David South Consulting

Tag: 2008

  • Solar Power Bringing Light and Opportunity to the Poor

    Solar Power Bringing Light and Opportunity to the Poor

    By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

    SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

    Meeting the South’s energy needs will be crucial to achieving radical improvements in quality of life and human development. It is estimated that 1.7 billion people around the world lack electricity (World Bank), of whom more than 500 million live in sub-Saharan Africa.

    Africa’s greater global engagement and economic growth in the past few years has started to draw attention back to the continent’s dearth of reliable power sources and inadequate power infrastructure. With demand for electricity growing fast, it is people running small enterprises and organizations – especially in rural areas – who often get cut out.

    Being able to see at night unleashes a vast range of possibilities, but for the very poor, lighting is often the most expensive household expense, soaking up 10 to 15 percent of income.

    There’s a direct link between lighting and economic development. Each 1 per cent increase in available power will increase GDP by an estimated 2 to 3 per cent.

    A reliable power supply helps people to work longer, important for small businesses, and this increases the amount of wealth that can be created. Lit streets are safer at night, and lure people outside to do business and seek entertainment. It makes it easier for students to study into the night, and in consequence improve their grades.

    To take up this challenge, entrepreneurs are using different approaches across the South, to make solar power affordable and able to reach millions of poor people.

    Marrying new lighting technology such as compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) and light emitting diodes (LEDs) with solar power generation, opens up the possibility to bring clean, portable, durable, low cost, high quality lighting to Africa’s poor. These new lighting systems also come with huge health and safety benefits, compared to gas alternatives.

    In Kenya, more than 80 percent of people lack access to the national grid and depend primarily on fossil fuels for their lighting needs, leading to respiratory diseases and environmental hazards associated with indoor air pollution.

    Kenyan solar entrepreneur Charles Rioba of Kodesha Mwangaza – Rent a Light is impressed by the interest in solar power solutions. An expert in renewable technologies with 15 years’ experience teaching in universities, he “realized that to reach the lower end of the market, one had to design an affordable solution.”

    “The biggest challenges faced are still affordability, and very little disposable income from the potential end users,” he said. “We are currently discussing with a number of micro institutions who have expressed interest on coming on board on rolling out the project.”

    Rioba’s business provides rental solar-charged Powerpacks designed to make electricity affordable for the majority of urban poor, rural households and slum dwellers. The rental system allows the consumer to rent a fully charged Powerpack from designated distributors in the neighbourhood, without having to invest in an off-grid power source, such as a solar panel. The project will set up 100 distribution agents and 10 service centers for the Powerpacks to reach approximately 8,000 households within 18 months. In addition the Powerpack will be used for mobile charging and powering radios, and hopes to create a new market concept for portable electrical energy distribution among the poor in Kenya.

    “My model targets to reach the lower end of the market,” Rioba said. “We are doing this by using existing businesses and groupings without creating new ones. We are also sourcing directly from the suppliers and we are working our project on numbers. In this way the margins are very low but aimed at achieving high usage hence return on investment.”

    Rioba has just been awarded funding by the World Bank’s Lighting Africa initiative, which aims to provide up to 250 million people in sub-Saharan Africa with access to non-fossil fuel based, low cost, safe, and reliable lighting products and associated basic energy services by the year 2030. It uses equipment that can weather long-term use in remote and difficult areas, trains people to service the equipment, and comes up with commercially viable business models to make all of this affordable to the rural poor.

    Rioba says that “for solar to be more attractive in Africa, there are a number of challenges. On the technology side, to make products which are both durable and affordable to the masses. Such new products such as LED lighting may ultimately reduce the size of the solar system and hence the cost.”

    In Laos, the rental mode is also proving effective. Only 48 percent of the country’s 5.7 million people have access to electricity, and most turn to firewood and kerosene for light and energy. Over 74 percent of people live on less than US $2 a day and could not afford to buy a solar-power system outright.

