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Nike, NASA, USAID and Sustainability

Nike, NASA, USAID and Sustainability
Nike has partnered with NASA, USAID and the US Department of State to bring together specialists, designers, academics, manufacturers, entrepreneurs and NGOs to take action around a global challenge — sourcing and utilizing sustainable materials. A three-day LAUNCH 2020 Summit is planned for September 2013, highlighting the importance of innovation and collaboration in developing materials that will not have a negative impact on people and the planet.

It is estimated that around 150 billion garments were produced around the world in 2010, and by 2015 the global apparel industry is expected to produce more than 400 billion square meters of fabric every year. This massive industry has a tremendous effect on agriculture, natural resources, communities, and environmental damage due to toxins, waste and carbon emissions.

LAUNCH, started in 2010, seeks “innovations that will transform the system of fabrics to one that advances equitable global economic growth, drives human prosperity and replenishes the planet’s resources.”  This is what sustainability is all about; finding business practices that are not detrimental, while also allowing for continued growth.

There is also a LAUNCH 2013 Challenge Statement, an open call for innovators to invent new systems of producing fabrics. In August, 2013, the 10 strongest ideas will be selected and participants will take part in an intensive program to provide them access to “capital, creativity and capacity.” Three years ago LAUNCH chose astronaut Ron Garan’s innovation on clean water. Garan developed a concept to deliver clean water, energy and sanitation to poor communities, through the combination of sustainable development and carbon credits. As part of the LAUNCH process, Garan met with experts and investors to bring his idea to life. His Carbon for Water project has now successfully distributed one million filters that provide clean water to 4.5 million people in Kenya.

Nike also recently joined 32 other multinational companies, including eBay, IKEA, L’Oréal and Limited Brands, in signing a “Climate Declaration” asking federal policymakers to take action on climate change. As part of the declaration, the companies also asserted that over coming climate challenge is also one of the biggest American economic opportunities of the 21st century.

– Mary Purcell
Source: Sustainable Brands, LAUNCH

 

 

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Jordanian Law Students Receive Human Rights Coursework

Jordanian Law Students
Jordanian law students will get human rights coursework thanks to the American Bar Association and USAID. The Human Rights Curriculum for Jordanian law students was launched on May 15th to Jordanian law faculties. This curriculum hopes to bring innovative, multimedia approaches to the law classrooms of Jordan and improve the quality of students’ legal education. Students have been dissatisfied with their education as it has failed to keep up with evolving technologies, and this program is one solution to the complaints.

The launch brought 19 human rights law professors together as well as several other faculty members to experience and use the curriculum. Demonstrations were done as well as hands-on simulations. The curriculum was created as part of the American Bar Association’s program “Enhancing Protection and Promotion of Human Rights in Jordan.” The program was designed by Jordanian and international professors and human rights experts to provide a complete picture of Jordanian law and human rights principles.

The coursework is designed to be interactive and deviates from the lecture model found in most legal classrooms. The material is conveyed through role play, case analysis, and video segments.  Each section includes history and theory regarding different aspects of human rights law.  The workshop done at the launch gave professors a glimpse into the curriculum. It gave professors the ability to learn how to implement the program and various outlets for additional resources and help.

The hope is that Jordanian law students will gain greater knowledge and skills through the more hands-on program and have a greater ability to apply the principles to real life law cases.  It will also give them a greater appreciation of the depth of human rights law and the many areas in which it applies.

-Amanda Kloeppel
Source: AME Info

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3D Food Printer Can Help End World Hunger

3D Printed Food
NASA is currently sponsoring Anjan Contractor, a senior mechanical engineer at Systems and Materials Research Corporation (SMRC), with a grant through the Small Business Innovation program to create a 3D food printer that can create real, edible food from powder. The goal is to be able to create food that can be eaten in space with a long shelf life. The creators are trying to synthesize all the ingredients that are in normal food, like proteins, carbohydrates, and various other nutrients, into a powder form. Without the moisture, the food can last 30 years.

