David South Consulting

Tag: Development Challenges

  • New Beer Helping to Protect Elephants

    New Beer Helping to Protect Elephants

    By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

    SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

    How to match the often conflicting goals of protecting animal habitats and supporting local economies? One clever solution may draw amusement but is actually a sharp marketing strategy to get attention for a product that is helping to preserve the elephants of Thailand’s Golden Triangle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Triangle_(Southeast_Asia).

    A beer flavored with a special ingredient – coffee beans that have passed through elephants – is generating profits that are plowed back into improving health services for the animals. The coffee beans excreted by elephants are roasted and turned into a high-quality coffee by a company in Thailand; this coffee is then used by a Japanese company to make a special beer brand that is getting attention and winning rave reviews.

    The elephant dung coffee beans used in the beer are called Black Ivory (http://www.blackivorycoffee.com) and come from Thailand’s Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation (http://www.helpingelephants.org). According to The Drinks Business, the coffee beans retail for US $100 per 35 grams.

    The beans are of the Thai Arabica variety and grow at an elevation of 1,500 metres. Elephants consume the coffee cherries and excrete the beans as part of their diet. Once the elephants have excreted the beans in their faeces they are harvested, processed, sun dried and roasted.

    It takes 10,000 beans to make a kilogram of roasted coffee, according to the Black Ivory website. A total of 33 kilograms of coffee cherries are consumed by the elephants to make a kilogram of the Black Ivory coffee.

    Elephants in Thailand are used for various activties, from heavy work to providing rides for tourists. The riders of the elephants – called mahouts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahout) – and their wives also benefit from the manufacturing and sale of the coffee. The income is used to pay for health costs, school fees, food and clothing.

    Additionally, 8 per cent of the proceeds from the sale of the coffee beans pays for a veterinarian to provide care to the elephants. The money is also used to pay for their medicine and the setting up of a laboratory.

    Elephants are much-revered in Thailand and feature in the country’s national iconography. They are listed as Protected Animals under Thailand’s Conservation Act 1992 (FAO). Many believe they should be classified as endangered. The last survey on the population was conducted in 1991 and elephant numbers were recorded as 1,900 (FAO).

    The main threat to elephants comes from humans – in the form of poaching for the animals’ ivory tusks, their abuse in begging on the streets, and the destruction of forests where the elephants live.

    The natural habitat and feeding grounds for the elephants have shrunk over the past decades. It is estimated the forest area in Thailand shrank from 80 per cent to 20 per cent between 1957 and 1992. Causes include major infrastructure projects, increasing farmland and the building of large resorts, all encroaching on the elephants’ territory. Limited space means elephants increasingly come into conflict with humans and this can lead to them being poisoned or killed.

    But the success of the Japanese-brewed Kono Kuro beer is creating a new funding source for helping the elephants and doing some good.

    The beer is brewed by Sankt Gallen brewery (http://www.sanktgallenbrewery.com) in Kanagawa, Japan using the Black Ivory coffee beans, imparting the beer with an earthy flavour. It may sound like a gimmick, but consumers have remarked on the beer’s distinctive taste, and sales do not lie: it has been a quick success, selling out within minutes of its launch in Japan.

    The beer comes in dark bottles with a sandy coloured label elegantly illustrated with pictograms showing the process of turning the beans excreted by the elephants into beer. It is a humorous visual tale that makes the label stand out from other beer brands.

    Brewer Sankt Gallen calls it a “chocolate stout” because of its rich, earthy flavour (it does not contain any chocolate, however).

    Although bottles of the stout sold out after going on sale on the Sankt Gallen website, the brewery has said that it has plans to put the beer on tap at its new shop, which opened in Tokyo recently.

