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  • Cheap Paper Microscope to Boost Fight Against Diseases

    Cheap Paper Microscope to Boost Fight Against Diseases

    By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

    SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

    To tackle diseases in the developing world, the most important first step is diagnosis. Without effective diagnosis, it is difficult to go to the next steps of either treatment or cure. While much attention is given to the high costs involved in treating and curing ailments, screening for diagnosis is also expensive, especially if it involves lots of people. Anything that can reduce the cost of diagnosis will free up resources to expand the number of people who can be checked, and help eradicate contagious diseases.

    One innovation is an inexpensive microscope that could allow diagnosing diseases such as malaria to be done on a much larger scale. Called the Foldscope (foldscope.com), it is made from paper, comes in a variety of bright colors and resembles the cardboard, three-dimensional cut-and-keep models regularly found in children’s books and magazines.

    Foldscope’s designs are developed on a computer and then printed. Foldscopes are made from thick paper, glue, a switch, a battery and a light-emitting diode (LED) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode).

    Inspired by the ancient Japanese paper-folding craft of Origami (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origami), Foldscope’s makers at the Prakash Lab at Stanford University (http://www.stanford.edu/~manup/) are trying to create “scientific tools that can scale up to match problems in global health and science education”, according to their website.

    The Foldscope can be put together in less than 10 minutes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rphTSmb-Ux4) using a pair of scissors, packing tape and tweezers.

    Once assembled, a user places a standard glass microscope slide in the Foldscope, turns on the LED light and uses their thumbs to guide the lens to view the slide.

    Each Foldscope can magnify up to 2000 times with a sub-micron resolution of 800 nm. The battery can last up to 50 hours on a single button-cell battery and requires no further external power. Its makers claim it can survive being stepped on or dropped from a three-storey building.
    It can perform a wide variety of microscopy techniques.

    Its makers hope to manufacture billions of Foldscopes a year by exploiting the cheapness of the material and the simplicity of construction.

    A beta test called “Ten Thousand Microscopes” will enlist 10,000 people to test the Foldscope in the field. Participants will contribute to helping write a field manual for the Foldscope prior to mass manufacturing. The Foldscope costs just US $0.50 to make for the basic model and US $1 for a higher-magnification version.

    Field tests are taking place in the United States, Uganda and India.

    Foldscope is designed to be used where more sophisticated lab analysis is not possible or affordable. It can also be an educational tool to give students experience in hands-on microscopy, or build awareness in the general population of how infectious diseases are spread by unseen lifeforms.

    Foldscope’s makers hope their creation will help diagnose common but devastating diseases including Plasmodium falciparum (malaria), Trypanosome cruzi (Chagas disease), Giradia lamblia (giardiasis), Leishmania donovani (leishmaniasis), Dirofilaria immitis (filariasis), Human Sickle Cell (sickle-cell anaemia), E. Coli and Bacillus and Pine strobilus.

    The quantity of people that need to be checked for diseases is vast and means, in countries where incomes and resources are low, it just isn’t possible to undertake diagnostic services using conventional methods.

    “There is definitely a huge gap between where we are and where we want to be,” Stanford School of Medicine Assistant Professor for Bioengineering Manu Prakash explained on the university’s website.

    “When you do get it (malaria), there is this simple-minded thing ‘forget diagnostics, let’s just get that tablet’ – and that’s what happens in most of the world. But the problem is there is many different strains, there are many different medications, you could potentially make the problem even worse by not realizing that you have malaria. And at the same time, the people who get a severe case – they are not detected at all.

    “What is that one thing that you could almost distribute for free that starts to match the specificity of what detection requires? For malaria, the standard is to be able to image, and sit on a microscope and essentially go through slides.

    “What we found as a challenge, if you truly want to scale, you should be really testing more than a billion people every year: that’s a billion tests a year. Any platform that you can imagine needs to scale to those numbers to make an impact.

    “One of these things that have been shown over and over again – if you can put (in place) an infrastructure to fight malaria that is scalable and sustainable, then you get retraction of malaria in different regions.”