The researchers also say that the powders can come from some unlikely sources, such as algae, grass, and insects. The first product for the 3D food printer is pizza because the layers in the food make it easier to “print.” First the printer will bake the dough, then the other layers (with oil and water added to the powder) will be added one at a time to create a printable pizza. Also, each food will have its own unique software to allow the user to customize their printer and bake a variety of foods.

Although the creation was originally intended to provide astronauts tastier food that will last longer in space, the invention could also help end world hunger by making longer-lasting food that can be packed and shipped easily around the world to places that need it the most.

– Katie Brockman

Source Los Angeles Times

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USAID’s New Global Water Strategy

USAID’s New Global Water StrategyOn May 21, 2013, USAID issued a new global water strategy, the government’s first comprehensive integration of water security into all US development funding and programs.

“For many years in development work, water, sanitation and hygiene have been a bit forgotten. Instead, significant focus has been placed on education, maternal health and nutrition, overlooking the fact that water and sanitation are foundational building blocks for all of those other elements,” said Alanna Imbach, media officer with WaterAid America.

Aid organizations have long been insisting that access to clean water is a basic and essential consideration underlying all development issues. In developing countries, some 5,000 children are estimated to die every day from water-borne diseases, overwhelmingly due to diarrhea from bad drinking water, poor sanitation and inadequate hygiene.

The plan for the next five years is to provide at least 10 million people with “sustainable access” to an improved water supply, and six million people with access to improved sanitation during that period. New USAID guidance will emphasize local ownership and sustainability of US-funded aid projects while offering greater flexibility on how that funding can be used. This new openness will allow for more innovation from partnering humanitarian groups, a positive change from the past.

“We know that every dollar we invest in clean water and basic sanitation yields eight dollars in benefits,” said Dick Durbin, a US senator pushing this legislation. “People are healthier, kids stay in school, food is safer, AIDS drugs and other critical health treatments are able to work.”

Read USAID’s Water Strategy Announcement:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Rajiv Shah, joined members of Congress – Senator Richard Durbin, Senator Chris Coons, Congressman Earl Blumenauer and Congressman Ted Poe – to release the U.S. Government’s first Water and Development Strategy. This strategy recognizes the vital role water plays in ensuring the health and economic well-being of people around the world.  In addition, it sets out to represent a fundamental shift at our Agency toward a new model of development – defined by public and private partnerships, the use of new technology, and emphasizes long-term results.

Globally, over 780 million people lack access to safe drinking water and 2.5 billion people lack access to sanitation. Projections are that by 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under severe water stress conditions.

“We will achieve greater impact by partnering with outside organizations and businesses that leverage innovative approaches and new technologies. This approach will also emphasize sustainability by building local capacities for operations, maintenance, and monitoring,” said Administrator Shah.

USAID’s Water and Development Strategy elevates the importance and visibility of water as a development priority within the Agency and highlights its importance in meeting the development imperatives to improve health and increase food security. The Strategy will address global water-related development needs by providing a clear understanding of USAID’s approach to water programming, emphasizing how sustainable use of water is critical to saving lives. To achieve this goal, the Strategy sets two strategic objectives:

  • Water for Health – Improve health outcomes through the provision of sustainable Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH).
  • Water for Food – Manage water for agriculture sustainably and more productively to enhance food security.

“This new U.S. Water and Development Strategy will help lift poor people around the world out of conflict and poverty.  It is smart, strategic and builds on our past successes using new breakthroughs in science and technology,” Senator Durbin said. “It will save water and it will save lives.  USAID’s new plan will bring water and sanitation – the most basic of human needs – to millions of people around the globe, dousing the flames of global poverty, disease and conflict.”

Improving human health and welfare, having adequate nutrition to thrive, and maintaining the sustainability of natural systems requires a coordinated global response to the challenges of water and sanitation access for present and future generations. This Strategy reflects the commitment of the U.S. government to work in partnership with the global community to meet these challenges.

– Mary Purcell
Photo: Flickr

Modern Philanthropy Depends On Innovation

Modern Philanthropy Depends On Innovation
One of the most significant charity foundations of the past century is the Rockefeller Foundation, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this month. The Foundation has set the bar high for other philanthropic organizations throughout the 20th century, and it will continue to do so throughout the 21st century by means of innovation.