    Published: June 2013

    Resources

    1) Coffee Alamid: Ethically produces the coffee harvested from the droppings of civet cats in the Philippines. Website: http://www.botecentral.net/

    2) Save the Elephants: A campaign to stop the poaching of elephant ivory. Website: http://www.savetheelephants.org/

    3) BBC Nature: Background on elephants. Website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/African_elephant

    4) WWF: Facts and background on elephants. Website: http://worldwildlife.org/species/elephant

    Southern Innovator logo

    London Edit

    31 July 2013

    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

  • African Media Changing to Reach Growing Middle Class

    African Media Changing to Reach Growing Middle Class

    By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

    SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

    Africa’s growing middle classes are being targeted by a new generation of media entrepreneurs. This growing group of Africans is ambitious and intelligent, and they want media that matches their aspirational ways. Clever media people are stepping up to feed this trend.

    The continent as a whole forms the 10th largest economy in the world. Of Africa’s more than 1 billion people, 900 million can be classified as part of the consumer economy. Out of this group, there a third – approximately 300 million people – make modest sums by Western standards, about US $200 a month, but have spare cash to buy things like mobile phones, DVDs and new clothes, or pay for better schools. They are the population that is overlooked when attention is focused only on the very poor living on less than US $2 a day.

    Pulitzer Prize-winning Nigerian journalist Dele Olojede is one of several African media pioneers re-shaping the continent’s media and taking it to the next level. Another is Godfrey Mwampembwa, whose popular puppet television show satirizes contemporary politics and current events and brings a welcome local flavour to a programming schedule packed with foreign imports.

    A book by University of Texas professor Vijay Mahajan, Africa Rising, details the phenomenon of Africa’s middle class consumer society. He calls this group of middle class consumers ‘Africa 2’, with the desperately poor called Africa 3s, and the extremely rich Africa 1s.

    This new group has expanded far beyond just the ruling elites and government workers. Many of its members work in the private sector, as secretaries, computer entrepreneurs, merchants and others who have benefited from consistent growth rates in many African countries.

    And because these people consume products and services – and advertising products and services are the lifeblood of private media – the opportunities are plentiful.

    “I’m convinced that Africa is going to be built by Africa 2s,” Mahajan told the Washington Post newspaper. “These are the people sending their kids to school . . . who are the most optimistic, the most forward-thinking.”

    Olojede, owner and publisher of Next newspaper (http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Home/index.csp) in Nigeria’s biggest city, Lagos, has been able to grab readers by breaking original stories and offering a quality, well-designed publication. Launched in 2008, it has its sights set on going continent-wide by 2011.

    “There is a need for a newspaper for the African metropolitan middle classes, along the lines of the International Herald Tribune,” he told Monocle magazine.

    Olojede cut his teeth as a foreign editor for the US newspaper Newsday and has used this experience to make Next such a success.

    Next has become the number one news website in Nigeria’s highly competitive media scene.

    Wisely, Olojede put design at the centre of making his newspaper and website stand out from the competition. He commissioned the experienced newspaper design team of Garcia Media (http://garciamedia.com/blog/articles/in_west_africa_a_new_newspaper_is_born_—online_first) – who have designed for The Wall Street Journal, The Miami Herald and Die Zeit – to develop the template and prototypes.

    Kenyan economist James Shikwati (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Shikwati) believes Africa’s middle-income consumers are also a driving force for political change.

    “It’s empowering,” he told the Washington Post. “If you give people a sense of freedom in the economic sector, then you deny it in the political sector, you have a problem.”

    Kenya-based newspaper cartoonist Gado (Godfrey Mwampembwa) has profited from this phenomenon. Fed up with TV channels sticking to a menu of foreign imports and dull news programmes, he looked to famous puppet TV shows Spitting Image (from Britain) and Les Guignols (from France) for inspiration. The result is the XYZ Show (http://xyzshow.com/blog), which features grotesque puppet caricatures of well-known public and political figures. The show’s blog makes for an excellent entry point into African TV programme-making and its ups and downs. The show is broadcast on Citizen TV in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.

    “I moved to Nairobi in 1992 when I was 23,” Mwampembwa explained to Monocle. “The Daily Nation, the biggest newspaper in Kenya, had lost its editorial cartoonist so they ran a competition to look for his replacement. I sent in my drawings and came second.”

