Tag: 2010

Favela Fashion Brings Women Work

Post author By David South Consulting
Post date 16/11/2022
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By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

A highly successful cooperative of women in Brazil has shown that it is possible for outsiders to make it in the fast-paced world of fashion. Despite being based in one of Rio de Janerio’s slums, or favelas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favela), the women have developed a reputation for high-quality merchandise and even put on fashion shows.

Fashion earns big money around the world: The global clothing industry is estimated to be worth more than US $900 billion a year. But fashion also has a reputation for relying on sweat shops, poor pay and poor working conditions. The poor are the most at risk of exploitation in the industry – upwards of 90 percent of sweatshop workers are women (www.feminist.org).

Yet the COOPA-ROCA cooperative (www.coopa-roca.org.br/en/index_en.html) – or Rocinha Seamstress and Craftwork Co-operative Ltd – has pioneered a way to involve poor women in the business, build their skills while creating high-quality products, and be flexible enough to make time for their families’ needs. It particularly helps single mothers.

The cooperative was founded by Maria Teresa Leal in Rocinha – the largest favela in Rio, home to over 180,000 people. After visiting her housekeeper’s home in the favela, Leal was impressed by the sewing skills of the women but found they weren’t making any money from their work. She decided to found the cooperative in 1981 and start making quilts and pillows. By the early 1990s, the cooperative had attracted the attention of Rio’s fashion scene. And in 1994, it jumped into making clothes for the fashion catwalks. Fashion designers in turn taught the women advanced production skills and about fashion trends.

Today, the coop has established a hard-won reputation for quality and sells its clothes to the wealthy elite of Rio. Its success has led to contracts with major clothing stores, including Europe’s C&A.

“Creativity is an important tool for transforming people and raising their consciousness,” Leal told Vital Voice. “My great passion is beauty. Beauty has the capacity to inspire, to touch individuals in a more subtle way. For this reason, I like to make beautiful things with the artisans of COOPA-ROCA.”

Leal realized that most small businesses helping the poor fail despite their best intentions. They often make the same mistakes: they fail to produce high quality goods, they fail to do market research and understand who they are selling to, they fail to develop the skills of their workers, and most importantly, they fail to see that they have to compete in a global economy with lots of other enterprises. How many people have seen crafts and knickknacks for sale that nobody really wants?

Slum dwellers are on the increase across the South. As the world becomes a more urban place – and 70 million people move every year to the world’s cities (UN) – the growing population of poor women and households presents a dilemma: how to provide meaningful work so they do not fall risk to exploitation? Without work opportunities, women can feel pressured to turn to prostitution, or even be trafficked by gangs for work or sex. And women in slums experience greater levels of unemployment than those who live elsewhere (UNHABITAT).

Women now make up the majority of the world’s poor: 70 percent of the world’s poor are women, as are a majority of the 1.5 billion living on less than US $1 a day (UNESCO).

Established in 1981 from a recycling project for local children, COOPA-ROCA started with finding ways to use thrown away scraps of cloth to make clothing. It eventually evolved into a cooperative. It focused on improving traditional Brazilian decorative craftwork skills like drawstring appliqué, crochet, knot work and patchwork.

“COOPA-ROCA works with traditional handicraft techniques that are widely used by women around the world,” explains Leal. “As COOPA-ROCA works with fashion, and fashion is always linked with media, the COOPA-ROCA artisans inspire other women who recognize in themselves the potential to do the kind of work that COOPA-ROCA does.”

For its first five years, COOPA-ROCA concentrated on building the organization and the skills of the artisans. Once a production structure was in place, quality control workshops were set up to increase the quality of the products so they could compete better in the marketplace.

“Many social projects believe that money is the only resource required to begin their work. The COOPA-ROCA case proves that social organizations must use a more entrepreneurial vision to understand the concept of resources.”

The cooperative’s mission statement is to “provide conditions for its members, female residents of Rocinha, to work from home and thereby contribute to their family budget, without having to neglect their childcare and domestic duties.”

By doing this to a high standard, the profile and reputation of traditional crafts has been raised.

The COOPA-ROCA hopes the work shows others how they can increase income in poor communities. The cooperative has 150 members and has partners in the wider fashion and decorative design markets.

The women equally share responsibility for production, administration and publicity. While they work at home, they come to the office to drop off the completed pieces and pick up more fabric.

The success of the cooperative has led to donations of funds to build a new headquarters designed by architect Joao Mauricio Pegorim.

