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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Online Education Could Boost African Development

Education is recognized as a major catalyst for human development. During a high-level meeting on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/mdgoverview.html) in 2010, UNESCO – the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization – pointed out the necessity of making rapid gains in education if all the MDGs are to be achieved. The goals deadline is 2015 – just two years away.

Two of the eight goals are directly related to education systems. MDG2 focuses on boosting universal primary education by 2015, and MDG3 calls for the elimination of barriers to primary and secondary education for women and girls.

UNESCO found that between 2000 and 2007, the share of total government education expenditure devoted to primary education across sub-Saharan Africa fell from 49 per cent to 44 per cent (Rawle, 2009). It also found total aid for education was on the decline and foreign aid for basic education began to stagnate in 2008. This contrasted, UNESCO stated, with the “strong advances made over the past decade.”

Overall, in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, resources for education fell by US $4.6 billion a year on average in 2009 and 2010 (UNESCO, 2010).

With funding for education dependent on fluctuating factors such as foreign aid, government budgets and the state of the global economy, alternatives are needed to retain the gains made in education and to improve them even further.

Thankfully, one new innovative learning tool, dubbed massive open online courses (MOOCs) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course), is about to have a major impact in Africa. Rapid improvements in access to the Internet in Africa means that online learning tools could be a growing solution to the education deficit.

MOOCs mean people will have access to a global treasure trove of free online courses in science, technology, engineering and math. Many believe the leapfrog into digital education will do for education what mobile phones have done for African’s ability to communicate and do business.

These online courses vary in approach – some have set start and finish dates and can last from six to 10 weeks, while others are more loosely structured. But they all offer students the ability to learn from online video lectures and use online forums as a replacement for seminars, debates and question-asking.

According to a recent paper by Harvard University Professor of International Development Calestous Juma, “There is a real possibility for Africa to dramatically improve its teaching – especially in science, technology, engineering, and math – through the deployment of MOOCs.”

The diffuse nature of the Internet means many of the drivers behind promoting this trend in Africa will be found at the regional rather than the national level. The Internet helps remove the dependence on national governments and their education policies and funding – or lack thereof – to further education goals. This means the ability to make the most of the powerful new resource of MOOCs will be amplified by innovators within Africa, from entrepreneurs to information technology pioneers.

Their solutions will help make it easier to access these learning resources.

MOOCs are a variation on OpenCourseWare (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCourseWare) university courses, created for free distribution on the Internet. MOOCs bypass the hazard in the past of digital courses going missing or being mislaid: they are online and always available. Nobody can mislay the content by accident.

The Khan Academy (khanacademy.org) is one of the best-known popular MOOCs pioneers. It was founded in the United States in 2008 by Salman Khan, who quit his job as a hedge fund manager to run the business full time. Khan is academically highly accomplished – he has three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard University. The Khan Academy targets mainly secondary school students and claims to have 5.5 million unique users a month. It is run as a not-for-profit and receives donations to keep it going.

It does this with a staff of just 37: proof of how much can be achieved when the power of the Internet is leveraged to pass on knowledge.

The Khan Academy platform greets readers with questions such as “What is the eccentricity of an ellipse?” or “What if there’s a negative exponent?” And if you do not know, you better get cracking doing their problem sets. Students can practice their math skills, answer other students’ questions or watch a video walk-through of the services on offer on the website. The main categories are math, science and economics, computer science, the humanities and help with preparing for various standardized tests such as the GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test). There are over 4,000 videos on offer on the website.

“Each video is a digestible chunk, approximately 10 minutes long, and especially purposed for viewing on the computer,” the website states.

“I teach the way that I wish I was taught. The lectures are coming from me, an actual human being who is fascinated by the world around him,” states Khan.

MOOCs offer not just course materials, videos, readings and problem sets but also discussion forums for the students, professors/teachers and tutorial assistants to build a community. This is considered an ideal model for reaching students over great distances and in remote regions. So-called “open” educational resources are used and often no fees or tuition are charged.

The OpenCourseWare (OCW) (http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm) project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) seeks to “publish all of our course materials online and make them widely available to everyone,” according to Dick K.P. Yue, Professor at MIT’s School of Engineering.

Through its website, it offers nearly all of MIT’s course content, a treasure trove from one of the top research universities in the world, a long-standing home for pioneers and innovators in science and technology.

By way of the Internet, anybody anywhere in the world can access this resource. The most visited courses online as of February 2013 included undergraduate “Introduction to Computer Science and Programming,” “Physics I: Classical Mechanics,” “Introduction to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science I,” “Principles of Microeconomics,” “Introduction to Algorithms,” and “Principles of Chemical Science.” There are 2,150 courses and so far 125 million visitors to the website.

