David South Consulting

Tag: development challenges south-south solutions

  • Ugandan Fish Sausages Transform Female Fortunes

    Ugandan Fish Sausages Transform Female Fortunes

    By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

    SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

    What to do when your food production enterprise is just not making much money? It is a common problem in the global South, where farmers and fishers often struggle to survive and can face the threat of bankruptcy and destitution when trying to provide essential food for their communities.

    Some fish farmers in Uganda – many of them women – were caught up in this dilemma, unable to find a way to make a good income from the fish they were harvesting.

    But a lucky hire for one fish cooperative, in the form of a humble secretary, has turned into a business and food success story that is getting set to jump across borders in Africa.

    Lovin Kobusingya is the former secretary and university graduate who, through tenacity and ingenuity, has built a business selling fish sausages that has become a hit in Kampala, Uganda in East Africa.

    Through trial and error, Kobusingya came upon the idea of turning the fish into sausages. The product, basically unknown in Uganda before, became a tidy solution to the dilemma of how to sell fish at a premium price that could boost the income of the farmers.

    She joins the growing number of female entrepreneurs in Africa. Africa has the highest rate of female entrepreneurship in the world, according to the World Bank, which says two-thirds of women in Africa are in the labour force.

    The 29-year-old mother of two set up Kati Fish Farms (http://katifarms.org) and Kati Farm Supplies Ltd. and now sells 500 kilograms of fish sausage a day.

    Located in the country’s capital, Kampala, Kati Farm Supplies Ltd. prepares and sells a wide range of food products made with chicken, beef, fish, pork, goat, lamb and honey.

    Kobusingya is notable not only for her success as a food entrepreneur, but also for the way she has generated attention and excitement around her business and products.

    According to Kenya’s Nation newspaper, Kobusingya boosted her profile by gaining customers in Uganda’s hotels.

    She graduated six years ago from Makerere University in Kampala (http://mak.ac.ug) and originally planned to go into banking. Like many graduates, she found it hard to break into the sector and get a steady job. After a year of frustrating job hunting, she found a position as a secretary with a fish cooperative society.

    “I got a job after a rigorous interview,” she told the Nation. “It was not well-paying.

    “The most challenging part of the job was dealing with fish farmers, who were grappling with an unsteady market for their produce.”

    Despite all the problems facing the fish industry, Kobusingya became inspired to do something about it. Rather than just hoping market prices would turn in favour of the fish farmers, she diversified the cooperative’s products to add value to the raw fish ingredients.

    “Most of our members were women who had taken up aquaculture (fish farming),” she said. “At the time, this was still a novelty.”

    It is a tale of trial and error, as Kobusingya tells it.

    “We tried selling our products, such as fish feeds, and even selling directly to consumers. But I felt that there was something more we could do to help the farmers even more.”

    Becoming frustrated with the constraints of her role, she decided to start the business on top of her day job. She started buying fish directly from the farmers, filleting it herself and selling it to customers.

    Yet, still fish was not selling and going to waste.

    Then the eureka moment came: make fish sausages. This had never been done in Uganda and she set about undertaking research on the Internet to learn how to do it.

    “I assembled bits and pieces of information from the Net on how to make the sausages,” Kobusyingya said.

    “Everywhere I went seeking more information, people thought I was out of my mind.

    “Nobody had heard of fish sausages but I received support from the Uganda Industrial Research Institute in 2011. They helped me to develop a formula for the product,” she said.

    With the new product developed, Kobusingya tried selling it to the hotels in Kampala. And this was the crucial moment when her fortunes changed: people were excited by the new and novel product.

    The first orders earned her US $800 and with that jolt of cash, she was able to launch the product in February 2012.

    Production started at 100 kilograms of fish sausage a day. By the third month, she was able to produce 500 kilograms a day. And because the product is so popular, she is running hard to meet demand from hotels, food outlets and institutions.

    Expanding into selling smoked fish and frozen chicken and beef, she is now working with 470 fish farmers, most of whom are women.

    “This business has motivated farmers throughout Uganda,” she said.

    “The enterprise, now worth about Ush50 million (US $19,230), has 16 permanent employees,” she said.