    The company Sunlabob rents solar-powered lanterns for prices beginning at 35,000 kip (US $3.80) per month, lower than the 36,000 to 60,000 kip (US $4.00 to US $6.60) per months households typically pay for kerosene fuel. After 10 hours’ use, the lanterns are recharged for a small fee from the village’s central solar-power collection facility. All fees go towards maintaining the central solar recharging station. The equipment is rented to a village-appointed Village Energy Committee, which sub-leases it to households at prices it sets. Rent covers all costs, including replacements and operational servicing costs. In the event of breakdowns, rent payments are suspended until repairs are made.

    Sunlabob has installed over 5,600 solar power systems since 2000 in over 450 villages and is also working in Cambodia and Indonesia.

    “Sunlabob really works well with local people,” says Bouathep Malaykham, head of the Lao Government Rural Electrification Program. “Because they are a private company they can make things happen quickly.”

    In Bangladesh, more than 230,000 households are now using solar power systems thanks to the government’s Infrastructure Development Company Ltd. (IDCOL), giving rise to opportunities for a whole new generation of entrepreneurs to make use of this new power supply for the poor. IDCOL is run by the Ministry of Finance, and is on course to install 1 million Solar Household Systems (SHS) using solar panels by 2012. The Bangladeshi government is hoping to bring electricity to all its citizens by 2020 – meaning this is now a prime time for entrepreneurs specializing in providing energy efficient products to the poor.

    The Executive Director of IDCOL, Ehsanl Haque, told a recent press conference: “SHS system, containing photo voltaic panels, battery, charge controller, solar lamp and switch, is a convenient mode for supply of power for small electrical loads such as lights, radio, cassette players and black and white TV.”

    It doesn’t provide electricity 24 hours a day, but Haque says even with a few hours of electricity available each day, the rural economy is being transformed. “Now they are using SHS for income-generating activities and working hours have been increased for small businessmen, weavers, tailors, hairdressers, and makers of handicraft items.”

    Among the many benefits of the electricity has been the ability to listen to radio and watch TV: an activity women reported made them feel safer at night.

    Published: September 2008

    Resources

    • Lighting Africa: this website run by the World Bank is a virtual business community and has forums, market intelligence, access to grants, network and partnership opportunities.
      Website: http://lightingafrica.org/index.cfm?Page=Home
    • D.light Design is dedicated to bringing modern lighting and power to over 1.6 billion people globally currently living without electricity. They aim to be the number one player in off-grid lighting and power solutions worldwide.
      Website: http://www.dlightdesign.com/
    • Solar Power Answers is a one-stop-shop for everything to do with solar power. It has a design manual and guides to the complex world of solar power equipment.
      Website: http://www.solar-power-answers.co.uk/index.php

    Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator. 

    Creative Commons License

    This work is licensed under a
    Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

    ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5311-1052.

    © David South Consulting 2022

  • Connoisseur Chocolate from the South Gets a Higher Price

    Connoisseur Chocolate from the South Gets a Higher Price

    By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

    SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

    Like coffee beans, cocoa beans are grown around the world and are a major commodity, highly prized in wealthy countries. West Africa accounts for 70 percent of the world’s output, with the rest grown either in Indonesia and Brazil (20 percent), or on a smaller scale in countries across the South, from Belize to Madagascar.

    Global sales of cocoa beans have grown by an average of 3.7 percent a year since 2001, and the World Cocoa Foundation estimates 40-50 million people depend on cocoa for their livelihood.

    But harvesting cocoa comes at a price to the farmers and those who work on the farms. It is estimated that 284,000 children in West Africa work under abusive conditions to harvest the beans. Cocoa farmers usually only benefit from the price of cocoa in the harvest season between October and February. In Ghana, the second largest producer of beans, child slavery allegations have plagued the cocoa plantations, along with too-low prices paid to farmers. Fluctuating global market prices constantly put small-scale farmers at risk of losing everything they have worked for.

    But consumers are developing ever-more sophisticated tastes for chocolate, paying more attention to the quality and origin of the beans. Savvy cocoa producers are using this greater awareness to increase prices for farmers and improve conditions for those who work on the farms.

