Big Data Can Transform the Global South’s Growing Cities

The coming years will see a major new force dominating development: Big Data. The term refers to the vast quantities of digital data being generated as a result of the proliferation of mobile phones, the Internet and social media across the global South – a so-called ‘data deluge’ (UN Global Pulse). It is an historically unprecedented surge in data, much of it coming from some of the poorest places on the planet and being gathered in real time.

Big Data will have a profound impact on how the cities of the future develop, and will re-shape the way the challenges and problems of human development are handled.

Estimates by Cisco (cisco.com) foresee 10 billion mobile Internet-enabled devices around the world by 2016. With the world population topping 7.3 billion by then, that will work out to 1.4 devices per person.

Some estimates say 90 per cent of the digital data ever generated in the world has been produced in the past two years. It is also estimated that available digital data will increase by 40 per cent every year (UN Global Pulse). This digital transformation is being accompanied by another trend: the largest migration in human history from rural to semi-urban and urban areas.

This presents an unprecedented opportunity to make this rapid urbanization and social change smarter and more responsive to human needs, and to avoid the failures of the past, from over-crowding to crime, disease, pollution, unemployment and poverty. Some believe data collection can radically alter development by flagging up problems quickly, giving cities the chance to respond and correct negative trends before they get out of control. In short, to build in resilience by way of digital technology.

The latest region to see rapid industrialization and urbanization has been Asia – in particular China, a country that since the 1980s has simultaneously lifted the largest number of people in world history out of poverty and undertaken the biggest migration ever from rural to urban areas.

And now Africa is beginning to follow in Asia’s wake.

Unlike previous waves of industrialization and urbanization, Africa’s transformation is occurring in the age of the mobile phone, the Internet, personal computers and miniature electronic devices capable of more computing power than the computers used during the Apollo space programme (http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/diypodcast/rocket-evolution-index-diy.html). This changes the game significantly.

This 21st-century approach to urban growth is at its most sophisticated, and utopian, in so-called “smart cities.” These are built-from-scratch cities that use the “Internet of Things”, where everything, from lamp posts to garbage bins to roads are embedded with microchips and radio frequency transmitters (RFID chips) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio-frequency_identification) to communicate data in real time. By analyzing this data, cities can be responsive to human needs and mitigate problems – improving waste collection and traffic management, reducing crime and pollution. Services can be customized to residents’ needs and liberate them to spend more time on things that matter such as their own health, family, work and hobbies. Examples of these cities include Tianjin Eco-city (tianjinecocity.gov.sg) in China, Masdar (masdar.ae) in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates and Songdo International Business District (songdo.com) in the Republic of Korea.

These experimental smart cities are springing up in the East, and it will be the East – as well as Africa – that will see most of the action going forward. As the global management consulting firm McKinsey noted in its report Urban World: Mapping the Economic Power of Cities: “Over the next 15 years, the center of gravity of the urban world will move south and, even more decisively, east.”

Cities in the global South will be generating the new prosperity of the 21st century. And it is widely accepted that people living in cities have the potential to become very efficient economically while rapidly driving prosperity higher.

The McKinsey report says that “by 2025, developing-region cities of the City 600 (a list gathered by McKinsey) will be home to an estimated 235 million middle-class households earning more than (US) $20,000 a year at purchasing power parity (PPP).

“Emerging-market mega-and middleweight cities together – 423 of them are included in the City 600 – are likely to contribute more than 45 percent of global growth from 2007 to 2025 (http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/urbanization/urban_world).”

The world’s future prosperity is going to be found in the urban, the digitally connected, and the middle class.

Tracking all this digital change is the UN Global Pulse. UN Global Pulse (unglobalpulse.org) was started by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2009 with a mandate to study these changes and build expertise in applying Big Data to global development. UN Global Pulse functions as a network of innovation labs where research on Big Data for development is conceived and coordinated. It partners with experts from UN agencies, governments, academia, and the private sector to research, develop, and mainstream approaches for applying real-time digital data to 21st-century development challenges.