    She also took the fish sausages on the road and introduced them to the SmartFish trade event in Lusaka, Zambia, where they became a hit with attendees.

    SmartFish (http://www.smartfish-coi.org/#!home/mainPage) is funded by the European Union through the European Development Fund and is implemented by the Indian Ocean Commission in partnership with regional trade organizations. The objective of the event was to increase trade within the region.

    With her confidence further boosted by the positive international reaction, Koubusingya is exploring how to sell into Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi.

    “I always knew I was a businesswoman,” she told The New York Times. “When I was in high school, I used to sell illegal sweets. And I made money.”

    “I am very happy and proud” of being a female entrepreneur. “When I was young, they said: ‘A woman is a woman – a man should take care of you.’ But women are actually contributing a lot more than men. We always find ourselves multitasking,” when juggling work and a family.

    Published: November 2012

    Resources

    1) SmartFish: The SmartFish Programme aims at contributing to an increased level of social, economic and environmental development and deeper regional integration in the ESA-IO region through improved capacities for the sustainable exploitation of fisheries resources. Website: http://fisheries.ioconline.org/smartfish.html

    2) Southern Innovator Issue 3: Agribusiness and Food Security: Packed with tips and tales on how to tackle the challenges of making food production pay. Website: http://www.scribd.com/doc/105746025/Southern-Innovator-Magazine-Issue-3

    3) Uganda Industrial Research Institute: Uganda Industrial Research Institute is Uganda Government’s lead agency for industrialization. Website: http://www.uiri.org/

    4) A photo gallery showing the harvesting of the fish and the making of the sausages. Website: http://katifarms.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=70&Itemid=90 

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

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/06/04/an-innovators-big-chicken-agenda-for-africa/

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/03/04/food-diplomacy-next-front-for-souths-nations/

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2022/02/10/food-inflation-ways-to-fight-it/

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/02/22/new-paper-citation-for-southern-innovator-issue-3/

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/09/16/small-fish-farming-opportunity-can-wipe-out-malnutrition/

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

    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.  

    Follow @SouthSouth1

    Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=D_A1VeiJWycC&dq=development+challenges+november+2012&source=gbs_navlinks_s

    Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challenges-november-2012-issue

    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

    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

  • Microwork Pioneer Transforms Prospects For Poor, Vulnerable

    Microwork Pioneer Transforms Prospects For Poor, Vulnerable

    By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

    SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

    A pioneering technology social enterprise has found a way to connect people around the world to the new digital economy, transforming their lives and providing long-term employment opportunities. It is closing the digital divide in a very practical way, teaching new skills and, most importantly, providing income to the poor and vulnerable.

    The San Francisco, USA-based non-profit social enterprise Samasource (samasource.org) uses what it calls microwork – a virtual assembly line of small tasks broken down from a larger project so they can be completed over the Internet – to outsource work to its network of workers around the world.

    The tasks in this virtual piecework range from writing to transcribing to organizing online content.

    The company organizes the projects using its own online work distribution system connecting workers around the world to the SamaHub in San Francisco. Most of the workers are women, youth and refugees. When they complete their task, it is sent back to the SamaHub in San Francisco where the staff check it and assure its quality. Once approved and completed, the project is returned to the client.

    The company was founded in 2008 and draws on experts in “distributed work, economic development, and outsourcing.”

    The microwork is divided into three areas: content services, data enrichment and transcription.

    Content services can include writing descriptions for online business listings, organizing large databases on information or creating brief descriptions of existing content to make it easier for search engines to find it. “Data enrichment” tackles the vast quantity of information on the Internet that needs to be kept up to date and reliable. It also includes ‘tagging’, where text or images on the Internet need to have appropriate ‘tags’ or labels. And finally, transcription services include digitizing paper documents like receipts or books or transcribing audio and video files for the web.

    All these tasks are labour intensive and require high attention to detail. And they are critical to any online business’s success if it wants a reputation for accuracy and consistency.

    Samasource is optimistic about its future potential because of the sheer size of the market for business process outsourcing: estimated to be worth over US $100 billion. What Samasource does, called ‘impact sourcing’ – outsourcing to people in the developing world living in poor or remote communities – is a market worth US $5 billion, according to Samasource’s website.