    “I took a year off in 2000-2001 to study film and animation in Vancouver. When I got back to Nairobi I started thinking about the sort of TV programme I would like to make. Kenya needed a show that would make fun of our politicians and expose hypocrisy and I thought a puppet show like Les Guignols or Spitting Image would be a great way to do it.”

    “We managed to raise funds for a pilot in 2007 and Citizen TV (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Citizen-TV-Kenya/261061365404), a private station, eventually agreed to broadcast a series.”

    Each episode costs US $16,740 and the puppets are US $3,600 to make. The programme-makers could only get money from foreign donors: the French, Dutch, and Finnish embassies and the Ford Foundation.

    Despite initial complaints from politicians, the show is preparing for its second season – and, Mwampembwa said, “there will be a lot of big stories for us to cover.”

    Making a popular TV show is not an easy thing to do. Mwampembwa maintains a furious work pace to straddle his many roles:

    “I have to draw a cartoon every day but editorial cartooning is not a nine-to-five job, it’s 24/7. Whenever I get ideas I have to sketch them.

    “It was a steep learning curve in the first season. The show is important for Kenyan TV and everything is done here in Nairobi. We won’t change any of the politics though. We are very hard-hitting and we will stay that way.

    “Over the years I’ve got nasty letters, emails and phone calls but that’s OK, it’s part of it.”

    As these media innovators show, there is nothing but opportunity for entrepreneurs feeding the hungry news and information appetite of the continent’s ambitious middle class.

    And Mwampembwa says becoming better informed doesn’t have to be dull: “We are informing the public but I’d like to think we are entertaining them too.”

    Published: September 2010

    Resources

    • Africa Rising: A book by Professor Vijay Mahajan on how Africa’s consumer economy is growing and growing. Website: http://tinyurl.com/2vk3m9n

    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

  • Local Animation: A Way Out of Poverty

    Local Animation: A Way Out of Poverty

    By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

    SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

    One of the more remarkable creative developments since 2000 has been the explosion in animation production in the developing world, in particular Asia. Once seen as frivolous or unnecessary, animation is now acknowledged as a high-growth area and a critical component in the emerging economies being shaped by information technology.

    The demand for more animation is being fuelled by several trends. Lucrative outsourcing contracts with major global film studios like Walt Disney and Warner Brothers get much of the attention. But even more importantly for small entrepreneurs, the rapid growth of information technology and mobile phones is fuelling demand for animation with a local flavour, which is an excellent way to make applications more attractive to users. As computers and animation software become cheaper, it is easier for entrepreneurs to compete with the bigger studios. It all started with the popularity of Japanese anime animation, which kicked the door open in the West, sparking an appetite for fresh, new styles unseen before.

    The animation leaders in Asia are Japan, Republic of Korea, Philippines and Taiwan Province of China, with India rising quickly. As animation production is very lucrative and a labor-intensive business (labor takes up 70 to 80 percent of business costs), other Asian countries such as India, China, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore have recently started their own industries.

    The National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) has forecast the Indian animation sector to gross overall turnover of US $950 million in 2009, while its gaming industry will reach US $300 million in 2009 (from US $30 million in 2005). The global industry is huge: it is estimated that games will gross US $11 billion and animation US $35 billion by 2009. In the Philippines, growth has been 25 per cent a year since 2005 (National Statistics Office), and the government has been heavily promoting animation as a viable career and business opportunity. China was able to make US $604 million in 2005. The AWN’s Animation Industry Database lists 48 studios operating in the Philippines alone. Others benefiting are Thailand, Taiwan Province of China and Republic of Korea. And even in Africa, there have been attempts to get things going.

    Ambitiously, China hopes to raise its home-made share of the animation pie from 10 per cent and to increase its overall animation programming from 5,000 hours/year to 16, 7000/year. In 2004, the Chinese government set up four animation schools: Communication University of China, Beijing Film Academy, China Academy of Art, and Tianjin Sorun Digital Media School. More than 200 animated films were produced in 2004.

