Solar-Powered Mobile Clinics to Boost Rural Healthcare in Africa

Around the world, innovative thinking is finding new ways of using solar power technology to bring electricity to underserved areas of the global South. Innovators are experimenting with new technologies, new business models and new ways to finance getting solar power into the hands of the poor.

One recently launched new solution is a solar-powered mobile health clinic that is bringing 21st-century medical diagnostic services to rural areas.

The US $250,000 Solar Powered Health Centre has been built by the Korean technology company Samsung (http://www.samsung.com/africa_en/news/localnews/2013/samsung-launches-solar-powered-health-centre-model-to-bring-quality-healthcare-to-rural-areas).

A truck packed with medical equipment that draws electricity from solar panels, it is traveling to rural, underserved parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

The truck is seven metres in length and comes packed with medical goodies, including a fully equipped eye and blood clinic and a dental surgery. It hopes to make it easier to reach the six in 10 residents of sub-Saharan Africa who live in rural areas, and who are often very far from affordable medical services. There is a blood analyzer, spectacle repair kit, and a non-contact tonometry test to measure the inside of a person’s eye. People can also be tested for HIV, malaria and many other conditions.

Samsung (samsung.com) developed the truck as part of its efforts to create “Built for Africa” technologies. The truck was built in Johannesburg, South Africa, helping create local jobs and skills.

Samsung hopes to scale the initiative to a million people in Africa by 2015.

The clinics were launched in Cape Town at the 2013 Samsung Africa Forum and are being rolled out by Samsung Electronics Africa (http://www.samsung.com/africa_en/#latest-home) as part of what the company calls a “large-scale medical initiative on the continent”.

The roaming trucks will be staffed by qualified medical professionals and will educate people about the importance of preventive medical screening.

Targeted conditions include diabetes, high blood pressure, tooth decay and cataracts. The clinics will also conduct public health education campaigns about the importance of preventive medicine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preventive_medicine).

“What many see as minor health issues will not only get worse over time, but will affect other aspects of quality of life. The child that cannot see properly cannot learn properly,” said Dr. Mandlalele Mhinga, a member of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Hospital (http://nelsonmandelachildrenshospital.org/). “Mobile solutions help address this issue by making medical services accessible to more people in rural areas, and educating them about health care at the same time.”

The mobile clinics hope to reduce the vast difference between the quality of health care available to rural residents and people in urban areas.

Even in countries such as South Africa with the highest level of development in the region, medical care coverage is patchy and unreliable. For those who can afford it, 20 per cent of the population, there are private medical schemes. But everyone else must rely on an over-stretched and under-funded public health sector.

Samsung has based this innovation on its first-hand experience with providing medical services to rural areas in Africa.

“This experience has shown us how desperately medical treatment is needed across the continent, and inspired us to develop a sustainable and innovative solution to reach the people who need it most,” said Ntutule Tshenye, Business-to-Government and Corporate Citizenship Lead for Samsung Africa. “While our CSR (corporate social responsibility) strategy in Africa is largely focused on education, our efforts to enrich lives will not be felt if people’s basic needs, such as access to healthcare, are not met.”

Samsung’s “Built for Africa” product range (http://www.samsung.com/africa_en/africancitizenship/home4.html) also has a wide range of other projects and initiatives to boost health and living standards on the continent. These include education programmes, such as the Samsung Electronics Engineering Academy, Samsung Solar Powered Internet Schools, the Samsung Power Generator, and the Samsung eLearning Centres.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. is a consumer electronics multinational and employs 227,000 people worldwide.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: August 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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Vietnamese Google Rival Challenging Global Giant

Information technologies are creating new business opportunities across the global South. As more and more people gain access to the Internet in one form or another, opportunities to offer them services also increase.

A number of key trends show how the Internet’s profile is being reshaped by the growing number of users from the global South. One of those trends is language. English was the first language to dominate the Internet – but this is changing, according to the latest data.

China has the largest number of Internet users in the world (China Internet Network Information Center) and the Chinese language is the second-most often used online, behind English and before Spanish and Japanese (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm).

While most English-language users turn to the giant Google search engine to look things up on the Internet, Google also has many rivals chasing its tail. In China, Baidu (baidu.com) offers searches in Mandarin using Chinese characters, making the Internet easier to navigate for Mandarin speakers. Elsewhere, Arabic language Internet users are being offered new services and urls using Arabic characters.

In short, the Internet is becoming multilingual, customized and local, and creating new opportunities with it.

One new business in Vietnam is challenging Google with its own locally tailored search engine. Called Coc Coc (http://coccoc.com/) – Knock Knock in English – it has already spent US $10 million to hire 300 staff at its Hanoi base, according to the Associated Press. Whether Coc Coc is successful or not in the long term, it is clear as a business it is already helping the local economy by hiring so many people and investing in Vietnam. Google currently does not have any staff in Vietnam because of its concerns about legal conflict with the government over censorship of content on the Internet, AP reports.