Unlike major technological trends of the past, this one is not restricted to the industrialized, developed world. Through the spread of mobile phone technology, billions of people are now using a device that constantly collects digital data, even in the poorest places on earth.

From an international development perspective, Big Data has five characteristics, according to UN Global Pulse: it is digitally generated, passively produced by people interacting with digital services, automatically collected, can be geographically or temporally traced and can be continuously analyzed in real time.

Sources of Big Data include chatter from social networks, web server logs, traffic flow sensors, satellite imagery, telemetry from vehicles and financial market data.

The key to using Big Data is combining datasets and then contrasting them in lots of different ways and doing it very quickly. The purpose?  Better decision-making, based on an understanding of what is really happening on the ground.

This data exceeds the capability of existing database software. It is either too much, or comes in too quickly, or can’t be handled using current software technology. Tackling this problem is creating a whole new wave of opportunities for those working in information technology.

As technology and processing power continue to improve, the cost of wrestling with this data and putting it to use is coming down.

The data can be analyzed for patterns and hidden information that before would have been too difficult to gather. This approach has been used by big companies such as WalMart (walmart.com), but it has cost them a large amount of money and time.

Pioneers in Big Data include search engine Google, email and search provider Yahoo, online shopping service Amazon and social media service Facebook. Many supermarkets use Big Data to analyze the way customers behave when they are shopping, combining it with their social and geographical data.

But new developments in hardware, cloud architecture, and open-source software mean Big Data processing is more accessible, including for small start-ups, who can just rent the capacity required on a cloud-based service (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing).

In the past, governments and planners had a ready excuse as to why they could not keep on top of ballooning urban populations and the chaos they brought. They could just throw up their hands and say “We do not know who these people are or what to do about them!”

This excuse does not work in the age of the mobile phone. It is now relatively easy to deploy the power of the networked computing inside mobile phones to map urban slums and identify the needs of the people there. Parse that data, and you have an accurate account of what is happening in the slum – all in real-time.

Making sense of all this information is creating its own new industries as innovators, entrepreneurs and companies step forward to chart this brave new world.

Historically, significant improvements in human development have occurred only after large-scale gathering of data and information on the actual living conditions of the population. For example, prototypes of today’s infographics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infographic) – informative visual representations of complex data – were created during the great attempts at tackling poverty and disease in Europe in the 19th century. Today’s masters of this technique include the Swedish doctor, academic and statistician Hans Rosling (gapminder.org), whose dynamic infographics are renowned for changing people’s perceptions of global problems.

UN Global Pulse notes “much of the data used to track progress toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) dates back to 2008 or earlier and doesn’t take into account the more recent economic crisis.

“While this may feed a perception that there is a scarcity of information about the wellbeing of populations, the opposite is in fact true. Thanks to the digital revolution, there is an ocean of data, being continuously generated in both developed and developing nations, that did not exist even a few years ago.”

UN Global Pulse believes Big Data can be used to protect social development gains when crises strike. Rather than undoing decades of good development work and human development achievements, Big Data can help to create agile responses to crisis as it happens.

UN Global Pulse believes the same data, tools and analytics used by business can be turned to help the public sector understand “where people are losing the fight against hunger, poverty and disease, and to plan or evaluate a response.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: June 2014

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

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Indian Business Model Makes Green Energy Affordable

The technology already exists to provide renewable energy and electricity to all the world’s poor. The trick is finding a way to pay for it and to make it sustainable. Many innovators are experimenting with business models to reach the so-called Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) cohort, and the 1.2 billion poorest people in the world who do not have access to electricity (World Bank) (http://tinyurl.com/n9p3f5x). A further 2.8 billion have to rely on wood or other biomass materials to cook and heat their homes.

The International Energy Agency (iea.org) believes US $48 trillion of investment will be needed between now and 2035 to make sure energy capacity matches rapid population growth.

In the influential book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fortune-Bottom-Pyramid-Eradicating-Poverty/dp/8177587765), the late professor C.K. Prahalad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._K._Prahalad) advocated seeing the poor as people with needs and assets: consumers who just need the right goods and services designed for them. It was a change from thinking only of the world’s wealthier populations as consumers, and revealed a market worth billions waiting to be tapped.

