Iranian Savings Funds to Tackle Loan Drought

For entrepreneurs around the world, acquiring finance to start or expand a small business has become harder and harder as the global financial crisis has bitten hard. Across the globe, people with good ideas or successful businesses that need funds to expand are finding the door closed by traditional banks.

As banks and governments have focused on reducing debt and building up cash reserves, it is small businesses and small-scale entrepreneurs – often without business or family connections – who suffer the most. Opportunities are being missed to create new jobs and enterprises and lift poor communities out of poverty.

In that climate, the search is on for alternative ways to build up wealth. In Iran, a new phenomenon has arisen to address the lack of bank loans for small businesses brought about by the economic crisis. Iran is suffering under international sanctions as well as outstanding bank loans exceeding US $45 billion, according to the Financial Times.

The domestic banking crisis this has provoked has resulted in a tightening of credit for loans.

But in response, middle class Iranians are forming their own savings clubs to help each other with loans.

The savings clubs work like this: each member buys a share in the club costing around US $2 per day (around US $620 over 10 months). Each share makes the saver eligible for one loan during the year. For example in a club of 30 Tehran taxi drivers, every month four members of the club receive US $600 each in loans. The fund lasts 10 months and each member is guaranteed one loan per share.

“It is a savings fund and doesn’t have the uncertainty of the banking system, which might or might not give you a loan,” club member Ahmad told the Financial Times newspaper. As one of the drivers, he has four shares and is eligible for four loans.

“My mother is also saving money in a fund of housewives among our female relatives.”

The fund is managed by the head of the taxi agency and a driver who is a retired teacher. Both are trusted. “The retired teacher receives the money every day and puts a check mark by the names of those who pay. He is trusted by the head of the taxi agency, while other drivers respect him as an educated, honest man.”

Savings clubs are also good for the local economy, helping people to be able to buy goods on loans they would never be able to purchase otherwise. Another driver used the fund to “buy the things we cannot afford under normal conditions, like a washing machine, for instance, for which we have zero chance to get bank loans.”

Overdue loans by Iran’s banks grew by 66 percent from last year according to Asghar Abolhassani, the deputy economy minister.

The Financial Times reported that an estimated 25 percent of bank loans are outstanding, making Iran’s banking system technically bankrupt. International sanctions are also blocking the country’s banks from accessing global financial markets for support.

“Stagnation has gripped many parts of the economy,” said Hamid Tehranfar, the central bank’s director-general for banking supervision.

Turning to savings clubs can be an excellent alternative saving and loans model, but it requires very specific trust guarantees in place to ensure the holder of the funds doesn’t just take the money. For those who can’t find somebody local they trust, there are a number of online social lending and fundraising alternatives for raising funds and borrowing money. These include Kiva (www.kiva.org), which connects poor people looking for loans with people around the world willing to lend.

As the crisis continues and banks and governments hoard wealth for their own needs to pay down debt, alternative sources of loans will become ever more important for the poor.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: April 2010

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Electric Bicycles Become Urban Transport Success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: April 2010

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

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A Local Drink Beats Global Competition

For many decades, strong American and multinational food brands have penetrated markets in the South. This is a global business success story for those companies, but the downside has been the marginalizing of local alternatives. This not only reduces wealth-creating opportunities for local entrepreneurs, but also leads to products like sugary soda pops (http://tinyurl.com/yzwal98) pushing aside healthier, local alternatives like tea.

But one company in Indonesia has been pioneering a healthy local drinks empire while also seeing off aggressive foreign rivals. Teh Botol Sosro, a tea drink in Indonesia bottled by family-owned business Sosro, was not only the first bottled tea brand in the country, but also in the world, it claims. The company started bottling the jasmine-flavoured black tea drink in the 1970s.

The Indonesian company has shown that it is possible for local flavours to beat powerful international brands like Coca Cola in the battle for drinkers’ palates. While Coca Cola has tried to sell many bottled tea drinks in the Indonesian market, they have not been able to push aside the local product, The Teh Botol Sosro. Brewed by the Sinar Sosro company, it has captured 70 percent of the non-carbonated drinks market.

It is a drink of cool, black, sweetened tea with a hint of jasmine. Invented by the Indonesian family of Sosrodjojos, Sosro (http://www.sosro.com/) was founded in central Java in the 1940s.

Culturally, Indonesians have either coffee or tea with their meals. The brand’s marketing slogan plays on this: “Whatever you eat, you drink Teh Sosro.”