Despite the cooperative’s success, it is still not easy to work with partners. “There are many negative preconceptions about Rocinha and the people who live there, both within and outside of Brazil. COOPA-ROCA is consistently rejected when it applies for loans,” Leal said. “Furthermore, the cooperative’s commercial partners usually do not enter the favela themselves, and I must serve as a bridge between the two worlds.”

But Leal is still ambitious for bigger things: “I envision COOPA-ROCA expanding to include 400 women artisans, producing for commercial partners, selling their own brand in Brazil and abroad, and carrying out fashion and design projects in the new headquarters in Rocinha.”

Published: March 2010

Resources

1) The online service CafePress is a specially designed one-stop shop that lets entrepreneurs upload their designs, and then sell them via their online payment and worldwide shipping service. Website:http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell/

2) Tips on how to start your own t-shirt business. Website: http://www.pioneerthinking.com/dy_tshirt.html And how to do it online: Website:http://www.ehow.com/how_2135779_start-network-online-tshirt-company.html

3) Once inspired to get into the global fashion business, check out this business website for all the latest news, jobs and events. Website:http://us.fashionmag.com/news/index.php

4) iFashion: This web portal run from South Africa has all the latest business news on fashion in Africa and profiles of up-and-coming designers. Website:http://www.ifashion.co.za/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

5) Kiva: Kiva’s mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty. Website:http://www.kiva.org/

6) Betterplace: Is another great way to solicit funds for NGOs or businesses in the developing world. Website: http://www.betterplace.org

7) Viva Favela: The first Internet portal in Brazil. Viva Favela has a team made up of journalists and “community correspondents” – favela residents qualified to act as reporters and photographers. Website:http://www.vivafavela.com.br/publique/cgi/cgilua.exe/sys/start.htm?infoid=40489&sid=74

8) Women in Poverty: A New Global Underclass by Mayra Buvinic (1998). Website: http://www.onlinewomeninpolitics.org/beijing12/womeninpoverty.pdf

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.

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© David South Consulting 2023

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Palestinian Olive Oil’s Peaceful Prosperity

Post author By David South Consulting
Post date 16/11/2022
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By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

The economic devastation of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine) has brought much hardship to the Palestinian people. The United Nations under the UNRWA mission has been working to lesson the hardship for over 60 years (http://www.unrwa.org). But there is only so much it can do.

However, several business initiatives are creating strong Palestinian food brands to improve the reputation and awareness of Palestine around the world. In particular, Palestinian olive oil has led the way and enjoyed strong sales in countries like the United Kingdom.

Since 2004, the Palestine Fair Trade Association (PFTA) (http://www.palestinefairtrade.org) has been leading the movement of fair trade producers in Palestine, linking small Palestinian farms in fair trade collectives and cooperatives across the country.

Zatoun (http://www.zatoun.com) – or Zaytoun (http://www.zaytoun.org) as its known in the UK – are olive oil and soap brands using the Arabic word for olive. Olive oil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_oil) is a popular cooking and seasoning oil and is sought after for its health benefits. Most of it is cultivated in the Mediterranean region, with Spain the largest single producer. Like wine, the quality of the olive oil varies greatly and the bouquet and viscosity of the oil play a big role in how consumers select a brand. The trend in the past 10 years has been for consumers to be more selective about the olive oil they buy and to be more informed about the choices available. This increasingly sophisticated consumer choice is what is helping the Palestinian oil succeed.

Another factor is the growing global popularity of the traditional Mediterranean diet. Research has linked it to the prevention of cancers, obesity and cardiovascular diseases, and an aid to food digestion. Olive oil and olives make up one of the six key groups of foods that are part of the Mediterranean Diet. The other elements are grains, fruits and vegetables, legumes and nuts, dairy products and fish.

The Zatoun brand of olive oil uses its profits to help olive tree farmers and their families in Palestine.

The brand is also hoping to alter public perceptions of Palestine. As its website states, “Zatoun helps to create a context based in ordinary everyday life to view and discuss the situation in Palestine-Israel. No longer is it an abstract geopolitical issue involving power elites and undefined national interest.”

The Zatoun brand is led in Canada by Robert Massoud, winner of the 2004 YMCA Peace Medallion. Zatoun is sold in Canada through peace groups and social justice and faith groups and is “intended as a tool to help promote their work and bring home the message that the struggle of Palestinians is ultimately one of human rights and social justice.”

The olive oil is certified fair trade under the Institute for Marketecology (IMO) (http://www.imo.ch/index.php?seite=imo_index_en) in Switzerland. The brand is operated as a not-for-profit with volunteer labour and the entire cost of the product goes to the farmers, customs and shipping costs, and promotion and administration. Each 750mL bottle sells from between CAD $15 (US $14) and CAD $17.50 (US $17.22) and each bar of soap is CAD $5.00 (US $4.90).