Energy is key to development and improvements to living standards. Yet energy poverty plagues much of the global South, especially in Africa and particularly in rural areas.

The World Bank has identified 20 countries in developing Asia and sub-Saharan Africa which will require a massive effort to expand access to electricity and safe cooking methods for poor households.

Around 80 per cent of the people without modern energy live in rural areas. While progress has been made since 1990 in expanding access to energy, it has failed to keep pace with population growth. According to the World Bank, the pace of expansion will have to double to meet the 100 percent access target set for 2030.

To avoid increasing global carbon emissions while achieving this goal, many are looking to renewable energy sources and technologies to reach these last groups of people.

As pointed out by the Institute of Development Studies (http://www.ids.ac.uk/news/can-renewable-electricity-reduce-poverty), “The global threat posed by climate change means that we also face the pressing need to use less carbon in existing energy systems. Making progress on both energy poverty and decarbonization requires a sharp increase in renewable electricity production, both on and off-grid.”

The institute identified four necessary factors for access to renewable energy to benefit poor people.

1.         Once electricity is generated, it needs to be reliably fed into the system.
2.         This additional supply must be made accessible, and affordable, for poor people.
3.         Increased electricity consumption then needs to translate into poverty reduction.
4.         Increased electricity supply can indirectly reduce poverty by boosting economic growth.

India’s Simpa Networks (simpanetworks.com), started in 2011, has a business model it believes will do the trick. Simpa has developed a clever way to increase access to home solar power systems for the poor, by allowing customers to purchase the system in gradual “rental” payments over time. The customers eventually come to own the power system outright, and from then on to generate electricity for free. Since the payments are small and incremental, it suddenly becomes within the realm of poor households to afford modern solar energy systems.

This is called the “Progressive Purchase Pricing Model” – similar to “prepaid”, “pay as you go” and “installment plan” models. Under this model, customers make a 10 percent down payment and receive the home solar system. The customer then buys a time-specific amount of energy for between US $1 and US $10 with their mobile phone. The orange lock box on the power system has a keypad on the front. When a code is punched in, it releases electricity (http://simpanetworks.com/our-solution/).

In increments, while the customer purchases energy for home use they also eat away at the cost of the system, until eventually it is paid off, usually at a total of US $300. Systems have an expected life span of 10 years.

With few cash resources, poor households usually are not capable of saving enough cash to purchase a full energy system for their home. Instead, they rely on buying kerosene for lamps or using battery-powered torches and lamps when they can afford it.

In 2012, Simpa teamed up with SELCO India (http://www.selco-india.com/) – a social enterprise providing sustainable energy solutions and services to households – to sell 1,000 home solar power systems, expanding to 5,000 systems in 2013, according to a case study from not-for-profit Synergie pour l’Echange et la Valorisation des Entrepreneurs d’Avenir (SEVEA) (sevea-asso.org). The goal is to reach 25,000 units sold by the end of 2014, proving this business model can scale. Ultimately, Simpa wishes to mega-scale its approach and reach 1 million households over the next five years.

Simpa believes take-up will be quick because this model reduces risk, both for the seller and for the bank that may loan the cash for the 10 per cent down payment. Simpa acts as a go-between for the system sellers such as SELCO and the banks. Simpa believe this business model reduces the risk of non-payment or loan default and has the right incentives in place to encourage the customer to hang in and keep making payments until they own the system outright. Customers enjoy the benefits of clean energy 24/7 from day one and can see clearly the connection between the energy they receive and the small payments they make. For those who default from paying, the system is taken from their home.

When the system was piloted in Karnataka, India, all loans were successfully repaid.

Simpa Networks is a venture capital-backed technology company. It hopes its approach will attract investors, particularly social investors, seeking a low-risk investment in helping expand energy access.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: June 2014

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=XhU9BQAAQBAJ&dq=development+challenges+june+2014&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challenges-june-2014-published?qid=be364432-b16e-4e07-a9a5-afee35205b96&v=default&b=&from_search=1

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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South-South Trade Helping Countries During Economic Crisis

Weathering the global economic crisis is testing the stability of countries across the global South. But many countries are finding South-South trade and catering to their domestic middle classes can lift incomes and maintain growth rates despite the global turmoil.

