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Thursday
Jun252015

Indian Entrepreneur Brings Dignity to Poor Women

 

Driven by the revelation that his wife was torn between spending money on milk for the children and buying commercially manufactured sanitary napkins, Indian innovator and inventor Arunachalam Muruganantham embarked on a long and intensive journey to find a solution. His achievement – a simple machine – is bringing dignity to poor women and providing them with a much-needed income source.

This is a story of a man who was considered crazy for his persistence and made many personal sacrifices to achieve his goal. The innovation is both a technological and a business solution. Muruganantham has come up with a simple machine to manufacture affordable hygienic sanitary napkins for poor women. It works by turning the pulp of pine wood into the flat, white sanitary pads (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitary_napkin) commonly used by women during their monthly menstruation. The machine’s simplicity means it can be expanded easily to other communities and is designed to fit well with the way women’s cooperatives work and help them earn an income.

Muruganantham sees it is a business model that “can deliver livelihood, hygiene and dignity to poor women, and help them strengthen society,” according to his website.

The manufacturing process produces the sanitary napkins in just five steps. This simple intervention is revolutionizing women’s health in India by giving them an alternative to using found and unhygienic rags every month when they menstruate.

It took Muruganantham four years of research to create a patented machine that sells for between US $1,332 and US $5,330. It can make 120 sanitary pads an hour. Each one sells for 10 rupees (US 18 cents). By comparison, the multinational company Procter & Gamble sells its product for 30 rupees (US 54 cents) a packet.

Two multinationals dominate the marketplace for sanitary napkins in India: Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson, with the Stayfree and Carefree brands.

Muruganantham’s machine was awarded the best innovation national award by the former President of India, Prathiba Patil, in 2009.

Like many innovators and inventors, his work at first was little understood by others and meant he had to plough a lonely furrow. But his persistence paid off and is now receiving attention from countries across the global South.

Apart from its technological simplicity, the idea is to make it easy for women to form cooperatives and businesses to boost their incomes. India has seen the concept of so-called Ladies Self Help Groups (SHGs) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-help_group_%28finance%29) become more popular as a source of income. One of the problems they encounter is finding a successful business to undertake. The machine invented by Muruganantham is being seen as a good business model for the SHGs to follow. The key is the simplicity of operating the machine, the growing and stable market for the product, and its affordable and competitive price.

Typical businesses that can be set up using the machine can employ 10 women.

Muruganantham set up his main business, Jayaashree Industries (motto: ‘new inventions… small is beautiful’) (http://newinventions.in/aboutus.aspx), after his education was disrupted due to family problems and he took up a job in a welding shop.

At first, he had a difficult time convincing people of the utility of the machine. He enlisted his wife to help with the marketing of the new napkins to nearby women. He says the advantage of his business model is that it turns the making of the napkins into a sustainable, grassroots activity. It provides an essential commodity for poor women at an affordable price, removing middlemen and using a simple, non-chemical technology.

It also cuts down on expensive transport costs by keeping manufacturing local.

Over 225 machines have been delivered to 14 Indian states and also to Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Nepal and Bangladesh.

And while Muruganantham is focused on making the machine a success, he is already looking forward to working on his next big invention. The only question is: what will it be?

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: July 2012

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=9fRcAwAAQBAJ&dq=development+challenges+july+2012&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challenges-july-2012-issue

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

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

Thursday
Jun252015

East Africa to get its First Dedicated Technology City

An ambitious scheme is underway to create a vast technology city on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya.

With information technology proliferating across Africa after decades of stagnation and underinvestment, a host of exciting new technologies have had to exist within structures not built for the 21st century.

One attempt to change things is Konza Technology City (konzacity.co.ke), an ambitious project that aims to build the infrastructure to host the companies of the 21st century for Kenya and East Africa. Konza Technology City joins a growing network of technology cities and parks across the global South. If the links between these centres of technological innovation and smart thinking can be strengthened, they have the potential to contribute to exceptional gains in human development.

Konza Technology City will be built on 5,000 acres (2,023 hectares) of land 60 kilometres south of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.

The lead agency on the US $10 billion project is the Ministry of Information and Communication (http://www.information.go.ke/). The Kenyan government is seeking partners and investors to help with funding the project, whose components include a business process outsourcing (BPO) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_outsourcing) zone – where specific business functions are contracted to third party providers. There is also a financial district and a commercial district with office space.