The company has aggressively fought off competition not only from local rivals, but also from Coca Cola’s Frestea brand and Pepsi Cola’s Tekita. The company stayed sharp in its business strategy, never letting a rival product take hold. Just as a rival would introduce a new product, Sosro would reply with a new drink attuned to Indonesian tastes. This ability to not be complacent about the company’s success, and to use its knowledge of local tastes to always outsmart foreign competition, has kept the company where it is today.

Sosro pioneered bottled drinking tea with its launch in 1970 and started with a dried tea only distributed in Central Java.

The journey to cold, bottled tea is an amusing one. The company first wanted to promote its tea in Jakarta, the capital, by having public tastings. But by brewing the tea on the spot, the too-hot tea took too long to drink for impatient Jakartens. The solution was to not brew the tea on the spot, but instead to brew it off-site and deliver to markets in big pans on trucks. But the bad roads made this a bit of a mistake as well: the tea would spill on the journey.

The ‘aha’ moment came when the idea arose to store the brewed tea in bottles. The bottles were eye-catching and have evolved in design over the years.

The drink now comes in various packages, from a returnable glass bottle (220 ml) to a Tetra Pak (1 litre, 250 ml, and 200 ml) and a 230 ml pouch.

The Botol Sosro (http://www.sosro.com/teh-botol-sosro.php) is not the company’s only product: it also brews Fruit Tea, The Botol Kotak and S-Tee. The economic benefits of these popular brands stay local, as Sosro gets the tea from PT Gunung Slamet, which operates three tea estates covering 1,587 hectares in Indonesia.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: March 2010

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Qx2YBgAAQBAJ&dq=development+challenges+march+2010&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsmarch2010issue

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

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

As cited in Export Now: Five Keys to Entering New Markets by Frank Lavin and Peter Cohan (Wiley).

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Indonesian Middle Class Recycle Wealth Back into Domestic Economy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: March 2010

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Qx2YBgAAQBAJ&dq=development+challenges+march+2010&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsmarch2010issue

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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

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

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Haiti Earthquake Prompts Tech Aid

The devastating earthquake that hit the Caribbean nation of Haiti on January 12 was a huge tragedy for the country’s people and for the large international aid community, including the United Nations. But the disaster has seen the use of new information technologies – often assembled by volunteers – to bridge the gaps in critical information and bring a semblance of order to the chaos of a large disaster. And many of the technologies being used in Haiti now arose from past disasters and crises in the South.

Remarkable stories from the disaster include a woman who used her mobile phone to text message Canadian officials she was trapped and needed rescue, to a filmmaker who used an application on his iPhone (http://www.apple.com/iphone/) to treat his wounds: “I was able to look up treatment of excessive bleeding and compound fracture, so I used my shirt to tie my leg and a sock on the back of my head and later used it for other things like to diagnose shock,” claimed Dan Woolley to NBC Miami.

Measuring 7.0 in magnitude (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake), the quake killed over 212,000 people, injured 300,000 and affected more than 3 million out of Haiti’s population of 9 million. Hundreds of thousands have lost their homes and are now dependent on food aid to survive. Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and is ranked 149th of 182 countries on the Human Development Index.

In the aftermath of the earthquake, communications were knocked out and it was difficult to grasp the scale of the disaster. Major infrastructure was either severely damaged or completely destroyed.

The public telephone system went down, and the two largest cell phone providers, Digicel and Comcel Haiti, were both disrupted. Most radio stations went off the air in the immediate aftermath and a week later, just 20 of the 50 stations in Port-au-Prince were back on air.

This represented the worst of all scenarios for disaster response: not only was the scale of the tragedy enormous, but existing government structures and the large international aid mission were equally badly hit. First responders and the government’s infrastructure were paralyzed in the hours after the disaster and it took some time for the aid response to build to significant levels.

But while communications were down in the country, outside it was a different story: people around the world were using the internet and mobile phones to begin piecing together the e-response to the earthquake.

After the disaster, technology-savvy volunteers around the world kicked into action to find ways to help. They have built software to aid in tracking people, using technology to map the disaster area and ways to use mobile phone text messages to find the missing.

Kenya’s Ushahidi (www.ushahidi.com) is a free software mashup (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_%28web_application_hybrid%29) born after the post-election violence in Kenya in 2007 and 2008. It gathers citizen-generated crisis information – SMS (text messages), email or web resources – and then places the information on a map or timeline. It is put together by volunteers from Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Malawi, the Netherlands and the United States.