A decade of boom in global markets as they became more integrated has brought rising incomes and created growing economies in the so-called emerging markets of the global South. Finance and investment from developed countries flowed into the global South and helped bolster growing economies, boosting incomes and bringing millions of people into the middle classes. But since the start of the global economic crisis in 2008, more and more countries in the global South have experienced turmoil, chaos and crisis.

The export-driven model that had served many Asian countries well – creating products for developed Western markets – is being tested by high unemployment in developed economies and declining purchasing power for the Western middle classes. Two trends that have grown in the past 10 years may offer a solution to this economic crisis. One is to build on the growth in South-South trade, and the other is to tap the growing middle classes of the global South by expanding the products and services available to them and further improving their quality of life.

It is well established that one of the key elements to securing sustainable prosperity is a thriving middle class. Middle classes in many countries in the global South are still classified as vulnerable – at risk of returning to poverty if the economy experiences a short-term crisis. Their resilience to an economic downturn needs to be strengthened, and this can be done by improving the quality of products and services available to them.

Building this market can also strengthen domestic job growth and help reduce a country’s dependence on imports.

One country facing up to this challenge is Indonesia. The New York Times recently reported that ports in Indonesia and other resource-exporting countries are quiet, as China’s demand for resources slows.

But while export markets are experiencing a slowdown, investment is going into Indonesia’s agricultural food-processing industry. Agricultural multinational Cargill (cargill.com) is building a cocoa-bean processing plant in the country, and the PT. Suprama (suprama.co.id/en/) instant-noodle factory is running at full capacity to meet the needs of the country’s growing middle class.

Many countries have experienced significant inflows of investment money as a result of stimulus measures led by the United States Federal Reserve (http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_12594.htm) to counter the economic contraction caused by the global economic crisis. This money, however, is uncertain and can just as easily disappear as it leaves to chase the next opportunity. Wise countries take measures to avoid being dependent on this fickle and fast investment funding.

Unlike in the Asian Crisis of 1997-1998 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Asian_financial_crisis), many emerging-market countries now have large foreign currency reserves and robust stock markets. They have also built up their middle classes and increased consumption. Trade links with other countries in the global South have grown enormously since the late 1990s. For example, the trade between China and Africa, as announced by Chinese President Xi Jinping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping) in early 2014, has surpassed US $200 billion for the first time, turning China into Africa’s largest trading partner

Despite a raging global crisis, in many emerging economies domestic spending is holding up and, in some cases, has never been stronger.

China now plays a key role in maintaining global economic demand. According to the global bank HSBC, Chinese growth adds “twice as many dollars to annual global demand as growth in the United States economy and far more than the economies of the European Union.”

An article in The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/business/emerging-markets-in-asia-in-a-delicate-limbo.html?_r=0) suggested that global South countries can benefit from these trends by becoming an alternative to China’s “own increasingly high-cost producers of coal, aluminum, and other minerals” – as well as of clothing, shoes and electronics.

China is also in the process of altering its economy, from being the low-wage workshop of the world to an increasingly high-tech, high-value economy with growing science, technology and innovation sectors buoyed by heavy investment in research and development, for example China’s Xi’an Hi-tech Industries Development Zone (xdz.com). As China changes, other countries can step in and replace the industries that no longer find China an affordable place to manufacture their goods.

As an example, the Indonesian vice minister of trade, Bayu Krisnamurthi, announced that the Foxconn Technology Group of Taiwan (foxconn.com), which makes components and assembles devices for the popular Apple (apple.com) computer brand, is looking to set up a large factory in Indonesia.

“The other brands will come in their footsteps,” Krisnamurthi told The New York Times.

Other countries are bucking the crisis trend and using greater freedom to boost economic growth.

