Tag: Colombia

Debt-free Homes For the Poor

Post author By David South Consulting
Post date 23/05/2022
No Comments on Debt-free Homes For the Poor

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

As the population around the world’s cities grows, and slums grow larger and more prevalent, the urgent need for affordable and decent housing becomes more pressing. The world’s megacities – like Buenos Aires, Argentina, where more than 13 million live in the metropolitan region – have to find a way to provide housing that is both cheap and does the minimum possible amount of harm to the environment.

About one-third of the world’s urban dwellers live in slums, and the United Nations estimates that the number of people living in such conditions will double by 2030 as a result of rapid urbanization in developing countries. Latin America is already the most urbanized region in the developing world.

“Throughout Latin America you have economies that are growing and doing well, but the way the economies are growing is actually generating more shanty towns,” said Erik Vittrup, senior adviser on Latin America and the Caribbean for the U.N. Human Settlements Program. “It’s a growth that is just generating wealth for those who (already) have it.”

How well people dwell is integral to their mental and physical health. Most squatters and slum dwellers live in makeshift homes made from whatever they can get their hands on. These dwellings are usually unsafe and vulnerable to fire, floods, and earthquakes.

But across the South, initiatives are proving it is possible to build good quality homes for the poor while avoiding burdening them with debt. Pioneering ways are being developed for the poor to build their own high-quality houses using recycled materials and environmentally friendly products.

In Colombia , Alejandro Salazar, a chemical engineer, professor at the Universidad del Valle (http://www.univalle.edu.co/english/) and innovator running several companies pioneering new building technologies using recycled waste, is building high-quality, inexpensive houses for the poor. By combining free building materials recovered from waste, a government grant and the voluntary labour of the homeowners, Salazar’s company is able to build homes for the poor that don’t leave them with ongoing bank debt from mortgages.

Based in Cali, Colombia (http://gosouthamerica.about.com/od/cali/p/Cali.htm), his companies Ecoingenieria (product and material research and development), Ecomat SA (production of eco-materials using industrial waste and construction rubble), Constructora Paez, (social housing construction using eco-products) and Wassh SA (environmental management and transformation of dangerous solid waste into non-dangerous materials), are focused on pioneering new technologies for housing.

“Our company uses two basic technologies,” said Salazar. “The production of eco-materials from solid waste and demolition waste, and the implementation of an agile building system, which does not require skilled labour and is hand-transportable. All the pieces are produced in a prefabrication plant that uses the eco-materials.”

Salazar has found a way to provide homes quicker than existing NGOs – Popular Housing Organizations (OPV), as they are called – established to address homelessness in Colombia. The homeless poor are caught in a Catch-22: they need to have a formal job to receive homebuilding assistance from the government, and they usually can not save up enough money for a down payment on the home.

Salazar’s solution is to take the maximum grant given by the central government, which is US $4,730, and combine it with the recycled building materials and homeowners’ own labour. He says this allows a house to be built for roughly half the price of a similarly sized one that uses conventional materials: the eco-materials house costs around US $ 6,590, compared to US $12,000 using conventional materials. Land is often either donated by the municipality or the family already owns it. And in Salazar’s experience, the whole family chips in with the building: husbands, sons, brothers, fathers, wives.

The training takes just three days on eco-materials and a day in construction techniques for house building.

“To date, we have built with this method 306 houses,” said Salazar. “For the coming year, we expect to deliver around 500 houses or more. To build a house, after acquiring the land, we need three people working eight hours a day to build it in four weeks – all under the supervision of a workforce teacher and the supervision of an engineer or architect.

“The houses are designed by architects with the participation of the community or families. They do some workshops and the design conforms to their vision and expectation. In Colombia, there is an earthquake resistance code which is binding in law and provides detailed specifications of the materials, foundations, structure and roof.”

