Nov 21, 09
How Can Bright Green Cities Thrive Without Capital?
What do you do when things are booming but your credit's dried up? Perhaps you begin to invent new ways of doing business. U.N. Habitat recently released a report showing that the pace of urbanization is increasing, with "200,000 new dwellers flooding into the world cities and towns each day." That's like a new city the size of Seattle, Washington D.C. or Copenhagen springing up every three days. And while it is true that in the Global North, some industrial areas have become home to...
Coffee Sales Helping Chimpanzees, Goodall Says
Decades after Jane Goodall began her pursuit to protect Tanzania's endangered chimpanzees, she has found a solution that was growing right beneath her nose. International gourmands say the forests surrounding the famed chimpanzees grow some of the best coffee in Tanzania. At 1,400 meters above sea level, the region provides a cool enough climate for coffee beans of "giddy, honey-toned, floral sweetness as fresh but voluptuous as a tropical morning," according to Coffee Review. Since the...
Winners Announced in Financial Innovation Competition
To help promote the creation of new ideas for financial security, nonprofit organization Changemakers devised a contest to encourage innovation for the global financial crisis. The competition is called Banking on Social Change – Seeking Financial Solutions for All. Changemakers in an initiative of Ashoka, the world's largest association of leading social entrepreneurs. The nonprofit association started Changemakers as an open source community that would provide, collect and create...
Worldchanging Interview: Inveneo
This article was written by Jeremy Faludi in September 2006. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective. Inveneo.org is a nonprofit that connects the most cut-off people in the world--they provide communication technology to people in developing regions or disaster zones which lack the infrastructure for normal telephone and internet connections. Their connections have helped rural villages spawn business, hurricane victims get aid, even helped the sick...
The Future of the U.S. Military: An Interview with Thomas P.M. Barnett
This Worldchanging Interview with Thomas P.M. Barnett was conducted by Alex Steffen in December of 2004. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective. Prof. Thomas P.M. Barnett, Senior Strategic Researcher at the U.S. Naval War College, is maybe the hottest military thinker in the world right now. His work, which focuses on the connections between development and security, and in particular his book, Pentagon's New Map, has become deeply influential with...
2007's Best: Sustainable Development
My early look at The Open Architecture Network and the Future of Design, about Cameron's work turning Architecture for Humanity into a design amplifier Some demographers call it the largest migration in human history: the movement of hundreds of millions of poor rural people to the emerging megacities where they believe they can build themselves a better future. Overall, the urbanization of the planet is a good thing, helping people struggle out of absolute poverty, increasing access to...
Incremental Infrastructure
Ethan has a terrific piece in the Boston Globe on his concept of incremental infrastructure: [T]he idea is to build essential facilities -- telephone networks, power grids, roads -- in small pieces using private investment, instead of relying on large, centrally planned, government-run projects.The rise of mobile phone networks linking more than 100 million Africans across the continent and the blossoming of cybercafes from Cape Town to Dakar are evidence that incremental infrastructure is...
Principle 9: Social Entrepreneurship/Base Of the Pyramid
How best do we meet the enormous social and humanitarian needs we find everywhere in the world today? There is no one right answer, no one perfect solution. Sustainable development will demand a variety of approaches, including much new thinking and innovative work. Two relatively new ideas we wrestle with frequently here at Worldchanging are social entrepreneurship and base of the pyramid businesses. Both are approaches with their problems (and many critics), but both also offer useful...
Microcredit: The Dead End Debate Continues
An interesting debate about the efficacy of microfinance has been going on lately, pitting development experts and economists against one another as they seek to understand the impact of microfinance on economic growth and well-being.The whole thing started with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. In it, Amar Bhide and Carl Schramm argue that microenterprise, fueled by microfinance, is less good than a "transformative entrepreneurship" enabled by policy reform. Their basic point...
Ashden Awards 2006
We covered last year's Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy. This year's winners are just as inspirational: Tanzania's Mwanza Rural Housing Programme, which has invented a way to fire bricks using rice husks, cotton waste and coffee husks instead of wood, turning agricultural wastes into a resource and helping to provide housing. India's International Development Enterprises which has distributed over half a million treadle pumps (which use human power to move water, rather like the Super...
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