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The Waterless Bath: A Solution to Sanitation-Related Illnesses

waterless bathWorldwide, nearly 2.3 billion people lack access to basic sanitation and water services. A waterless bath created by a South African student has the potential to help alleviate this issue.

Inadequate access to clean water leads to devastating disease outbreaks like trachoma, which can lead to permanent blindness. The invention, called DryBath, is a waterless alternative to bathing that comes in the form of a cream and could help eliminate the threat of these water-borne diseases. By gaining the ability to bathe, people in poverty-stricken areas can drastically decrease the number of trachoma cases, which currently blind about 1.8 million people globally.

The South African student and inventor of DryBath, Ludwick Marishane of Limpopo, South Africa, created the alternative after a friend’s comment regarding bathing. Marishane eventually realized the potential for the waterless bath in developing areas. In his Ted Talk, Marishane elaborated on DryBath’s potential capabilities.

“Anyway, we realized that we could save 80 million liters of water on average each time they skipped a bath, and also we would save two hours a day for kids who are in rural areas, two hours more for school, two hours more for homework, two hours more to just be a kid,” Marishane said.

The effects of eliminating the need for bathing water has a wide array of positive results as Marishane mentioned. Not only does it decrease the risk of disease, but by removing the long walk for water that many children must embark on each day, DryBath allows children to spend more time on their education.

According to Business Insider, after Marishane’s first few marketing experiments, he realized that to reach people in developing areas, the waterless bath must be sold in smaller packets that cost about 50 cents per pack.

“One of the things we learned was that poor communities don’t buy products in bulk. They buy products on-demand,” Marishane said during his Ted Talk. “A person in Alex doesn’t buy a box of cigarettes. They buy one cigarette each day, even though it’s more expensive.”

With limited internet access, Marishane used his Nokia cell phone to research and write a 40-page business plan for his invention. The young entrepreneur was able to successfully create a product that made real progress to health in developing nations. While his initial intention was not so, he realized the potential and worked to develop the waterless bath.

“After seeing that global impact, we narrowed it down to our key value proposition, which was cleanliness and convenience. DryBath is a rich man’s convenience and a poor man’s lifesaver,” Marishane said.

– Austin Stoltzfus

Photo: Flickr

Where Does the ‘Ugly’ Food Go?

tristram stuart_opt
With hopes to change the global opinion about the waste of “unwanted” food, Tristram Stuart, author of Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal and founder of Feeding the 500, prepared a meal for global ministers and diplomats February 19, 2012 in Nairobi. The meal was
prepared with only “ugly” ingredients, Stuart claims.

The five course meal consisted of yellow lentil, grilled sweet corn, French Beans and pleothra of other vegetables. Although well- presented, the dinner ingredients likely would have been rejected by various UK supermarkets for their appearance. Through his meal, Stuart hoped to uncover the truth about unwanted fruit and vegetables.

“The waste of perfectly edible ‘ugly’ vegetables is epidemic in our food production systems and symbolizes our negligence,” Stuart tells.

In addition to cost and environmental impact, food waste increases pressure on the already fragile global food system. In a country with millions of hungry people, it is a scandal that UK supermarkets waste so much food, adds Stuart. The expected amount of vegetables wasted every week is 40 tons, 40 percent of what the farmer grows.

A study by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that one third of all food produced worldwide is either wasted or lost, resulting in 1.3 billion tons annually.  Combined data from the FAO and Unep estimates the annual cost at approximately $1 trillion.

Half of all consumable food in industrialized countries is wasted, the FAO claims. In retrospect that is 300 million tons of usable food, more than the total amount of food production of Sub-Saharan Africa sufficiently feeding 900 million hungry.

With these figures as evidence, use of wasted food can benefit farmers and the global hungry alike. Instead of simply asking to reduce food waste, it would more beneficial to utilize the food wasted, Stuart claims.

In his TED talk about global food waste, Stuart reflected on personal application of food waste utilization as a teen raising livestock. By utilizing scraps from his school, local bakers and other farmers “throwing out potatoes because they are the wrong shape and size”, Stuart was able to provide plump, healthy and profitable pigs. Not only was this method environmentally friendly, it was the most economically sufficient, Stuarts exclaims.