The pre-fabricated building materials are made from recovered waste from a wide variety of sources: ceramic red brick, coarse ash and fly ash, slag from steel, copper slag, porcelain insulators used for electrical power lines, nickel slag, sludge from sugar and alcohol plants and water treatment plants.

“The raw materials we use are industrial solid waste and demolition waste. It costs the industry a lot to throw away this waste,” Salazar said.

He said the biggest obstacle to the new homes is psychological: many people initially “tend to reject at first-hand the technology.”

“When visiting the factory and then visiting the homes – or model homes – they then compare it with a traditional house, and realize that the best eco-homes when finished meet the standards of Colombian earthquake resistance and are also cheaper,” he said.

Compared to using conventional building materials, the eco-materials reduce the cost of a new home. And the company still makes a profit from it!

In Paraguay, Elsa Zaldivar is using recycled plastic, cotton netting, corn husks, and loofah sponges (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luffa) to make cheap, lightweight construction panels for housing. This has a double benefit: it makes for cheap housing and it is good for the environment.

“That’s very important in Paraguay,” said Zaldivar, “because we’ve already reduced our original forest to less than 10 percent of the national territory.”

Zaldivar got her experience working with people in the impoverished area of Caaguazú, where in the past she helped with the building of toilets and making stoves. She found that involving local people in this work made a huge difference: “They told me: ‘Now we feel like we’re people with dignity.’”

She encourages local women to grow loofah – a plant that once flourished but was being ignored. While the fruit is edible she was more interested in the crusty sponge that is left over when the plant is dried. The women started a cooperative selling loofah sponges, mats and slippers. But there was a lot of waste in the process, with a third not suitable for export. She then came up with the idea to use the loofahs for wall and roof panels for cheap housing.

Along with industrial engineer Pedro Padros, she developed a way to combine loofah with plastic waste. Padros invented a machine to melt the recycled plastic and mix the molten plastic with loofah, vegetable fibres and chopped corn husks. It has produced a building panel that is lighter and easier to move around than lumber or brick. With a grant from the Inter-American Development Bank, design improvements have been made and the cost-per-panel brought down from US $6 per square meter. It is now competitive with the cost of wood panels. The great thing about the panels is that they can be recycled again when they wear out, completing the cycle.

“To have a decent home liberates people,” said Zaldivar.

Published: January 2009

Resources

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things: This radical concept is about how products, can be used, recycled, and used again without losing any material quality—in cradle to cradle cycles. Website: http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm
Builders Without Borders: Is an international network of ecological builders who advocate the use of straw, earth and other local, affordable materials in construction. Website: http://builderswithoutborders.org/
World Hands Project: An NGO specialising in simple building techniques for the poor. Website: www.worldhandsproject.org
CIDEM and Ecosur specialise in building low-cost community housing using eco-materials. They have projects around the world and are based in Cuba. Website: http://www.ecosur.org

Follow @SouthSouth1

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsnovember2010issue

Southern Innovator Issue 1: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Q1O54YSE2BgC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 2: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ty0N969dcssC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 3: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AQNt4YmhZagC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 4: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9T_n2tA7l4EC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 5: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6ILdAgAAQBAJ&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/02/04/cubas-hurricane-recovery-solution/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/11/11/decent-and-affordable-housing-for-the-poor/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2022/11/16/housing-innovation-in-souths-urban-areas/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/11/11/housing-solution-for-worlds-growing-urban-population/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/02/12/rammed-earth-houses-china-shows-how-to-improve-and-respect-traditional-homes/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/02/12/rebuilding-after-chinese-earthquake-beautiful-bamboo-homes/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2022/11/19/securing-land-rights-for-the-poor-now-reaping-rewards/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2022/05/23/solar-bottle-bulbs-light-up-dark-homes/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/03/05/southern-innovator-issue-4/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/03/05/southern-innovator-issue-5/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2022/11/17/tiny-homes-to-meet-global-housing-crisis/

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

© David South Consulting 2023

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Innovation Villages Tackling MDGs

Post author By David South Consulting
Post date 04/03/2021
No Comments on Innovation Villages Tackling MDGs

By 2014, Southern Innovator had published five issues and become a recognised global innovation brand.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

The global economic crisis that began to roll across the world in September 2008 is threatening gains made against poverty and hunger all over the South. As Kevin Watkins from UNESCO’s Global Monitoring Report told the Financial Times, “With the slowdown in growth in 2009, we estimate that the average income of the 391 million Africans living on less than US $1.25 a day will take a 20 percent hit.”

