Mobile Phone Microscopes to Revolutionize Health Diagnostics

 

Mobile phone usage has increased hugely across the global South in the past five years. In Africa, the number of mobile phone subscribers reached 545 million in 2013, while there are 3.5 billion mobile phone users in Asia and the Pacific (ITU). Some 93 million people in Africa and 895 million in Asia and the Pacific have mobile phone Internet access (ITU).

“Every day we are moving closer to having almost as many mobile-cellular subscriptions as people on earth,” Brahima Sanou, Director of the ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau, wrote in its latest report on their growth.

The number of mobile phone subscriptions in the developing world has surpassed 5 billion and the number in the world as a whole reached 6.8 billion in 2013 (ITU), out of a world population of more than 7.1 billion. This compares to considerably lower numbers of people with access to the Internet: 2.7 billion in the world (ITU).

While many people in poorer countries have basic versions of mobile phones, the next generation of smartphones has been growing in number as prices come down (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone). Examples of these smart phones include the BlackBerry, Apple’s iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy, and the Nokia Lumia. Smartphones tend to have enormous computing power and an ability to run complex ‘apps’ or applications – including public transport options, maps, restaurant and store locators, banking services and market information and resources. They can also access the Internet through Wi-Fi, and have camera and video capability.

What people can do with these feature-packed phones is limited by little other than human imagination. With the ability to store large amounts of data and images, using apps that perform a limitless range of services and tasks, smartphones can be deployed as powerful tools to tackle problems.

Science fiction sagas have long fantasized about people being able to walk around with small electronic devices that can do immensely powerful tasks, including being a medical diagnostic tool. But this science fiction dream is rapidly becoming reality in the global South.

Various initiatives and innovators are using mobile phones and smartphones to conduct medical diagnosis and gather data for medical studies in real time.

Some innovations are even turning smartphones into mobile microscopes.

Developed by the University of California, Berkeley in the lab of Professor Daniel Fletcher (http://cellscope.berkeley.edu/), the CellScope (cellscope.com) is capable of turning the camera on a cell (mobile) phone into a diagnostic microscope with a magnification of 5x to 60x. Fletcher’s lab has also pioneered work on needle-free injection technology.

The CellScope can be used for ocular imaging (technologies for visualizing and assessing a range of diseases of the eye) and for detecting tuberculosis, blood-borne diseases and parasitic worms.

Fletcher is a bioengineer and was impressed with how much mobile phone technology has proliferated across the global South.

“You don’t have to put in these copper wires (for phone lines) anymore; you have the (cell) towers. It’s big business,” Fletcher told The Scientist Magazine.

“It’s leaping over the need for infrastructure.”

Fletcher and his colleagues experimented by attaching extra lenses to smartphones. They then used the phone to image cells that had been stained with fluorescent dyes to make them easier to see. The quality of the image was so good, they were able to diagnose malaria from blood samples and tuberculosis from sputum (spit) samples.

With the addition of image analyzing software, the phone was able to automatically count the number of Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacilli. They were trying to prove you did not need conventional microscopes to do this sort of diagnostic work.

Fletcher and his colleagues are currently trialling the technology in Vietnam, India, Cameroon and Thailand.

“Technology alone doesn’t create effective health care,” Fletcher emphasizes. “It’s got to be part of a context in which the information is captured and validated and is analyzed in the right way, and treatments are then available in response to information.”

Another group from Toronto General Hospital in Canada (http://www.uhn.ca/corporate/AboutUHN/OurHospitals/Pages/TGH.aspx) has ‘hacked’ an iPhone smartphone by placing a 1 millimeter ball lens on the phone’s camera. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist, had been investigating parasitic worm infections in children on Pemba Island off the coast of Tanzania. Along with Jason Andrews of Massachusetts General Hospital, they had been inspired by a report about how a team of researchers from the University of California, Davis had created a simple microscope out of an iPhone with a 1 millimeter lens. This makeshift microscope was used to take pictures of blood smears at a 350 times magnification and giving a 1.5 micron resolution.