Farmers have learned to use “leftovers” to feed their livestock.  Because livestock serve as a source of livelihood and supplement for farmer family diets, the use of food waste helps famers both health-wise and economically, Stuart adds.  If applied by all farmers and non-farmers alike, quality of life would increase while global hunger would decrease.

Reflecting on yet another example from his pig-raising days, Stuart told his TED talk listeners of yet another applicable story. One day when he was feeding his pigs, Stuart saw a rather consumable tomato loaf. Stuart washed it off, sat down and ate it. For Stuart this was the first application of what he would later term Freeganism, an exhibition of the injustice of food waste and the provision of the solution. The solution to food waste and global hunger is simple:  to sit down and eat the food than throw it away, Stuart concludes.

– Danielle Doedens

Sources: TED Talk, The Nation
Sources: The Guardian

Duflo Talks Social Experiments to Fight Poverty

Esther Duflo is the founder and director of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a research network that evaluates social experiments to fight poverty. It’s concerned less with wide-ranging policy than with specific questions. Esther Duflo takes economics out of the lab and into the field to discover the causes of poverty and means to eradicate it.

In Esther Duflo’s TED Talk, she brought up three specific questions people care about:

  1. The “last mile problem” of immunization.
  2. Should we donate lots of bed nets to solve malaria?
  3. What do we do about education?

When you ask the general question of whether millions dollars of aid are good or bad for Africa’s development, no one seems to be able to produce an exact answer. No one knows and no one can do the control experiment to prove his or her point, because Africa is a singularly unique continent whose development cannot be so easily compared to other regions of the world. But when you specify that big idea into small questions, social experiments, in some areas, may answer these questions. This may not answer people’s big questions like whether or not donating to African charities is a good or bad thing, but they definitely can tell us what we should do to help make Africa a more stable and prosperous continent.

– Caiqing Jin (Kelly)

Source: TED Talk

Rosling Explores New Facts and Data on HIV

Hans Rosling, a professor of global health at Karolinska Institut, focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world and its relationship with HIV/AIDS.

In Hans Rosling’s TED Talk, he used very interesting and vivid graphs to explain how HIV spread throughout the past twenty-five years. The rate of those effected by HIV is not about poverty and undeveloped, although there are many reasons why one’s living conditions makes one more susceptible to the virus. An often understated fact, Rosling notes that even countries with a good economy and peaceful environment may be hard to drop the population of HIV-infected persons, because with good healthcare, HIV carriers can live ten to twenty years longer than those living in places with less access to effective healthcare.

– Caiqing Jin (Kelly)

Hans Rosling’s New Insights on Poverty

Hans Rosling
Hans Rosling, a professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which he points out is no longer worlds away from the West. In fact, most of the Third World is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the West did.

The statistic of the world has not been made properly available, because of that we still have the old mindset of developing and industrialized countries, which is wrong. According to Hans, Africa has done a great job and it has done better beyond our thinking.

And there are some wrong ideas. Many developed countries say now the problem is that the emerging economies are emitting too much carbon dioxide. The minister of the Environment of India said, “Well, you are the one who caused the problem.” The OECD countries, the highest income countries, were the ones who caused the climate change. So we need to have the right opinion about emerging economies and developed countries.

We can get out of poverty. Rosling spent 20 years researching African farmers who were on the verge of famine. “When you are in poverty, everything is about survival, it is about having food.” To get out of poverty, they need technology. “We hate this mortar to stand hours and hours,; get us a mill so that we can mill our flour then we will be able to pay for ourselves”.

Technology will bring us out of poverty. But there is a need for market to get away from poverty. His 20 years’ experience in Africa has convinced him that “the seemingly impossible is possible”. Africa is not done badly. In 50 years they have progressed from a pre-medieval situation. Africa has a bright future. Even though we are facing many obstacles, “seeing the impossible is possible” if we work together. Then we can make a great Africa.

– Caiqing Jin(Kelly)

Source: TedTalk

Ron Finley Ted Talk on Urban Gardening


Artist and designer Ron Finley couldn’t help but notice what was going on in his backyard. “South Central Los Angeles,” he quips, “home of the drive-thru and the drive-by.” And it’s the drive-thru fast-food stands that contribute more to the area’s poor health and high mortality rate, with one in two kids contracting a curable disease like Type 2 diabetes.