Cuba has been able to bounce back with free-market reforms. The Caribbean island has had its ups and downs economically since its revolution in the late 1950s. After the revolution, the country had several decades of impressive human development gains and built up enviable education and health care systems. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the country lost its trade relationships and subsidies and was pitched into a major economic crisis.

During the Cold War, the USSR hoovered up almost all of Cuba’s exports of sugar, nickel and citrus fruit, and sold Cuba two-thirds of its food and 98 per cent of its fuel.

What was termed the “special period” after the collapse of the Soviet Union saw petrol become scarce. Many had to turn to cycling and walking to get around. Factories closed and food production declined.

One estimate by Hal Klepak of the Royal Military College of Canada, reported in The Observer newspaper, found the economy collapsed by 50 per cent in the five years to 1993.

Since then, Cuba has endured significant austerity and has struggled to regain its trade relationships and restore economic growth. Tourism has played a key role in keeping the country going.

And since 2008, various economic reforms have started to shift the economy away from over-dependence on the state and towards a more mixed market model.

Its capital, Havana, is a UNESCO world heritage site and is a popular tourist destination with one of the best-preserved former Spanish colonial architecture in the Caribbean.

When President Raul Castro took over from his brother Fidel, he began to slowly experiment with reforms to test how much market freedom could boost the economy and increase incomes. This has included allowing paladares, or privately-run restaurants, which are now flourishing and benefiting from the steady flow of tourists to the island.

The state now allows people to set up as independent traders in 200 occupations. Some have established entertainment businesses such as paint balling, others are running bars, or bookshops. It is now possible to easily change money in Havana and to find accommodation in private homes. Cash machines are spreading throughout the capital and more and more businesses will accept credit cards.

Registered businesspeople rose from 157,000 in October 2011 to more than 442,000 in 2013.

By being flexible, it is possible to discover new ways to grow economies and increase incomes, even in hard times. And increasing South-South trade is the way to go.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: June 2014

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=XhU9BQAAQBAJ&dq=development+challenges+june+2014&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challenges-june-2014-published?qid=be364432-b16e-4e07-a9a5-afee35205b96&v=default&b=&from_search=1

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

The first five issues of Southern Innovator. The highly influential magazine was distributed around the world and each issue was launched at the annual Global South-South Development (GSSD) Expo hosted by the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation (UNOSSC).

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3D Printing Gives Boy a New Arm in Sudan

3D printing is rapidly going mainstream and is now starting to make a big impact in health care. One innovative solution is using the technology to manufacture artificial arms for amputees harmed by war in Africa.

While large-scale manufacturers use the machines to fabricate products and parts, from aircraft components to furniture, it is the smaller-scale use of 3D printing machines that has been getting many working in development excited.

3D printing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printing) usually involves a desktop-sized fabrication machine that builds a three-dimensional object following instructions from a digital computer file. It is an additive process, in which material is laid down in successive layers to create an object. The technology has been around since the 1980s but only became affordable for the general public in the past five years. Typically, 3D printers are used to make prototypes — for example architectural models or machine parts — or to manufacture one-off objects without the need to turn to mass production methods. But the technology is evolving quickly and, according to The Guardian, “20% of the output of 3D printers is now final products rather than prototypes.”

For international development, 3D printing offers the potential to close the gap between what is available in developed and developing countries. Just as the Internet has closed the knowledge gap, and enabled people around the world to access news and knowledge at the same time, so 3D printing could make it possible for technological innovations to be available everywhere. Just upload the digital plans for an object, and people can download them and print the item, wherever they are.

Some of the more enthusiastic proponents of 3D manufacturing see it as a game-changer in access to technology. They argue it could eliminate material want and place the power of manufacturing in the hands of billions, in the same way the rapid proliferation of mobile phones and the Internet transformed access to information. That is the dreamers’ dream, but it is closer than many think.

The conflict in the new nation of South Sudan, which separated from the Republic of the Sudan in 2011, continues and involves UN peacekeeping forces (http://unmiss.unmissions.org). The violence has killed over 10,000 (International Crisis Group) and injured many more, ruining lives through lost limbs and capabilities. One young boy, Daniel Omar, 16, lost both his hands while trying to use a tree trunk to shield himself from an exploding bomb. Losing his hands was devastating enough, but he was also so depressed at not being of full use to his family that he wished he had died that day.

