Cyber Cities: An Oasis of Prosperity in the South

The future is arriving in the South even faster than many think: so-called “cyber cities” are being created to become this century’s new Silicon Valleys. Well-known ‘cyber cities’ like India’s Hyderabad and Bangalore have been joined by many other cities across the global South. But two places are set to make big waves with their ambition and drive in 2008: Mauritius and China.

Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean strategically close to Africa, better known for tourism and luxury hotels, wants to become the world’s “cyber island”. Armed with the first 3G network in Africa (the third generation of mobile phone technology – offering high-speed internet access and video telephony), Mauritius is moving fast to make good on this advantage. And it is even moving to the next level of mobile-phone speed, something called High-speed Download Packet Access (HSDPA) – allowing even greater quantities of information to be exchanged.

Mauritius joins a select few countries, including Japan and South Korea, at the forefront of access to 3G. Wireless – or wi-fi – computer access is available in three-quarters of the island.

Outside the capital of Port Louis, former sugar cane plantations are being turned into a “cyber city”. The centrepiece of the development is the 12-story Cyber Tower, home to young technology start-ups. The country is also investing heavily in education from primary school to university, to make sure the country’s 1.2 million people are cyber-ready.

Computer novices in remote villages are being visited by a Cyber Caravan with a classroom teaching housewives, children, the unemployed and the disabled basic computing and world processing.

Mauritius built its wealth on tourism, sugar plantations and textile manufacturing. But it is worried that trading arrangements that helped the sugar and textile industries to flourish, will be taken away. So it is focusing on the future: it sees itself as the world centre for disaster recovery computing services for the world’s companies in event of a disaster in their own country that destroys computer networks.

In China, its largest Cyber Park is under construction in Wujin New and High-tech Development Zone of Changzhou. It will be a technology incubator, a research and development centre, and a place for small and medium-sized enterprises to innovate.

What is truly making people stop and think is another far-reaching project: the Beijing Cyber Recreation District (CRD) – China’s most ambitious digital media industry development: a virtual worlds’ initiative with digital media academies and company incubators. It is spread over 100 square kilometres, creating the world’s largest virtual world development. It is already home to more than 200 game and multimedia content producers in western Beijing.

The CRD says its goal is “to create a virtual economy providing infrastructure and platforms through which any business – not just those based in China – can come in and sell their real-world products and services. While a concerted effort will be placed on bringing Chinese businesses and consumers in, the effort is worldwide and open to businesses and consumers from any country.”

The idea is to create a vast virtual economy for commerce where manufacturers can directly connect with billions of customers – bypassing middlemen.

It claims it will be “the world’s one-stop shop for customers and producers.” It will host billions of avatars – or virtual people – surpassing the capability of the very popular Second Life virtual world game’s 40,000.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: January 2008

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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Decent and Affordable Housing for the Poor

Urban populations across the South are growing fast: by 2030, some 5 billion people around the world will live in cities. This year will be the first year in which urban dwellers (3.3 billion people) will outnumber rural residents for the first time (UNFPA).

Africa now has a larger urban population than North America and 25 of the world’s fastest growing big cities. Asia and Africa’s cities are growing by an incredible 1 million people a week, with 72 per cent of the population in sub-Saharan Africa living in slum conditions.

How well people dwell is integral to their mental and physical health. Most squatters and slum dwellers – a category that includes half the urban population of Africa, a third in Asia and a fourth in Latin America and the Caribbean – live in makeshift homes made from whatever they can get their hands on. These dwellings are usually unsafe and vulnerable to fire, floods, and earthquakes. On top of this, these sprawling slums can be depressingly grim to look at for those living there.

In Brazil’s Sao Paulo neighbourhood of Heliopolis – the largest of the city’s 400 favelas, or shantytowns – the majority of its dwellings are made from cement and brick. It is stigmatised as the ugliest part of the city, yet a unique initiative has transformed perceptions of the area – and brought pride to its residents. The project offers a model for slum areas looking to make the next leap up the ladder of development. Heliopolis first sprang up in the 1970s, wedged between highways and roads. Plagued by crime, there is a wide spread in incomes and urbanisation among the 120,000 residents packed into the one-and-a-half square mile. Older parts have many services, while newer areas lack basics like plumbing and electricity.