    Indian animation feature productions have exploded in the past few years. In 2005, animated feature Jai Hanuman started the current boom. Its quality marked a departure from past Indian productions and heralded in a new era. Importantly, it out-grossed any Disney film in India, and proved films featuring local topics could be commercially successful. It is a difficult market with 14 official languages and 1,400 dialects. At present, the huge Indian market has little locally produced animation to feed its needs. But by 2007, 71 Indian animation films were announced to be in production.

    Productions in development draw heavily on India’s culture and love of gods. They include Epiphany Films’ The Dream Blanket, a Tibetan fairy tale, and Graphiti studios’ Action Hero BC, a teenager who fights evil.

    The world’s animation producers scour India for talent to outsource. Global films with some Indian production in them include Finding Nemo, The Lion King and The Adventures of Tenali Raman. Toonz Animation Studio based at the Technopark in Kerala, was called by Animation Magazine one of the top ten studios in the world.

    In Africa, South Africa has by far the most dynamic and sophisticated animation sector. Ten years after the birth of democracy, hundreds of production companies and several 2D animation houses were established. In turn, South Africa advertises itself as a cheaper place to produce animation.

    The highly successful South African 3D animated series Magic Cellar by Morula Pictures – the first of its kind based on African culture – was successfully sold to the US Home Box Office channel this year. Based on 20 folk tales, the stories were collected through interviews with elders in African villages. Mfundi Vundla, 58, who owns Johannesburg’s Morula Pictures, South Africa’s largest black-led studio, said his productions are meant to counter the perception of “Africans as unsophisticated, superstitious idiots who visited witch doctors to solve problems.” It employs 60 people and dozens of actors.

    In 2004, UNESCO’s Africa Animated! was launched, with East Africa’s first animation project. The participants undertook animation, drawing techniques, scriptwriting for animation and storyboarding. The project was launched to assemble resources and expertise for the production of culturally relevant children’s animated cartoons and programmes in Africa. It sought to create a high-quality “African branded” training and production model, in order to make African animation competitive for regional organizations to produce animated TV series, Public Service Announcements (PSA) and short films.

    The Nairobi office is seeking to establish a Regional Training and Production Centre for Animation in Kenya in 2008.

    Moustapha Alassane of Niger and one of Africa’s film pioneers, said: “The good thing about animation is that you can do it on a shoe-string budget. With the computer, animation is getting easier and anyone can do it now. I want to encourage young Africans to use new technologies for animation.”

    Published: December 2007

    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

  • Protecting Threatened Fruits and Nuts in Central Asia

    Protecting Threatened Fruits and Nuts in Central Asia

    By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

    SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

    Between 94,000 and 144,000 plant species — a quarter to a half of the world’s total — could die out in the coming years, according to an estimate by Scientific American (2002).  Among them are vital food crops, threatened by a world in which climate change is causing more weather turbulence and diseases and viruses can spread rapidly and destroy crops.

    This scale of plant loss risks leaving the world’s food security dependent on fewer – and more vulnerable – domesticated species. The hunt is on for hardy plant species that can survive these ups and downs while protecting the world’s food security for this and the next generation.

    In the Central Asian nations of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, conservation of trees and their fruits and nuts are being placed at the centre of the economic lives of people who had been unwittingly destroying the trees’ habitat. Two projects, one to preserve walnut trees in Tajikistan, and the other to preserve apple trees in Kyrgyzstan, are beginning to bear fruit.

    The Red List of Trees of Central Asia published in April 2009 by the Global Trees Campaign (http://www.globaltrees.org/rl_centralasia.htm), identified the 44 species most at risk in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. Growing in rugged, mountainous terrain, the plants have high genetic diversity and are thought to be critical in the development of disease-resistant and climate-tolerant fruit varieties.

    The diverse environments of Central Asia are host to over 300 wild fruit and nut species that are ancestors to the fruits and nuts we eat today, including wild apple, plum, pears, pistachios, cherry, apricot, and walnut.