Coc Coc believes it has developed a system that better understands the grammar, syntax and nuances of the Vietnamese language. Another advantage it believes it has over Google is its large presence on the ground in Vietnam. With a headquarters in Hanoi, it can quickly make marketing deals and agreements with content providers. To further its local advantage, Coc Coc has dispatched camera crews and photographers to film and photograph streets and log the details of shops, cafes and businesses – all to make search results more accurate and richer in detail.

The headquarters is spread out over four floors of a downtown office block in Hanoi, and according to the Associated Press has a relaxed atmosphere similar to that found in many places in California’s technology start-up culture.

Coc Coc is a joint Russian-Vietnamese venture and is hoping to ride the fast-growing Asian Internet market by offering a search tool that understands the nuances of the Vietnamese language online. By using algorithms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm) it promises to give a faster and better search experience to Vietnamese-language users. It also uses its knowledge of the local scene to  tailor results to users’ needs.

The plan is to spend US $100 million during the next five years to lure 97 per cent of Vietnamese Internet users to make the switch from Google.

“When I came here, I had some understanding why Vietnam was a good market to beat Google,” said Mikhail Kostin, the company’s chief search expert. “But after living here for one year, I understand the language and market much more deeply. I’m sure it’s right.”

Having a local search engine tool can be a successful approach. The Yandex (http://www.yandex.com/) search engine in Russia beats Google in the Russian-speaking market. In South Korea, there is the Naver (naver.com) search engine.

Google battled it out with the Chinese search engine Baidu in 2010 before leaving the country when Google refused to abide by government censorship guidelines. Baidu in the meantime has become the number one search engine in China and is planning to expand to other markets throughout Asia.

“Google is a foreign company, and they are not here,” said one of the three founders of Coc Coc, Nguyen Duc Ngoc. “We can serve the interests of the local market better.”

Vietnam has been experiencing rapid economic growth since the introduction of the Doi Moi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doi_Moi) economic reforms two decades ago in 1986.  Vietnam is fast becoming an Internet success story, with a third of its population of 88 million (World Bank) (http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/vietnam) now online. Many are accessing the Internet through their mobile phones and electronic devices.

Vietnam connected to the Internet in the 1990s and the infrastructure was built up in the mid-2000s. A national plan that kicked off in 2005 accelerated take-up of the Internet in the country as more and more people accessed the Internet through mobile phones, often at home, rather than just in public Internet centres. One study found 71 per cent of users in major cities were accessing the Internet at home (https://opennet.net/research/profiles/vietnam). One in three people in Vietnam now has access to the Internet. Significantly, the Internet has been an overwhelming success with youth in the main cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, where 95 per cent of people in the 15-to-22 age group has Internet access.

Optimists point to Vietnam’s large youth population, fast-growing economy and its modern Internet infrastructure as advantages that will boost its Internet economy. This is attracting entrepreneurs and investors from across Asia and around the world working in the field of online content, e-payments systems and other online services.

With Vietnam’s Internet scene on fire, many people and companies are piling in to come up with the Next Big Thing online. Many have failed, but the same is true in every other country where new information technologies have been introduced. The nature of information technology innovation means ideas quickly rise or die depending on whether Internet users find the innovation useful or attractive. Despite great ideas, there are often far too many factors at play to guarantee any one person or company will have a success on their first try. As has happened elsewhere, ideas hatched by small start-ups, if good, are gobbled up by larger companies. Talented and skilled people usually find themselves being chased by other companies.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: August 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.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=YfRcAwAAQBAJ&dq=development+challenges+august+2013&source=gbs_navlinks_s

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Haitian Coffee Becoming a Hit with American Connoisseurs

The Caribbean country of Haiti has had to deal with the twin challenges of recovering from a devastating earthquake in 2010 while also pulling itself out of the economic and social chaos that has resulted in its status as the poorest place in the Western hemisphere.

Violence has also led to a number of UN peacekeeping missions in Haiti over the years, and there is now a substantial international presence in the country to aid in stabilization and economic recovery (http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/minustah/).

Haiti has a lot of potential when it comes to agriculture, but this would require substantial changes in the way land and agriculture are managed.

Haiti is ranked 77 out of 79 countries in the 2012 Global Hunger Index. Access to sufficient quantities of nutritious food remains an issue for millions of Haitians. An estimated 3.8 million Haitians, or 38 per cent of the population, is food insecure (WFP 2012). Despite its fertile potential, Haiti is dependent on food aid and imports to meet its food security needs.

Fifty per cent of the country’s food requirements are imported, and food prices have been rising since the end of 2010, the year of Haiti’s devastating earthquake. This increase has led to an overall loss of purchasing power for the majority of Haitians. Low agricultural productivity and urban encroachment on arable land provide additional challenges for Haiti’s rural populations. Eighty per cent of farms fail to produce enough to feed their households (http://www.foodsecurityportal.org/haiti/resources).

But some are trying to create a new market for Haiti’s agricultural products to help boost farmers and farming as an occupation and an industry.

It’s hard to imagine now, but Haiti was once the world’s largest producer of coffee in the 18th century when it was a French colony. Today Haiti produces less than 1 per cent of the world’s coffee.