In the U.K., the Zaytoun brand was started by British women Heather Masoud and Cathi Pawson, also in 2004. The Palestinian olive oil has benefited from sales promotion during the United Kingdom’s annual Fair Trade Fortnight: a highly publicized promotion over two weeks that has consistently raised the profile of all Fair Trade products. Palestinian products were profiled during the 2009 event.

The Zaytoun brand is certified with the World Fair Trade Organization (www.wfto.com) and has been able to break through to sales in British supermarkets as a result. Having this certification is key to being accepted for display on the supermarket shelves. By being certified, the farmers are able to get guaranteed above market prices for their olives. This makes it easier to plan and invest in the farm and the community and avoid the wild fluctuations of market prices. It is common around the world for farmers to be bankrupted and impoverished when market prices crash and fall below the cost of growing and harvesting the product.

“We have been working for the Fair Trade certificate for four years,” Nasser Abufarha, chairman of the Palestinian Fair Trade Association told the Guardian newspaper. “Fair Trade will increase our sales, and bring us new markets and widen our reach.

“We have given farmers hope,” he said. “An economic exchange that recognises Palestinian farmers’ rights and respects the value of their connection to their land, after marginalization under Israeli occupation, is a major accomplishment.”

Olives are Palestine’s biggest crop, and critical to the local economy. The industry employs more than 100,000 people and its economic health affects many more. But the ongoing conflict has harmed the olive industry in many ways, from the bulldozing of orchards to make way for the Israeli security fence – over 1,100 hectares olive orchards were cut off by the fence in the West Bank village of Anin alone – to clearing fields for the building of new settlements.

For some of the farms, fair trade has meant access to outside markets they haven’t had for 40 years.

The Palestinian olive oil is in a market with fierce competition. In the UK, the oil can retail for £14.49 (US $23) a litre, while some Italian olive oils can be had for just US $9. But the Palestinian olive oil has a number of advantages in the marketplace: consumers have shown a willingness to pay the premium to support the farmers and Palestine, and most importantly in the competitive world of food sales, food connoisseurs rave about it. Food and wine writer Malcom Gluck called Zaytoun olive oil “one of the aggressive yet pungently attractive olive oils I have tasted”. He believes it easily ranks alongside the best Sicilian, Cretan and northern Spanish oils.

Another Palestinian company having success with the olive products is the Anabtawi Group (http://www.anabtawigroup.com/index.php?a=1&lid=3&lid1=24). Based in Nablus in the West Bank, it started in 2008 the Al-Ard Palestinian Agri-Products Company and sells Al-Ard extra virgin olive oil, virgin olive oil and an olive oil soap. Operating on a large scale, the group has the largest olive oil storage facility in Palestine and provides training and support to the farmers. It also undertakes marketing of the products in new markets including Latin America.

Ziad Anabtawi, the company’s president and CEO, told the Brazil-Arab News Agency “Palestinian olive oil is known worldwide for its high quality and its very striking aroma. It is ‘premium’ and organic by nature. Farmers grow the product the traditional way. They do not irrigate the olive trees, [irrigation] comes from rainwater and we do not use any chemicals.”

The Palestinian experience shows it is possible to create new economic opportunities for farmers under even the most arduous political and security conditions.

Published: October 2010

Resources

Palestine Fair Trade Association: Website:http://www.palestinefairtrade.org/
International Olive Oil Council (IOOC): The global body to help market and promote olive oil products. Website:http://www.internationaloliveoil.org/

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

This work is licensed under a
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ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5311-1052.

© David South Consulting 2022

Tags 2010, David South Consulting, Development Challenges, development challenges south-south solutions, fair trade, food, Issue 3, Mobile Phones and Information Technology, October 2010, olive oil, Palestinian Olive Oil’s Peaceful Prosperity, prosperity, South-South Solutions, Southern Innovator Issue 3, Southern Innovator magazine, UNDP, United Nations, UNOSSC

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Indonesian Middle Class Recycle Wealth Back into Domestic Economy

Post author By David South Consulting
Post date 15/11/2022
1 Comment on Indonesian Middle Class Recycle Wealth Back into Domestic Economy

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

The global downturn and economic crisis is now into its third year. Economic growth has dropped across the South, as the knock-on effect of shrinking credit and slowing global markets took its toll.

One solution to re-starting growth and building up domestic industries is to target local products at the existing middle class, which in turn grows the middle class by creating better paying jobs.