Well-known Sao Paulo-based Brazilian architect Ruy Ohtake (http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/3836/saopaulo.html) mobilised the 6,000 residents to use a fixed palette of six colours – from bright yellow to deep purples – to create a look described as akin to an Italian hill town.

“Ohtake told a newspaper that Heliopolis was the ugliest part of the city, so we went to him and asked him to figure out how to make it beautiful,” Geronino Barbosa, director of the Heliopolis community group UNAS, told the design magazine Dwell.

Ohtake, famous for his hotel designs and renovating former colonial areas, rose to the challenge: “I believe in beauty as a social function, so what better way to exercise that belief,” he said. To avoid the initiative feeling like something being imposed from on high, the plan did not go ahead until the residents were happy. And to make sure they felt they owned the results, they did all the painting themselves. The result is a river of colour running through a landscape of dreary, unfinished brick homes jammed between streets and factories. The Italian hill town-effect leaves pedestrians experiencing a surprise as they turn through the streets, happening upon hidden plazas and little bars.

“Our dream is to expand this project to the entire favela,” said Barbosa. “People love their painted houses. One of our participants told me that her house has been transformed into a sort of Carnival parade.”

“Who doesn’t want to live in a beautiful house?” said UNAS’ head, Joao Miranda, to Dwell. “We want the same things as everyone else.”

Another architect has tackled the problem of how to create inexpensive but durable and beautiful homes for the poor. Iranian-born architect Nader Khalili (http://www.calearth.org/) has created what he calls ‘super adobe’ dwellings inspired by traditional Iranian rural homes. The cone-shaped homes are made from sandbags piled one on top of the other in a circular pattern. A basic home is three rooms of 400 square feet, and can be built by five people (with only one needing skills), within weeks. Being sandbags, the homes can easily be dismantled and moved or adapted to meet new space needs.

Khalili first fell in love with the sand adobe homes of Iran in the 1970s. He had been on a journey to find a home design that was both environmentally harmonious and could be built anywhere in the world quickly and cheaply. But while the original Iranian sand adobe is easily destroyed by earthquakes and bad weather, the ‘super adobes’ are earthquake, hurricane and flood resistant. They are now being built across the Americas , Asia and Africa.

“You can never build one of these that doesn’t look beautiful,” he said. “Just as you have never seen an ugly tree or an ugly flower.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: January 2008

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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Dabbawallahs Use Web and Text to Make Lunch on Time

The developing world’s rapidly growing cities are bringing with them whole new ways of living and working. One rapidly expanding category of citizen is the office worker. A symbol of growing prosperity, the office worker also tends to be a time-poor person who often must commute large distances between home and workplace.

These long commutes mean that many workers have lost the old ability to go home for lunch. This has led to an expanding new field of business: catering to all these office workers’ appetites.

Every morning Mumbai’s legendary dabbawallahs (it means “box-carrier” or “lunchpail man”) fan out across the city to collect freshly prepared lunches from people’s homes and restaurants. They then efficiently use the transport network to quickly deliver lunches to the customers’ workplaces. Once just for the elite, the dabbawallah lunch has become the norm for Mumbai’s middle class office workers. Lunches are packed into small, metal tiffin boxes, ingeniously organized so each component of the meal is sealed in its own section and kept warm.

With a plethora of religious and cultural practices, Indians are particular about what they eat. In Mumbai there are 200,000 office workers receiving cooked lunches every day delivered straight to their desks. This is done by an army of 5,000 dabbawallahs. While their delivery accuracy was already impressive – only six deliveries in a million go astray – they realized they had to adapt to the city’s rapid changes. In addition to their network using trains, hand-carts and bicycles to get the lunches to desks, they have turned to the internet and mobile phone SMS text messaging to take orders.

It is a 125-year old industry that has grown at the rate of five to ten per cent a year and all are paid the same no matter what their function in the business.

With foreign direct investment into developing countries surging – according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), it rose by 12 per cent from 2005 to 2006 – the number of office workers is on the rise too.