This will be combined with the other side of Konza: hotels, hospitals, a sports stadium and other support services necessary to support a city. The idea is to develop the site over a period of 20 years, with the BPO and IT Educational and Science Park taking up 23 per cent of the site.

Kenya plans to expand its business process outsourcing sector and has been hosting conferences in Europe to gather the best advice. The sector has experienced double-digit growth in the past three years, rising on the increasing capacity brought by new undersea cables like TEAMs, Seacom and EASSy.

The idea is to put in place the building blocks of a 21st century Kenya and to become the leading hub for the whole of East Africa. Kenya has an ambitious plan to become a middle-income country by 2030 (http://www.vision2030.go.ke/).

There is scepticism about large projects in Kenya, with some fearing they will be abandoned before they are finished. But it does seem this project has galvanized a wide community of support. According to IT Web’s (http://www.itweb.co.za/) Ken Macharia, opponents of the project make various arguments. People in the information and communication technologies sector would like to see greater local capacity in place before such massive investment in buildings goes ahead. Others oppose the idea of having a planned city and would like to see things evolve organically. Still others question the government’s capacity to undertake such an ambitious scheme.

According to Macharia, the ‘if you build it, they will come’ argument is winning the day. The scope and ambition of the project has both excited many players within and outside government and focused their efforts.

Macharia even believes the public sector is way ahead of the private sector.

“The government is light years ahead in terms of the vision and drive of developing the ICT sector in the country, while the private sector is trying to catch up,” he said.

Kenya will become the first country in the region to build a technology city. It can look to China for some examples. One is Shenzhen City and its Science and Technology Park (http://www.ship.gov.cn/en/index.asp?bianhao=20). Or Cairo, Egypt’s Smart Village (http://www.smart-villages.com/).

Macharia also says the focus solely on technology is missing the bigger impact Konza can have.

“The city’s concept has financial, educational, commercial and industrial implications, which have not been sold as aggressively as the tech aspect has. Perhaps the better name for the proposed city would be Konza Special Economic Zone, where the key pillars mutually benefit from each other’s presence. Technology, after all, is a means to an end, not the end itself.”

The timing for a place like Konza City is excellent: undersea cables are being placed around and to Africa. The continent was notorious for being the most underserved continent on the planet and is in a furious transition from this information technology wasteland to a potential oasis of prosperity.

The undersea cable projects are promising a bandwidth explosion for the continent of Africa. The WACS cable (http://wacscable.com/index.jsp) is being put in place to link South Africa and Britain, and is due to be completed in 2012. It runs up the West Coast of Africa and will become the first direct connection to the undersea cable network for Namibia, the Congo and Togo.

It will increase South Africa’s bandwidth by an estimated 23 per cent.

Various technology investors, including the search engine giant Google, are also planning to build an undersea cable linking the so-called BRICS countries by 2014 – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The cable will also link them all to the United States. The technology group i3 Africa is leading the project (http://www.i3-mea.com/africa/), which should open up 21 additional African countries to the world’s undersea cable network.

Konza Technology City could make Kenya a significant beneficiary of all this new connectivity and bandwidth.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: July 2012

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=9fRcAwAAQBAJ&dq=development+challenges+july+2012&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challenges-july-2012-issue

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

 

Thursday
Jun252015

Mauritanian Music Shop Shares Songs and Friendship

 

 

Around the world, traditional music stores selling vinyl records, tapes and CDs (compact discs) are closing down. Digital downloads distributed over the Internet and mobile phones make it unnecessary to build a music collection in these hard formats.

While this has been a revolution that has made acquiring music as simple as firing up a digital download service like iTunes, it has many downsides as well. One of them has been the loss of vast swathes of musical history, as many songs recorded in the past have not made their way into digital downloads. And how can you find music online if you only remember part of a tune or song and can’t remember its title or the musician?

The background and knowledge that was once imparted by an informed person in a music store has been lost in the world of digital downloads.

A Mauritanian music shop is showing how a traditional record store can stay relevant and commercially viable in the 21st century. Entrepreneur Mohamed Vall’s Saphire d’Or store in Mauritania’s capital Nouakchott (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouakchott), is a treasure trove of the sort of long-lost recorded songs that normally vex lovers of African music. Pictures of the shop can be seen at the sahelsounds blog (http://sahelsounds.com/?p=887).