    Published: April 2014

    Resources

    1) World Health Organization: Facts on malaria from the WHO. Website: http://www.who.int/topics/malaria/en/

    2) WHO: Ten Facts on Malaria: About 3.4 billion people – half of the world’s population – are at risk of malaria. In 2012, there were about 207 million malaria cases (with an uncertainty range of 135 million to 287 million) and an estimated 627,000 malaria deaths (with an uncertainty range of 473,000 to 789,000). Website: http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/

    3) Instructables: How to build a US $10 stand to turn a smartphone into a digital microsope. Website: http://www.instructables.com/id/10-Smartphone-to-digital-microscope-conversion/

    4) Microscope adapter app for smartphones:  iPhone, Android, Blackberry or any Smartphone, with an attachment and an app, can be turned into a microscope. Website: http://internetmedicine.com/iphone-microscope/

    5) Stanford University: Stanford University, located between San Francisco and San Jose in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, is one of the world’s leading teaching and research universities. Website: stanford.edu

    6) MaRS: Located in Toronto, Canada, MaRS is where science, technology and social entrepreneurs get the help they need. Where all kinds of people meet to spark new ideas. And where a global reputation for innovation is being earned, one success story at a time. Website: marsdd.com

    7) Universal smartphone to microscope and telescope adapter/mount: The SkyLight is a universal smartphone-to-microscope adapter. Website: http://www.amazon.com/Universal-Smart-Microscope-Telescope-Adapter/dp/B00GF3Q3CK

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

    Creative Commons License

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

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

    © David South Consulting 2022

  • Haitian Coffee Becoming a Hit with American Connoisseurs

    Haitian Coffee Becoming a Hit with American Connoisseurs

    By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

    SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

    The Caribbean country of Haiti has had to deal with the twin challenges of recovering from a devastating earthquake in 2010 while also pulling itself out of the economic and social chaos that has resulted in its status as the poorest place in the Western hemisphere.

    Violence has also led to a number of UN peacekeeping missions in Haiti over the years, and there is now a substantial international presence in the country to aid in stabilization and economic recovery (http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/minustah/).

    Haiti has a lot of potential when it comes to agriculture, but this would require substantial changes in the way land and agriculture are managed.

    Haiti is ranked 77 out of 79 countries in the 2012 Global Hunger Index. Access to sufficient quantities of nutritious food remains an issue for millions of Haitians. An estimated 3.8 million Haitians, or 38 per cent of the population, is food insecure (WFP 2012). Despite its fertile potential, Haiti is dependent on food aid and imports to meet its food security needs.

    Fifty per cent of the country’s food requirements are imported, and food prices have been rising since the end of 2010, the year of Haiti’s devastating earthquake. This increase has led to an overall loss of purchasing power for the majority of Haitians. Low agricultural productivity and urban encroachment on arable land provide additional challenges for Haiti’s rural populations. Eighty per cent of farms fail to produce enough to feed their households (http://www.foodsecurityportal.org/haiti/resources).

    But some are trying to create a new market for Haiti’s agricultural products to help boost farmers and farming as an occupation and an industry.

    It’s hard to imagine now, but Haiti was once the world’s largest producer of coffee in the 18th century when it was a French colony. Today Haiti produces less than 1 per cent of the world’s coffee.

    The targeting of niche coffee drinkers in the United States has introduced a new market to the special taste of the Haitian brew. While the market at present is small, some are hoping, with the right measures, it could be grown significantly, boosting both the country’s revenue from agricultural exports and incomes for coffee farmers.

    Several US-based companies are carving out a market for Haitian coffee and boosting awareness about the country’s unique coffee beans. La Colombe Coffee Roasters (http://lacolombe.com/), based in the city of Philadelphia, has already been able to export four shipping containers of Haitian coffee to the United States since 2010. The company supplies high-end chefs such as Eric Ripert and Daniel Boulud.

    In Florida, Kafe Pa Nou (kafepanou.com) – “our coffee” in Haitian Creole – is owned by Haitian-American Jean René Faustin and sells online coffee from Haitian suppliers Rebo and Cafe Selecto.

    So far, Haitian coffee has not been able to gain wider distribution through mass buyers such as Starbucks because it has not been possible to supply the quantities required to fulfill such a contract.

    Haiti would need to boost its current average coffee yield of 250 kilograms per hectare to double or triple that yield to gain large-scale contracts.

    “Haiti was for a brief moment in time the biggest producer of coffee for export in the world,” Gilbert Gonzales, Vice President of coffee exporter Rebo (http://rebo.ht/The%20Technics.htm), told Medium for Haiti (https://medium.com/medium-for-haiti). But “right now, most people would say it’s impossible” for Haiti’s coffee sector to return to international prominence.

    “We’re not saying that it’s possible in the next two years, maybe not even in the next 12 years,” he said. “But it is possible.”

