Electric Bicycles Become Urban Transport Success

A money-saving way to get about has emerged in China: the electric bicycle. It seems an excellent solution to the travel needs of people in fast-growing metropolises. The bikes are good at navigating traffic gridlock, and since they are electric they do not emit air pollution, a big problem in many cities.

With urban populations ballooning across the South – and the world now a majority urban place – the challenge of moving people around economically and cleanly is a big issue. While turning to cars seems an appealing option for people who have raised their incomes, the resulting traffic jams and pollution are a major drawback. Gridlock (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridlock) is a daily reality in cities across Asia and Africa.

The success of e-bikes in China is striking: It is estimated there are four times more electric bikes than cars in the country, 120 million in all. According to the Electric Bikes website (www.electricbikee.com), the number of electric bicycles produced each year has grown from 200,000 eight years ago to 22 million in 2008. It is estimated to be a US $11 billion a year business: a true Southern success story that is going around the world.

A typical electric bicycle has a rechargeable power pack, with a battery that takes up to four hours to charge and lasts from an hour to two hours depending on local conditions, like hills. The batteries can range from heavy lead acid models (around only 100 charges) to nickel metal to lightweight, long-lasting lithium batteries. The batteries range from 12 volts to 36 volts. How long a battery lasts depends on its energy retention ability, road and temperature conditions and the rider’s weight.

And while some cities are turning to encouraging more peddle power with human-powered bicycles, this is an unappealing option in hot or humid climates. Who wants to turn up at work hot and sweaty?

In China, a highly competitive market of manufacturers has sprung up in the last 10 years to provide e-bikes for every taste and need.

China has a long tradition as a cycling nation: in the 1980s, four out of five commuters used bicycles. But that changed dramatically as people bought cars with their rising incomes.

In the capital, Beijing, rapid economic development and rising incomes have led to serious traffic congestion. There are over 4 million cars on Beijing’s roads. The pollution in the city is very bad and has led to various campaigns to ban high-polluting vehicles.

The ensuing traffic gridlock means the benefits of having a private vehicle – the freedom to get around on your own – are eroded as a driver wastes time in long commutes. So, many have turned to the nimble electric bicycles.

One resident, David Dai, told the BBC “It takes only 10 minutes to ride my electric bike from home to work.”

“If I took the bus, I’d have to spend time waiting for it, and then I could be trapped in a traffic jam. It could take me half an hour to make the same journey.”

Competition is fierce in the electric bike market, with shops sometimes sitting side-by-side.

A manager of a Beijing electric bicycle store, Zhang Zhiyong, puts the success down to this: “Beijing is not like other smaller cities – it’s big. If people ride their bicycles to work, they get really tired. If they drive to work, the roads are often congested,” he told the BBC.

“But an electric bike is environmentally friendly and convenient. Promoting the use of these bikes would benefit us all.”

And the price is a definite incentive: just 2,680 yuan (US $390), while cars sell for thousands of dollars.

The electric bicycles are so successful they are now growing faster than cars in a country that has become the fastest growing car market in the world.

Some believe the bikes are just a stop gap before people get enough money to buy automobiles. But the bigger trend of growing urban populations and the ensuing traffic jams will ensure they remain a practical option to get around the gridlock.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: April 2010

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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Indonesian Middle Class Recycle Wealth Back into Domestic Economy

The global downturn and economic crisis is now into its third year. Economic growth has dropped across the South, as the knock-on effect of shrinking credit and slowing global markets took its toll.

One solution to re-starting growth and building up domestic industries is to target local products at the existing middle class, which in turn grows the middle class by creating better paying jobs.

Globally, 2009 saw 70 million people join the emerging-market middle class, with incomes between $6,000 and $30,000. And 1 billion people are expected to join the middle class by 2020. It has been called “the story of the decade,” by Goldman Sachs’s chief economist Jim O’Neill, who forecasts their global spending power will outstrip the developed world in two decades.

Indonesia’s middle class first began to grow in the 1980s. But rising prosperity took a heavy blow with the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s, when the currency was devalued, pitching millions of people back into poverty.

Even so, Indonesia’s middle class is estimated to be between 35 and 40 million people (out of a population of 230 million) and they pay out roughly US $750-1000 on monthly household spending.

They are a mix of people, including professionals in management, banking, accounts, specialized law, bio-technology, engineering and other areas – all skills needed to run the market economy.