Vall has run the shop for three decades and amassed a large collection of rare African music on records and tapes. He has married this trove of African creativity to a clever business model: Vall doesn’t let customers buy the precious records themselves but instead will transfer the songs to a disc or a USB stick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive) for US 30 cents each.

He has also used traditional hospitality to create an atmosphere that encourages people to interact and keep coming back.

“I have the biggest collection in Mauritania,” Vall told The Guardian newspaper. “Any music you want from Africa – I mean the kind of music that puts Africa on the map – I have it.”

The shop is down an alleyway in the bustling capital and offers a refuge for music lovers.

The atmosphere encourages friendly conversation and lets customers take their time making a selection. Customers can relax in armchairs while browsing and drink some traditional mint tea or enjoy a snack from a communal bowl.

The shop uses traditional Mauritanian nomadic hospitality to improve the customer experience. It also uses the music it sells to heal rifts between the different cultures that cross Mauritania, as it bridges Arabic-speaking North Africa and the majority black sub-Saharan Africa.

“When you are here, it doesn’t matter who you are,” Vall said. “We get youngsters wanting 1940s ballads and old people whose minds are musical museums. We get toubabs (white people) who heard one song decades ago.”

One of the treasure troves held in the shop is the recordings made by West African orchestras during the post-colonial period.

The shop also acts as an interactive museum and archive of many African musical greats, from Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour to Nigerian afrobeat pioneers, Guinean pop legends and Maliaian and Congolese musicians.

Its collection ranges beyond Africa to take in musical genres from around the world, from blues to salsa to rock.

“The music allows you to travel in your head,” said one customer, teacher Abdoul Kaba.”When I first came to Mauritania from Guinea, I went round and round looking for zouk (West African funk) music that everybody listens to in Guinea until I ended up here.”

The shop also serves as a sanctuary for many from life’s everyday hardships.

“It’s not about the music any more. People come back because in here you can be free. You can listen to music and forget this hard life,” Kaba said.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: June 2012

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=VLp5na3pgHIC&dq=development+challenges+june+2012&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsjune2012issue

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

Thursday
Jun252015

Global South’s Rising Economies Gain Investor Spotlight

A new book is arguing that the world’s attention should switch away from BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – and take another look at nations and regions elsewhere across the global South. It argues many are lodestones of future growth and prosperity in the making and will see dramatic changes over the next decade.

The story of the BRIC and BRICS countries is an impressive one. In just eight years from 2000 to 2008, the BRIC countries’ combined share of total world economic output rose from 16 to 22 per cent. This led to a 30 per cent increase in global output during the period, showing how key these countries were to global prosperity in the 2000s. BRIC countries make up nearly half the world’s population and are regional leaders. Taken together, their gross domestic products (GDPs) are not far behind the United States.

Ruchir Sharma’s Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles (http://www.amazon.com/Breakout-Nations-Pursuit-Economic-Miracles/dp/0393080269) argues that the BRICS are now entering a more stable growth path and thus will not see the rapid-fire expansion and quick profits investors have become used to in the past decade.

“The BRICs,” Sharma told Forbes magazine, “were last decade’s team.”

The BRIC acronym (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRIC) was coined in 2001 by Goldman Sachs managing director Jim O’Neill, in a 2001 paper titled “Building Better Global Economic BRICs” (http://www.goldmansachs.com/ourthinking/brics/building-better.html). O’Neill predicted that this handful of countries would dominate the growth and economic development story for the years 2000 to 2010. This was because they all shared a similar stage of advanced economic development.

The BRIC states first began meeting together in 2006. South Africa was added in 2010 to form the BRICS acronym.

The buzz surrounding the BRICS countries over the past decade has been justified by their impressive growth rates, declining poverty levels,modernizing economies and societies and growing middle class populations.

China alone had seen its gross domestic product grow by US $5 trillion between 2001 and 2011.

Now, Sharma argues, it is someone else’s turn.

Sharma is head of emerging markets with Morgan Stanley Investment Management in New York, and Breakout Nations looks at where the next economic surprise stories will take place.