Having access to the courses allows teachers to gain new insights into the subjects they teach and benefit from the impressive resources of MIT.

MIT also sees it as a way to aid people to tackle the big development issues of our time, including climate change and health problems such as cancer.

Other MOOCs providers include Peer-to-Peer University (https://p2pu.org/en/), Udemy (udemy.com), Coursera (coursera.org), Udacity (udacity.com), and
edX (edx.org), a not-for-profit partnership between Harvard and MIT to develop courses for interactive study on the Internet.

In the United Kingdom, the Open University (open.ac.uk) and Futurelearn (http://futurelearn.com/) also offer online courses, as does Open2Study (http://www.open.edu.au/open2study) in Australia.

Boosting access to MOOCs presents a great business opportunity for Africa’s mobile phone entrepreneurs and its mushrooming information technology (IT) hubs (https://africahubs.crowdmap.com/).

“I view online learning as a rising tide that will lift all boats,” Anant Agarwal, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and president of edX, told The Financial Times. “It will not only increase access, it will also improve the quality of education at all our universities.”

All of this matters because it means Africans will increasingly have the tools to participate in the global marketplace of ideas and products and services on a more level playing field. By far the biggest obstacle to competing is the lack of timely information and knowledge about what is happening in the global economy. It is a frequent complaint, from the farmer desperate for the latest news on market prices and trends and innovations, to the strivers in the growing megacities of the continent who have their sights set on global success.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: April 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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Global South’s Middle Class is Increasing Prosperity

The global middle class is on the rise – and this is creating both challenges and opportunities. As poverty rates have come down across the global South, many countries have seen a rise in the proportion of their population categorized as “middle class”. Globally, being middle class is defined as a person able to consume between US $4 a day and US $13 a day (ILO).

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), most of this growth will be in Asia and the region will soon make up 66 per cent of the world’s middle class. Historical experience shows that members of the middle class quickly become absorbed in spending their accumulated capital on housing, equipment, industry and business, health and education. In countries with a growing middle class, policy makers need to show a strong interest in creating stable economic conditions to encourage this expanding consumption and domestic demand, the OECD advises.

Growth of the world’s middle class took off after 2001, with an additional 400 million workers joining this group. The McKinsey group of consultants found the total number reached 2 billion in a dozen “emerging nations” in 2010, collectively spending US $6.9 trillion every year (McKinsey).

Forecasters predict a further increase in the middle class across the global South will bring with it a surge in consumption (a combination of spending and demand). Areas being highlighted by various studies and reports include China’s small and mid-size cities, other areas of East Asia and Africa.

Middle class spending in these dozen emerging nations could reach US $20 trillion during the next decade – twice the amount of consumption occurring in the United States right now (McKinsey).

The result is a re-shaping of populations, with growing numbers of people now neither rich nor desperately poor, but landing in the middle of the income distribution.

And local competitors in the global South are fighting hard for these consumers on their own turf.

The Hangzhou Wahaha (http://en.wahaha.com.cn/) beverage maker in China has been able to compete against multinationals such as Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, according to McKinsey. It has turned itself into a US $5.2 billion business using a multi-pronged strategy: targeting rural areas, catering to local needs, keeping costs low and positioning itself as the patriotic choice.

And this change is also occurring in Africa, where a growing middle class is fuelling sales of refrigerators, television sets, mobile phones, motors and automobiles across the continent, according to the OECD. In Ghana, for example, car and motorcycle ownership has risen by 81 per cent since 2006.

According to the African Development Bank (AfDB), Africa’s middle class has reached 34 per cent of the population, or 350 million people. In 1980, it was 126 million people, or 27 per cent of the population.

Countries with the largest middle classes in Africa include Tunisia and Morocco, while Liberia and Burundi have the smallest number of people in the middle class.

The economic growth that is fuelling this middle-class surge is coming from a combination of increasing investment in the services sector, the tapping of the natural resource sector and better economic policies in the past two decades. Africa’s middle class is driving growth in the private sector and boosting demand for goods and services, most often also provided by the private sector.

“The liberalization of African economies has resulted in improved efficiencies and led to a rapid growth in the service sector, which has spurred the growth of the middle class,” Lawrence Bategeka, a principal researcher at the Uganda-based Economic Policy Research Centre, told The East African newspaper.

How important the middle class is to increasing consumption levels can be seen in the cases of Brazil and South Korea.

According to the OECD, both countries had similar income levels and growth rates in the 1960s. But by the 1980s, high income inequality in Brazil capped the middle class at 29 per cent of the population. In South Korea in the 1980s, the middle class population reached 53 per cent. This larger middle class population enabled South Korea to switch from an export-driven growth strategy to domestic consumption.