The Rockefeller Foundation has promoted innovation as the key to doing good through the “Next Century Innovator Awards,” which look at projects that do more than just help society but transform it. The projects find or create new ways to approach huge societal issues including education, sanitation, marketplace literacy, and cancer, for example.

One project that was awarded the “Next Century Innovator Award” was Innovate Salone in Sierra Leone. The organization transformed the education system of the country to help more children attend school. The project did more than just build a school or donate money for education. It gave the young people in the community an opportunity to solve their own problems according to their individual needs. Those with the best workable solutions were given financial support to build on their ideas to create real results while receiving support and feedback from mentors and peers in their community.

Other organizations, particularly universities, have taken note of this new form of innovative modern philanthropy and are joining the effort to transform the world of charity. More people are beginning to realize that donating money can help to an extent, but the best way to achieve long-lasting benefits is to transform the way people think of the art of giving through innovation.

– Katie Brockman

Source: Forbes
Photo: EmpowerOU

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The Future of Toilets in Poor Countries

The future of toilets in poor countries
What does the future of toilets in poor countries look like? The Gates Foundation hosted a competition to reinvent the toilet to process human waste without utilizing piped water, sewer or electrical connections and to transform waste into useful resources like water and energy.

The grand prize design was a solar-powered toilet that creates hydrogen and electricity. The second place prize was taken by a toilet that creates biological charcoal, minerals and clean water. A toilet that sanitizes feces and urine and recovers resources and creates clean water won third place.

Why all the excitement about toilets? In a nutshell, return on investments in sanitation is huge. For every dollar spent on sanitation, 5.5 dollars are returned. At a national level, lack of access to proper sanitation costs countries up to 7 percent of their GDP. In addition to being a smart investment, investing in sanitation is also a moral imperative. Diarrhea is the cause of an estimated 5000 child deaths every day. In areas where people defecate in the open or share large community bathrooms, women and girls are more frequently victimized.

Despite these striking numbers, improved sanitation is neglected at every political level. Without a drastic shift in strategies and the courage to undertake this stigmatized issue, the Millennium Development target of cutting the proportion of the population without access to clean water and basic sanitation by a half will be missed by a long shot.

In addition to the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, the government of India is running multiple campaigns to improve sanitation such as the “No toilet, no bride” campaign and an information and shaming campaign aimed at changing the culture of open-space defecation.

The World Bank also recently wrapped up a sanitation hackathon where mobile phone application developers were challenged to create apps to improve sanitation. Many involved mapping public toilets and reporting malfunctioning toilets. Several were designed as games to teach children good sanitation.

– Katherine Zobre


Sources: Gates Foundation , Global Poverty Project
Photo: The Guardian

Aid and Innovation Through the Peace Corps

The Peace Corps is a unique arm of the US government first started in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy when he tried to inspire younger generations to serve their country “in the cause of peace, living and working in developing countries.” Since then, the agency has continued with bi-partisan support, expanding its reach and impact by sending American volunteers around the world to help developing communities.

The Peace Corps has three underlying goals:

  1. Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.
  2. Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
  3. Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

Currently, there are 8,073 volunteers in the field, in 76 countries around the world, primarily working on education based programs. In the past, many Senators and representatives from both parties have served as Peace Corps volunteers. It is the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and House Committee on Foreign Affairs that provides the oversight of all activities and programs. Its annual budget is determined by the congressional budget – generally amounting to about 1 percent of the foreign operations budget.

The video above talks of the tremendous progress that has been made in preventing Malaria deaths through the Peace Corps’ work. They have found that no one “fix” works across the board, and each community is different. So Peace Corps workers have to adapt to each new situation and time. A great example of creative thinking is talked about in the video – in Senegal, where local villagers were not really utilizing their mosquito nets. A PC volunteer used rice bags to visually represent the total money spent on Malaria medications by the locals, and once they saw how much they were spending they realized how much they could save by simply preventing Malaria and using a net. This simple demonstration helped change behavior that can now save lives.

– Mary Purcell

Source: The Peace Corps
Video: You Tube

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Innovation Saves Lives of Underweight Babies

Innovation Saves Lives of Underweight Babies

Approximately 20 million babies are born underweight each year with 96% of them being born in developing countries. Further, underweight babies have a higher risk of becoming one of approximately 4 million babies that die within 27 days of birth every year.