The trend is especially pronounced in India, which is on track to overtake the United Kingdom as the world’s fifth largest economy by 2010, according to investment bankers Goldman Sachs.

India’s cities are booming. Mumbai is one of the top five global megacities as well as the world’s most crowded metropolis. The dabbawallahs are an excellent example of how a business can move with the times.

A key component in India’s new-found success has been a willingness to do things better and become more efficient; the key to this is often information technology. The new technology for the dabbawllahs has been built for them by software engineer Manish Tripathi – he has even been adopted as an honorary tiffinwallah.

“When people move to Mumbai for work, and need a lunchbox carrier, who do they ask?” he said. “They ask their friends, or their neighbour. Now, they just need to go to the website and they can find out how to get in touch with us. They can also get in touch with us via SMS.”

The move online has been a great success said Tripathi: “We get 10 to 15 enquiries more a day via SMS and the website.”

Raghunath Medge from the dabawallahs cooperative said they are also making money by selling advertising on table mats. They have also turned to being a health service: they distribute health advice, beginning with this year’s World AIDS Day. An “AIDS kit”, comprising a car calendar and fliers on testing and counseling tied neatly with a red ribbon, was distributed ahead of World AIDS Day December 1.

“The kit was attached to empty lunch boxes and delivered to about 100,000 clients’ homes,” said Raghunath Megde,

Targeting hungry office workers is a goldmine for others too: in Saigon, Vietnam, the Ben Thann restaurant capitalised on its proximity to an area with a fast-growing office worker population to increase its profits. “Since our restaurant began serving lunch for office workers our business has increased by 60 per cent. This increase in number of guests enjoying the new menu was the main reason for Ben Thanh’s decision to introduce a buffet lunch,” said Nguyen Thi Thu Thao, deputy manager of Ben Thanh Restaurant.

In the past, the dabawallahs were visited by Prince Charles and British entrepreneur multimillionaire Richard Branson, to study their working methods. It looks like this next round of innovation will equally grab the world’s attention. 

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: December 2007

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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Flurry of Anti-poverty Innovations

Innovation is key to transforming the lives of the world’s four billion poor. And it is at the core of much of the new thinking these days. While the world’s poor can’t rely on political developments, or wider macro-economic events to go their way, they can harness the power of invention, innovation and self-reliance to make big changes in the quality of their lives and increase income – and so can those who want to help them. New York Times journalist and author Thomas Friedman put it like this: “Africa needs many things, but most of all it needs capitalists who can start and run legal companies. More Bill Gateses, fewer foundations. People grow out of poverty when they create small businesses that employ their neighbours. Nothing else lasts.”

In the 1940s, Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote that “the function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionise the pattern of production.” Schumpeter’s definition remains at the core of an entrepreneurial approach that focuses on innovation and enterprise as a means of addressing social needs. “Social innovators” are pragmatic and embrace innovation to tackle social problems through both for-profit and non-profit models.

International Development Enterprises India (IDEI) is a non-profit that uses product invention to transform the lives of the poor and tackle hunger and malnutrition. Its approach is to take existing technologies and adapt them, reducing costs and improving effectiveness. By constantly evolving the design, they can focus in on making it cheap and relevant.

One innovation is the Treadle Pump: a foot operated, water pump for small plots of land. It enables crops to be grown in winter and summer – no need to rely on rain. And since women are key to farm life, it is physically easy for women to use. So far more than 350,000 small farms are using it. It has been calculated the pump increases household incomes by a minimum of US $100/year.

Another of their innovations is the Affordable Drip Irrigation Technology Intervention. While drip irrigation systems have been for sale in India for the past 15 years, they were not relevant or affordable for small and marginal farms. IDEI adapted these technologies during trials from 1997 to 2000. Existing technologies suffer from two drawbacks: they are complicated to maintain and they are expensive to buy. A big challenge was demystifying the idea that crop irrigation methods were for only the big orchards. The irrigation systems are sold as kits and are scalable so that farmers can expand their systems if they want. IDEI has sold over 85,000 of the various irrigation kits.

