Picking Money from the Baobab Tree

 

The fruit of the highly revered African baobab tree is being seen as a great new opportunity for the poor, after a recent decision by the European Commission to allow its importation. According to one study, gathering the fruit has the potential to earn an extra US $1 billion a year for Africa, and bring work and income to 2.5 million households, most of them African bush dwellers (Britain’s Natural Resources Institute).

The fruit of the African baobab tree is mostly collected in the wild from the ancient trees, which can live for 500 years, with some as old as 5,000 years. The baobob enjoys the veneration and respect traditionally accorded to age in Africa, and features in many stories and myths.

The fruit is seen as highly nutritious and a new taste option for the European market. This could be a major potential boost to Africa; the European Union is the world’s biggest trader, accounting for 20 percent of global imports and exports, and a major trading partner of most African countries. South Africa alone exports Euro 20.9 billion a year to Europe (2007).

But serious concerns have been raised about how the harvesting of the fruit will be done, and under what conditions. Getting this right is critical if the sustainability of the fruit is to be maintained, local populations are to benefit, and local use of this food source — eaten by both people and animals — does not suffer.

European food and drink companies are looking to use the fruit of the tree to flavour a large range of products, from cereal to drinks.

Baobab fruit is valued for its alleged medicinal properties in treating fevers and diarrhoea, and as a calcium supplement.

“The potential is huge … We’re quite confident that it’s going to represent significant returns for rural producers,” Dr. Lucy Welford, marketing manager of PhytoTrade Africa, a trade organisation that campaigns for the sustainable use of African natural products, told Reuters.

“I’d say it’s somewhere between grapefruit and tamarind as a kind of flavour,” said Welford, who expects baobab fruit to be used at first to flavour smoothies and cereal bars. It could also be used in juices, ice-creams and jams or bakery products.

PhytoTrade works with South African firm Afriplex, which supplies baobab fruit pulp and extracts.

A refreshing juice made from baobab fruit pulp, known as “bouye” is widely served.

“The tart flavour, the interesting vitamin and nutrition profile and the sexy story that goes with it — that it’s wild harvested from a very lovely tree — these things add value to the existing products,” said marketing economist Ben Bennet, who wrote the 2007 Natural Resources Institute’s report.

In the baobab forests around Tandene village in Senegal, local farmers said they looked forward to earning much more from the trees. Prices for a kilo of baobab fruit varied between 40 US cents and a dollar, they said.

“If people know (that European consumers will buy the product) then they’ll look after the trees better and feed them less to their animals,” said farmer Alassane Sy.

Chido Makunike, an active commentator on food and agricultural issues in Africa, raises some serious concerns about how this is handled. “Being a non-cultivated forest product, who ‘owns’ the baobab fruit? Can anybody just take a truck into the forest, collect the fruit and export it? Obviously the sudden dramatic change in the economic importance of the baobab will open up many questions that will need regulation.”

He worries the fruit will just be exported in its raw form, and processed into products in Europe – leaving Africa and Africans the ones who benefit least economically.

“Yet baobab is a dry, not-easily perishable, easy to process fruit,” he said. “It would not be difficult to have the smoothies and cereal bars that are being contemplated for its use made in Africa and exported as finished product, producing many downstream benefits and keeping more of the wealth to be generated within the continent.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: October 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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The Disabled in the South can Make Money, Restore Dignity

The South’s disabled are a large population and often suffer more than even the poorest residents. It is estimated that there are 500 million disabled people in the world, with either mental, physical or sensory impairment. As many as 80 percent of all disabled people live in isolated rural areas in developing countries, and in some countries more than 20 percent of the population is classed as disabled (UN).

Obstacles are everywhere for the disabled and just being able to economically survive, let alone thrive, can be a superhuman struggle. There are many physical and social barriers in most countries which thwart full participation, and millions of children and adults live lives of segregation and degradation.