One of the difficulties associated with premature, underweight babies is a lack of the necessary fat to regulate body temperature. If a low body-weight baby is not placed into a warm environment as a way to regulate temperature early on, death is highly possible. For hospitals located in areas where electricity is spotty or where resources are low, creating the necessary warm environment may be very difficult, if not impossible. Incubators may not emit enough heat or may fail to work at all and hospital heating generators may not be present or go out occasionally.

This is why Embrace Global has created a simple, low-cost product that will help save the lives of many babies at the fraction of the price of current solutions, such as incubators. The product, notedly named Embrace BabyWrap, resembles a mini sleeping bag and helps to regulate a baby’s internal temperature effectively and for long periods of time. This is done with the use of a WarmPak. A WarmPak is placed into a AccuTemp heater for 25 minutes then transferred to the back of the BabyWrap where it slowly releases heat for up to 6 hours. Further, the BabyWrap traps heat inside, providing a warm and insulated place for the baby at the perfect temperature – 37 degrees Celsius.

The Embrace BabyWrap is a great innovation that is “embracing embrace” and saving the lives of underweight babies worldwide.

– Angela Hooks

Sources: AllAfrica, Embrace Global

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Innovative Means of Development

AllAfrica
As the world continues to deal with economic financial crises, there is still a need for global contribution and aid to countries of extreme poverty. With the amounts of Western foreign aid decreasing, there is a need for new and innovative means of development to lift people out of poverty. The main themes that are the current focus include taxing, gender equality laws, inclusive growth and regional integration.

The Chief Economist and Vice President of the African Development Bank, Mthuli Ncube, urged the need for transparency between investors and the African people. He points out that it is problematic how even when commodity prices increase, African governments’ revenues do not follow the pattern. He suggests that international investments in African natural resources should be monitored so that they “benefit the African people through job creation, protecting the environment, developing African entrepreneurs,” and then using all the resulted revenues to create a diverse African economy.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has stated that there has been a shift in aid from extremely poor countries to those of middle-income, and it emphasizes the point that in order to meet the U.N. Millennium Goals by 2015, this shift must be reversed to prioritize and address the extremely poor countries. A professor of Development Policy and Practice at the University of Warwick in the U.K., Franklyn Lisk, discussed how African countries suffer from an irony where their natural resources have not been giving them any returns on improving human development. He argues for tax justice, citing that there are many extranational companies who enter developing nations “paying little or no taxes, through manipulation and connivance with corrupt regimes.” With taxation, Lisk says, revenue would increase to 6 times the amount of total aid.

In 2012, 9 members of the Development Assistance Committee increased their aid, and those members are: Australia, Iceland, Austria, Korea, Luxembourg, Canada, Norway, Switzerland, with other donors including Poland, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.

– Leen Abdallah

Source: All Africa
Photo: National Geographic

Mobile Money Africa Set To Return In 2013

Mobile Money Africa Set To Return In 2013
The fifth annual Mobile Money Africa Conference is projected to gather over 400 mobile banking industry leaders in Johannesburg, South Africa to discuss ways to move the market forward.

Mobile Money is a mobile banking concept that has taken root in African communities in rural areas where the nearest bank is often several miles away. Mobile bankers use their cell phones to transfer money from one person to another with only the use of a SIM card.

While Mobile banking continues to spread slowly, primarily throughout the developing world, its biggest markets are in Africa. 15 of the top 20 Mobile Money-using countries are located on the African continent. Generally about 10% of people in these countries use Mobile Money, but in Kenya the number of users reaches 68% of people.

Mobile banking continues to spread through developing nations because the fees for banking are too high and the locations are too sparse. Mobile Money Africa works to help alleviate these problems and develop a stronger market, possibly in alliance with traditional banking methods.

This year, Mobile Money Africa will be hosting the Mobile Money Awards – a contest in which Mobile Money innovators are recognized and rewarded by the industry. The conference is slated for the 28th and 29th of May.

– Pete Grapentien

Source: BizCommunity
Photo: IT News Africa