light systems, Selco received a loan of about $128,000 from USAid, through its partner Winrock, to finance its first three rural service centres to sell, install and service solar lights. This was the first step towards building the sustainable rural delivery system that Mr Hande envisaged. “This can succeed only if you have doorstep service and doorstep financing,” he says.

Between 1999 and 2001, Selco India received a $750,000 equity infusion, after Mr Williams raised funds from boutique investors in the US for solar light promotion in India and Vietnam. The ownership of Selco India was transferred from Self to a US for-profit company; with the new investors in control, Mr Hande was given a 2.5 per cent stake. Meanwhile, Selco India received a $1m loan from the International Finance Corporation, the private lending arm of the World Bank, in 2003.

Selco broke even for the first time in March 2001 and then earned small cash surpluses for several years. But by 2004, Mr Hande was under pressure from foreign shareholders over the company’s profits, which peaked at $88,380 in March 2005. The real crisis came, though, when Germany’s solar power subsidies created a global shortage of solar cells, causing prices to rise by 47 per cent.

In 2007, Mr Hande, who by then had 120 workers and 25 rural service centres, needed to raise new capital. “We were bleeding,” he says. “We had clients but we couldn’t do the sales – we had no supplies.” The foreign shareholders wanted him to shed staff – which he refused to do – and rebuffed his appeal for fresh funds as they sought to sell out.

But with its own $1m loan at stake, the IFC, which had another outstanding loan to the US-based parent company, staunchly backed Mr Hande and Selco India management, giving him the confidence to bring in a new set of more socially oriented investors.

With extra cash and lower solar cell prices, Mr Hande says he can now wipe out Selco’s Rs7.5m losses within two years, while expanding. But he has learnt a hard lesson about those who are driven less by ideas of social service than profits.

“Irrespective of whether you want money, you should have control of the company for the sake of the mission,” he says. “No matter how desperate you are for money, never take it from someone whose mission is not aligned with your own.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

TED: Jose Antonio Abreu: Help me bring music to kids worldwide

Jose Antonio Abreu: Maestro

Video (click here)

Jose Antonio Abreu founded El Sistema ("the system") in 1975 to help poor Venezuelan kids learn to play a musical instrument and be part of an orchestra. 30 years on, El Sistema has seeded 102 youth orchestras -- and many happy lives.

Why you should listen to him:

The gulf between the rich and the poor in Venezuela is one of the worst in the world. Jose Antonio Abreu, an economist, musician, and reformer, founded El Sistema ("the system") in 1975 to help Venezuelan kids take part in classical music. After 30 years (and 10 political administrations), El Sistema is a nationwide organization of 102 youth orchestras, 55 children's orchestras, and 270 music centers -- and close to 250,000 young musicians.

El Sistema uses music education to help kids from impoverished circumstances achieve their full potential and learn values that favor their growth. The talented musicians have become a source of national pride. Several El Sistema students have gone on to major international careers, including Gustavo Dudamel, soon to be the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the bassist Edicson Ruiz, who at 17 became the youngest musician ever to join the Berlin Philharmonic.

There is a simple concept behind Abreu's work: for him an orchestra is first and foremost about together­ness, a place where children learn to listen to each other and to respect one another.

"Music has to be recognized as an ... agent of social development in the highest sense, because it transmits the highest values -- solidarity, harmony, mutual compassion. And it has the ability to unite an entire community and to express sublime feelings."

José Antonio Abreu

===

Gustavo Dudamel and the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra: Ensemble

Please block out 20 minutes, hook up your computer to the best speakers you own, crank the volume and enjoy orchestral music as you've never seen or heard it before. 

The Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra is the national high-school-age youth orchestra of El Sistema, made up of the best young musicians from throughout Venezuela. Gustavo Dudamel, himself a product of El Sistema, is the new musical director of the LA Philharmonic.