“A breakout nation is a nation that will grow above expectations, and will grow more than nations with similar per capita income,” Sharma told Forbes. “You can’t bunch all of the emerging markets together anymore. The last decade saw these countries behaving the same economically, but I think that is behind us now. Investors today will really have to pick their spots.”

He points out that Indonesia was the best performing emerging market in 2011 and has an economy that will surpass a trillion dollars in the coming years.

He also believes Sri Lanka and Nigeria are economies to watch.

Sharma says funds flowing into emerging market stocks grew by 478 per cent from 2005 to 2010, a massive jump compared to 2000 to 2005, when they grew by 92 per cent.

As he sees it, China has now reached middle-income status and its growth rates will not be as high as they have been for the past two decades. In his research, he found that countries like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan all slowed down once their per capita income went past US $5,000.

Investors who watch the emerging markets predict the hot growth areas for the next decade will be around energy, technology, and agricultural resources.

Sharma picks out Indonesia, Turkey, the Philippines, Poland and the Czech Republic for future investment interest, but urges caution with thinking all emerging economies are on course to boom.

“You’ve got to pick your spots, rather than just assume that because you put a tag of emerging on a particular nation, it’s going to boom,” Sharma told The Globe and Mail newspaper.

To make sense of the complexity of fast-emerging economies, a flurry of new investor acronyms has popped up. One of the country clusters is called the CIVETS: Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey, South Africa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIVETS).

The MINTS (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey) are also set for great growth in the next decade, many investors believe.

Then there is the N-11 or Next 11. This is the MINTS plus Bangladesh, Egypt,Iran, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea and Vietnam.

And after that there is VISTA (Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, Turkey and Argentina). While clearly the creative juices are flowing at investment houses as they come up with ever-catchier acronyms, a more serious point is being made: many countries in the global South, for the first time in history, are no longer solely dependent on the Western economic system for demand.

These countries, investors note, now have an unprecedented range of options uncoupled from the political, financial and economic legacy of Western developed nations. They say that many nations in the global South are set for a runaway investment boom because they are making changes and modernizing their economies faster than many expect.

As the BRICS economies mature and slow down and take on different priorities based around improving the quality of life of their citizens, those seeking faster profits will look elsewhere. This trend is even happening within the BRICS, as Chinese and Brazilian companies offshore work to Vietnam and Colombia.

There are many new centres of economic activity and rising prosperity across the emerging markets that often fail to gain wider attention. Few would probably know that the Northeast Asian nation of Mongolia – mired in the 1990s in the worst peacetime economic collapse in half a century (http://www.scribd.com/doc/20864541/Mongolia-Update-1998-Book) – is now the world’s fastest-growing economy (http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/2012/02/28/what-behind-mongoliaeconomic-boom) and one of the top places for mobile phone usage and penetration (http://www.businessmongolia.com/mongolia/2012/03/19/mongolia-ringing-the-changes/).

Then there is Myanmar (formerly Burma), where many are hoping recent moves toward democracy and improvements in diplomatic relations will lead to an economic boon for the region. Investors are also targeting Kazakhstan in Central Asia.

Reflecting these changing realities, Standard Bank, Africa’s largest bank, has been documenting the rising role played by the Chinese currency in international trade. A recent report forecast US $100 billion (R768 billion) in Sino-African trade would be settled in the Chinese currency, the renminbi, by 2015. This would be double the trade between China and Africa in 2010. It also found 70,000 Chinese companies are using the renminbi in international trade transactions.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: April 2012

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=6U6eBgAAQBAJ&dq=development+challenges+april+2012&source=gbs_navlinks_s

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

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

 

Thursday
Jun252015

New Cuban Film Seeks to Revive Sector

 

Since Cuba’s 1959 revolution, the country’s film sector has largely survived on the largesse of the state. The switch to Communism as the guiding economic model of the country after the revolution led, at first, to generous support to filmmakers. The government ranked cinema ahead of television seeing both cinema and television as the two most important forms of artistic expression in the country. But as state funding has dwindled in recent years, adventurous independent filmmakers have tried to keep the Cuban film tradition going using other sources.

Prior to the revolution, Cuban cinema had been dominated by American and Mexican companies that used Cuba as an exotic backdrop for their productions and dominated the distribution of film in the country.