    The coffee cherries used to make the popular beverage are processed in one of two ways: a dry process and a wet process. In Haiti, the dry process is more commonly used to form a hard cocoon on the outside of the coffee cherries to help preserve them for a year or more.

    This enables farmers to preserve the coffee cherries so they can keep a portion of the crop back as a safety reserve.

    The wet processed beans are first immersed in water and then the pulp is washed away before the beans are dried (http://coffee.wikia.com/wiki/Wet_process). The superior flavor this creates has attracted fans in the United States, especially in the trendy neighbourhoods of Brooklyn, New York and San Francisco, California. By bucking the traditional Haitian dry processing method for the beans, it is possible to earn three times the market price by selling wet-processed beans.

    Haiti’s history of coffee growing goes back to the 1700s. At the time, the country grew half the world’s coffee. This helped to make the French colony highly profitable.

    This long heritage has left the country with a unique asset: original Arabica typica coffee trees first imported by Europeans to Haiti. These coffee trees are considered to be heirloom because they are so old and untainted by modern breeding methods. According to Douglas Weiner in Medium for Haiti, “when you drink coffee from Haiti, it’s like drinking coffee from 200 years ago.”

    Weiner is part of a family business, Geo Weiner (http://selectohaiti.com/home/), which has been selling Haitian coffee for four generations and is one of the few surviving coffee exporters in the country.

    The country has an estimated 200,000 coffee farmers. Because their methods have not changed much, they are effectively organic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_food). Most farmers can not afford chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

    The coffee farms are located in mountain areas with a rich biodiversity of plants and trees. This stands in stark contrast with much of the rest of the country, where deforestation has left the country with just 2 per cent of virgin forest left. Coffee-producing areas are lush and green because coffee is one of the few cash crops that makes enough money to keep it worthwhile to preserve the trees and foliage. In other parts of the country, many are making money from turning trees into charcoal for cooking fuel, the most common fuel for most of the country’s population.

    Haiti’s coffee growers have had a hard time coping with the rise and fall of world coffee prices. The world market price for coffee dropped in the early 2000s as the markets were flooded with coffee from Brazil and Vietnam. In response, farmers then cut down the coffee trees and replaced them with subsistence crops such as corn and beans.

    With the amount of coffee grown in Haiti dropping quickly, the number of exporters in the country plummeted from 20 companies to two companies today, Geo Weiner and Rebo.

    Jobert Angrand, Executive Coordinator of the National Institute of Coffee (http://www.icefda.org/), believes coffee production declined in Haiti because of a wide range of problems, from diseases and pests to aging trees, too-small plots and inefficient production methods. Per-hectare coffee yields are as low as one-tenth of production in Latin America.

    The Vice President of coffee exporter Rebo says these problems are holding things back. “I don’t think today we’re looking into going mainstream,” said Gilbert Gonzales. “We can’t. There is not enough volume for that.”

    Because production will be small, Gonzales believes Haiti would be wise to target the higher end of the marketplace with American grocery stores such as Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods: “It’s looking into the higher-end gourmet shops, things like that,” he said, “so that we could really share with the rest of that world the quality available from Haiti.”

    Significant purchases of Haitian coffee have been made by various overseas companies, which does give hope that this plan could work. Irish coffee company Java Republic bought 97 tonnes of Haitian coffee from the Rebo exporter in 2010.

    Published: August 2013

    Resources

    1) National Coffee Association: Ten Steps to Coffee. Website: http://www.ncausa.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=69

    2) International Coffee Organization: The International Coffee Organization (ICO) is the main intergovernmental organization for coffee, bringing together exporting and importing governments to tackle the challenges facing the world coffee sector through international cooperation. Its member governments represent 97 per cent of world coffee production and over 80 per cent of world consumption. Website: http://www.ico.org/

    3) Coffee Research: Growing Coffee Beans at Home. Website: http://www.coffeeresearch.org/coffee/homegrowing.htm

    4) Puro Fairtrade Coffee: Puro is a leading brand of Fairtrade and Fair Trade Organic coffee that works in partnership with the World Land Trust to purchase and protect areas of precious rainforest in South America. Website: http://www.purocoffee.com/

    More on Haiti here: State Of Decay: Haiti Turns To Free-Market Economics And The UN To Save Itself

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/10/28/ending-gang-violence-while-cleaning-the-streets-in-haiti/

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

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2021/10/28/milk-co-operatives-help-hungry-haiti/

    https://davidsouthconsulting.org/2020/04/22/state-of-decay-haiti-turns-to-free-market-economics-and-the-un-to-save-itself/

    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.