Why you should listen to them:

The Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra (Sinfónica Juvenil Teresa Carreño) is the national high school age youth orchestra of El Sistema, Venezuela's groundbreaking, life-changing musical education program. To put this ensemble's musicianship in context, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela is the next step for many of these young musicians. That orchestra, containing musicians from 18 to 28 years old, has toured the world with conductor Gustavo Dudamel and has made a number of recordings on Deutsche Grammophon. The Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra is the next level below, and will succeed the Simón Bolívar.

Their conductor in this TEDTalk is Gustavo Dudamel, himself a product of the El Sistema. Dudamel conducted the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela for several years, and recently was named the Los Angeles Philharmonic's music director. He also continues to conduct other orchestras around the world.

The orchestra's namesake, Teresa Carreño, was a legendary Venezuelan pianist after whom the main theater/concert hall complex in Caracas is also named.

Seth Godin: National Day of Service - 18 ideas that you can do with time and not so much with money

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/01/national-day-of.html

National Day of Service

Monday, January 19 is Martin Luther King Day. And wonderfully, instead of adding yet another shopping day to the calendar, it's being transformed to a day of service.

If every person in the US spent an hour doing something selfless, useful and leveraged, what would happen? What if you and your circle committed to doing it an hour a day for a year? 300 million hours is a lot of hours for just one day, a year of that would change everything.

While I applaud stopgap contributions like helping out in a soup kitchen (where labor and supplies are really needed), I wonder how those that are lucky enough to be web savvy can create work that really adds leverage. What if you did one of these things every day?

Here are some ideas that you can do online or in your community, with time, not so much with money.

1. Read a copy of the Lorax to a child that's never heard it.
2. Teach someone how to sell their services on Craigslist, or how to use the web to find a job.
3. Build a Squidoo lens every day for a year about a favorite author or musician and dedicate the proceeds to charity. 300 a year could earn tens of thousands of dollars for a cause you care about. That adds up to serious money.
4. Start a blog and profile one worthy non-profit every single day.
5. Go through your house and find beloved books that you're glad you read... and give them to the library.
6. Find an artisan and redesign their website or help them figure out how to promote their work.
7. Create and promote an online petition for a cause you care about.
8. Make a video that teaches people how to do better in a job interview or balance a checkbook or spot consumer fraud.
9. Start a Facebook group for like-minded people who support the same non-profit you do. Commit to spending time to promote it, organize the people there and actually create outcomes of value.
10. Seek out a religion that isn't yours and volunteer to help build a bridge between your circle and theirs.
11. Write ten letters a day to corporations seeking donations for a local homeless shelter.
12. Find a tool that non-profits need online, and then organize some brilliant people to build it as an opensource utility.
13. Find a cause that supports soldiers or diplomats or other public servants that are on the road, and make it easier for them to connect with people back home.
14. Use Copilot to diagnose and fix computer problems for people or causes that can't afford fancy IT support. It's free on weekends.
15. Find an entrepreneur in the developing world and become her email penpal. Daily advice and encouragement might save hundreds of lives.
16. Lobby Congress with letters and blog posts to make a change to a law that doesn't benefit you at all, but helps the community in the long run.
17. Write a great wikipedia article every day about a person who is changing the world for the better.
18. Find video and remix it into an insanely viral video that promotes a cause that you believe in.

If you want to add some brainstorms to the list, here's a plexo just waiting for your ideas.

Monday, January 19 is Martin Luther King Day. And wonderfully, instead of adding yet another shopping day to the calendar, it's being transformed to a day of service.

If every person in the US spent an hour doing something selfless, useful and leveraged, what would happen? What if you and your circle committed to doing it an hour a day for a year? 300 million hours is a lot of hours for just one day, a year of that would change everything.

While I applaud stopgap contributions like helping out in a soup kitchen (where labor and supplies are really needed), I wonder how those that are lucky enough to be web savvy can create work that really adds leverage. What if you did one of these things every day?

Here are some ideas that you can do online or in your community, with time, not so much with money.