Like members of the middle class around the world, increasingly affluent Indonesians forge their identity through consumerism and lifestyle. This desire for goods and services represents a huge business opportunity. Often, this is captured by large multinational companies with long experience of selling branded goods and services.

Indonesia, however, is having great success growing its middle class despite the global economic downturn by building up the domestic market. Millie Stephanie, the director of Indonesia Tatler Magazine, told the BBC that two-thirds of the country’s economy runs on domestic consumption.

New middle class housing is springing up around the capital Jakarta. Home ownership for many, unthinkable a decade go, is now possible as banks make more loans possible. This in turn feeds into more consumption.

By turning to local products – something the Indonesian government is encouraging by increasing its own spending on local goods and services in 2010 by US $21.32 billion, according to Industry Minister MS Hidayat – a cycle is created where middle class wealth creates middle class jobs in local companies.

The department store chain of Matahari (http://www.matahari.co.id/) – the largest local department store in Indonesia – is a good example. Eighty percent of the goods it sells are made in Indonesia. The store targets the middle class with products like jeans that Indonesians can afford. And this strategy has helped Indonesia to get through the downturn.

According to Widia Augustinia, who runs the PT Inti Garmindo Persada jeans factory, the company was able to triple production despite the downturn.

“In the last few years we kept getting calls from our clients saying they had sold all our jeans and they wanted more, so we had to expand our business and had to hire more people,” she told the BBC.

One of the factory’s workers, 37-year-old Miriam, has seen her salary increase annually over the last four years while she has worked in the factory. The increasing wealth means she can now educate her children and buy a TV and a motorcycle.

This matters when half the population are living on less than two dollars a day. This recycling of middle class wealth into the Indonesian economy is making more workers become part of the emerging middle class with the jobs created.

In Africa, the Aureos Advisers (http://www.aureos.com/) private equity firm specializes in investing in African small and medium size enterprises, and is having great success with it despite the downturn. Its niche is finding and investing in companies that sell quality local products.

Run by Sri Lankan-born Sev Vettivetpillai, it raised US $150 million in 2009 to invest in Africa, much of it from pension funds.

“That’s a large sum of money in a market where raising capital is tough,” he told The Guardian newspaper.

Leverage was a game when cheap debt was around,” he says of the old private equity market that went up in flames in 2008. “Today a large chunk of growth is in emerging markets and we have proved you can invest responsibly in these markets and achieve attractive returns while paying attention to building sustainable businesses.”

And the faith in small and medium-sized African businesses has been paying off despite the economic turmoil: since most of the companies have little debt, they have not suffered in the downturn. And since many do not export much to Europe or the United States, they have not suffered from the consumer slump.

“When markets crashed 60 percent, good management teams were making sure they had cash, not much debt,” said Vettivetpillai. “Most banks don’t lend to these SMEs. And that has saved a number of those businesses. So we had an upward lift in earning growth in 2008 when many people showed a drop.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: March 2010

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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Housing Solution for World’s Growing Urban Population

 

Across the South, cities are expanding and urban populations growing at a phenomenal rate — the cities of Africa and Asia are growing by a million people a week. Megacities and sprawling slums will be the hallmarks of this majority urban world. In sub-Saharan Africa, 72 percent of the population already lives in slum conditions.

How people will be housed is an urgent problem. There are many ways to build a dwelling, from scavenged materials, to labour-intensive and expensive custom-built construction, yet affordable and safe construction techniques for the poor are sorely needed.

The danger of building unsafe housing can be seen in the recent devastating earthquake in Haiti, where many buildings collapsed, killing an estimated 212,000 people. If the rapid growth in urban populations is to be safe and sustainable, then new dwellings will need to be built that meet high standards of durability.

In South Africa, one company believes it has the right technology for an age of rapid urban population growth and the need for quick and safe housing construction.

The Moladi building system (http://moladi.com/) (http://www.moladi.net/default.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1) developed in 1986 by South African injection mold maker Hennie Botes consists of molded plastic panels, looking like the panels found in children’s construction toys that are screwed together and assembled as a frame for the building. With the frame in place, a concrete mortar mix is poured in and left to dry: depending on local conditions, taking between 12 and 15 hours. When dry, the plastic mold is removed and a fully built house is the result. Because of the use of molds, the home’s walls are smooth and even and the resulting home is tidy to look at.

