Coca-Cola aims to double 50,000 farmers income in Kenya and Uganda

Launched early in 2010, Project Nurture is an $11.5 million partnership among The Coca-Cola Company, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the international non-profit organization TechnoServe. It intends to double the fruit incomes of more than 50,000 smallholder farmers in Kenya and Uganda by 2014 by building inclusive mago and passion fruit value chains.

Harvards CSR Initiative has analysed the project and finds some impressive achievements already:

• More than 42,000 farmers have participated in the program, 14,000 of them women
• Annual fruit incomes have, on average, already more than doubled.
• 297 loans worth $115,300 have been disbursed to finance passion-fruit farming start-up costs such as seeds, seedlings, poles, and wires.
• Coca Cola expects to recoup its investment in the project in the next 3-5 years through cost optimization and replication in other countries

Key elements of the model have been implemented in Haiti and India, with further replication being considered for Zimbabwe, Nigeria and/or Ghana. The foundation is now looking to establish similar additional partnerships for widely-grown staple crops such as rice, maize, and cassava.

Philips and UNIDO create centres of light in Africa

Dutch technology company Royal Philips and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) have signed a declaration regarding their joint collaboration on innovative LED lighting solutions for poverty reduction. 

Philips is currently installing more than a hundred Community Light Centres across Africa. These are areas of approximately 1000m2, or the size of a small soccer pitch, and are lit using a new generation of efficient solar-powered LED lighting. The concept of the Light Centres is to create areas of light for rural communities, which live without electricity, thus effectively 'extending the day and extending play', creating numerous opportunities for social, sporting and economic activities in the evening.

The joint declaration commits UNIDO and Philips to cooperate to promote rural access to energy and energy efficiency for productive activities, technology transfer and access to renewable energy solutions through solar-powered LED technologies, in particular in Ghana, Kenya and South Africa. The two organizations state their intention to identify suitable projects relating to the above areas of cooperation on an annual basis.

Using the web to improve accountability in war-torn countries

Integrity Action's mission is to empower citizens to act with and demand integrity, actively taking part in building institutions to promote a state that is open, accountable and responsive. They were recently selected to receive a £500,000 Global Impact Award from Google's Global Impact Challenge.

With the Global Impact Award, Integrity Action plans to develop an online data collection and reporting platform that enables citizens to hold government and development agencies accountable. Over the next 18 months, Integrity Action will train over 2,000 community monitors in seven war-torn countries and help citizens fix 50% of problems in public services and infrastructure projects. This will ultimately lead to better quality of life for over 500,000 poor people.

Fredrik Galtung, CEO of Integrity Action said: "The Google Impact Award is an  incredible endorsement by Google of the power of technology to empower even the poorest and most disenfranchised so that their voices will be listened to". The organisation operates from offices in Jakarta, Jerusalem, and London and has staff permanently based in Amman, Bishkek, Nairobi and Yerevan.

China gears up for green building boom

According to the China GreenTech Report 2013, buildings currently account for at least 33% of China's total energy consumption. Green buildings offer a solution, which can dramatically reduce the environmental impact of new and existing developments. Aggressive targets set within the 12th Five-Year Plan, and developed through more recent policies and guidelines, could encourage widespread adoption of green building practices, driving significant near-term growth.

China aims to develop 1 billion m2 of new green building floor area by 2015. This represents a fourteen-fold increase on the 69.5 million m2 in existence at the end of 2012. By 2014, all government investment in public buildings, and all affordable housing in selected cities, must meet green building standards and 30% of new buildings measured by floor area must be certified as green by 2020.

During the past six years, China has been developing and promoting its own green building rating system, based on a rising scale of one, two and three stars. There is a wide difference in standards between the three but all are considered by the government to qualify for green certification. More recently, international systems such as LEED, BREEAM and CASBEE have also been recognized and applied.

Greening Lighting: Check out the Algae Powered LED bulb

Designer Gyula Bodonyi has harnessed the power of green algae in a light bulb, according to Yanko Design on Inhabitat. Algae projects have already been seen powering power entire buildings, but Bodonyi's concept brings green power to the public on a more user-friendly scale. With the Algaebulb, algae powers a single LED activated by a tiny air pump and hydrophobic material able to create a teeny-tiny power house for light. 

The tear-shaped bulb is made up of an air pump, LED, hidrophob container, PC Shell, and air outlet. The system sucks in carbon dioxide and water through the pump near the E27 screw-top, and as the air passes through the bulb, chlorella pyrenoidosa spirulina microalgae are fostered. While algae flourishes, it gives off oxygen, which in turn powers the tiny LED inside.

When the AlgaeBulb is not illuminated, it appears to be a dark green; a result of the colony of microalgae living within. When illuminated, it gives off a slightly green tinge on the interior, making for a green bulb that is literally "green." Although small in size, if AlgaeBulb is employed on a large scale, it holds the potential to save a significant amount of energy. Aside from providing a light source with renewables, the bulb also sucks up carbon dioxide, helping to alleviate greenhouse gases one bulb at a time.

Honey-suckers in Bangalore turn sewage into sweet profits

Every year, each of us produces some 500 litres of urine and 50 kilograms of faeces a year, enough to fertilise plants that would produce more than 200 kilograms of cereals. Scale that up and the world's population excretes 70 million tonnes of nutrients annually. Applied to fields, this could replace almost 40 per cent of the 176 million tonnes of nutrients in chemical fertilisers used by the world's farmers in 2011.

In Bangalore, the so-called "honey-suckers" hoover up the city's sewage from a million septic tanks and pit latrines and head for farms outside the city, where their loads are in demand to fertilise vegetables and coconut and banana trees. The fact is that human sewage is packed with nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium compounds, the three main nutrients plants need to grow - helpfully in roughly the correct proportions.

Provided there are sufficient controls for hygiene, health and safety concerns can been dealt with. And on the up side, there are significant economic benefits. In one experiment, after just 13 weeks, corn cobs were about 15 times bigger than they would have been without being fertilised by urine. Besides this, a single truck driver can service a population of 20,000 people, and generate an income of $50,000 a year, twice the price of a new truck.

Source: New Scientist. Full article here.

Pioneering White-Space Wifi Gives Remote Internet Access in Kenya

To improve technology access, Microsoft has announced the deployment of a pilot project with the Kenyan Ministry of Information and Communications and Kenyan Internet Service Provider, Indigo Telecom Ltd., to deliver low-cost, high-speed wireless broadband and create new opportunities for commerce, education, healthcare, and delivery of government services across Kenya. 

The deployment is called 'Mawingu', which is Kiswahili for cloud. It is the first deployment of solar-powered based stations together with TV white spaces, a technology partially developed by Microsoft Research, to deliver high-speed internet access to areas currently lacking even basic electricity.

Microsoft hopes to implement similar pilots in East and Southern Africa in the coming months to further explore the commercial feasibility of white space technologies. These pilots will be used to encourage other African countries to accelerate legislation that would enable this white spaces technology to deliver on the promise of universal access – high-speed wireless internet – for the African continent.