Globally, 2009 saw 70 million people join the emerging-market middle class, with incomes between $6,000 and $30,000. And 1 billion people are expected to join the middle class by 2020. It has been called “the story of the decade,” by Goldman Sachs’s chief economist Jim O’Neill, who forecasts their global spending power will outstrip the developed world in two decades.

Indonesia’s middle class first began to grow in the 1980s. But rising prosperity took a heavy blow with the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s, when the currency was devalued, pitching millions of people back into poverty.

Even so, Indonesia’s middle class is estimated to be between 35 and 40 million people (out of a population of 230 million) and they pay out roughly US $750-1000 on monthly household spending.

They are a mix of people, including professionals in management, banking, accounts, specialized law, bio-technology, engineering and other areas – all skills needed to run the market economy.

Like members of the middle class around the world, increasingly affluent Indonesians forge their identity through consumerism and lifestyle. This desire for goods and services represents a huge business opportunity. Often, this is captured by large multinational companies with long experience of selling branded goods and services.

Indonesia, however, is having great success growing its middle class despite the global economic downturn by building up the domestic market. Millie Stephanie, the director of Indonesia Tatler Magazine, told the BBC that two-thirds of the country’s economy runs on domestic consumption.

New middle class housing is springing up around the capital Jakarta. Home ownership for many, unthinkable a decade go, is now possible as banks make more loans possible. This in turn feeds into more consumption.

By turning to local products – something the Indonesian government is encouraging by increasing its own spending on local goods and services in 2010 by US $21.32 billion, according to Industry Minister MS Hidayat – a cycle is created where middle class wealth creates middle class jobs in local companies.

The department store chain of Matahari (http://www.matahari.co.id/) – the largest local department store in Indonesia – is a good example. Eighty percent of the goods it sells are made in Indonesia. The store targets the middle class with products like jeans that Indonesians can afford. And this strategy has helped Indonesia to get through the downturn.

According to Widia Augustinia, who runs the PT Inti Garmindo Persada jeans factory, the company was able to triple production despite the downturn.

“In the last few years we kept getting calls from our clients saying they had sold all our jeans and they wanted more, so we had to expand our business and had to hire more people,” she told the BBC.

One of the factory’s workers, 37-year-old Miriam, has seen her salary increase annually over the last four years while she has worked in the factory. The increasing wealth means she can now educate her children and buy a TV and a motorcycle.

This matters when half the population are living on less than two dollars a day. This recycling of middle class wealth into the Indonesian economy is making more workers become part of the emerging middle class with the jobs created.

In Africa, the Aureos Advisers (http://www.aureos.com/) private equity firm specializes in investing in African small and medium size enterprises, and is having great success with it despite the downturn. Its niche is finding and investing in companies that sell quality local products.

Run by Sri Lankan-born Sev Vettivetpillai, it raised US $150 million in 2009 to invest in Africa, much of it from pension funds.

“That’s a large sum of money in a market where raising capital is tough,” he told The Guardian newspaper.

Leverage was a game when cheap debt was around,” he says of the old private equity market that went up in flames in 2008. “Today a large chunk of growth is in emerging markets and we have proved you can invest responsibly in these markets and achieve attractive returns while paying attention to building sustainable businesses.”

And the faith in small and medium-sized African businesses has been paying off despite the economic turmoil: since most of the companies have little debt, they have not suffered in the downturn. And since many do not export much to Europe or the United States, they have not suffered from the consumer slump.

“When markets crashed 60 percent, good management teams were making sure they had cash, not much debt,” said Vettivetpillai. “Most banks don’t lend to these SMEs. And that has saved a number of those businesses. So we had an upward lift in earning growth in 2008 when many people showed a drop.”

Published: March 2010

Resources

1) A paper from the University of Hawaii by Mohammad Hasan Ansori on Indonesia’s middle class. Website: http://tinyurl.com/ylq7nf6

2) The red dot logo stands for belonging to the best in design and business. The red dot is an internationally recognised quality label for excellent design that is aimed at all those who would like to improve their business activities with the help of design. Website: http://www.red-dot.de/

3) A video on designing for the middle class in emerging markets. Website: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JLO1RuQIPw&feature=related

4) Product design strategies for emerging markets. Website: http://www.appliancemagazine.com/editorial.php?article=1633&zone=1&first=1

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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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

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Innovation: Cairo’s Green Technology Pioneers

Post author By David South Consulting
Post date 11/11/2022
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By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

One thing is ubiquitous to every country, community and society: garbage. It’s a social and environmental problem, but far from being mere waste, rubbish has its uses. This by-product of the goods and foods consumed can also be a source of fuel. As such it has many advantages, including providing free fuel to cash-strapped households, independence from unreliable municipal services and a way to dispose of waste.