    It differs from conventional business process outsourcing in a number of respects, including the educational background of the workers. Most conventional outsourcing goes to college graduates in cities in India, China and the Philippines. Impact outsourcing is done by people with at most a high school education.

    The digital economy needs these workers to handle the many millions of detailed tasks required to link together information. It is easy to take this for granted because it is hidden from view, but it is what enables the Internet to function and businesses to thrive. Samasource provides outsourcing services including content moderation and data entry to clients like LinkedIn, Intuit and the US State Department.

    “We bring dignified, computer-based work to women, youth, and refugees living in poverty,” said Samasource’s founder and chief executive officer, Leila Janah.

    Janah has a background in development studies and formerly worked for the World Bank. This experience convinced her that much foreign aid was failing to target what poor people are really looking for: a job that pays well.

    Samasource sees what it does as work, and not handouts.

    It also believes it is changing perspectives, proving people from the poorest places on earth can become trustworthy, hard-working knowledge workers.

    The Internet is a unique medium because it transcends borders and smooths contact between people with varying linguistic, cultural and educational capabilities.

    “The Internet reduces the friction of collaboration across all of these centres and time zones, and with a highly distributed workforce,” said Janah.

    Samasource claims to have paid out US $1 million in wages to more than 1,500 workers around the world. Ambitiously, it wants to expand this to reach some of the 144 million youth between 16 and 24 living on less than US $2 a day.

    Youth are a particular focus for Samasource. Samasource targets young people who are literate and have received an education but still can’t get a job.

    As for the many women employed by Samasource, they were either unemployed or earning poverty-level wages doing precarious work in low-level manufacturing and not building their skills.

    Samasource currently has 16 partnerships in Haiti, India, Pakistan, Kenya, Uganda and South Africa. Criteria to work with Samasource includes being in a high-poverty region. Another criteria is for most of the money earned to stay within the region where the work is done and adhere to the standards laid down by Samasource.

    Samasource’s success means it has attracted further funding. In December 2011, it was given a US $1.5 million grant from Google.org – the Google.com search engine’s charity. It has also raised US $5 million from non-profit investors, including the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the eBay Foundation. The challenge for the Samasource model will be to prove, with this new funding, that it can scale its operations to pay out more to its workers than it is taking in to meet its operating costs.

    Microwork is turning out to be big work indeed!

    Published: January 2012

    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.  

    Follow @SouthSouth1

    Like this story? Here is a dirty secret: this website is packed with stories about global South innovators. We spent 7 years researching and documenting these stories around the world. We interviewed the innovators to learn from them and we visited them to see how they did it. Why not use the Search bar at the top and tap in a topic and see what stories come up? As for my work, I have been involved with start-ups and media ventures since the early 1990s. In the years since I have learned a great deal about innovation and digital and have shared these insights in the stories on this website as well as in the 5 issues of Southern Innovator magazine. So, stick around and read some more!    

    Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=qLYTxcC8HgcC&dq=development+challenges+january+2012&source=gbs_navlinks_s

    Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsjanuary2012issue

    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

    While Southern Innovator’s digital presence has been key to its success and global reach, the hard copy of the magazine was designed with special features. The magazine neded to be robust and able to stand a fair bit of abuse and hard wear. It needed to be easy to read in low light conditions. And it needed to look sharp and eye-catching to reach as wide an audience as possible.

    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 2021

  • Disaster Recovery, Ten Years After: The Gujarat, India Experience

    Disaster Recovery, Ten Years After: The Gujarat, India Experience

    By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

    SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

    In the past decade, there have been many devastating natural disasters, from Iran’s 2003 Bam earthquake and the Asian tsunami of 2004 to Hurricane Katrina in the United States in 2005 and the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti in 2010. All of these events received extensive media attention and drew a large aid response. Those who track natural disasters have noticed a serious increase in frequency over the past decade (http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article26290.html).

    But rapid aid and media attention do not necessarily lead to long-term recovery. More than a year after the earthquake in Haiti, pace of recovery remains slow. Numerous media stories highlighted the lack of progress.

    For the people caught up in these tragedies, quickly returning to a normal life is paramount for psychological and physical health. But this is often the hardest part. Some countries do this well and others do not.