Both inventions are designed to mimic traditional technologies and are inexpensive, thus maximising take-up by small farmers, who can recover the cost within one season of crops.

They not only do the research and development and product design and manufacturing, but also set up the vertically integrated marketing and sales network and make it viable for the private sector to step up and sell the kits.

Paul Polak, the founder of the global International Development Enterprises, believes progress is only possible if products are sold at a fair market price. “When you give things away, you lack discipline in how you design them because you don’t have to get feedback from the customer,” he said.

In the village of Otse, Botswana in southern Africa, the Godisa Technologies Trust has brought affordable solar-powered hearing aids to the poor. Most of the employees are deaf, and as a non-profit social enterprise, its battery chargers – and its branded Solar Aid digital behind-the-ear (BTE) hearing aid – are all for use in developing countries. It is estimated over 600 million people suffer from some form of hearing impairment. According to the World Health Organization, 278 million people in the world are affected by moderate hearing loss. Yet the global production of hearing aids does not come anywhere close to meeting the need.

The Solar Aid needs only six to eight hours of sunlight to recharge for a full week. And it is fully compliant with WHO guidelines. Conventional hearing aids and batteries are very expensive and often not locally available. Solar Aid batteries can take 400 charges before being replaced.

The Solar Aid hearing aid was developed through field testing, funds were raised for further design improvements, and it went on to win several awards. But it initially failed to earn back its production costs and so the Godisa Technologies Trust was established to sweat the details on making it sustainable. It was developed in partnership with the Botswana Technology Centre,

“I want to help other deaf people to have access to education training and employment. I would like to use my skills and opportunities to help other deaf people achieve their goals,” said one of Godisa’s technicians, Sarah Phiri. So successful are these hearing aids, there is interest around the world, including in Canada.

Adequate street lighting has been proven to cut down muggings and improve public safety, reduce traffic accidents, and boost business confidence in neighbourhoods because people feel safe going there. StarSight’s street lamps combine solar-powered street lighting and internet access in a wireless configuration, freeing up the lighting poles from needing to access the main power and telephone grids. Each one contains VoIP, wi-fi broadband, CCTV and are being rolled out in Istanbul.

StarSight street lamp poles, designed in Turkey, are also being rolled out in Martinique, Republic of Congo, Cameroon, and Cote d-Ivoire. StarSight’s goal is to install 70,000 street lamps by 2011. Malaysia and Indonesia are next.

d.light design is a social enterprise targeting the 1.6 billion people who rely on kerosene oil to light their lanterns, or use candles. There is an ambitious goal behind this business: they want to replace all the kerosene lanterns in the world with their lights within the next ten years. They use light emitting diode (LED) technology and are about commercializing light and power solutions for families living without electricity in emerging markets.

Better lighting has many benefits, including helping children and adults to study and learn during dark hours. Importantly, it will make the air inside dwellings cleaner and the environment safer without the risk of fire. Indoor air pollution is one of the biggest killers of children under five in India. UNDP has found that families with improved lighting see a 30 per cent increase in their income because they can keep doing things at night.

On high beam, the lights last five hours; on low beam, they last for 200 hours without a charge. It can be re-charged by solar panels or by normal electric outlet. They promise consumers can expect to save $150 over five years. They have received additional support from the Acumen Fund to enter the peri-urban and, later, the rural market in India.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: December 2007

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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Local Animation: A Way Out of Poverty

One of the more remarkable creative developments since 2000 has been the explosion in animation production in the developing world, in particular Asia. Once seen as frivolous or unnecessary, animation is now acknowledged as a high-growth area and a critical component in the emerging economies being shaped by information technology.

The demand for more animation is being fuelled by several trends. Lucrative outsourcing contracts with major global film studios like Walt Disney and Warner Brothers get much of the attention. But even more importantly for small entrepreneurs, the rapid growth of information technology and mobile phones is fuelling demand for animation with a local flavour, which is an excellent way to make applications more attractive to users. As computers and animation software become cheaper, it is easier for entrepreneurs to compete with the bigger studios. It all started with the popularity of Japanese anime animation, which kicked the door open in the West, sparking an appetite for fresh, new styles unseen before.