While Brazil wasn’t able to do this at the time, it has since made impressive gains in reducing poverty – from 40 per cent of the population in 2001 to 25 per cent in 2009. This has seen the middle class grow to 52 per cent of the population and boosted domestic consumption.

While a rising middle class in the global South is good news for improving human development and living standards, the OECD found much of the new middle class was vulnerable and could easily slip out of that category. They also often lacked enough income to purchase more expensive durable goods such as automobiles (OECD Yearbook 2012).

The success of this fragile but growing middle class will be key to how well the global economy fares in the coming years.

A new report by the UN’s International Labour Organization (ILO) argues that the global South’s growing middle classes are just the thing to spur growth across the wider world economy.

“Over time, this emerging middle-class could give a much needed push to more balanced global growth by boosting consumption, particularly in poorer parts of the developing world,” said Steven Kapsos, one of the authors of the report.

In Indonesia, an example of the economic impact of the middle class trend in action can be seen in the surging life insurance business.

Association of Indonesian Life Insurance Companies (AAJI) chairman Hendrisman Rahim believes the growing middle class are potential customers for the country’s thriving life insurance industry.

“They are the ones who have the need to be insured and can afford to purchase a policy. Extremely rich people are financially capable [of buying], but may not have the need. Extremely poor people have the need, but require financial assistance to be insured,” he said to the Jakarta Post.

As the Indonesian middle class increases, the life insurance industry is expecting to see revenue rise by 30 per cent in 2013.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: February 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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All-in-One Solar Kiosk Business Solution for Africa

 

Kiosks are ubiquitous throughout commercial areas in the global South. These highly efficient little business outlets enable small-scale entrepreneurs to sell necessary products without the expense of renting and running a shop.

While they are a great solution for entrepreneurs and customers alike, they often lack connection to municipal services such as electricity and water. That means kiosk owners need to use batteries or a generator if they need a refrigerator to cool food and drink – an expensive proposition.

A new product launched this year in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia offers a solution.

Created by a team of German architects, the Solarkiosk (solarkiosk.eu) is an autonomous business unit designed for remote, off-grid areas. With solar panels across the top of the kiosk, it generates its own electricity and is basically a mini solar power plant. Inside, it is just like a conventional kiosk, with display shelves for products and a counter in the front with a flap – which can feature advertising and messages – that can be opened up for business and locked shut when the kiosk is closed.

The kiosk captures solar energy and the electricity generated can be used to run a computer, lights or a refrigerator. That makes the Solarkiosk capable of offering a wide range of services needing electricity, from Internet access to car-battery charging and mobile phone recharging – a now essential service as mobile phone use explodes across Africa.

The first kiosk was prototyped in November 2011 and the makers incorporated their first subsidiary, Solarkiosk Solutions PLC, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in March 2012.

According to Solarkiosk 1.5 billion people worldwide have no regular supply of electricity – 800 million of them in Africa. The makers of Solarkiosk consider this a huge market and hope to make the most of it.

The kiosk comes in a kit form ready for assembly. The kit is designed to be easy to transport and is light enough and compact enough to be transported on the back of a donkey, its makers claim.

Solarkiosk operators receive training in running and managing a kiosk. They learn about solar technology and how to maintain the kiosks and run a sustainable business. Once the operators are trained and up and running, they typically hire others to help with running the kiosk and offer the services at convenient times for the customers. The Solarkiosk then, potentially, becomes an income and employment generator for the local community.

The kiosk is designed to be durable, secure and difficult to tamper with from the outside. The kiosks have been designed to suit many environments and requirements. There is a basic platform that can be added to or expanded depending on local needs and a series of models depending on the customer’s needs. Cleverly, the largest kiosk model is powerful enough to provide electricity to telecom towers. This has proven attractive to mobile telephone companies who can power a telecom tower and make money from running the kiosk as well.

The Solarkiosk is especially useful for countries near the equator where nights are long (12 hours) and the kiosk can help people get light to read, study and work.

Solarkiosk is targeting off-grid customers who are using up to 40 per cent of their household income on electricity substitutes. According to Solarkiosk, people in off-grid households collectively spend more every year (US $30 billion) lighting their homes – using candles for example – than do all the people living in electricity grid connected countries (US $20 billion).

Solar technology is becoming more affordable at the same time as demand in developing countries for electricity and the products powered by electricity is on the rise. Mobile phones are now essential tools for doing business and staying connected – and all of them need to be kept charged up.

Solarkiosk believes it can save the average off-grid household US $10 per month, while each kiosk could supply solar electricity services to between 200 and 5,000 households.

For now, Solarkiosk is available in Ethiopia. It is based in Berlin, Germany and receives money from the German government. The kiosks themselves were designed and built by Graft Architects (http://www.graftlab.com).