    Maturing consumers’ palates are now picking chocolate and other food products from the South in much the same way as connoisseurs pick wines. In the United Kingdom alone, sales of Fairtrade-branded goods (www.fairtrade.org.uk)- a scheme that offers guaranteed prices and better trading conditions to farmers – have reached £560 million (US$1.1 billion) a year. A survey of consumers in six countries found awareness of fairly traded chocolate was highest in the UK, with 43 percent of people having tried it (http://www.barry-callebaut.com).

    British consumers willing to pay more for ethical products are at the forefront of a global surge in fair trade. Hans Vriens, chief innovation officer with Belgian chocolate makers Barry Callebaut, told The Independent newspaper: “Nowadays, chocolate consumption is coming to resemble the way we enjoy wine: we sample and compare different tastes.”

    The world’s appetite for chocolate is voracious: For example by 2007, volume sales of chocolate confectionery increased from 1998 by 30 percent in Eastern Europe, and by 40 percent in the Asia Pacific region. Europeans devour 35 percent of the world’s cocoa.

    In order to be classed as Fair Trade, a producer must meet a strict set of criteria governing how people and the environment are treated. The Fair Trade scheme pays farmers a higher price for cocoa beans, calculated on the basis of world market prices, plus fair trade premiums. The Fair Trade premium for standard quality cocoa is US$150 per tonne. The minimum price for Fair Trade standard quality cocoa, including the premium, is US$1,750 per tonne. Fair Trade ensures a minimum price of 80 US cents a pound under long-term contracts, with access to credit, and prohibits abusive child labour and forced labour.

    At the Chuao Plantation in Venezuela, the local Chuao Empresa Campesina cooperative, representing 100 farmers, is reaping the benefits of developing an exclusive relationship with an Italian chocolate company. Chocolatier Alessio Tessieri was willing to pay a lot more for the beans if high standards were maintained. His sister Cecilia was struck by the aroma of the rare Criollo bean grown by the farmers: it is the least productive in terms of output, but prized for its flavour.

    “We found an aroma that was greatly reminiscent of ripe red fruit and plum preserves, with an extremely delicate aftertaste,” she said. “A highly complex and sophisticated aroma lacking any trace of acidity.”

    Located in Parque Nacional Henri Pittier, a road and sea trip from the capital Caracas, the town of Chuao, population 1,500, has ideal growing conditions because of its high humidity. In the village, the women take care of the drying process. Throughout the town the cocoa beans lay out in the open on verandas. In the warehouses the enormous “masorche” – the fruit of the cocoa trees, looking like big red melons – are split in half and the pulp is removed, revealing the super-sweet white-coated beans inside.

    Alessio struck a good deal with the farmers in recognition of the exclusivity of the beans. He pays US$4 per kilogram against the US$1.30 per kilo paid by the local merchants. He also took on the farmers’ debts with the merchants. But most importantly, he ensured that one of his agronomists would stay behind and supervise the plantation and increase its production, from the current level of 120-130 kilos per hectare to a projected 250-300 kilos.

    The Toledo Hills Cacao Cooperative in Belize, South America has developed a relationship with one of the UK’s pioneers in fair trade chocolate, Green & Blacks. The Mayan Indians who farm the cocoa live a traditional life more or less as they have done for centuries. They also live in one of the poorest areas of Belize. The profits made are ploughed back into buying machetes, or rubber boots to protect against snake bites. The cocoa harvest helps supplement their traditional way of life.

    Green & Blacks has been buying organic cocoa from the farmers’ co-operative since 1994 and paying a guaranteed price above the world cocoa price. In 2003, they extended their activities with the cocoa farmers and started the Belize Programme to provide even more support. With an investment of £225,000 (US$443,350) over three years, the investment was used to help improve management and farming practices, rehabilitate hurricane-damaged crops, plant more cocoa trees, and train farmers in better growing methods. Green & Blacks continues to provide technical advice and support to the farmers. The business relationship with Green & Blacks has been so successful that other farmers in Belize are now interested in cocoa farming.