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

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

    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

  • Development Challenges, South-South Solutions Newsletter

    Development Challenges, South-South Solutions Newsletter

    By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

    The original southerninnovator.org website launched in 2011, in tandem with the first issue of Southern Innovator Magazine, and ranked midway in the top 10 million most popular websites in the world. Its content has been cited in books, scholarship and strategic plans.

    ISSN 2227-3905

    Development Challenges, South-South Solutions is the monthly e-newsletter for the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation in UNDP (formerly the United Nations Development Programme’s South-South Cooperation Unit). I research and write all stories (since January 2007). You can view the original website here. The stories are in English, French and Spanish.

    The original WordPress website for Development Challenges, South-South Solutions (southsouthnews.wordpress.com). It was launched in 2006 and eventually became southerninnovator.org in 2011. The magazine Southern Innovator was also launched in New York in 2011.
    The newsletter archive on the website for UNDP’s Special Unit for South-South Cooperation circa 2011 (including issues in English, French and Spanish). 2011 was an important year as the e-newsletter Development Challenges, South-South Solutions scaled into a dedicated web archive, http://southerninnovator.org, a sister magazine, Southern Innovator (https://unsouthsouth.org/2014/12/25/southern-innovator-magazine/), and pollinated its content across multiple platforms, capitalising on the platform and social media explosion of the time.

    Here is a good background article on the rise of South-South cooperation, how it is altering global trade and power relationships, and what the future holds: South-South Cooperation Defies the North. And here is some historical background from Wikipedia: South-South Cooperation.

    Development Challenges, South-South Solutions reaches a global audience of influential decision-makers on the frontlines of international development in the South. More than 2,000 subscribers read the newsletter every month (academic institutions, UN agencies, private sector companies, UNDP Country Offices, financial institutions including the IMF and World Bank, inter-governmental organisations, UNDP knowledge networks around the world, and all South-South focal points in West Africa).

    Remember to think of Development Challenges, South-South Solutions when you have a Southern innovation to share with the world. You can read our archive of stories online here: http://ssc.undp.org/index.php?id=66

    From Special Unit for South-South Cooperation: 2008 Reflections: “As part of the strategy to foster South‐South cooperation within and across regions, the Division has continued to invigorate and re‐enforce a South‐South cooperation focal point system. These efforts included the publication and distribution of a monthly e‐newsletter, Development Challenges: South-South Solutions, which presents a briefing for South‐South focal points, Southern academics and development professionals on practical solutions to development challenges found throughout the South. Over the course of 2008, twelve e‐newsletters were released via e‐mail and published on the website of the Special Unit.”

    What are people saying about Development Challenges, South-South Solutions? Read some comments here.

    Contact me by email about the newsletter here: developmentchallenges@googlemail.com.

    Contact me by email about the new global magazine Southern Innovator here: southerninnovator@yahoo.co.uk

    July 2014 issue of Development Challenges, South-South Solutions: The last issue is available online for download. Support the e-newsletter for 2017: we are seeking additional funding so we can improve the reader experience and frequency of the e-newsletter. Since first launching in 2006, we often heard from readers how they valued the stories in the e-newsletter and how it has helped in raising the profile of innovators across the global South (“Congratulations on another great newsletter that’s packed with fascinating information! I really enjoy getting it each month.”). Additional resources would enable us to improve the way readers can access and receive the e-newsletter, enable the e-newsletter’s contributors to travel and report on developments, and allow us to offer daily and weekly updates and a wider range of resources online and on mobile platforms. Additional funds help in maintaining the quality of the e-newsletter, something that has been appreciated by readers (“Great economic and business reporting! Very helpful for us.” Africa Renewal). It will also allow the e-newsletter to spin-off quality resources for innovators, such as the influential magazine Southern Innovator. Contact the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation if you wish to support the e-newsletter for 2017: UNOSSC.

    “What a tremendous magazine your team has produced! It’s a terrific tour de force of what is interesting, cutting edge and relevant in the global mobile/ICT space… This is great, engaging, relevant and topical stuff.” Rose Shuman, Founder & CEO, Open Mind and Question Box, Santa Monica, CA, U.S.A.