    On January 26, 2001, an earthquake laid waste to a large region of the Indian state of Gujarat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Gujarat_earthquake). Ten years later there is a remarkable recovery that has taken place. So how did they do it?

    The 7.9-magnitude quake killed an estimated 20,000 people, injured 150,000, made a million homeless, and destroyed around 8,000 villages. It devastated the Kutch district capital, Bhuj, and other major towns.

    In the decade since the earthquake, the state has averaged double-digit growth. Despite having only five percent of the country’s population, Gujarat racks up impressive economic achievements: it has a fifth of India’s exports and a sixth of its industrial production. It has a long-standing entrepreneurial culture based on trade. It can draw on a well-connected global diaspora that ensures a steady inflow of new thinking and investment. Members of this diaspora also contributed to the US $130 million in aid that poured into the region after the quake.

    One of the factors contributing to the successful recovery is effective government action.

    The disaster has been turned into an opportunity to jolt the region out of the “Middle Ages and into the modern world,” NGO worker Navin Prasad told the BBC.

    All the media attention, support and cash at the time forced the Indian government to pay attention to a region it had ignored in the past.

    The army came in to help with the emergency and the Indian government allocated US $2 billion to the reconstruction that followed.

    Aid was used well and in the first two years many of the damaged villages were rebuilt. And not just rebuilt to what they were, but completely modernized. New houses were constructed to high standards, with more rooms and lots of light. They also came with running water and a toilet. New facilities like medical centres and communal areas were put in place.

    The district capital of Bhuj was levelled in the earthquake. But new plans for the city were drafted in the following years. Now Bhuj has two new ring roads, a new airport, parks and shops. Streets were widened and new water and sewage works installed.

    But along with the new infrastructure and plenty of cash, came something more important for the region’s long-term recovery: economic growth. The Indian government created tax-free zones drawing in private investment. An astonishing US $10 billion in private investment has come in with US $7 billion more to come, according to the BBC.

    One miraculous turnaround is in the former tiny fishing port of Mundra. Prior to the earthquake, it sat in the middle of a salt marsh. It is now India’s largest private port and rivals Mumbai with its Mundra Port and Special Economic Zone (http://www.portofmundra.com/), incorporated in 2003. The Adani Group, a very large Indian private company with global interests (http://www.adanigroup.com/index.html), owns the port now worth US $7 billion, hiring many people once dependent on aid agencies for income.

    The head of the Adani Foundation the charitable wing of the Adani Group, Sushma Oza, told the BBC how the company is spending its profits on further developing the area: “Our own budget for social development in this region is $6m a year, so you can imagine how we are trying to change the lives of people to live in a better way,” she said.

    In the western portion of the state, in the administrative district of Kutch which is home to Bhuj, around 300 businesses have been established, including the Welspun towel factory (http://www.welspun.com/content.asp?Link=Y&SubmenuID=24). The biggest towel factory in the world, it was built in just nine months and makes 250,000 towels a day. An ambitious firm, it bought the British company Christy (http://www.christy-towels.com/), maker of the official Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championship towels.

    So why towels in Kutch? Welspun chairman Balkrishan Goenka laid down the incentives to the BBC: “There were no local taxes for the first five years and no excise duties. Nor were there indirect taxes to government – they were exempted for five years.”

    “Those were the primary benefits,” he said. “More than that there was huge support from the local government so industry can come faster.”

    Since the earthquake, 110,000 jobs have been created in Kutch alone. More importantly for the area’s future, it is has gone from neglected backwater to a significant pillar of the Indian economy.

    Another driver of recovery was the growth of the dairy industry. The Bhuj dairy plant collapsed in the earthquake and was then rebuilt by the National Dairy Development Board (http://www.nddb.org/). The plant can now process 50,000 litres of milk a day and is run by the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (http://www.amul.com/organisation.html), India’s largest food products marketing organization. It has 2.9 million producer members and represents 15,322 village societies.

    Not everyone has turned their lives around, however. Aid workers estimate thousands are still living in temporary shelters. They defecate in the open and few have clean water. Just getting two meals a day is a problem.

    There are complaints about the landless and tenants not receiving the same help.

    “Many are tribal, others are low-caste communities, some are Muslims – but they all have one thing in common: poverty,” Bharat Parmer, program coordinator for ActionAid International in Kutch, told Alertnet.