    The pattern is being repeated elsewhere in Latin America. In San Martin, Peru, rice farmers have moved into cocoa to reap the rewards of the higher prices. Alvis Valles Sajami and Alberto Inou Amasifuen are both graduates of the Peru Farmer Field School. Sajami uses a plant nursery as an extra source of income by selling cocoa plants to other farmers. “I already have 4,000 plants, he said. “This (the nursery) will be so important to increase my cocoa area. I can sell planting material to other farmers in order to have a new source of income for my family.”

    Amasifuen has already increased his own cocoa production from two hectares to five, and has also established a nursery to produce cocoa and timber tree seedlings to sell to area farmers.

    “We have an increase in demand for cocoa plants in San Martín,” he said. “We expect to provide seedlings not only to our farm, but also to other farmers in expanding their production area.”

    Learn more about cocoa trading and Africa’s role here (content provided by commodity.com): Cocoa’s Future as Commodity: What If Africa Can’t Keep Up the Supply? – Where’s Cocoa From and How Much Does It Contribute to the World’s Economy?

    Published: June 2008

    Resources

    • International Cocoa Organization, a good source of current data on the trade.
      Website: http://www.icco.org/about/chocolate.aspx
    • The Fairtrade Labelling Organization sets the standards for fair-trade and is the place to go to receive official certification.
      Website: www.fairtrade.org.uk
    • The Max Havelaar Foundation offers a similar service and is popular in continental Europe.
      Website: http://www.maxhavelaar.nl/pages/default.asp?rID=4
    • The International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) represents the organic farmers’ movement.
      Website: www.ifoam.org
    • World Cocoa Federation was formed in 2000 to play a leading role in helping cocoa farming families by developing and managing effective, on-the-ground programs, raising funds and acting as a forum for broad discussion of the cocoa farming sector’s needs.
      Website: http://www.worldcocoafoundation.org/about/default.asp

    More on chocolate here: West African Chocolate Success Story

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2022/11/21/agribusiness-food-security/

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/10/03/civet-cat-coffee-brews-filipino-opportunity/

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2022/10/14/indias-modernizing-food-economy-unleashing-new-opportunities/

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2022/10/21/new-beer-helping-to-protect-elephants/

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2022/10/31/rainforest-gum-gets-global-market/

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/03/05/southern-innovator-issue-2/

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/03/05/southern-innovator-issue-3/

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2022/10/20/trade-to-benefit-the-poor-up-in-2006-and-to-grow-in-2007/

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2022/10/17/west-african-chocolate-success-story/

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2022/10/18/woman-wants-african-farming-to-be-cool/

    Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator. 

    Creative Commons License

    This work is licensed under a
    Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

    ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5311-1052.

    © David South Consulting 2023

  • Small-scale Farmers Can Fight Malaria Battle

    Small-scale Farmers Can Fight Malaria Battle

    By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

    SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

    Malaria is one of Africa’s biggest killers. Each year globally 300 to 500 million people are infected, and around 1 million die from the disease (theglobalfund). Ninety percent of malaria deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa – mostly to children under the age of five. The disease costs African countries US$12 billion a year in lost gross domestic product.

    Malaria is a parasitic disease – the parasite plasmodium – transmitted by mosquito bites. Symptoms include fever, headache and vomiting. Internal bleeding, kidney and liver failure may follow and can result in coma and death.

    The most common and effective treatment, recommended by the World Health Organization, is artemisinin-based combination therapies, known as ACTs. ACTs have low toxicity, few side effects and act rapidly against the parasite. Research shows that artemisinin remedies cure 90 percent of patients within three days.

    But there are far fewer doses available than people who need them. WHO has claimed the quantity made available by pharmaceutical companies falls far short of the more than 130 million doses required to combat malaria throughout the world.

    And ACTs are very expensive to deliver: in just one country, Tanzania, providing such therapy for three years would cost US $48.3 million. Every year, this would account for 9.5 percent of Tanzania’s health budget, and 28.7 percent of yearly spending on medical supplies: a six-fold increase in budget for malaria treatment (Malaria Journal 2008, 7:4).