“We thought that was a great idea,” Bogoch told The Scientist Magazine. Bogoch regularly works as part of an international team around the world, often in remote locations.

“We thought … we could take it to the field and see if it accurately works in a more real-world setting.”

Inspired, Bogoch got together with his colleagues and created a similar microscope with a 3 millimeter ball lens and then got to work using it to identify soil-transmitted helminth eggs in stool samples in Tanzania. When examining the stool samples of 199 children in a clinical trial using the makeshift microscope, they were able to accurately identify helminth infections in 70 per cent of the cases. They also found the iPhone microscope did very well at spotting eggs of particular parasites, such as 80 per cent of Ascaris lumbricoides infections (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascaris_lumbricoides). The success rate dropped significantly, however, when trying to detect whipworm parasites (just over half) and hookworm infections (14 per cent).

But this is early days and an experiment: “Obviously the results aren’t perfect and there’s definitely room for improvement,” Bogoch admits.

What stands out is the potential to completely revolutionize health care by continuing to develop the capability of smartphones. With their portability and low cost, they also have the advantage of not needing a trained physician to operate them, according to David Walker, president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, in The Scientist Magazine.

One of the many advantages of combining a microscope with a digital smartphone is the ability to take a picture and send it straight away to someone to make a diagnosis.

Even more exciting, Sebastian Wachsmann-Hogiu at the University of California, Davis (http://cbst.ucdavis.edu/people/sebastian/) is adapting mobile phones to undertake spectroscopy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectroscopy), using diagnostic test software to analyze samples on the spot. This, when successful, would be akin to the capabilities first mooted in the science fiction television and film series Star Trek (startrek.com). In Star Trek, the doctor is able to use a small handheld digital device to quickly diagnose what ails somebody.

The potential for this technology in the global South is significant. Aydogan Ozcan at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is also working on mobile phone microscopes, believes this is as significant as the dawn of the personal computer: “If you look at the early computers, they were bulky, they were extremely expensive,” he says.

But now computers “are portable … and almost anyone can afford them. The same thing is going on today (with microscopy). We are miniaturizing our micro- and nano-analysis tools. We’re making them more affordable; we’re making them more powerful.”

It looks like this science fiction dream will soon become today’s reality.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: July 2013

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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Kenya Reaches Mobile Phone Banking Landmark

 

Financial transactions and banking with mobile phones have been a Kenyan success story.

Now, one service, M-Shwari, has reached a significant milestone in the history of m-banking (mobile phone banking): it was able to record a billion Kenyan shillings (US $11,926,100) in savings deposits in a month after its launch in November 2012 and reached deposits of Kenyan shillings 2.8 billion (US $33 million) by February of 2013. This outstripped the Kenyan shillings 378 million (US $4 million) in loans lent by the service, reports Daily Nation.

M-Shwari is a mobile phone banking product that allows people to save and borrow money by phone and earn some interest too. The service offers small emergency loans to customers, offering a financial lifeline to people who would have been frozen out of financial services in the past.

There is no need to have any contact with a bank or bother with paperwork. And loans are instant because they are small.

Safaricom Chief Executive Officer Bob Collymore told the Daily Nation “Trends show that it has become more of a savings service than a lending service. This is what we intended since the beginning.”

As of February 1.6 million customers had used the service.

On top of this success, the pioneering M-PESA (http://www.safaricom.co.ke/personal/m-pesa/m-pesa-services-tariffs/relax-you-have-got-m-pesa) mobile phone banking platform developed in Kenya by Safaricom is set to roll out across India and help bring banking services to the country’s 700 million “unbanked.”

Both these developments are solid proof that innovation aimed at drawing in the poor into the mainstream economy not only works, it is profitable and exportable.