    “A large number of these people were tenants and did not own land and so it has been much harder for them to claim their rights as rehabilitation was very much focused on home and land owners.”

    But local authorities say rehabilitation schemes have been comprehensive, covering all those who were hit by the quake.

    “I don’t think that there are people who did not get what they were due – there may be a rare case here and there but we have rehabilitated all that were in need,” said Gunvant Vaghela, the second-most senior civil servant in Kutch district.

    Published: February 2011

    Resources

    1) How to activate support from the global technology community in a disaster. Website: http://crisiscommons.org/

    2) UNICEF: Community-Based Disaster Preparedness Projects (CBDPs) in India have been helping communities restructure to survive when disaster strikes. Website: http://www.unicef.org.uk/campaigns

    3) The US Government has extensive resources online on how to prepare for a wide variety of natural and man-made disasters. Website: http://www.fema.gov/areyouready/

    4) The magazine Popular Mechanics has excellent resources on how anyone can prepare their family and community for disasters. Website: http://www.popularmechanics.com/survival/

    5)  Telecoms Sans Frontiers: Focuses on providing communications in the first days after an emergency. Website: http://www.tsfi.org/

    Associated Press

    On the ground reporting from the Associated Press (AP) Archive: India: Earthquake Aftermath Update 

    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.  

    Follow @SouthSouth1

    Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=p03–n51i44C&dq=development+challenges+april+2008&source=gbs_navlinks_s

    Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsapril2008issue

    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

    More on disaster resilience here:

    From southasiadisasters.net:

    Southern Innovator in Southasiadisasters.net

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/02/23/southern-innovator-in-southasiadisasters-net/

    Innovations In Green Economy: Top Three Agenda

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/10/22/innovations-in-green-economy-top-three-agenda/

    Lima To Delhi: What Can Be Learned On Urban Resilience?

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/10/22/lima-to-delhi-what-can-be-learned-on-urban-resilience/

    South–South Cooperation For Cities In Asia

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/10/22/south-south-cooperation-for-cities-in-asia/

    A New House Kit for Slum Dwellers that is Safe and Easy to Build

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/10/03/a-new-house-kit-for-slum-dwellers-that-is-safe-and-easy-to-build/

    Haiti Earthquake Prompts Tech Aid

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/09/01/haiti-earthquake-prompts-tech-aid/

    Rebuilding After Chinese Earthquake: Beautiful Bamboo Homes

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

    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

  • Brazilian Design For New Urban, Middle-Class World

    Brazilian Design For New Urban, Middle-Class World

    By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

    SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

    Countries across the global South are experiencing rapid urbanization as people move to cities for better economic opportunities — and this massive social change is creating new business opportunities. Those who recognize how fundamentally people’s lifestyles are changing will be those who will benefit from this big shift in populations.

    Finding ways to live well in urban areas will be critical to determining whether this move repeats past urban failures — from the favelas of Brazil to the slums of India — or introduces a new way of living that is exciting and colorful. Design and designers will be critical to this change.

    One young design company in Brazil, Sao Paulo-based furniture studio NUUN  (nuun.nu), is attempting to resolve a dilemma common across the rapidly urbanizing global South: How to create a design aesthetic that fits with the new way of living and being?

    The company consists of designer and founder João Eulálio Kaarah and architects Renato Périgo and Carolina Sverner.

    Périgo specializes in furniture and interior design, while Carolina Sverner worked with respected Japanese architect, Shigeru Ban (shigerubanarchitects.com), who is well known for designing buildings and houses made from paper and for creating easy-to-build homes for people after a disaster has struck (http://www.ted.com/talks/shigeru_ban_emergency_shelters_made_from_paper).

    A collaboration among upcoming artists, designers and architects, NUUN tries to infuse its designs with a sense of “brazilianness”. Brazilianness is a modern aesthetic, made for modern lifestyles in the new urban landscape, that draws on aspects of Brazil’s culture and environment.