1. Read a copy of the Lorax to a child that's never heard it.
2. Teach someone how to sell their services on Craigslist, or how to use the web to find a job.
3. Build a Squidoo lens every day for a year about a favorite author or musician and dedicate the proceeds to charity. 300 a year could earn tens of thousands of dollars for a cause you care about. That adds up to serious money.
4. Start a blog and profile one worthy non-profit every single day.
5. Go through your house and find beloved books that you're glad you read... and give them to the library.
6. Find an artisan and redesign their website or help them figure out how to promote their work.
7. Create and promote an online petition for a cause you care about.
8. Make a video that teaches people how to do better in a job interview or balance a checkbook or spot consumer fraud.
9. Start a Facebook group for like-minded people who support the same non-profit you do. Commit to spending time to promote it, organize the people there and actually create outcomes of value.
10. Seek out a religion that isn't yours and volunteer to help build a bridge between your circle and theirs.
11. Write ten letters a day to corporations seeking donations for a local homeless shelter.
12. Find a tool that non-profits need online, and then organize some brilliant people to build it as an opensource utility.
13. Find a cause that supports soldiers or diplomats or other public servants that are on the road, and make it easier for them to connect with people back home.
14. Use Copilot to diagnose and fix computer problems for people or causes that can't afford fancy IT support. It's free on weekends.
15. Find an entrepreneur in the developing world and become her email penpal. Daily advice and encouragement might save hundreds of lives.
16. Lobby Congress with letters and blog posts to make a change to a law that doesn't benefit you at all, but helps the community in the long run.
17. Write a great wikipedia article every day about a person who is changing the world for the better.
18. Find video and remix it into an insanely viral video that promotes a cause that you believe in.

If you want to add some brainstorms to the list, here's a plexo just waiting for your ideas.

FT: Far from the boardroom

Far from the boardroom

By Sarah Murray

Published: January 12 2009 00:06 | Last updated: January 12 2009 00:06

When John Eder, an MBA student at Kenan-Flagler Business School in the US, was on a summer internship in Ethiopia giving business training to women with HIV/Aids, he discovered something surprising.

“Some of the women have been selling stuff in the local market for a long time,” he says. “And they’d sit there and talk about principles I learned from my classes. Things my professors had been telling me, they would be telling me – and they never went to any college or had any business training.”

Mr Eder, who was working with the Society of International Missionaries in Addis Ababa, plans to start a business. However, rather than gaining experience through a summer internship at an investment bank or management consultancy, Mr Eder decided to work in a developing country with a non-profit organisation supporting entrepreneurs.

He is not alone. As the appetite among MBA students for courses that address social and environmental problems grows, many are using their summer internship to gain experience in these areas by working with non-profits, non-governmental organisations, or social entrepreneurs.

“There’s a huge appetite for this,” says Gib Bulloch, director of Accenture Development Partnerships, an arm of Accenture that provides services to non-profit groups in developing countries. “You have the international experience that people crave and the emerging markets experience that’s increasingly important to the whole sustainability agenda.”

While assignments at ADP are mainly taken up by Accenture employees who wish to spend time working in an emerging market, the company has in recent years also offered the assignments as internships for undergraduates and MBA students. Students have worked with organisations such as Unicef in New Delhi, the Global Food Banking Network in South Africa and Women’s World Banking in New York.

Chance to gain firmer grasp

After acquiring a taste for development work on an internship, many MBA graduates look for something permanent in this field. However, while having the prerequisite qualification, they do not – apart from their summer trip – necessarily have the international experience that development and large non-governmental agencies are looking for.

One organisation that can help is the Corporate Development Corps, a non-profit organisation based in Washington. For the past 18 years, CDC has been placing recently graduated MBAs from top US business schools with entrepreneurs or non-governmental organisations in developing countries.

Through its MBA Enterprise Corps (MBAEC) programme, the CDC selects business school graduates and finds them appropriate projects in emerging markets.

Placements are for 12 to 15 months, giving graduates a chance to gain an in-depth understanding of the kind of work they sampled during their internship.

“The MBAEC becomes the launch pad for a career move,” says CD Glin, MBAEC director. “And usually they’re picked up right after because they’re already in the country or region they’re interested in.”