But two radically different approaches show something can be done, and perceptions re-shaped.

In the Republic of Congo in central Africa, blind entrepreneur Jean-Pierre Louya is mentoring other blind people in the business of making soap. There are an estimated 11,709.95 blind people, or 0.3% of the population of 3,903,318 (http://www.uniteforsight.org/eye_stats.php). Most are blind because their eye infections have gone untreated, or they have diseases like diabetes.

Life is very hard for many in Congo. Brazzaville, the capital, was heavily damaged in a civil war in 1997 and many thousands were killed.

Jean-Pierre, who is also the head of the country’s association for the blind (http://www/afub-uafa.org/pages/pages3.asp), picked up his soap-making skills from a soap cooperative. Once a truck driver, he went blind as a result of an eye disease 25 years ago. With the training from the soap cooperative, he has been successfully running his soap-making business, where he turns palm oil into high-lather soap, and used the profits to raise his seven children and buy some land.

But rather than just keeping his business secrets to himself, Jean-Pierre mentors other blind people in this delicate art. There are many stages in the process of making soap that are risky, but he mixes 20 litres of water with three kilograms of caustic soda – the most dangerous part of making soap – by using his memory. He knows what temperature it is by touch, how to get the mixture right by smell, and what amounts to use by sound.

Pouring in the hot palm oil, he told Reuters: “The barrel was already hot, so the first bit of oil I poured made noise: that’s how I l knew I had poured the liquid inside the barrel.”

“It was very hard for me to accept this condition,” he said. “it was two years before I could go out in public because I was embarrassed that my friends see me this way.”

“A blind person is teaching a trade to another blind person,” said Samuel Koubouana, a blind apprentice soapmaker Jean-Pierre is teaching. “It really means a lot to me. JP is improving my life.”

Jean-Pierre relies a great deal on the goodwill of local people to get around. As local Lenvo Lydie told Reuters: “Blind people really suffer in this country. The blind should be driven from one point to another rather than being left alone to fend for themselves in the streets.”

But in Congo there are few government programmes for disabled people and none for the blind. As president of the Association of the Blind in Congo, Jean-Pierre is helping other blind people take control of their lives.

In Angola, the Miss Landmine contest has taken a highly controversial approach to restoring dignity to the disabled. The brainchild of Norwegian theatre director Morten Traavik, the beauty contest featuring landmine amputees took place for the first time in April in Angola’s capital, Luanda. Angola has one of the highest rates of landmine amputees in the world, after a brutal 27-year civil war. Estimates place the number injured at 80,000.

The 18 contestants represented each province of the country, and the contest is about restoring self-esteem in women who have been isolated and marginalised. Traavik was shocked by the large number of amputees, but he also saw that Angolans really liked beauty contests. The contest’s motto is “Everyone has the right to be beautiful”.

It is funded by the Angolan government’s de-mining commission and Norway’s Arts Council. Participants receive US $196 a day and get to keep their dresses and jewellery. The winner, 31-year-old Augusta Hurica from Luanda, becomes an ambassador for international landmine survivors.

While the contest has had many critics, it has been so successful it will be replicated in Cambodia next year. And a worldwide contest is in the works for 2015.

Emilia Luzia, a contestant, told Marie Claire magazine: “I am happy to be representing my region and all disabled people, but it is also good to feel special and glamorous. This is the first time I’ve worn such nice clothes.”

Another contestant took on the critics. Twenty-six-year-old Sandra Tichika, said: “Most of the ladies here are from small villages: we struggle, we are isolated, yet here we are being noticed and accepted – how bad can that be?”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: June 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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Mobile Phones: Engineering South’s Next Generation of Entrepreneurs

 

Technology is fuelling unprecedented growth in productivity in Asia, with sub-Saharan Africa languishing behind (International Labour Organization). But the growth in mobile phones could help close this gap, as home-grown entrepreneurs are stepping up to exploit this new opportunity.