    “Great economic and business reporting! Very helpful for us.” Africa Renewal, Africa Section, Strategic Communications Division, United Nations Department of Public Information

    “The reviewer observed that, although the Policy and UN Coordination Unit had produced all of the reports requested by intergovernmental bodies, especially for the High-level Committee, it had not been able to produce many of the publications (evidence-based analytical reports) that had previously been within its purview. Such publications included Southern Innovator magazine and the monthly e-newsletter “Development Challenges, South-South Solutions”. In the case of Southern Innovator, one issue (No. 5 on waste and recycling) was published during the four-year period of the framework but did not have wide online distribution, and issue No. 6 was awaiting funds for publication. The e-newsletter was last issued in July 2014 even though the reviewer found it a good way to communicate with focal points at the national and inter-agency levels. In fact, the shortage of funds for those knowledge products was the main reason that they had ceased being produced during the evaluation period.”  Final evaluation of the performance of the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation  under its strategic framework, 2014-2017, in light of the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

    Note: Unfortunately, the reason for “the shortage of funds” was down to suspension of funding to the UNOSSC in 2015 and 2016 pending two internal UN audit investigations after arrests made in 2015 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) revealed a bribery and money laundering network targeting the United Nations via various NGOs, including the UN-based news organisation South-South News. The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court of the United States.

    Click to access 20200316115239877_2020.03.16%20Ng%20Cert%20Petition%20Final.pdf

    Back Issues

    Development Challenges, South-South Solutions Newsletter | 2011-2014

    2014

    https://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/may-2014-development-challenges?qid=89df0660-ef43-429c-af52-d85f02d9f686&v=&b=&from_search=5

    Development Challenges, South-South Solutions Newsletter | 2007-2010

    2013

    https://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challenges-july-2013-issue

    2012

    https://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challenges-july-2012-issue

    2011

    https://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsdecember2011issue

    2010

    https://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsmarch2010issue?qid=7bd11340-2b07-44c5-ac42-8484d56133eb&v=&b=&from_search=7

    2009

    https://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsjuly2009issue-44444719?qid=227efbbc-650a-448b-ab1c-762b217d1b4b&v=&b=&from_search=11

    2008

    https://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challenges-may-2008-issue

    2007

    https://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsaugust2007issue?qid=9f706768-2933-4bf5-98ac-10f960c0b365&v=&b=&from_search=10

    “Beautiful, inspiring magazine from UNDP on South-South innovation. Heart is pumping adrenaline and admiration just reading it.”

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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

    © David South Consulting 2025

  • Affordable Space Programmes Becoming Part Of South’s Development

    Affordable Space Programmes Becoming Part Of South’s Development

    By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

    SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

    Space: the final frontier. At least that was how heading off into the stars was portrayed in cult television and film series Star Trek. While many countries are working to raise living standards and eradicate poverty on earth, some are also looking to space for solutions to earth-bound problems.

    Traditional space programmes were government-led and state-financed. They involved enormous armies of technicians, engineers and scientists. Each launch and mission had to be overseen by a vast mission control centre with row upon row of technicians watching computer screens in real time. Space technology advanced rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s with so many bright brains hard at work and with brave people willing to put their lives at risk, leading to humans walking on the surface of the moon in 1969.

    All of this expensive expertise meant few governments had the resources to set up space programmes – and it was even out of the hands of most of the private sector. In time, these leviathan space efforts lost the financial support of governments and the pace of new developments and achievements slowed. Nobody has set foot on the moon in 40 years – or on any other planet, for that matter.

    But various developments are changing the space scene today and promising a bright future and a return to rapid innovation.

    Space programmes are playing a greater role in the economic and innovation strategies of countries in the global South. New technologies and trends are turning space exploration into more affordable, small-scale operations within the reach of many countries.

    New information technologies and innovations in miniaturization mean satellites can be very small and light. These developments bring down costs considerably, and also reduce the number of people needed to monitor space missions.

    For example, on 14 September 2013 Japan’s space agency, JAXA, proved a slimmed-down space launch can work when it fired off its Epsilon rocket with a small satellite onboard. What made this mission different was how little it took to monitor the mission: just two laptop computers  and a small team of eight people. Previously, similar missions required a team of 150 people.

    Fewer people meant the launch was much cheaper. One of the reasons for having many people involved in the launch of a rocket is the need to perform multiple systems checks to make sure the launch is successful. The Epsilon is a “smart” rocket and saves on the need for people to micro-manage the launch procedures by having its own on-board computer with artificial intelligence (AI) capable of doing the laborious checklists before launch.

    Billing itself as “The first Latin American space development company,” Colombia’s Sequoia Space (sequoiaspace.com) was established in 2008 to build miniature satellites (called nano or pico satellites) that are affordable to countries in the global South.