    The young studio’s first collection of furniture offers simplicity. Called Eos, it tries to blend urban cosmopolitanism with raw nature. Brazil is known for its jam-packed urban cities as well as its vast expanse of Amazon rainforest. In practice, NUUN’s look is a mix of contrasts redolent of what used to be called brutalism: concrete mixed with glass, steel, wood and semi-precious gems. NUUN takes inspiration from NASA’s Earth Observation System (EOS): the collection vibes off of space satellites, antennae and the dry soil of the backwoods. NUUN says that “despite its Martian features, [the collection] is as Brazilian as it comes”. There is the modular Panorama sofa (http://nuun.nu/products/panorama) in five colors, capable of being re-shaped to fit a variety of living arrangements. A glass-topped coffee table with a concrete base and a side table with a carbon steel metallic structure to complement the sofa.

    Elsewhere in the world of Brazilian design, footwear brand Grendene S.A. (http://ri.grendene.com.br/EN/Company/Profile) has become one of the world’s largest producers of footwear and made one of its founders a billionaire. And Grendene has boosted its international success by turning to another Brazilian success: supermodel Gisele Bündchen (giselebündchen.com.br).

    Grendene began in 1971 and owns various successful shoe brands, including Melissa (melissa.com.br/en/), Grendha, Ilhabela, Zaxy, Cartago, Ipanema, Pega Forte, Grendene Kids and Grendene Baby.

    It has six industrial zones with 13 footwear factories and can produce 240 million pairs of shoes a year. It undertakes all areas of production— from making its own moulds for the shoes to creating PVC (polyvinyl chloride) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinyl_chloride) – and handles its own distribution.

    While Grendene is already a well-known shoe brand in Brazil, it wanted to expand its presence overseas to increase profits. Named after the two brothers who founded the company, Alexandre Grendene Bartelle and Pedro Grendene Bartelle, Grendene started working with supermodel Gisele Bündchen in 2002 to help her launch her own line of affordable flip-flops, iPanema (ipanemaflipflops.co.uk). The brightly colored sandals with elaborate patterns became an instant success.

    But do celebrity endorsements really work? In the case of Bündchen and Grendene, the answer is yes. According to Forbes, 25 million pairs of the flip-flops and sandals are sold every year, accounting for 60 per cent of Grendene’s annual exports of about US $250 million.

    Brazil was able to produce 864 million pairs of shoes in 2012, up 5.5 per cent from 2011.

    Of these, 113 million pairs were exported to the United States, Argentina and France.

    Brazil, like many other countries, has had to work out how it could compete with cheaper shoe imports from China. The strategy it chose was to target the growing number of middle-class people both in Brazil and elsewhere, as well as the high end of the market.

    In 1979, Grendene created the Melissa brand, which has now become a coveted style leader. It collaborates with top design names such as Karl Lagerfeld and architect Zaha Hadid.

    Making a partnership with Bündchen is part of the company’s strategy to reach higher-income buyers.

    And it is working: Grendene increased its export revenue by 50 per cent in 2013.

    Co-founder Alexandre Grendene Bartelle became a billionaire according to Forbes World’s Billionaires list and is worth US $1.4 billion. He owns 41 per cent of Grendene S.A. and close to 40 per cent of the Dell Anno brand.

    This is a critical lesson for manufacturers in the global South. Grendene had achieved strong market dominance at home, and was already benefiting from growing wealth among Brazil’s middle classes. But it was the overseas market that had the potential to clinch even more profits for the company.

    Bündchen’s high brand profile has enabled the company to compete head-to-head with the well-known Brazilian flip-flop brand, Havaianas (havaianas-store.com).

    Another modern design leader owned by Grendene, Dell Anno (lojasdellanno.com.br), is a maker of modernist cabinets and furniture.

    Dell Anno only use wood from renewable forest sources, to protect and preserve the Amazon and other native forests. Dell Anno tries to recycle as much as possible: up to 80 per cent of the water used in manufacturing is recycled, and byproducts from the production process such as a sawdust, wood, plastic and cardboard are also reused.

    Dell Anno makes a full range of furniture for kitchens, bedrooms, closets, home theatres, home offices, service areas, restrooms and commercial environments. Dell Anno uses research and development to study trends and advise customers on the best options. The brand offers its staff training to help standardize customer service, and also has an excellent blog covering developments in modern design around the world (http://www.lojasdellanno.com.br/blog/).

    Published: May 2014

    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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