Mobile phone applications are proving a boon to small businesses and entrepreneurs. They are now putting power in the hands of individuals, making it easier to invent new ways of doing things, transfer money, organise business accounts, provide services, sell things, and keep in touch and up-to-date.

Technology has been the common factor in increases in productivity around the world, and with the rapid rise in mobile phone use, especially in Africa, it looks as if this handy device augers in the next wave of innovation.

And technology and mobile phones in particular, are creating a whole new route to wealth: “The switch.. frees people from geography,” Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis told The Christian Science Monitor. “Singapore can be as rich as Canada, even though Singapore has no land.”

Technology is seen to be opening a new phase in economic competition in services, embracing a wide range of fields, from banking to tourism to healthcare. And it is entrepreneurs who will be at the forefront of making this happen. The majority (59 per cent) of the world’s 2.4 billion mobile phone users live in developing countries (MIT) – making it the first telecommunications technology in history to have more users there than in the developed world. The number of African mobile phone users passed 200 million at the beginning of this year (www.ovum.com), making it the fastest growing mobile phone market. It has increased at an annual rate of 65 per cent – twice the global average (MIT Media Laboratory).

In Kenya in 2005, the government’s Economic Survey found the small business sector, which employs the majority of workers in the nation of 32 million people, created 437,900 jobs – mostly down to the boom in mobile phones. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), adding an additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people boosts a typical developing country’s GDP growth by 0.6 per cent. The boost comes from the innovative use of mobile phone technology by local entrepreneurs.

At the University of Nairobi, the SMS Boot Camp (SMS is the text messaging system on mobile phones) is breeding the next generation of African technology entrepreneurs. Working in partnership with MIT, the student entrepreneurs are working on an impressive list of projects, which can be found online at eprom.mit.edu. The projects are varied, and include perfecting prototype ways to collect medical data on mobiles, accurately tracking phone user’s profiles (habits, friend networks etc.), improving communication between Kenyan hospitals and the centralised blood banks in the country, and quick ways to install applications on all of Kenya’s mobile phone SIM cards.

One graduate, Mohammed Temam Ali in Addis Ababa, is now working on a project for the Ethiopian Telecommunications Company. Another is working for Kenyan mobile phone download service, Cellulant.

Nathan Eagle, a visiting lecturer at the University of Nairobi, has been working with the students on the projects: “Phones are starting to be used as a surrogate for all sorts of technology we take for granted in the West. Credit cards, TVs, radios, computers, etc… In the small Kenyan village where I’m writing this email, I can pay for the taxi ride home with my mobile — we’re even scheduled to be getting a Wimax network (wireless internet) here next year. Talk about leapfrog…”

“I’m also advising a small group of newly graduated Rwandan hackers who are building an SMS-based payment system for electricity.”

But Eagle says the obstacles can still be huge: “Government corruption and red-tape. SMS is illegal in Ethiopia… it is pretty frustrating when you go over to teach an ‘sms bootcamp’ class.”

In India, where there are 185 million mobile phone subscribers, computer science doctoral student and founder of Ekgaon Technologies, Tapan Parikh, has founded a business specifically targeting developing mobile phone-based information systems for small businesses in the developing world. Working in rural India, the applications are designed to make it easier for business owners to manage their own operations in an efficient and transparent way, and also to build strong connections both with established financial institutions and their customers. By making it easier to access finance, and also to get a better price, these businesses will stand a better chance of flourishing, it is believed.

One of his applications is called Cam (named after the phone’s camera). It is a toolkit that makes it simple to use phones to capture images and scan documents, enter and process data, and run interactive audio and video.

Parikh is also using these applications to improve micro-finance. Targeting Indian self-help groups (15 to 20 people who pool their capital together, usually women), the application (called SHG MIS – self-help group management and information system) uses the phone’s camera to enter data, uploading it to online databases, and a package of Web-based software for managing data and reporting to the institution that lent the money.