How well millions of people survive the economic turmoil will depend on how local communities respond. And there are innovating communities across the South that show it is possible to succeed. By studying the microcosm of test villages, where quantifiable results are being tracked, lessons are being learned on how to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (http://www.undp.org/mdg/).

The challenge of matching improving living standards and quality of life with environmental sustainability has been taken up by one village in Colombia. The technologies it has developed over the past few decades have been adopted around the country.

In Las Gaviotas, Colombia a unique experiment was hatched at the end of the 1960s: to see if a village could survive – and even thrive – while eschewing fossil fuels and industrial agriculture. It found its first test in the oil crisis of the early 1970s. For Las Gaviotas’ survival, meeting energy needs became paramount.

One of the simple concepts the community applied is a take on the physical reality that energy is never created or destroyed, it just moves from one medium to another. Las Gaviotas believes in using all the sources for energy that can be found in a local area first, before seeking out others.

Founded by development specialist Paolo Lugari,Las Gaviotas(http://www.friendsofgaviotas.org) is located in a desert region of Colombia. The area covers a vast territory comprising three-fifths of the country but is home to just 10 percent of the population. To Lugari, the harsh environment is a challenge to be overcome. To begin to reverse the arid environment at Las Gaviotas, the villagers reversed the dry climate by planting trees.

This had the effect of increasing local rainfall by 10 percent, making it possible to do other economic activities.”The only deserts that exist in this world are deserts of the imagination,” Lugari told the New York Times.

The 200 people living in Las Gaviotas have been able to get by without guns, police, a mayor, cellphones, television or the Internet. Nobody uses a job title — instead the adults in the community rotate jobs.

While the villagers do not use many of the technological tools people associate with modern life and prosperity, they do have a culture of invention. The inventions they have come up with include a solar kettle for sterilizing water and a 8,012 hectare pine forest which is harvested for resin to make biofuel for trucks and motorcycles. The resin is also used to make varnishes and linseed oil.

For years Colombia’s ongoing civil war raged around the community. Violent drug traffickers and private armies destabilized the country for decades. But despite this mayhem, Las Gaviotas has attracted rural peasants seeking to double their wages (US $500 a month) and enjoy the quiet life away from the war.

“We try to live a quiet life, depending on nothing but our own labor and ingenuity,” said Teresa Valencia, a teacher who has lived in Las Gaviotas for three decades.

Other products developed by the village included a turbine powered by a small, one metre high dam that produced 10 kilowatts of electricity, a windmill that was able to spin despite light breezes, and a pump strong enough to draw water from the hard-to-reach savannah water table.

Pride of place was the village’s hospital. Despite hot temperatures and high humidity, the hospital used clever technologies like subsurface tunnels and double ventilation systems in the walls to cool its operating theatre. The roof slid off to allow ultraviolet sunlight to disinfect rooms. After healthcare reforms in Colombia, the hospital was closed. Undefeated, the village turned the hospital’s kitchen into a potable water bottling facility, and reduced the need for hospital visits by making sure everyone in the area had access to clean water.

The community’s approach inspired scientists and architects, who came to design homes, laboratories and factories for Las Gaviotas.

One significant success has been the windmill-driven water pumps developed by Las Gaviotas. Invented by Jorge Zapp, head of the mechanical engineering department of Bogota’s Universidad de Los Andes, it is a lightweight windmill unit weighing barely 45 kilograms. The blades use the airfoil found on airplane propellers to make the most of light breezes.