The targeting of niche coffee drinkers in the United States has introduced a new market to the special taste of the Haitian brew. While the market at present is small, some are hoping, with the right measures, it could be grown significantly, boosting both the country’s revenue from agricultural exports and incomes for coffee farmers.

Several US-based companies are carving out a market for Haitian coffee and boosting awareness about the country’s unique coffee beans. La Colombe Coffee Roasters (http://lacolombe.com/), based in the city of Philadelphia, has already been able to export four shipping containers of Haitian coffee to the United States since 2010. The company supplies high-end chefs such as Eric Ripert and Daniel Boulud.

In Florida, Kafe Pa Nou (kafepanou.com) – “our coffee” in Haitian Creole – is owned by Haitian-American Jean René Faustin and sells online coffee from Haitian suppliers Rebo and Cafe Selecto.

So far, Haitian coffee has not been able to gain wider distribution through mass buyers such as Starbucks because it has not been possible to supply the quantities required to fulfill such a contract.

Haiti would need to boost its current average coffee yield of 250 kilograms per hectare to double or triple that yield to gain large-scale contracts.

“Haiti was for a brief moment in time the biggest producer of coffee for export in the world,” Gilbert Gonzales, Vice President of coffee exporter Rebo (http://rebo.ht/The%20Technics.htm), told Medium for Haiti (https://medium.com/medium-for-haiti). But “right now, most people would say it’s impossible” for Haiti’s coffee sector to return to international prominence.

“We’re not saying that it’s possible in the next two years, maybe not even in the next 12 years,” he said. “But it is possible.”

The coffee cherries used to make the popular beverage are processed in one of two ways: a dry process and a wet process. In Haiti, the dry process is more commonly used to form a hard cocoon on the outside of the coffee cherries to help preserve them for a year or more.

This enables farmers to preserve the coffee cherries so they can keep a portion of the crop back as a safety reserve.

The wet processed beans are first immersed in water and then the pulp is washed away before the beans are dried (http://coffee.wikia.com/wiki/Wet_process). The superior flavor this creates has attracted fans in the United States, especially in the trendy neighbourhoods of Brooklyn, New York and San Francisco, California. By bucking the traditional Haitian dry processing method for the beans, it is possible to earn three times the market price by selling wet-processed beans.

Haiti’s history of coffee growing goes back to the 1700s. At the time, the country grew half the world’s coffee. This helped to make the French colony highly profitable.

This long heritage has left the country with a unique asset: original Arabica typica coffee trees first imported by Europeans to Haiti. These coffee trees are considered to be heirloom because they are so old and untainted by modern breeding methods. According to Douglas Weiner in Medium for Haiti, “when you drink coffee from Haiti, it’s like drinking coffee from 200 years ago.”

Weiner is part of a family business, Geo Weiner (http://selectohaiti.com/home/), which has been selling Haitian coffee for four generations and is one of the few surviving coffee exporters in the country.

The country has an estimated 200,000 coffee farmers. Because their methods have not changed much, they are effectively organic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_food). Most farmers can not afford chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

The coffee farms are located in mountain areas with a rich biodiversity of plants and trees. This stands in stark contrast with much of the rest of the country, where deforestation has left the country with just 2 per cent of virgin forest left. Coffee-producing areas are lush and green because coffee is one of the few cash crops that makes enough money to keep it worthwhile to preserve the trees and foliage. In other parts of the country, many are making money from turning trees into charcoal for cooking fuel, the most common fuel for most of the country’s population.

Haiti’s coffee growers have had a hard time coping with the rise and fall of world coffee prices. The world market price for coffee dropped in the early 2000s as the markets were flooded with coffee from Brazil and Vietnam. In response, farmers then cut down the coffee trees and replaced them with subsistence crops such as corn and beans.

With the amount of coffee grown in Haiti dropping quickly, the number of exporters in the country plummeted from 20 companies to two companies today, Geo Weiner and Rebo.

Jobert Angrand, Executive Coordinator of the National Institute of Coffee (http://www.icefda.org/), believes coffee production declined in Haiti because of a wide range of problems, from diseases and pests to aging trees, too-small plots and inefficient production methods. Per-hectare coffee yields are as low as one-tenth of production in Latin America.

The Vice President of coffee exporter Rebo says these problems are holding things back. “I don’t think today we’re looking into going mainstream,” said Gilbert Gonzales. “We can’t. There is not enough volume for that.”

Because production will be small, Gonzales believes Haiti would be wise to target the higher end of the marketplace with American grocery stores such as Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods: “It’s looking into the higher-end gourmet shops, things like that,” he said, “so that we could really share with the rest of that world the quality available from Haiti.”

Significant purchases of Haitian coffee have been made by various overseas companies, which does give hope that this plan could work. Irish coffee company Java Republic bought 97 tonnes of Haitian coffee from the Rebo exporter in 2010.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: August 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.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=YfRcAwAAQBAJ&dq=development+challenges+august+2013&source=gbs_navlinks_s

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