An enterprising Egyptian man is showing his community how it is possible to lower the cost of gas and hot water while also avoiding the service disruptions common with municipal utilities. In the process, he is pioneering a local green innovation model that can be replicated elsewhere.

Biogas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogas) generators — which can transform organic household waste into fuel — have been very successful in India and China. It is estimated there are 20 million small-scale urban biogas digesters in China and 2 million in India.

Hanna Fathy’s roof in the Manshiyet Nasser neighbourhood, home to the Coptic Christian Zabaleen community of Cairo – the city’s traditional garbage collectors and recyclers – is now a utility system, providing biogas and hot water.

The area is made of narrow streets and makeshift houses. Residents live cheek-by-jowl in a neighbourhood that is home to tens of thousands of people.

The community was badly hit when the 300,000 pigs the Christian residents have kept for the past 30 years to eat Cairo’s vegetative waste — an effective garbage-disposal system — were slaughtered under government orders to prevent the spread of swine flu (H1N1) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_influenza).

One woman told U.S. National Public Radio about the hard life in the neighbourhood: “I’m working all the time. My hands get dirty, there’s no water. The price of food is too high. The gas has gone up to seven pounds (US $1.28) a bottle, so it’s expensive to heat.

“Everything is so expensive, and I have to live like this?” she said.

Fathy plops kitchen scraps, stale tea and tap water into a jug which he pours into a homemade biogas maker on the roof of his house. The stew of waste mixes with water and a small quantity of animal manure used to start the process, and overnight makes biogas, which is then used for cooking. The digester is able to provide an hour’s worth of cooking gas a day in winter months, and two hours in the summer, from around two kilograms of waste. The remaining waste by product becomes liquid organic fertilizer for the garden.

Fathy has been developing the biogas digester with the NGO Solar Cities (http://solarcities.blogspot.com), which provides designs, technical advice and support to Cairo citizens keen to embrace green technologies.

What is interesting is not only the technology but how that technology is being developed. The approach is to innovate and adapt the technology to local resources and skills. This increases the chances of take-up and buy-in.

The designs for the digesters and heaters have evolved through experimentation, brainstorming and availability of local materials.

Each biogas system costs about US $150 for materials, a cost that is being picked up right now by donations. Solar Cities believes there are only eight biogas digesters in Egypt so far, most built in 2009.

Solar Cities’ founder, Thomas Culhane, points out many urban dwellers do not believe they can generate biogas and associate it with rural systems that use animal manure. But the abundance of urban kitchen waste is in fact an excellent source material for biogas.

Culhane believes the biogas digesters are an excellent solution to two problems: the vast quantities of garbage piling up in Cairo, which has had its traditional disposal system disrupted by the slaughter of the pigs, and the city’s emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

Fathy has one goal: to be completely self-sufficient. He has been also prototyping a solar heater on his roof as well as the biogas digester. The solar water heater makes use of items that can be easily found: it recycles black garbage bags, has an aluminium frame and a glass cover. The whole thing rests on a Styrofoam block and uses copper tubes. The water is stored in a bright blue barrel.

Biogas, solar power and other forms of green energy face many obstacles if it is to expand further in Egypt. The average cost of each unit will need to come down to match the income of the users and compete with the government-subsidized energy sector.

Fathy has also found neighbours are skeptical and can’t believe biogas can be made this way.

Another man, Hussain Soliman, had both a solar water heater and biogas digester on the roof of his apartment building before the crumbling building collapsed.

The complete solar water heating system designed by Solar Cities can be assembled for under US $500. It uses two 200-litre recycled industrial shampoo barrels for the holding tank and back-up water supply. The solar panels need to be kept clean from dust every week, but other than that, Culhane insists the heaters require little maintenance.

Now in temporary government housing, Soliman is still enthusiastic about the technology and is re-building a solar heater and biogas digester for his new home.

“I’m planning to collect the organic waste from restaurants in the neighborhood to increase my gas output,” he told IPS News. “I’ll give the restaurants plastic bags and they can separate out the organics, and I’ll collect the bags at the end of each day.”

Published: January 2010

Resources

1) Practical Action has technical drawings and guidelines for making a small biogas digester. Website: http://practicalaction.org/practicalanswers/product_info.php?products_id=42

2) The Anaerobic Digestion Community: Here is an excellent technical explanation of how a digester works, including a short film. Website: http://www.anaerobic-digestion.com/

3) China boasts a fast-growing biogas economy using farm waste. Here is a full summary of their experience. Website: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/BiogasChina.php.