    Located in Bogota’s trendy neighbourhood of Chapinero, Sequoia has set itself up to exploit the technological trend towards making things smaller and smaller.

    The firm manufactures satellites that range in size from 1.3 kilograms to 16 kilograms and are custom built for the customer’s needs. One satellite it is working on for the Colombian air force weighs 4.5 kilograms. It can make satellites to conduct missions in earth observation, remote sensing, micro-gravity experiments and other scientific experiments.

    The company was launched in 2007 by a team of Colombian engineers, who turned their extensive experience in developing satellites for the aerospace industry into a start-up. Their dream is to further develop the aerospace industry in Latin America and grow its role in the global space industry. They hope to make it possible for more and more countries in Latin America to carry out space missions.

    The company currently has clients in Colombia, Chile, Ecuador and Peru.

    Other Latin American space programmes include Peru’s CONIDA (http://www.conida.gob.pe/). Its mission is to “To promote, to research, to develop and to disseminate science and space technology for national interests, in order to create unique and differentiated services driving national development.”

    Ecuador’s Ecuadorean Civilian Space Agency (EXA) (http://www.exa.ec/index-en.html) has had a rough ride with its space programme with the failure of the Pegasus nano-satellite. Ultra-small, Pegasus was a small cube measuring just 10 centimeters along its edge and weighing just 1.2 kilograms (BBC). It was launched on 25 April 2013 from the Chinese spaceport of Jiuquan (http://www.cgwic.com/LaunchServices/LaunchSite/JSLC.html) but collided with a cloud of particles from an old Soviet-era rocket. It was declared lost by August 2013, having cost the government US $700,000.

    A second satellite, Krysaor (http://www.exa.ec/nee-02-eng.htm), is set to be launched in November 2013. It is intended as a partner to Pegasus and is for educational uses and also to monitor space debris, its website states.

    Other trends in the space race include radical changes in how space missions can be funded and the range of players who can do it. Space entrepreneurs who are using their own private wealth to finance space missions and technology development are now driving innovation.

    Pioneers in this new frontier include two US-based private companies. SpaceX (spacex.com), headed by Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk, boasts of having “the world’s first reusable rockets.” Started in 2002, it now employs more than 3,000 people and has an ultimate goal of creating the technological capability for humans to live on other planets.

    The way SpaceX offers access to space as a service is also radical. The company website shows how the re-usable rockets work and then offers potential customers a price list and various options for delivering payloads to space (spacex.com/falcon9).

    Another pioneering company is run by the founder of the online shopping service Amazon (amazon.com). Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin (blueorigin.com) seeks to lower the costs of getting humans into space.

    Inspired by the revolution in project funding brought about by the Internet, Denmark’s Copenhagen Suborbitals (http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/) is looking to crowd-fund space missions from donations and says it will use the money to launch peaceful-purpose suborbital spacecraft.

    “We aim to show the world that human space flight can be different from the usual expensive and government controlled project,” its website says.

    How are these companies relevant to countries coping with wide-scale poverty and economic underdevelopment? There are many space technology applications that can aid poor countries. They can improve communications technology and provide more sophisticated communications services. Satellites can monitor weather and agriculture and conduct sophisticated mapping activities. This can help with planning for fast-growing urban areas.

    The West African country of Nigeria is running one of Africa’s largest space programmes to boost its effectiveness as an agricultural economy. Nigeria announced its space programme in 2003 and launched its first satellite in 2007 with the Chinese. Unfortunately, this satellite failed and fell out of orbit.

    But Nigeria did not give up and now has three satellites in space.

    In 2011, President Goodluck Johnathan said the satellites would “substantially reduce the annual expenditure of over $1 billion arising from the use of foreign bandwidth for GSM Communications, cable television, e-commerce and e-government by both public and private users in the country” (allAfrica).

    The Nigerian government is using these satellites to help with its planning and monitoring of disaster-prone areas.

    Two countries of the global South, India and China, got involved in space programmes early on in the global space race. India started its space programme in the late 1960s and launched its first satellite in 1975. China began its space programme more than 50 years ago but did not launch its first satellite until the early 1970s. Since then, the country has also launched human beings into space.

    And their ambitions are rising: both India and China have their sights set on large-scale space voyages, including missions to the planet Mars.

    China is now working on a 60-ton space station to orbit around the earth which is planned to be finished by 2020. Ambitiously, the country is also working towards sending human beings to the planet Mars sometime around 2040 to 2060.

    Published: September 2013

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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.  

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