Ushahidi’s founder is Kenyan Ory Okolloh, and the first version of the software for download is called “Mogadishu,” after the capital of Somalia.

It was put to use in Haiti (http://haiti.ushahidi.com/reports/submit) as users populated its online maps and timelines with information on the location of people in need of food and water, those trapped in rubble or those in need of medical attention. It is a real-time reporting system for people in a disaster, offering a way for people in need to broadcast to the outside world.

Sample reports on the timeline look like this (http://haiti.ushahidi.com/reports): ” SOS food, water and care needed in the Bertin Zone of Carrefour S.O.S. for the people of Carefour in the Bertin area, Titus Road, Froide River, these people haven’t recieved anything yet like water, food, care.”

“Alive under the Rubble of Bar Lakay Restaurant, Ave. Christophe 6633. Carole Joseph is alive under the rubble of the Bar Lakay restaurant on Avenue Christophe.”

The UN estimates there are more than 900 non-governmental organizations operating in Haiti. One of the best ways to try and coordinate this large aid response is through innovative information technology.

The Ushahidi software has spawned many creative variations to track a wide range of problems. In the Philippines, TXTpower (http://www.cp-union.com/ushahidi/) is put together by the Computer Professionals’ Union to keep an eye on mobile phone companies and their business practices. In Mexico, a mashup (http://www.cuidemoselvoto.org/) was put together for the 2009 federal elections. Stop Stockouts (http://stopstockouts.org/) keeps track of near real-time pharmacy and medical supplies in health facilities and pharmacies in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia.

In San Diego, California, computer programmer Tim Schwartz quickly contacted his network of fellow programmers to address the problem of information being spread too widely across many web sources. In a few hours they put together http://www.haitianquake.com, a way for people to post and locate missing relatives.

It was online in less than 24 hours. It was followed by many other similar services and they were merged into a service eventually put together by Google called PersonFinder two days later. Google’s PersonFinder grew to have more than 32,000 missing people listed.

Another response has been Crisis Camps (http://crisiscampmiami.org/) in London England and cities across the United States. Technology workers got together to brainstorm relevant solutions to help the aid effort, and developed tools including Tweak the Tweet, Port Au Prince Basemap (up-to-date data on what his happening on the ground), The Haiti Timeline (developing a real-time history of events as they unfold), Family Reunification Systems, crisis wikis (http://crisiscommons.org/wiki/index.php?title=Crisis_Wiki), Mobile Applications 4 Crisis Response, translation (Creole to English for example), Mapping NGOs in Action (in the chaos of a crisis, this seeks to track what NGOs are working where), We Need, We Have Exchange (a way to post requests for resources or help).

“It really is amazing the change in the way crisis response can be done now,” Noel Dickover, a Washington, DC-based organiser of the Crisis Camp tech volunteer movement, told The Independent newspaper.

“Developers, crisis mappers and even internet-savvy folks can actually make a difference.”

Josh Nesbit is a co-creator of a text message service for mobile phones that is being used by international organizations like the United Nations and the Red Cross. Haitians are able to send free text messages from mobile phones on the country’s Digicel service. The messages include requests for water and food. The messages are organized and tagged with key words by volunteers in the Haitian community in New York City, and Haitian radio stations promote the service. It was developed based on similar systems already running in hospitals in Malawi.

In Haiti, mobile phone networks were back up and running within a few days – many within 24 hours. Haiti is poor, but it nonetheless has impressive mobile phone ownership rates: one-in-three people has one.

OpenStreetMap (http://www.openstreetmap.org/) is another excellent resource in a disaster and represents a significant step forward in helping people to respond. Real time data is uploaded to satellite photographs of the disaster area and people then can add updates on the location of working hospitals or where infrastructure has been damaged. The information comes in by many forms, from the micro-blogging service Twitter (www.twitter.com) to eyewitness reports.

Reports from Haiti have talked of rescue teams uploading the maps to their GPS (global positioning system) devices for easy access, or printing then in A4 form to carry around.

The utility of this service has been confirmed by many working on helping Haiti. “We have already been using their data in our initial post-disaster needs assessment,” Stuart Gill of the World Bank told The Independent.

Dutch mobile phone maker Intivation (http://www.intivation.nl/) is distributing for free solar-powered mobile phones in Haiti to help with aid efforts and is launching the phones for sale around the world as well.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: February 2010

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GxyYBgAAQBAJ&dq=development+challenges+february+2010&source=gbs_navlinks_s

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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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