Compensated for board and expenses, plus a per diem rate, the MBAEC advisers help the organisations in which they are placed with tasks such as creating business plans, conducting strategic analysis and improving marketing programmes.

A monitoring programme assesses progress on the projects. “Then the graduates can get some satisfaction that they’ve achieved something,” explains Barbara Gbologah-Quaye, CDC representative in Ghana.

For some individuals, the choice of this type of internship may be a prelude to a career in the non-profit sector. However, for others, such as Mr Eder, such experience is seen as highly relevant to a career in the business world.

“These are MBAs who have offers from McKinsey, Bain and Deloitte,” says Elmira Bayrasli, head of partnership policy and outreach at Endeavor, a US-based non-profit that identifies and supports entrepreneurs in countries such as Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, India, Egypt and Jordan.

“But they’d like to have an experience working with a real entrepreneur in an emerging market.”

Through what it calls its eMBA programme, Endeavor selects students from top business schools in the US to spend 10 weeks working with some of the entrepreneurs on its programme. Recruits come from Harvard, Stanford, Wharton and Columbia business schools. Endeavor is expanding the programme to other schools such as Thunderbird, Chicago and MIT Sloan.

“A lot of the students are going for the first time to these developing economies,” says Ms Bayrasli. “And they’re not just learning about the economy – they’re learning about the culture and the people. Those are things that don’t come into a business school classroom.”

While students working with non-profits or entrepreneurs are gaining knowledge of new markets and ways of doing business, the learning process is two-way. Such organisations recognise that MBA interns provide valuable services to non-profits and social entrepreneurs.

As a result, savvy non-profit organisations have established fellowships or summer programmes that attract MBAs looking for an alternative internship.

Among the first to do so was Ashoka, the pioneering social entrepreneurship non-profit organisation. Last year, Ashoka’s MBA interns worked with small businesses in housing, health, energy, banking and agribusiness on 10-week assignments in Brazil and Mexico.

In addition to giving non-profits or social entrepreneurs access to the business skills of MBA students, some of the organisations offering these kinds of internships have found the programmes bring other benefits too.

At ADP, the internship programme also gives the company a competitive edge when it comes to recruiting talent. “They come back highly motivated and with new skills, but they also tell their whole campus about a different side to Accenture – and they tend to accept job offers,” says Mr Bulloch.

For MBAs, the internships give the opportunity to gain international experience in a very different business context from any they may have encountered at home.

Amy Lin, a Wharton MBA student who spent a summer in the Kenya office of Acumen Fund, which invests in and supports developing country entrepreneurs, found one of the biggest adjustments was working in a resource-stretched environment.

“The East Africa office is really small, with only two full-time people and there’s a lot to be done, so there was a lot of sharing work.”

Working without access to the kind of infrastructure and technology taken for granted in mature markets was also a challenge.

However, much of what the MBA students have learned in their first year proves highly relevant to their summer assignments.

“Sometimes when you’re a student, you can lose track of real world applications and this threw me into it right away,” says Ms Lin.

“I had to look at financial models, evaluate whether I believed their assumptions, pick apart a balance sheet and make sure that it fitted with the business model.”

And some of the more intangible lessons MBA students have learned during their time in the developing world have proved extremely powerful. Mr Eder was deeply impressed by the perseverance of the women he was working with – women who, even with access to retroviral drugs, could only count on a limited lifespan.

“They [the women] faced something I had thought was insurmountable but they were just going to keep going. And that’s really healthy for someone who’s going to be an entrepreneur. It’s not a direct business principle, but for me it’s very important for what I’m going to be doing.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Fortune: A CEO masters micro-credit

Unlike most of those lenders, Hand in Hand insists on extensive training for the borrowers before advancing the money, because those little businesses need to succeed. Hand in Hand targets the very poorest; most have never operated in the cash economy at all and aren't ready to run even a simple business. "We teach 75,000 women a year to read, write, and do basic math in 150 days," says Barnevik.