Moladi doesn’t require professional builders to assemble the frames, and the technique has been tested for strength and for resistance to earthquakes and hurricanes. Since it was developed specifically for the poor, this building method draws on what is called ‘sweat equity’: often the only asset a poor person has to contribute to the cost of building a home is their free labour.

Because the dimensions of the home have already been established when the plastic frames were molded, common on-site mistakes are avoided.

Moladi benefits from South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment programme (http://www.southafrica.info/business/trends/empowerment/bee.htm) and is certified for its quality with the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) (https://www.sabs.co.za/). Moladi contractors and developers are working in 15 countries and the technique is distributed in a further seven countries.

The Moladi construction technique was born of frustration with the traditional approach of laying one brick on top of another. This traditional construction method, dating back thousands of years, just doesn’t match the needs of our times. It is slow and requires highly skilled bricklayers to be done right. Across the developing world, it is possible to see poorly constructed brick dwellings – often built unevenly with poor quality mortar holding the bricks together – that are unsafe in an earthquake.

Training in the Moladi technique takes from one to two weeks for unskilled workers depending on the size of the home. Moladi provides handbooks and all the necessary resources to complete the project. Each project has its own custom-built plastic frames made based on the home’s design.

“There is no flat fee for on-site training; the client is only responsible for covering the travel and living expenses for the Moladi representative or training foreman,” said Hennie Botes.

The ideal size for a project is 15 homes. By building a large number of homes, the individual cost comes down and savings increase.

The system “can be reused 50 times, which means that the more Moladi houses you build, the more economical it becomes,” Botes said. “Compared with the exorbitant cost of traditional construction methods and when current market values are considered, the cost savings of building with the Moladi technology are achieved from the first application.”

As the world’s cities grow, and slums become larger and more prevalent, the urgent need for affordable and decent housing will go hand-in-hand with a need for jobs — particularly jobs for unskilled workers. There just won’t be enough skilled workers to go around to build the homes. Even in developed countries, this has become a problem.

“The recent earthquake disaster in Haiti could benefit from the Moladi system,” Botes said. “Job creation for Haitians is desperately needed and Moladi can immediately facilitate an income for family groups, as over 95 percent of the construction team consists of unskilled labourers. There is no requirement for heavy machinery, or even electricity, and remote areas can be easily accessed; Moladi also allows for the utilisation of building rubble resulting from the earthquake in the construction of new buildings.”

The essence of the Moladi system is breaking down the construction process into simple, replicable steps. It is inspired by the American pioneer of mass production, car maker Henry Ford (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford), who achieved efficiency and low costs in production by simplifying production into standardized and modulated steps.

“The Moladi construction process should be viewed as a workflow process similar to that of a vehicle assembly line,” Botes said. “Through the simplification, standardization, modularization, and industrialization of the construction process, efficiency and cost savings are achieved and maintained by managing the continuous flow process on site.

“Contractors must make sure that they have planned their project roll-out and budget well and have clearly defined goals as to what they want to achieve. It is very important to have all team players and professionals on the same page with regards to their roles and responsibilities.”

In the beginning, Botes encountered resistance to his innovative production methods. “I was highly motivated and really believed in my idea, but when I presented it to investors, they’d shoot holes in it. … It’s been a 22-year journey, but I always kept the goal in mind. Moses spent 40 years in the desert … I’m quite happy my desert experience was only 20-odd years, though,” he told Men’s Health magazine.

South Africa is facing a population growth rate of 1.73 percent a year (UNICEF). It also has 61 percent of the urban population trying to live on four percent of the land, according to Botes. This urban population grows at 2.7 percent a year, yet existing housing needs are not being met. There is already a backlog of 2.2 million homes needed to be built, and this grows by 180,000 every year, according to the Banking Association of South Africa (http://www.banking.org.za/default.aspx).

“Even though the need for housing has always been a fundamental requirement to sustain one’s health and welfare, the advances in this area have been seriously lacking,” said Botes. “The brick and mortar method of construction was recorded as early as 1458 B.C, which means that very little has changed in terms of building structures over a period of almost 3.5 millennia.

“We cannot expect to resolve the housing crisis in our age with a technique developed for the requirements of society 3468 years ago.”