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: November 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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Ugandan Fish Sausages Transform Female Fortunes

 

What to do when your food production enterprise is just not making much money? It is a common problem in the global South, where farmers and fishers often struggle to survive and can face the threat of bankruptcy and destitution when trying to provide essential food for their communities.

Some fish farmers in Uganda – many of them women – were caught up in this dilemma, unable to find a way to make a good income from the fish they were harvesting.

But a lucky hire for one fish cooperative, in the form of a humble secretary, has turned into a business and food success story that is getting set to jump across borders in Africa.

Lovin Kobusingya is the former secretary and university graduate who, through tenacity and ingenuity, has built a business selling fish sausages that has become a hit in Kampala, Uganda in East Africa.

Through trial and error, Kobusingya came upon the idea of turning the fish into sausages. The product, basically unknown in Uganda before, became a tidy solution to the dilemma of how to sell fish at a premium price that could boost the income of the farmers.

She joins the growing number of female entrepreneurs in Africa. Africa has the highest rate of female entrepreneurship in the world, according to the World Bank, which says two-thirds of women in Africa are in the labour force.

The 29-year-old mother of two set up Kati Fish Farms (http://katifarms.org) and Kati Farm Supplies Ltd. and now sells 500 kilograms of fish sausage a day.

Located in the country’s capital, Kampala, Kati Farm Supplies Ltd. prepares and sells a wide range of food products made with chicken, beef, fish, pork, goat, lamb and honey.

Kobusingya is notable not only for her success as a food entrepreneur, but also for the way she has generated attention and excitement around her business and products.

According to Kenya’s Nation newspaper, Kobusingya boosted her profile by gaining customers in Uganda’s hotels.

She graduated six years ago from Makerere University in Kampala (http://mak.ac.ug) and originally planned to go into banking. Like many graduates, she found it hard to break into the sector and get a steady job. After a year of frustrating job hunting, she found a position as a secretary with a fish cooperative society.

“I got a job after a rigorous interview,” she told the Nation. “It was not well-paying.

“The most challenging part of the job was dealing with fish farmers, who were grappling with an unsteady market for their produce.”

Despite all the problems facing the fish industry, Kobusingya became inspired to do something about it. Rather than just hoping market prices would turn in favour of the fish farmers, she diversified the cooperative’s products to add value to the raw fish ingredients.

“Most of our members were women who had taken up aquaculture (fish farming),” she said. “At the time, this was still a novelty.”

It is a tale of trial and error, as Kobusingya tells it.

“We tried selling our products, such as fish feeds, and even selling directly to consumers. But I felt that there was something more we could do to help the farmers even more.”

Becoming frustrated with the constraints of her role, she decided to start the business on top of her day job. She started buying fish directly from the farmers, filleting it herself and selling it to customers.

Yet, still fish was not selling and going to waste.

Then the eureka moment came: make fish sausages. This had never been done in Uganda and she set about undertaking research on the Internet to learn how to do it.

“I assembled bits and pieces of information from the Net on how to make the sausages,” Kobusyingya said.

“Everywhere I went seeking more information, people thought I was out of my mind.

“Nobody had heard of fish sausages but I received support from the Uganda Industrial Research Institute in 2011. They helped me to develop a formula for the product,” she said.

With the new product developed, Kobusingya tried selling it to the hotels in Kampala. And this was the crucial moment when her fortunes changed: people were excited by the new and novel product.

The first orders earned her US $800 and with that jolt of cash, she was able to launch the product in February 2012.

Production started at 100 kilograms of fish sausage a day. By the third month, she was able to produce 500 kilograms a day. And because the product is so popular, she is running hard to meet demand from hotels, food outlets and institutions.

Expanding into selling smoked fish and frozen chicken and beef, she is now working with 470 fish farmers, most of whom are women.

“This business has motivated farmers throughout Uganda,” she said.

“The enterprise, now worth about Ush50 million (US $19,230), has 16 permanent employees,” she said.

She also took the fish sausages on the road and introduced them to the SmartFish trade event in Lusaka, Zambia, where they became a hit with attendees.

SmartFish (http://www.smartfish-coi.org/#!home/mainPage) is funded by the European Union through the European Development Fund and is implemented by the Indian Ocean Commission in partnership with regional trade organizations. The objective of the event was to increase trade within the region.

With her confidence further boosted by the positive international reaction, Koubusingya is exploring how to sell into Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi.

“I always knew I was a businesswoman,” she told The New York Times. “When I was in high school, I used to sell illegal sweets. And I made money.”

“I am very happy and proud” of being a female entrepreneur. “When I was young, they said: ‘A woman is a woman – a man should take care of you.’ But women are actually contributing a lot more than men. We always find ourselves multitasking,” when juggling work and a family.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: November 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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