    But a cheap alternative to the expensive pill form of the treatment is being piloted across Africa. It involves the drinking of a tea made from the bushes of the artemisia plant. Artemisia annua is an annual shrub and the active ingredient in the pills (artemisinin). It is native to China and Vietnam and has been used for 2,000 years to treat fevers.

    Bushes cultivated by farmers in Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique under the supervision of the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, Kenya, are helping to bring down malaria rates without the long wait for the pills to arrive.

    The leaves are boiled and made into a tea. Drinking the tea gives a high enough dose of artemisinin in the blood to cure malaria. Helen Meyer, a nurse operating nine mobile health clinics in rural Mozambique, is using the bitter tea made from the dried leaves. Even in treating drug resistant malaria, she has found the artemisia tea effective: “If you drink the tea, you feel better after the first day. Other medicines take a few days.”

    A special hybrid of artemisia, A-3, is used because it is adapted for warmer climates. The wild variety grows to only five centimetres in the tropics, but A-3 grows to three metres and packs 20 times more artemisinin. It is also highly economical: thousands of plants can come from a single stem.

    The daily adult dose of anti-malaria tea just needs five grams of dried A-3 leaves in one litre of water. The tea is drunk every six hours for seven days. Each plant produces 200 grams of dried leaves, and a thousand shrubs can cure 5,700 people. Since it is a cheap cure, money can be spent instead on other things. Farmers are also able to supplement their income by growing the bushes. And the dried leaves have long-lasting power: even after three years the leaves retain close to a 100 percent of their artemisinin.

    Access to authentic artemisinin is critical: it is estimated 16 percent of malaria medicines in Kenya are counterfeit. Elsewhere, the proliferation of counterfeit anti-malarials substantially raises the risk of the emergence of resistance to artemesinin combination therapy, the last truly effective treatment against malaria. Past misuse of other malaria drugs, such as chloroquine in the 1980s and sulphadoxine/pyrimethamine in the 1990s, resulted in the malaria parasite becoming resistant. Hundreds of thousands of people in malaria-prone areas may have died as a result.

    The World Agroforestry Centre, recognizing potential problems with artemesinin monotherapies, is working to combine it with indigenous herbal remedies made from other anti-malarial trees, producing a herbal combination therapy (HCT).

    “I used to grow fruits and beans here,” said Charles Kiruthi, a Kenyan farmer, to the IRIN news service. “but I will get a better return from this plant. No pests attack it, and until harvesting time it requires very little labour.”

    “I expect to get a good return, and I am also very happy to be helping fight malaria,” continued Kiruthi. “I recently lost two friends to the disease, and my child gets sick with malaria sometimes.”

    Published: July 2008

    Resources

    Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator. 

    Creative Commons License

    This work is licensed under a
    Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

    ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5311-1052.

    © David South Consulting 2023

  • Cash Machines for the Poor

    Cash Machines for the Poor

    By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

    SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

    Access to basic banking services for the poor is weak at the best of times. Many are openly discriminated against as a ‘bad risk’ by banks, and denied the sort of banking services middle and higher income people take for granted. Yet it is a myth that the poor do not have money or do not wish to save and invest for their future or for business.

    The so-called Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) – the four billion people around the world who live on less than US $2 a day – are being targeted by a wide range of businesses. Indian business consultant and professor CK Prahalad, the man who coined the term BOP, has gone so far as to claim this is a market potentially worth US $13 trillion, while the World Resources Institute puts it at US $5 trillion in its report, The Next 4 Billion.

    And contrary to popular perception, the poor do have buying power, as has been documented by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professors Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo in their paper “The Economic Lives of the Poor”. Surveying 13 countries, they found those living on less than a dollar a day, the very poor, actually spent 1/3 of their household income on things other than food, including tobacco, alcohol, weddings, funerals, religious festivals, radios and TVs. The researchers also found that the poor increasingly used their spending power to seek out private sector options when the public sector failed to provide adequate services.

    India, where 63 percent of the BoP market is rural and 304.11 million people are illiterate (Human Development Report), makes for a particularly tricky market to reach with bank machines: the average transaction is just 100 rupees (£1.25).