“In these groups, things are often done in a somewhat ad hoc manner, using informal documentation,” Parikh says, “which can lead to instability and impermanence and contribute to the kinds of tensions that lead small groups to fall apart.” The software gives groups a more systematic method of documenting decisions, tracking financial performance over time, and collecting information on loan effectiveness. Parikh has developed his applications around the needs and behaviour of the users.

This next wave of entrepreneurs will be joining a growing list of made-in-the-South mobile phone innovators like ARYTY, G-Cash and Smart Money in the Philippines; WIZZIT and MTN Mobile Money in South Africa; M-Pesa in Kenya; Celpay in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: September 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.  

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Saving Water to Make Money

The world’s water supplies are running low, and according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), four out of every 10 people are already affected. But despite the gloomy reality of this problem, entrepreneurs in the South are rising to the challenge to save water.

“The situation is getting worse due to population growth, urbanisation and increased domestic and industrial water use,” said WHO’s Director-General, Dr Margaret Chan. While the WHO has adopted the theme ‘Coping with Water Scarcity’ for this year, every year more than 1.6 million people die from lack of access to safe water and sanitation. Ninety percent of these deaths are children under the age of five.

The health consequences of water scarcity include diarrhoeal diseases such as cholera, typhoid fever, salmonellosis, other gastrointestinal viruses, and dysentery.

One unnecessary waste of water is car washing. The number of cars in developing countries is growing fast, with a 27 per cent increase in sales in China this year, and South America overtaking Asia as the world’s fastest-growing regional vehicle market (Global Auto Report). And all these cars will be washed, wasting this precious resource.

The large informal car washing market in Brazil has long been known for paying low wages and avoiding taxes. On top of this they also waste water. Lots and lots of water. In Brazil, 28.5 per cent of the population (41.8 million people) do not have access to public water or wastewater services. And 60 per cent do not have adequate sanitation (Brazilian Institute of Applied Economic Research).

Started in 1994, Drywash uses a locally available Brazilian organic carnauba wax to clean cars without using water. Drywash has also developed a line of cleaning products that cleans every part of a car without the need for water. They estimate they have saved 450 million litres of water in their first 10 years of operation. From the start, they set out to change the status quo and run a business that “thinks like a big corporation,” said its international partner, Tiago Aguiar.

To do this, Drywash’s management team focused on operating an efficient and professional business. When Brazil’s government passed strict laws against informal selling of products, Drywash was well positioned to benefit, with companies preferring to work with a legal business. Customers have also been attracted to Drywash because they know the service is consistent and to a high standard. Drywash made US $2.7 million in 2005.

Drywash prides itself on operating “on the books”, and paying taxes. They are also ambitious, and have expanded outside Brazil and into other services.

And they don’t just do private cars: they also clean private jets, with Drywash Air. They have also expanded into Mexico, Portugal and Australia, on top of 50 Brazilian franchises. They also want to enter the US market.

In China, Landwasher toilets is tackling the growing problem of providing flush toilets to the country’s 1.32 billion people. As its founder Wu Hao told the World Resources Institute (www.nextbillion.net), “Assuming all of our country uses water-flushing toilets, not even the Changjiang and the Yellow Rive will be enough.”

Formed six years ago, it has patented a process using a special agent and sterilisation to dispose of human waste without using water, and very little electricity.

Hao graduated from Beijing University’s Physics Department and developed management experience working in manufacturing, securities investment and corporate management.

“On a personal level, I love the natural environment… I can’t endure the large scale waste and damage to the environment caused by the process of construction in China.”

Landwasher has seen its sales grow to 40 million Yuan (US $5.2 million), and has six sales offices covering 27 provinces.

Landwasher has just been awarded a contract to provide portable toilets to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: September 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=73-VBgAAQBAJ&dq=development+challenges+september+2007&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsseptember2007issue

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