The Ron Finley Ted Talk outlines his vision for a healthy, accessible “food forest” started with the curbside veggie garden he planted in the strip of dirt in front of his own house. When the city tried to shut it down, Finley’s fight gave voice to a larger movement that provides nourishment, empowerment, education — and healthy, hopeful futures — one urban garden at a time.

Visit L.A. Green Grounds

Amanda Palmer Ted Talk on Asking


The Amanda Palmer Ted Talk on asking explores a new way of selling records. The singer-songwriter-blogger-provocateur, known for pushing boundaries in both her art and her lifestyle, made international headlines this year when she raised nearly $1.2 million via Kickstarter (she’d asked for $100k) from nearly 25,000 fans who pre-ordered her new album, Theatre Is Evil.

But the former street performer, then Dresden Dolls frontwoman, now solo artist hit a bump the week her world tour kicked off. She revealed plans to crowdsource additional local backup musicians in each tour stop, offering to pay them in hugs, merchandise and beer per her custom. Bitter and angry criticism ensued (she eventually promised to pay her local collaborators in cash). And it’s interesting to consider why. As Laurie Coots suggests: “The idea was heckled because we didn’t understand the value exchange — the whole idea of asking the crowd for what you need when you need it and not asking for more or less.”

Summing up her business model, in which she views her recorded music as the digital equivalent of street performing, she says: “I firmly believe in music being as free as possible. Unlocked. Shared and spread. In order for artists to survive and create, their audiences need to step up and directly support them.”

Can Charter Cities Help Eliminate Poverty?

Can Charter Cities Help Eliminate Poverty?When many of us imagine utopias, we may have flashbacks to our 7th-grade reading assignment of Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Paul Romer, however, has created a ‘concept’ over the past few years that leaves all imagined futuristic cities in the dark. Romer’s concept or “start-up” cities don’t actually possess any futuristic characteristics. They revolve around three basic principles: an independent watchdog, the influence of an external legal framework, and business investors. The product of these will “help drive economic growth…and reduce poverty and enhance development”.

Cities such as the ones Romer has tried to establish around the world were somewhat common during the period of industrial growth in the western world. When new factories would pop up, communities were built around them providing homes, schools, and other institutions for the workers. Romer, however, stresses that his cities are nothing like these. “A city built solely by a private business will just become a modern company town — a corporate city, not a charter city”.

His latest attempt was in Honduras. In partnership with the U.S. investment group MGK, Romer was hoping to create a city that would lure in businesses to revitalize the city and provide jobs. President Profirio Lobo Sosa cooperated, thereby facilitating the process of creating the city. However, in the fall of 2013, major issues began to rise. There was a lack of a solid independent ‘big brother’ for the city. There was no way the city was going to exist alone alongside the corruption in the Honduran government. Aside from that, the Honduran Supreme Court overturned the law that would create the charter city. Romer left the project in September with the investment group shortly abandoning it 2 months later.

Why did this project fail? Was it the concept or the lack of requirements that were being met? Paul soon found out that perhaps his venture’s foundation was too broad. Creating a city out of almost nothing (“Rome wasn’t built in a day” they say) requires confidence from numerous sources, especially given the participants required for charter cities. Of course, the external countries need to provide revenue and training, but if they do not trust the government of the country they are working with, the projects will fail.

Perhaps Honduras was not ready for a charter city. Charter cities have to be in countries that are ready for change; whose governments are willing to take on a drastic idea and let it redefine their communities. Countries such as those affected by the Arab Spring.

Tunisia and Morocco, where Romer is currently expanding his ideas to, have few preexisting symptoms that would make charter cities such a good fit for them. For one, they have a large population of unemployed and consequently agitated, youth. Their political leaders are desperate for a change both politically and economically, something charter cities can achieve.

There are those however who believe Romer’s approach is too complex and can create more problems than it solves. Michael Strong of MGK sees the involvement of the outside countries as too much. He believes that the charter city’s country should focus on developing a relationship with the private investors of the city and keep all affairs internal.

All in all, the use of charter cities offers a novice approach to create semi-autonomous patches of peace and economic success within countries that are slowly trying to reinvent themselves whether it’s out of political upheaval or recession. Even though there are some projects that have not had too much success such as the Georgian city of Lazika, the energy and thought put into building these cities, whether from scratch or renewing a fallen one, will not go wasted and unnoticed.

– Deena Dulgerian

Photo:The Economist