M-Shwari (http://www.safaricom.co.ke/personal/m-pesa/m-shwari/m-shwari-faqs) works like this: a customer can save as little as one Kenyan shilling to receive an interest rate of up to 5 per cent. If they want a loan, then they can borrow from 100 Kenyan shillings (US $1.19) to a maximum of 20,000 Kenyan shillings (US $238) for a processing fee of 7.5 per cent which will need to be paid back after 30 days.

By offering greater access to loans, M-Shwari s increasing competition in the banking sector and giving customers a choice.

It joins an ongoing revolution in access to credit for the poor. Powerful mobile phones enable individual depositors and businesspeople to organize their financial affairs and business needs on the phone. This is a revolutionary development in many places where people previously had to contend with poor access to financial services – or no access at all.

M-Shwari and products like it allow people to borrow, save and conduct transactions with family, friends, business partners and customers over their mobile phones.

M-Shwari is a collaboration between Kenyan telecoms company Safaricom and the Commercial Bank of Africa. It is being hailed as an example of how banks and telecommunications companies can cooperate to offer innovative financial products to the country.

For the unbanked in India, the initiative between Vodafone India (https://www.vodafone.in/pages/index.aspx) and ICICI Bank, India’s largest private bank, has started to roll out the Kenyan M-PESA mobile phone banking platform in India as of April 2013. They are hoping to open up access to banking to 700 million Indians who currently do not have bank accounts or access to banking facilities. The rollout starts in the country’s eastern regions of Kolkata and West Bengal (CNN).

It looks like access to banking services for the poor in the global South will soon undergo radical change with these large-scale initiatives.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: May 2013

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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Mauritanian Music Shop Shares Songs and Friendship

 

Around the world, traditional music stores selling vinyl records, tapes and CDs (compact discs) are closing down. Digital downloads distributed over the Internet and mobile phones make it unnecessary to build a music collection in these hard formats.

While this has been a revolution that has made acquiring music as simple as firing up a digital download service like iTunes, it has many downsides as well. One of them has been the loss of vast swathes of musical history, as many songs recorded in the past have not made their way into digital downloads. And how can you find music online if you only remember part of a tune or song and can’t remember its title or the musician?

The background and knowledge that was once imparted by an informed person in a music store has been lost in the world of digital downloads.

A Mauritanian music shop is showing how a traditional record store can stay relevant and commercially viable in the 21st century. Entrepreneur Mohamed Vall’s Saphire d’Or store in Mauritania’s capital Nouakchott (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouakchott), is a treasure trove of the sort of long-lost recorded songs that normally vex lovers of African music. Pictures of the shop can be seen at the sahelsounds blog (http://sahelsounds.com/?p=887).

Vall has run the shop for three decades and amassed a large collection of rare African music on records and tapes. He has married this trove of African creativity to a clever business model: Vall doesn’t let customers buy the precious records themselves but instead will transfer the songs to a disc or a USB stick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive) for US 30 cents each.

He has also used traditional hospitality to create an atmosphere that encourages people to interact and keep coming back.

“I have the biggest collection in Mauritania,” Vall told The Guardian newspaper. “Any music you want from Africa – I mean the kind of music that puts Africa on the map – I have it.”

The shop is down an alleyway in the bustling capital and offers a refuge for music lovers.

The atmosphere encourages friendly conversation and lets customers take their time making a selection. Customers can relax in armchairs while browsing and drink some traditional mint tea or enjoy a snack from a communal bowl.

The shop uses traditional Mauritanian nomadic hospitality to improve the customer experience. It also uses the music it sells to heal rifts between the different cultures that cross Mauritania, as it bridges Arabic-speaking North Africa and the majority black sub-Saharan Africa.

“When you are here, it doesn’t matter who you are,” Vall said. “We get youngsters wanting 1940s ballads and old people whose minds are musical museums. We get toubabs (white people) who heard one song decades ago.”