With the success of the Moladi building system, Hennie is working on “producing windows, doors, toilet seats, window frames, sinks and washbasins. If I can include these as part of my product, I’ll reduce the total unit cost of the house.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: February 2010

Moladi is a building and housing solution from South Africa and was featured in Southern Innovator Magazine.

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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Enormous Potential for Nigerian Software Industry

Nigeria has an unfortunate global reputation as the home of 419 scams. A typical 419 scam involves sending emails to people around the world in order to extort money from them. Online scams may show an unexpected technical sophistication for a country associated with poverty, but are a sign that some of Nigeria’s plentiful talents are being turned to illegal activities rather than building legitimate businesses.

Many argue that Nigeria is missing its potential to become an African legal software powerhouse. The Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria said the country’s annual consumption of software reached US $900 million in 2006, making it possibly Africa’s biggest market.

“Nigeria stands a good chance of dominating both the local and West African diaspora in a thriving global software market,” it argues.

Production of computer software is a major income earner for countries like the United States and India.

Many argue that Nigeria has enormous potential, if it can address some common problems: an absence of software quality assurance, poor investment in software development, poor product standards and a lack of proper documentation. In short: if Nigeria’s software industry takes on board global best practice, then it is sitting on a goldmine of legitimate business opportunities.

Chris Uwaje, president of the Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON), told Business Day that the country’s software technology, if well retooled and strategically positioned for global competitiveness, could earn about US $10 billion annually from foreign software exchange.

He argued that developing the software industry would have many benefits for the population as a whole.

“Software has … become and will remain one of the fastest growing industries with power to enrich, and sustain national economies,” Uwaje said.

Some estimates put the world software industry and associated markets at US $1,300 billion, with 90 percent of the world’s software exports coming from the United States and Europe. Outside the U.S., U.K., Germany and Japan, the new and emerging countries within the software industry are India and China, and to a lesser extent Singapore and Malaysia.

According to market researcher DataMonitor, the worldwide software industry grew by 6.5 percent between 2007 and 2008.

DataMonitor forecasts that in 2013, the global software market alone will have a value of US $ 457 billion, an increase of 50.5 percent since 2008 (Datamonitor’s Software: Global Industry Guide).

Africa has a high proportion of entrepreneurs because people have next to no social supports to fall back on and need to do business to survive. Nigeria’s large youth population – 43.2 percent of the total – could be the driver of this new economy if used right.

Nigeria mostly imports software solutions despite having an extensive capacity in software development. If developed well, software could surpass oil as a revenue generator for the country.

According to A Profile of Nigeria’s Software Industry by H. Abimbola Soriyan and Richard Heeks, “A typical software company (in Nigeria) had between 11 and 50 customers (the average was 36 though a few firms involved with package installation had several thousand). There was a strong concentration among these customers. Almost all were private sector … There was a surprising lack of government/public sector organizations as customers (reflected above in the limited number of firms found in Abuja).”

Jimson Olufuye, president of the Information Technology Association of Nigeria (ITAN), believes that more needs to be done to support the software developers. And while on paper there is strong support for this sector in information technology policy, “In addition, we need to establish more IT parks with appropriate policies on infrastructure, human resources, incentives and business plan.”

Wahab Sarumi, chief executive officer of Wadof Software Consulting, explains the problem: “Indigenous software developers are an endangered species, abandoned by the government, neglected by its own people and bullied by the poachers from India, to whom Nigerian businesses rush to buy software applications to solve local business problems.”

Already, Nigerian software firms are offering existing off-the-shelf software that they custom package with local services. This recognizes software made in advanced countries isn’t entirely right for developing countries: and this is where business opportunities await for software developers.

But the key to success, at the end of the day, is to be the best solution on offer for the right price. James Agada, managing director of ExpertEdge Limited, believes people buy the best software for the task and don’t care where it comes from.

“If you want to sell software, the buyer does not buy the software alone, he buys the software, buys capacity to support the software, buys your capacity to improve on the software, he buys what he assumes is your mastery of the domain the software … the software must be able to compete favourably with its competitors.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: February 2010

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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Cool Food for the Poor

A whole wave of hi-tech, innovative products are now being developed and marketed for the world’s poor. These products are designed to raise the quality of life of poor people and treat them as a market with real needs, rather than a mass of people to be ignored.