In the 1980s, UNDP hired the Gaviotas team to install water and windmill pumps in other places in Colombia. Thousands have now been installed in Colombia and the design has been copied throughout Latin America.

Other inventions include a solar-powered kitchen, a water pump powered by a children’s see-saw, and a zeppelin that floats above the savannah plains to detect forest fires.

While the community has been able to forge a success, it can’t avoid the ups and downs of the global economy entirely. Competition from cheap imports of pine resin have pushed down the price the community can charge.

But in a topsy-turvy world, and surrounded by a civil war, what Las Gaviotas has achieved still seems impressive. “We have survived,” said Andrea Beltran. “Maybe, at this time and place in Colombia, that is enough.”

More recently, a much-publicized experiment is also underway in the Millennium villages. The Millennium Villages (http://www.millenniumvillages.org/index.htm) is a joint project between Columbia University’s The Earth Institute and UNDP, and is a bold experiment working with villages in Africa to identify and test solutions to help in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (http://www.undp.org/mdg/).

Britain’s Guardian newspaper has also been sponsoring and tracking changes in the villages of Katine sub-county in Uganda (http://www.guardian.co.uk/katine). Comprising 25,000 people, the project began in October 2007, and is conducted in partnership with the African Medical and Research Foundation (Amref) and Farm-Africa in Katine.

What is useful to people looking for solutions is the way the project is being tracked in detail on the newspaper’s website.

In India, the Model Village India (www.modelvillageindia.org.in) concept pioneered by Rangeswamy Elango, a head of the village of Kuthampakkam near Chennai, has now expanded to 30 model villages. Its approach is about being positive, eschewing griping about problems and instead getting down to work to solve them. Its success is based on an ancient Indian self-organizing model, the Panchayat, and Elango has modernized it to become what he calls The “Network Growth Economy Model” – a direct challenge to the “special economic zones that benefit only capitalist owners,” he said.

Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World – 10th Anniversary Edition by Alan Weisman details further the achievements of the village (www.amazon.com)

Published: November 2009

Resources

1) Unleashing India’s Innovation: Toward Sustainable and Inclusive Growth, a report by the World Bank. Website: http://www.worldbank.org/

2) NextBillion.net: Hosted by the World Resources Institute, it identifies sustainable business models that address the needs of the world’s poorest citizens. Website: http://www.nextbillion.net/news

3) Model Village India: Drawing on self-organizing methods used in India since 1200 BC, the Model Village India is based around India’s democratic system of Panchayats: a village assembly of people stemming back to pre-colonial times. Website: http://www.modelvillageindia.org.in

4) Maker Faire: The African Maker Faire has tapped into Africa’s well-entrenched do-it-yourself development culture. It went looking for more inventors like those celebrated on the website AfriGadget (http://www.afrigadget.com/), with its projects that solve “everyday problems with African ingenuity.” The Faire works with the participants to share their ideas and to find ways to make money from their ideas. Website: http://makerfaireafrica.com/

5) eMachineShop: This remarkable service allows budding inventors to download free design software, design their invention, and then have it made in any quantity they wish and shipped to them: Amazing! Website: http://www.emachineshop.com/

6) The red dot logo stands for belonging to the best in design and business. The red dot is an internationally recognized 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

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2022/05/02/landmark-study-finds-simple-toys-key-to-boosting-educational-development-and-meeting-mdgs/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/12/20/press-release-1-southern-innovator/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/12/20/press-release-2-southern-innovator/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/12/20/press-release-3-southern-innovator/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/03/05/southern-innovator-issue-1/

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

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

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/03/05/southern-innovator-issue-4/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/03/05/southern-innovator-issue-5/

https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2020/12/09/study-finds-simple-toys-key-to-boosting-educational-development-january-2007/

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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.