    But a Madras-based company has come up with the Gramateller – a low-cost, blue-and-white bank machine custom-designed for the poor and illiterate. Vortex received funding of 2 million rupees (US $48,000) from an investment company, Aavishkar, that specializes in micro-venture capital — small sums for new business ideas. The advantage of micro-venture capital funding is its longer payback time: a young company does not get driven out of business by having to pay back the cash before the idea has been realized. Normally, venture capital helps a business to grow quickly but the venture capitalist wants to see an immediate profit on the investment.

    Vortex’s chief executive officer, V.Vijay Babu, said: “The idea was conceived by Prof. Jhunjhunwala of IITM (Indian Institute of Technology Madras) in the course of an exploratory project focused on using ICT to deliver modern banking services to rural India.”

    “It was found that branch-based banking is too expensive to be extended to remote rural locations where the volume and size of transactions are small. Using conventional ATMs (automatic teller machines) as a channel posed many difficulties because these ATMs were not built to operate in [illiterate] environments. Hence the need for developing an ATM specific to this context.”

    Costing just a 10th as much to build as an ordinary cash machine, Gramateller has a fingerprint scanner for the illiterate, and is able to accept dirty and crumpled bank notes. Vortex came up with an ingenious solution to do this, said Babu: “Vortex developed a beltless dispenser design that in many ways mimics the way a human teller would pick and count notes.”

    Vortex hopes to massively expand access to cash machines: at present, India has just 30,000 machines, or one for every 43,000 people (the US has a machine for every 1,000 people). These machines are being piloted with India’s biggest private bank, ICICI, and they have garnered interest from Indonesian banks as well.

    “We are running pilots for two leading banks with about 10 ATMs,” said Babu. “Though it is still early, the initial response has been very encouraging – rural users find fingerprint authentication intuitive and simple and the ATM convenient and easy to use. A few users also gave feedback that our ATMs look less intimidating, maybe because it is placed in a non-air conditioned room with easy access and also is different in shape from a typical ATM.”

    Furthermore the cash machines have taken a beating to see if they are robust enough for rural India: “The ATMs were tested for extended operating cycles under the harshest of environments that would prevail in the rural context — using soiled currencies, operating in non-air conditioned and dusty environments, subjecting the machine to typical fluctuations in line voltages and power outages. User-acceptance was tested by enlisting the participation of rural and semi-urban people to carry out test transactions.”

    As for thieves getting their hands on the cash before the poor, Vortex maintains the machines will not become the victim of thieves: each machine will only carry a fifth of the money of city-dwelling bank machines.

    Elsewhere in the South, a South African research and analysis company BMI-TechKnowledge (http://www.bmi-t.co.za/) in its latest report identifies a boom in banking services across Africa. In particular, South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Mauritius, Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt and Morocco – all have seen surges in profit and services as a result of improving banking regulations and political conditions. Maybe future markets for the Gramateller to reach Africa’s poor lie ahead?

    Published: August 2008

    Resources

    • Unleashing India’s Innovation: Toward Sustainable and Inclusive Growth, a report by the World Bank.
      Website: web.worldbank.org
    • xigi.net (pronounced ‘ziggy’ as in zeitgeist) is a space for making connections and gathering intelligence within the capital market that invests in good. It’s a social network, tool provider, and online platform for tracking the nature and amount of investment activity in this emerging market also referred to as blended value investing. xigi’s goal is to help this international emerging market to grow through market formation activities that guide and educate a growing wave of new money, while connecting it to the emergent entrepreneurs and deals on the internet.
      Website: http://www.xigi.net/
    • The new report Global Savings, Assets and Financial Inclusion by the Citi Foundation is packed with innovative approaches that are allowing the BoP (bottom of the pyramid) to use their income to build assets and more sustainable livelihoods.
      Website: http://www.newamerica.net
    • NextBillion.net: Hosted by the World Resources Institute, it identifies sustainable business models that address the needs of the world’s poorest citizens.
      Websites: http://www.nextbillion.net/ and World Resources Insitute

    Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator. 

    Creative Commons License

    This work is licensed under a
    Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

    ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5311-1052.

    © David South Consulting 2023