The animation leaders in Asia are Japan, Republic of Korea, Philippines and Taiwan Province of China, with India rising quickly. As animation production is very lucrative and a labor-intensive business (labor takes up 70 to 80 percent of business costs), other Asian countries such as India, China, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore have recently started their own industries.

The National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) has forecast the Indian animation sector to gross overall turnover of US $950 million in 2009, while its gaming industry will reach US $300 million in 2009 (from US $30 million in 2005). The global industry is huge: it is estimated that games will gross US $11 billion and animation US $35 billion by 2009. In the Philippines, growth has been 25 per cent a year since 2005 (National Statistics Office), and the government has been heavily promoting animation as a viable career and business opportunity. China was able to make US $604 million in 2005. The AWN’s Animation Industry Database lists 48 studios operating in the Philippines alone. Others benefiting are Thailand, Taiwan Province of China and Republic of Korea. And even in Africa, there have been attempts to get things going.

Ambitiously, China hopes to raise its home-made share of the animation pie from 10 per cent and to increase its overall animation programming from 5,000 hours/year to 16, 7000/year. In 2004, the Chinese government set up four animation schools: Communication University of China, Beijing Film Academy, China Academy of Art, and Tianjin Sorun Digital Media School. More than 200 animated films were produced in 2004.

Indian animation feature productions have exploded in the past few years. In 2005, animated feature Jai Hanuman started the current boom. Its quality marked a departure from past Indian productions and heralded in a new era. Importantly, it out-grossed any Disney film in India, and proved films featuring local topics could be commercially successful. It is a difficult market with 14 official languages and 1,400 dialects. At present, the huge Indian market has little locally produced animation to feed its needs. But by 2007, 71 Indian animation films were announced to be in production.

Productions in development draw heavily on India’s culture and love of gods. They include Epiphany Films’ The Dream Blanket, a Tibetan fairy tale, and Graphiti studios’ Action Hero BC, a teenager who fights evil.

The world’s animation producers scour India for talent to outsource. Global films with some Indian production in them include Finding Nemo, The Lion King and The Adventures of Tenali Raman. Toonz Animation Studio based at the Technopark in Kerala, was called by Animation Magazine one of the top ten studios in the world.

In Africa, South Africa has by far the most dynamic and sophisticated animation sector. Ten years after the birth of democracy, hundreds of production companies and several 2D animation houses were established. In turn, South Africa advertises itself as a cheaper place to produce animation.

The highly successful South African 3D animated series Magic Cellar by Morula Pictures – the first of its kind based on African culture – was successfully sold to the US Home Box Office channel this year. Based on 20 folk tales, the stories were collected through interviews with elders in African villages. Mfundi Vundla, 58, who owns Johannesburg’s Morula Pictures, South Africa’s largest black-led studio, said his productions are meant to counter the perception of “Africans as unsophisticated, superstitious idiots who visited witch doctors to solve problems.” It employs 60 people and dozens of actors.

In 2004, UNESCO’s Africa Animated! was launched, with East Africa’s first animation project. The participants undertook animation, drawing techniques, scriptwriting for animation and storyboarding. The project was launched to assemble resources and expertise for the production of culturally relevant children’s animated cartoons and programmes in Africa. It sought to create a high-quality “African branded” training and production model, in order to make African animation competitive for regional organizations to produce animated TV series, Public Service Announcements (PSA) and short films.

The Nairobi office is seeking to establish a Regional Training and Production Centre for Animation in Kenya in 2008.

Moustapha Alassane of Niger and one of Africa’s film pioneers, said: “The good thing about animation is that you can do it on a shoe-string budget. With the computer, animation is getting easier and anyone can do it now. I want to encourage young Africans to use new technologies for animation.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: December 2007

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=hoGVBgAAQBAJ&dq=development+challenges+december+2007&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsdecember2007issue

Southern Innovator Issue 1: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Q1O54YSE2BgC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 2: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ty0N969dcssC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 3: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AQNt4YmhZagC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 4: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9T_n2tA7l4EC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 5: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6ILdAgAAQBAJ&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

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