One of the treasure troves held in the shop is the recordings made by West African orchestras during the post-colonial period.

The shop also acts as an interactive museum and archive of many African musical greats, from Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour to Nigerian afrobeat pioneers, Guinean pop legends and Maliaian and Congolese musicians.

Its collection ranges beyond Africa to take in musical genres from around the world, from blues to salsa to rock.

“The music allows you to travel in your head,” said one customer, teacher Abdoul Kaba.”When I first came to Mauritania from Guinea, I went round and round looking for zouk (West African funk) music that everybody listens to in Guinea until I ended up here.”

The shop also serves as a sanctuary for many from life’s everyday hardships.

“It’s not about the music any more. People come back because in here you can be free. You can listen to music and forget this hard life,” Kaba said.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: June 2012

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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New Journal Celebrates Vibrancy of Modern Africa

Africa has seen huge changes to its communications and media in the past five years. The rise and rise of mobile phones, the expansion of the Internet and the explosion in African blogging and social media, on top of flourishing print and broadcast media, all bring an increasing range of options for telling African stories and increasing dialogue.

With all this new media creating new communications channels – and all the turmoil and change affecting millions as economies and countries change – people need the ability to make sense of it all. One magazine is trying to play that role.

An entrepreneur and multimedia innovator has created a unique publication that is capturing the spirit, ideas and stories of modern Africa. It is a high-quality product, has gathered together talented writers and photographers and is gaining a growing global audience. Chimurenga Magazine (http://www.chimurenga.co.za/) based in Cape Town, South Africa, calls itself a “pan African publication of writing, art and politics.” Named for the Zimbabwean Shona word for “revolutionary struggle,” it is published three times a year. Editor Ntone Edjabe is from Cameroon and came to Cape Town in the 1990s after the end of South Africa’s racist Apartheid regime.

With more than 100 contributors, the magazine offers insight into contemporary Africa, what occupies people’s thoughts and how their lives are actually lived.

It is involved in a wide range of other activities, including co-curating a Global South Dialogue Series. And its readership is truly diverse.

“We have readers who are long-term prisoners at Pretoria Central Prison, who have subscriptions that they get to us in coins, and readers who are successful businessmen,” Edjabe said to The Financial Times Magazine.

Chimurenga is out to challenge perceptions of Africa. Practicing the art of long-form journalism more associated with established high-end publications like The New Yorker (newyorker.com), the magazine sets out to challenge perceptions about Africa.

“Discourse on Africa is geared towards simplicity,” Edjabe told CNN. “Everything must be simple – ‘he’s a poor black man, he’s a victim’ – like there has to be a simple story, in a way this is what signifies Africa and global consciousness.

“The moment you bring a degree of complexity to it, it kind of throws people off, they just don’t know where to look anymore. It’s like, ‘what’s going on?’ So Chimurenga in a way does not try to maintain the superficiality of this narrative – we engage with life, we try to present life as complex as it really is.”

Stories in the journal include Billy Kahora writing on the decay of a neighbourhood in Nairobi, Kenya, Michael Abrahams writing about his time in the Cape Town mental hospital after a suicide attempt, and Sean O’Toole following a Zimbabwean immigrant on his journey into South Africa.

The magazine’s website carries back issues of the journal, along with a shop selling magazines, books and t-shirts and the “Chimurenga Library,” an archive of pan-African, independent periodicals. There’s also live online streaming of music – “from ancient techno to future roots” – through the Pan African Space Station radio station, there is a biennial publication of urban life it calls “Africa-style,” and the writings of 14 African writers who visited 14 African cities to check-up on life in urban areas.

As an example of the creativity of Chimurenga’s talent, a special issue of the magazine tried to better understand the impact of violence in South Africa in May 2008 that led to the deaths of 62 people. It did this by creating a fictitious newspaper called The Chimurenga Chronic (http://www.chimurenga.co.za/chimurenga-magazine/current-issue) set during the violence.