He is not alone in being harmed by the conflict. In total, an estimated 50,000 people in South Sudan are physically disabled, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Prosthetic limbs are very expensive and so far are not a priority for medical services in the country. Saving lives is the priority, with rehabilitation an expensive luxury.

This is where Not Impossible Labs (notimpossiblelabs.com), based in Los Angeles, California, came in. The non-profit startup founded by Mick Ebeling specializes in “crowd-sourcing to crowd-solve previously insurmountable healthcare issues.” The solutions are then made public on the Internet and explained in online media to help innovators either replicate the solutions or be inspired to come up with their own ideas.

The lab’s ingenious solutions include BrainWriter – a way to draw using brainwaves and a computer mouse that can allow disabled artists to carry on creating. Not Impossible Labs also developed a high-tech cane for the blind that draws on sonar technology and a laser to navigate the terrain and foresee upcoming obstacles.

Emotionally touched after learning about Daniel’s plight, Ebeling decided to act.
“I’ve got three little boys,” Ebeling told The Guardian newspaper. “It was hard for me to read a story about a young boy who had lost his arms.”

Project Daniel (http://www.notimpossiblelabs.com/#!project-daniel/c1imu) set out to manufacture artificial hands for Daniel without him having to leave his country and his family. Daniel was living between the Yida refugee camp in South Sudan and his home in the Nuba Mountains.

A team from Not Impossible Labs set up the 3D printing lab in the Nuba Mountains and trained and supervised the local team to print two prosthetic arms. The design for the arm was done in the U.S. at its headquarters in Venice, California and is available for free and is open source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source). A “dream team of innovators” were assembled – including the South African inventor of the Robohand (http://www.robohand.net/), an Australian MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) neuroscientist and a 3D printing company owner from Northern California – to crowd-solve the challenge of making a 3D-printable prostheses. A precision engineering company, Precipart (precipart.com/home), and Intel were also drafted in to support the project.

Not Impossible believe the spirit behind the project will be globally transformative.

“We are on the precipice of a can do maker community that is reaching critical mass,” said Elliot V. Kotek, Not Impossible’s content chief and co-founder. “There is no shortage of knowledge, and we are linking the brightest technical minds and creative problem-solvers around the globe. Project Daniel is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.”

Daniel’s new artificial arm and hand took a 3D printer several days to make and cost around US $100.

In November 2013, Ebeling travelled to South Sudan with all the equipment required to “print” Daniel a new arm: 3D printers, spools of plastic and cables.

The plastic arm printed by the 3D printer works by allowing the wearer to flex what remains of their arm to pull various cables that act as ligaments, like in a real limb. When the user flexes and bends, the cables pull back and in turn make the fingers close and open.

It is not a solution for every amputee. “With the technology we currently have it’s hard to help people with no arm left,” said Kotek. “There needs to be at least a little bit of a stump.”

Shy at first, once Daniel saw the arm, he was transformed. “It was a pretty amazing thing to see this boy come out of his shell,” said Ebeling. “Getting Daniel to feed himself was a highlight that was right up there with watching my kids being born.”

Even more impressive has been the quick adoption of the technology by the local doctor, Dr. Tom Catena, who performs all the amputations in the area.

With two 3D printing machines left behind by Ebeling, Dr. Catena has been able to print a prosthetic arm a week.

The machines mostly work at night when it is cool. The printer parts are then assembled by eight local people trained to operate the machines and build the arms.

But how do they ensure, over time, this 21st-century technology doesn’t just fall into disrepair and neglect as has been seen time and again with other attempts at technology transfer? Weekly phone calls are made to check on the project and the plastic used to make the arms is sent directly from Not Impossible Labs.

And then there is community buy-in.

“At first these kids wanted arms that matched their skin tone, because they didn’t want to stand out,” said Kotek.