Then comes training in finance, entrepreneurialism, and basic operations in one of many possible businesses, such as baking or making jute bags. Only then, after three to four months, does cash follow, and it must go directly into the business; some microlenders don't monitor the cash, which may then go into consumption.

The model is different in other ways as well. Beyond microlending, it focuses on improving health, cleaning up village environments, involving the poorest in democracy, and getting children (more than 30,000 at last count) out of jobs and into school. Those elements reinforce one another to create a system Barnevik insists must become self-sustaining; Hand in Hand may bring in new schoolteachers, for example, but the villagers must pay them. Otherwise he's just creating dependency, not prosperity.

===

A CEO masters micro-credit

Ex-ABB chief (and GM board member) Percy Barnevik is making a different kind of subprime loan: to India's very poor.

By Geoff Colvin

January 12, 2009: 6:01 AM ET

(Fortune Magazine) -- Most retired CEOs don't really retire. They serve on boards, teach at business schools, fund charities. Percy Barnevik's retirement plans are more ambitious: He intends to lift millions of people out of the world's deepest poverty.

Barnevik, 67, is best remembered as the star CEO of ABB, the giant Swiss-based electrical engineering company, from 1988 to 1996; he was then chairman of Investor AB, the business vehicle of Sweden's Wallenberg family, for another five years. He still holds a few retired-CEO jobs - including the unhappy one of being a General Motors director - but his passion is an organization called Hand in Hand International, which he came to four years ago, when it had 30 employees; today it has 6,000, plus 20,000 volunteers.

Barnevik bills himself as its "advisor," but he is its main benefactor and driving force. He spends about 80% of his time on Hand in Hand and its mission of raising living standards among the poorest of the poor, starting in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. As he made clear when I spoke with him recently in New Delhi, he isn't just helping poor people, he is building businesses. "Everything I learned as a CEO applies in this world as well," he says.

Hand in Hand's model is microfinance, but with several important differences. Like Grameen Bank and others, it makes tiny loans (average size: $125) to groups of women who are starting or running businesses. Unlike most of those lenders, Hand in Hand insists on extensive training for the borrowers before advancing the money, because those little businesses need to succeed. Hand in Hand targets the very poorest; most have never operated in the cash economy at all and aren't ready to run even a simple business. "We teach 75,000 women a year to read, write, and do basic math in 150 days," says Barnevik.

Then comes training in finance, entrepreneurialism, and basic operations in one of many possible businesses, such as baking or making jute bags. Only then, after three to four months, does cash follow, and it must go directly into the business; some microlenders don't monitor the cash, which may then go into consumption.

The model is different in other ways as well. Beyond microlending, it focuses on improving health, cleaning up village environments, involving the poorest in democracy, and getting children (more than 30,000 at last count) out of jobs and into school. Those elements reinforce one another to create a system Barnevik insists must become self-sustaining; Hand in Hand may bring in new schoolteachers, for example, but the villagers must pay them. Otherwise he's just creating dependency, not prosperity.

Hand in Hand reaches about 350,000 Indian women in 200,000 small businesses, and while continuing to grow in India, it is also expanding into Afghanistan, South Africa, and China. The great promise, Barnevik says, is helping the billion people globally who live on less than a dollar a day. Consider the math: He figures it costs $200 on average to create a job in the developing world, and the developed world currently spends about $110 billion a year on aid. No, it can't all be redirected into programs like his, but divert just a bit of it, and in ten or 20 years you've made a huge impact.

A couple of timely thoughts inspired by Barnevik's story: First, "subprime" is a cultural notion, not just a financial one. By conventional criteria, no one would ever lend a cent to illiterate women in South Indian villages, but Hand in Hand says its repayment rate is 99.7%.

Second, as we leave the season of giving and enter a challenging new year, we're reminded that the most valuable thing each of us has to give isn't money. Barnevik has given about $17 million to Hand in Hand, but that isn't what has made it so effective. For him and for the rest of us, the most serious gift - arguably the only serious one - is our knowledge, abilities, and passions.  

Microlending gives hope to the HIV positive
Saving the world with a cup of yogurt
Chasing the 'base of the pyramid'