The writers are a mix of Anglophones and Francophones, all based in Africa. Common subjects focus on the world of lower-middle class Africa. Examples of past issues show the variety of its content: Conversations With Poets Who Refuse To Speak, Futbol, Politricks & Ostentatious Cripples, Conversations in Luanda and Other Graphic Stories, *We’re all Nigerian!

Well-travelled editor Edjabe has studied and lived in Lagos, Nigeria and Johannesburg, South Africa. He has worked as a disc jockey, music writer and basketball coach. He launched Chimurenga in 2002. He told The Financial Times Magazine “I printed 1,000 copies, which I carried around in my bag. I sold it mainly to friends.”

It was supposed to be a one-off publication but became a journal, initially written mostly by his friends.

“I found out later that this is how most journals actually begin,” he said. “At the time I thought it was unique.”

He aspired to get Africans writing about the Africa they saw and lived in. The challenge was changing the dynamic he found of writers only considering something worth writing about if it had been featured in non-African media.

Edjabe had already made his mark with an innovative initiative to show the diversity of what Africa has to offer. Three years after arriving in South Africa he started the Pan African Market (PAM) in Cape Town. An African cultural centre, it began as a craft market with various traders able to run their individual businesses and leasing stall space from the market. PAM became very successful because it brought together Africans from across the continent and offered a vibrant mix of artists, small businesses and food. It now has 33 stores and stalls from 14 countries of Africa. Shoppers can find arts and crafts, hair dressing, tailoring, holistic healing and catering.

Hard copies of Chimurenga are distributed around Africa and sent to Europe, the United States and India.

“There’s a feeling about writing something, sharing something that is beautiful and truthful from one’s perspective,” Edjabe told CNN.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: June 2012

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.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

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Bolivian Film School’s Film Scene Paying Off

 

A film school in Bolivia shows how a creative hub can become the start of something much bigger. The school is inspiring a new generation of young people to get into filmmaking. And one of its lecturers is already experiencing global success acting in an award-winning new Spanish film.

Bolivia’s economy has grown over the last decade, and the country is beginning to shed its long-standing reputation for grinding poverty and political instability. Public spending has risen, and more money has been put into programmes to reduce poverty. More students are entering higher education and the country recognizes an urgent need for greater awareness and understanding of modern technology.

Film and media production have been targeted as an important way to advance Bolivia’s social and economic development.

Veteran Bolivian filmmaker Jorge Sanjines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Sanjin%C3%A9s) has been one of the most passionate exponents of using film to spread the stories and wisdom of Bolivia’s indigenous people. He believes their stories understand the need to balance the demands of humanity with preservation of the environment. Film, to him, is a way to liberate Bolivian society and address its pervasive problems of poverty, hunger and marginalization.

This chimes with rising global awareness of the importance of the creative economy in future development. No longer seen as a frippery, the creative economy is the “interface between creativity, culture, economics and technology in a contemporary world dominated by images, sounds, texts and symbols” (UNCTAD). It is seen as a way for emerging economies to leapfrog into high-growth areas in the world economy.

It’s a formula that has worked well in many other places. A successful art gallery fosters a scene and draws in audiences, buyers and new businesses. Soon, a creative economy comes alive and that means serious money. Both New York and London have shown how this can work. By 2005, New York City’s creative economy employed over 230,899 people in 24,481 businesses (Americans for the Arts).

Creative economies tend to create excitement and pride in the country; creative businesses like advertising and design make it much easier to sell products and connect with customers. It is hard to imagine the Apple computer brand (http://www.apple.com/) being as successful as it is without intelligent and engaging design.

Regeneration – of poor neighbourhoods, districts, even whole countries – is both a challenge and a key to transforming lives. There is a strong track record of turning to artists and creative people to re-imagine neighbourhoods or a country’s culture, restoring pride and vitality to places beaten down by life’s hardships.