But in time the youths have been decorating the arms in many colors and customizing them. And the arms have been given a name: the Daniel Arm.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: May 2014

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

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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

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African Hotel Boom Bringing in New Investment and Creating Jobs

Africa is experiencing a boom not seen for decades. The IMF forecasts economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa of 6 per cent in 2014, compared to global growth of 3.6 per cent.

And this boom is getting an additional jolt of support from the world’s multinational hotel chains. January 2014 saw Africa’s largest hotel chain bought by global giant Marriott (marriott.com). For decades major global multinationals shied away from Africa, but today they are battling to get a place in Africa’s fast-growing economies and to serve the growing middle classes.

Marriott is leading the way by investing US $1.5 billion in 25 new hotels equalling 5,000 rooms. To boost capacity further, Marriott is taking over South Africa’s Protea group (proteahotels.com) and its 116 African hotels.

“We have 25 Marriott brand hotels under construction in seven countries in Africa that will come on stream over the next four years,” Alex Kyriakidis, the chain’s president for the Middle East and Africa, told Bloomberg (bloomberg.com).

The new hotels “are going to bring us into Benin, Gabon, Ghana, Ethiopia and Mauritius. With our existing hotels plus those in the pipeline and those Protea operates today, we will be in 16 countries in Africa by 2017.”

Bloomberg calls what Africa is experiencing the “fastest pace of hotel development in the world”.
“Our mission here is to grow, grow, grow,” according to Kyriakidis.

Meanwhile, a further boost is coming from the US $5 billion Angolan sovereign wealth fund, Fundo Soberano de Angola (fundosoberano.ao/language/en/). It will be investing in hotels and commercial infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa, according to Bloomberg. This could include 50 sub-Saharan African hotels in the next three years.

“We believe there’s a lot of investment interest in Africa,” said Chairman Jose Filomeno dos Santos. “It has a lot of mineral potential, almost a commodity hub. We believe this interest will remain there for the coming years.”

Little thought is given to the role hotels play in development, yet they are a critical development tool for any country wishing to move up the economic ladder. As the quality of hotels improves, they tend to become key gathering and meeting places. Conferences and seminars can act as catalysts for change, attracting people from around the world. When quality hotels are in place, then the top-drawer global conferences will come to town, in turn bringing new tourist income for local businesses.

Anyone who has stayed in a hotel in Africa knows that standards are variable: the pool with dirty water, the power cuts, the food hygiene standards that might not match what people are used to at home. This is what international hotel chains can change. Not only do they demand the highest standards in their own establishments, they also push up standards at local competitors, as all of them battle for the attention of visitors.

Africa has been overlooked by the large global hotel chains and brands since the end of the colonial period in the 1960s and 70s. Africa was considered too poor, too chaotic, too dangerous and too much hard work for it to be worth the effort.

But now the tune has changed. With Africa’s population over a billion, and many of the continent’s economies experiencing rapid growth while also urbanizing, conditions are fortuitous for the hotel trade.

The situation has changed in the last decade, for a variety of reasons: debt relief, a rise in commodity prices, expanding trade and investment with China and the global South, and a growing middle class — all slowing the growth of poverty. Africa is still notorious for under-investment in infrastructure and has a long way to go to catch up to the fast-moving economies of Asia. But greater optimism is leading to greater real investment. And the world’s large hotel brands are the latest to join in the rush to Africa.

Large chains including Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, Hyatt and Kempinski hope to open 300 new hotels in Africa over the next five years. The number of hotel beds is set to increase by 30 per cent by 2018.

Four Seasons Safari Lodge Serengeti in Tanzania (http://www.fourseasons.com/serengeti/) is the first investment in Africa by the Canadian brand. Four Seasons is known for its luxury, upmarket city hotels and has kept with this tradition by building the largest and most luxurious safari lodge ever built in Africa.

This is having a knock-on effect on African hotel operators. The surge in investment is giving these local operators the right incentives to create African brands and to raise their game.