In the 17 years after the 1959 revolution, generous funding for filmmaking in Cuba produced 74 full-length films and 600 documentary shorts (Julianne Burton: Revolutionary Cuban Cinema). Soon Cuba had established a reputation for making its own, interesting, high-quality films. These range from “Memories of Underdevelopment” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memories_of_Underdevelopment) released in 1968, with its innovative narrative technique, to Academy Award-nominated “Strawberry and Chocolate” in 1993 and 2006’s “Tomorrow” (http://www.cubaabsolutely.com/articles/art/article_art.php?landa=23).

But funding for Cuban film has been dropping since the ending of generous state supports with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Cuba had received extensive subsidies from the Soviet Union and enjoyed preferential trading privileges.

But a new Cuban film is grabbing fistfuls of international accolades and shows it is possible to make films with a combination of foreign investment and state support.

The zombie horror-comedy “Juan of the Dead” (juanofthedeadmovie.com/lang/en/) has raised more than a few eyebrows but it is also showing a more commercial instinct among Cuban filmmakers and points the way to greater diversity in Cuba’s film sector.

The film’s poster declares: “50 years after the Cuban revolution a new one is about to start.” The film’s website is a colourful feast of images from the film and uses slick graphic design. It has previews, background resources and online clips for viewers to sample.

Calling itself a “zombie comedy”, the film was written and directed by Alejandro Brugués and produced by Gervasio Iglesias, Inti Herrera and Claudia Calviño.

The plot revolves around Juan, a 40-year-old man who has spent most of his life doing nothing. He and his lazy pal Lazaro witness people starting to attack each other. Mistaking this for another stage in Cuba’s revolution, the pair at first believe the government media when it says the incidents are provoked by dissidents paid by the U.S. government. But it begins to dawn on the two men they are surrounded by zombies. Taking a Cuban approach to the problem, Juan decides to get rid of the zombies while making some money at it.

“Cubans have basically three ways of dealing with problems: they try to make a business out of it, they get used to it and keep going with their lives; or they throw themselves to the sea to run away from the island,” Brugués says on the movie’s website. “‘Juan’ gave me the opportunity to make things really difficult for Cubans, filling the country with zombies, which is in a way what we have become after all these years, but also gave me a leading character that could take a different option, that could stand and say ‘I’m not going to allow this, this is my country, I love it and will stay to defend it’ … after trying to make a business out of it and keep going with his life, of course.”

The film has received enthusiastic praise from international film festivals and audiences, and its producers are hoping it will give a boost to Cuban cinema.

Released in 2011 as a joint Spanish/Cuban co-production, “Juan of the Dead” was filmed on location in Cuba’s capital, Havana. The country’s first feature length horror film in half a century, its title is a play on George Romero’s 1978 zombie classic “Dawn of the Dead”, which also inspired the successful 2004 British comedy “Shaun of the Dead”.

It cost US $2.7 million, and the funds were raised from Spanish investors and the Cuban Institute on Cinematographic Industry and Arts (ICAIC) (http://www.cubarte.cult.cu/paginas/servicios/directorio/directorio.php?id_institucion=77&selected=&offset=36&windowstart=1&letra=&canal).

Brugués was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1976 and graduated from the International Film and Television School of San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba.

He built up his expertise in the Cuban film industry as a scriptwriter for several Cuban films and is one of the partners at the Cuban indie film production company Producciones La 5ta Avenida (http://eses.facebook.com/pages/Producciones-de-la-5ta-Avenida/110339122340016).

His first feature film was “Personal Belongings”, which received worldwide distribution.

“I have been a follower of the zombie movies since I was a little kid (zombie movies have followers, not fans),” Brugués said. “The idea of ‘Juan’ simply came from watching the reality around me. That reality is Cuba, so one day inevitably, I was asking myself if we were so different from film zombies. Besides that, Cuba is a country that has been preparing itself for a confrontation with the United States during the last 50 years. So, what if instead of that, have to confront zombies?”

Brugués sees a coming together of independent filmmakers and state-funded filmmakers in the future: “At the moment there are two trends, films produced by Cuba’s state production company and films made outside of that,” he told the BBC.

“There needs to be a balance but I think the two will eventually merge. When this happens I think this will produce the best Cuban cinema.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: March 2012

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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