    Many face extinction as local people — driven by the need for fire wood, or to earn an income — cut down this precious resource. The Red List estimates that over 90 percent of the trees in the fruit and nut forests across Central Asia have been destroyed in the past 50 years.

    The importance of these fruits and nuts can’t be over-emphasized: all the common varieties of apricot come from one living ancestor, the species Armeniaca vulgaris, now very rare in Central Asia. Central Asia’s Malus sieversii (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malus_sieversii) gave birth to today’s domestic apples. It spread its way around the world along the ancient Silk Road (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road). The name of Kazakhstan’s former capital city is Almaty (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaty), which literally means ‘Grandfather of Apples’.

    Scientists have found genetic diversity and disease resistance greater in wild plant species that have not been domesticated, like Malus sieversii. Malus sieversii is highly resistant to Fire Blight (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_blight), a nasty disease that turns the fruits black (USDA).

    To stop this free-for-all in which resources are plundered to extinction and trees wiped out to be used for firewood, deals are being struck to guarantee local communities’ rights to exploit the trees as a resource, while also obligating them to preserve them.

    In Tajikistan, the walnut trade is a critical source of income for some villages, with most of the crop exported to Turkey. The country shares with Kyrgyzstan the world’s largest natural-growth walnut forest. But the use of short-term land leases discouraged long-term management, while local people were lacking any other sources of income and over-exploited the trees.

    Jilly McNaughton of British NGO Fauna and Flora International (www.fauna-flora.org), said the current situation “is not good, with use of the forest by local people both heavy and inadequately controlled.” “Collection of firewood and grazing are perhaps the biggest concerns,” she said. “There is very little natural regeneration of wild trees due to grazing and hay making in the forest. “As the walnut is valued as an income generating crop, other trees are cut for firewood and timber, meaning parts of the forest have become a park-like landscape with scattered large walnut trees.”

    Fauna and Flora International, which specializes in species preservation, is encouraging local people to work towards long-term leases and diversify their sources of income. The strategy includes encouraging other ways to make a living, including raising chickens, making clothes and bee keeping.

    As one villager said: “We have bought honey buckets and bees. Next year we will get a lot of honey – it will be a great income. We got a job.”

    The Red List of Trees found the causes of species’ destruction are multiple: over-exploitation, human development, pests and diseases, overgrazing, desertification and fires. Since the break up of the Soviet Union, funds have been short to help reverse these threats.

    The most threatened apple species in the Red List is the Niedzwetzky apple (Malus niedzwetzkyana) (www.globaltrees.org/kyrgyzstan_apple.htm).

    In Kyrgyzstan, work to preserve the Niedzwetsky apple is directly involving the community. Projects are working with the village of Kara Alma in southern Kyrgyzstan and government forest services to encourage eco-friendly small businesses to earn incomes and protect the forests.

    They have catalogued all 111 trees that still survive, and have set up a community-run nursery to grow more. The ambition is to expand this approach across the region, both preserving these great resources and bringing hope and employment to the people.

    Published: July 2009

    Resources

    • The Global Trees Campaign, a partnership between Fauna & Flora International, Botanic Gardens Conservation International and many other organisations around the world, aims to save threatened tree species through provision of information, conservation action and support for sustainable use. Website: www.globaltrees.org
    • The Red List of Trees of Central Asia: Has evaluated 96 of the region’s tree species, identifying 44 as globally threatened with extinction. Website: www.globaltrees.org/news_RLCA.htm
    • Association of Cities of Kyrgyz Republic. Website: www.citykr.kg/en/index.php
    • Planeta: One of the first ecotourism resources to go online (since 1994) and still offers plenty of information for those wanting to start a business. Website: www.planeta.com
    • Environmental Public Awareness Handbook: A thorough account with case studies of a successful two-year project in Mongolia to combine environmental protection with livelihoods. Website: http://tiny.cc/oZ9sA

    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