Nairobi in Kenya has become something of a test market for high-end boutique hotels. Already a city benefiting from its status as an international development hub, home to many agencies including the UN Environment Programme’s sprawling and verdant headquarters (unep.org), it has also become a corporate headquarters for Africa and has a large U.S. presence (nairobi.usembassy.gov). This means lots of people coming to the city to do business and attend events, creating a market for better quality accommodation.

The Kenyan-owned, 156-room Sankara Nairobi Hotel (sankara.com) boasts of having the best wine list in Africa and claims to be a five-star hotel. It also capitalizes on being close to the international airport and the UN’s Nairobi headquarters.

“There’s an appetite for something local that’s different and, for the first time, there’s the confidence and funding to bankroll new developments,” said Sankara Hotel Group director Rohan Patel to Wallpaper Magazine. “Africans don’t want a theme-park African hotel, with prints of ‘the big five’ on the wall. That’s condescending. Nor do they want a New York-style hotel. They’ve probably been to New York. They want modern, connected Africa.”

Elsewhere in Nairobi, the Kenyan-owned Tribe Hotel (tribe-hotel.com) is looking to expand to meet growing market demand.

“The market for new, authentic, yet modern African hotels is growing,” manager Michael Flint, who previously ran New York’s Ritz-Carlton, told Wallpaper.

“We’ve been so successful here we are building a new 187-room hotel in Nairobi. We’ve taken over a boutique hotel called Westhouse (westhouse.co.ke). And we’re looking to expand further, with properties at the airport and on the coast. Who knows what will be next? Tribe will be a mini empire.”

In Rwanda’s capital Kigali, the Rwanda Marriott has ambitious plans. Rwanda was ripped apart by ethnic genocide in the 1990s that killed an estimated 500,000 to 1 million people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide). Now, the country’s economy is booming and its hotels are getting an upgrade.

The Akilah Institute for Women (akilahinstitute.org) in Kigali has been helping in training women for the hotel sector. They sent trainees to Dubai and Doha to learn how to do hotel service the Marriott way.

Starwood (starwoodhotels.com), a competitor to Marriott, is hoping to grow its African hotel investment by 30 per cent as well. It will be done through the Sheraton, Aloft, Le Meridien, St Regis and Four Points brands. The first St Regis has already opened in Mauritius.

Neil George, Starwood’s head of African development, believes “Africa is the final frontier. It’s adventurous.

“I would rather arrive in Kinshasa and work out how to do a hotel there than do it in Frankfurt,” he told Wallpaper.

The Hyatt (hyatt.com) brand is now running the Hyatt Kilimanjaro Hotel in Dar es Salaam (http://daressalaam.kilimanjaro.hyatt.com/en/hotel/home.html), Tanzania. Peter Norman, Hyatt’s African head, is working on opening a Park Hyatt in Zanzibar (http://zanzibar.park.hyatt.com/en/hotel/home.html) and another Hyatt Regency (http://investors.hyatt.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=228969&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1863203&highlight=) will open in Arusha and a further 140-room Hyatt in Senegal (http://investors.hyatt.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=228969&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1863204&highlight=).

The 200-room Villa Rosa Kempinski in Nairobi (http://www.kempinski.com/en/nairobi/hotel-villa-rosa/welcome/), boasting an outdoor heated pool, and the Olare Mara Kempinski (http://www.kempinski.com/en/masai-mara/olare-mara/welcome/) luxury camp in the Maasai Mara will also be joined by projects in Ghana and Equatorial Guinea.

Kempinski also has properties in Chad and the Congo, has bought the Hotel des Mille Collines (https://www.millecollines.net/) in Kigali and aims to operate 20 hotels across sub-Saharan Africa.

British entrepreneur Richard Branson has the Mahali Mzuri in the Maasai Mara and it is seen as a stylish role model for other hotels. The local landowners and herdsmen have been included in the business, benefiting from the hotel and helping to preserve the local ecosystem.

EasyHotel (http://www.easyhotel.com/news/2011/africa0.html), a low budget hotelier, is also rapidly expanding across southern Africa.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: May 2014

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=NhQ9BQAAQBAJ&dq=development+challenges+may+2014&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/may-2014-development-challenges

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

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.