One of the major challenges of the 21st century is finding ways to make these products affordable for the poor – bringing significant development gains in health and quality of life – without increasing the burden on the world’s environment. In India, this vast new market is rapidly coming alive, with new marketing channels reaching deep into the country’s slums and aided by a lively media scene turning people on to new products.

India is turning its large number of well-trained engineers and product designers to the task of making relevant products for the country’s millions of rural poor.

An Indian refrigerator – the ChotuKool fridge (http://www.new.godrej.com/godrej/godrej/index.aspx?id=1) – is designed to stay cool for hours without electricity and to use half the power of conventional refrigerators. Priced at US $69, it is targeted at India’s poor – a population of over 456 million, almost half the total Indian population (World Bank).

Manufactured by Godrej and Boyce and weighing just 7.8 kilograms, it is designed around the stated needs of the poor, who wanted a fridge capable of cooling 5 to 6 bottles of water and 3 to 4 kilograms of vegetables. Portability was crucial as well, since it needed to be moved when large family gatherings take place in small rooms.

As a video shows (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtCRlynp0bM), the fridge looks more like a drinks cooler than the typical large refrigerator. It works by replacing the standard compressor motor found in most fridges with a battery-powered heat exchanger.

A group of village women was involved in the design process from the beginning. The fridges are being distributed by a microfinance group.

While people in developed countries take it for granted they will have both a refrigerator and a steady supply of electricity, the world’s poor have few options for keeping food cool.

There is a strong economic advantage to refrigeration: many farmers have to throw away vegetables or sell at high discounts because they are quickly spoiling in the heat. By refrigerating, they can keep them fresh and get the higher price. For somebody living on less than US $2 a day, this is a big economic boost.

Keeping food cool also comes with health advantages: it slows bacterial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria) growth, which happens at temperatures between 4.4 degrees Celsius and 60 degrees Celsius. This is called ‘the danger zone’, when some bacteria double in just 20 minutes. But when a refrigerator is set below 4 degrees Celsius, most foods will be protected from bacteria growth (USDA).

Through refrigeration, the poor not only can avoid food poisoning, but also benefit from better quality foods, more dietary variety, and better take advantage of buying and storing food when prices are lower. For example, eggs in a refrigerator can last for up to five weeks. Fresh fish can be stored unfrozen for up to two days.

The quality of life improvements from refrigeration are obvious. But with conventional refrigerators costly and dependent on a steady supply of electricity, the poor will not buy them.

An Indian government survey in 2007/08 found daily pay in rural areas ranged from 45 rupees a day (US $1) to 110 rupees a day (US $2.40). This means the ChotuKool fridge costs between one and two month’s wages for a rural worker.

Some argue even the cost of the ChotuKool is still too prohibitive to many poor people. And there are other initiatives out there to offer low-tech solutions to cooling food.

In Nigeria, grassroots inventor Mohammed Bah Abba has designed a cooler called the Zeer (http://practicalaction.org/?id=zeerpots). It works like this: two ceramic earthenware pots of different sizes are arranged one inside the other. The space between the pots is filled with wet sand and kept moist. The user then places their drinks or vegetables inside and covers with a damp cloth. As the water from the moist sand evaporates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporation), the air inside the centre pot is cooled several degrees, enough to preserve some foods and drinks.

Another Indian innovation is also targeting the rural poor consumer: a water filter. Called the Swach water purifier (http://www.tata.com/article.aspx?artid=TtOdcdNuSRk=), it is aimed at households and stands just less than 1 metre (just over 3 feet) in height. The filter is designed to do bulk water purification and is the result of 10 years’ research. It is aimed at the one billion people in the world who do not have access to clean water. It will sell for 1,000 rupees (US $21.50).

It is very slick and modern in design, with a mix of white and clear plastic, resembling the commonly used Brita (http://www.brita.net/) water filters found in many homes. It works by using ash from rice milling to filter out bacteria. The ash is impregnated with silver particles to kill germs that cause diarrhoea, cholera and typhoid. It is able to purify 3,000 litres of water before the cartridge needs to be replaced.

It is manufactured by the Indian industrial giant Tata.

“It was the pressing need of people trapped by the effects of natural disasters such as the (2004 Indian Ocean) tsunami that saw the deployment of one of the earliest versions of this product,” said Tata vice chairman S. Ramadorai. “A key part was the insight that a natural material like rice husk can be processed to significantly reduce water-borne germs and odours when impure water is passed through it.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: January 2010

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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