In the Bolivian city of El Alto (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Alto,_La_Paz), the Cine Alto film school at the Municipal Arts School of El Alto (http://cinealto.blogspot.com/2009/01/nueva-carrera-de-artes-cinematogrficas.html), offers students a free education in filmmaking. Lecturer and actor Juan Carlos Aduviri is one of the high-profile successes to come from the school since it opened in 2006.

A graduate of the school and a lecturer on screenwriting, he got a big career boost by acting in a major new, award-winning film and is nominated as Best Newcomer by Spain’s top film awards, the Goyas (http://www.academiadecine.com/home/index.php). The nomination is for his role in the Spanish film Even the Rain (http://www.tambienlalluvia.com/) – set in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba, where protests a decade ago broke out over privatisation of water services. It stars well-known Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal, who plays a filmmaker set on making a movie about the Spanish conquest of the Americas. While making the film, the so-called “water wars” break out and the actor played by Aduviri must balance his film role with being a protest leader.

The protests against water privatisation in Cochabamba led to the election of Evo Morales (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales) as Bolivia’s president in December 2005.

Cine Alto is one of four film schools in Bolivia but the only one that does not charge students tuition. Cash is tight for the school, which is a simple place and runs on thin resources. The classrooms have bare walls and broken windows, but the school is serious about transforming the lives of young people. The curriculum emphasises a strong theoretical foundation in combination with technical and practical training.

“Conditions in Bolivia to make a film are challenging and in El Alto, it’s even more difficult,” Aduviri told the BBC.

“Life is hard here in El Alto, and this film school is trying to rescue this talent, and support these young people.”

A member of Bolivia’s indigenous people, the Aymara (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aymara_people), Aduviri grew up in El Alto, a city known for its strong pride and resilience. It is home to almost a million people, most of whom are Aymara.

He studied screenwriting and turned to teaching at the school after graduating. He is passionate about filmmaking as an alternative to negative influences in the community: he wanted the film school “to give a voice to all the talent that we’re losing to alcohol, drugs, prostitution, homelessness and gangs.”

One student, Edson Chambiborque, told the BBC: “”He has taught us to value the little that we have in this school, and never drop our heads despite all the difficulties we may have.”

Aduviri comes from a poor family but now makes a good salary by Bolivian standards: US $200 a month. (The average monthly wage in Bolivia is around US $90). He still lives with his mother in a poor neighbourhood. His father, a miner, died of lung disease.

He wants to become a director and screenwriter and dreams of his film career taking him to the Cannes Film Festival in France (http://www.festival-cannes.com/).

He will continue acting to raise the money to be able to finance his own films. With the money he has made from appearing in the Spanish film, he has bought a computer with film editing software and a television. He has a goal to watch two movies a day on his new television and keep learning.

Appearing in the film has catapulted his career to the next level: the phone is always ringing and the world’s media keep asking for interviews. It has come with trips to Europe to promote the film and receive awards. He also won the best actor award from the Festival de Cinema Europeen des Arcs (http://www.lesarcs-filmfest.com/2010/programme/). An impressive journey for somebody from a poor family.

When he saw his first movie he was inspired by the magic of filmmaking. He told the BBC: “It was showing Rambo. And that day I realised what I wanted to do. When I left the cinema, I said: I want to make films.”

Bolivian film has had to fight for attention with other Central and South American countries. Brazil, Argentina and Chile all have experienced global success. The country has a rich – but little-known – film history, with significant Bolivian filmmakers including Pedro Sambarino, Jorge Ruiz, Oscar Soria, Jorge Sanjines, Antonio Eguino, Paolo Agazzi, Rodrigo Bellott, Juan Carlos Valdivia, Adriana Montenegro, Marcos Loayza.

Bolivia is looking to the digital age to rectify its relative anonymity, and Cine Alto may be ground zero for a Bolivian film new wave.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: March 2011

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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