NEWSINCOME GENERATING ACTIVITIES

Some say that solar cookers and solar panels pull the sun down from the sky and that this can cause evil in the world. Others say that humans should use the sun, as plants do, to live and grow without polluting the sky gods’ kingdom with black smoke.

The SolSource 3-in-1 was born from this second desire. It harnesses the suns’ energy for cooking, heating, and electricity generation without pulling it from the sky.

The initial concept for the SolSource solar cooker platform was born out of a memory relayed by a Ladakhi nomad.

“The colors of our land are changing. The land was once a vast expanse of green grasses dotted with black tents. Now it is a desert of yellow and white.

When I was a child, we would move our black yak tents from place to place and only leave a small pile of white ashes on the ground where we had been. Now, my children think it is better to live in a white synthetic tent and leave the ground covered with yellow plastic. They think that everything from the outside is better than what we make even when it doesn’t work as well…like the synthetic tents that let in all the cold air and have to be replaced every two years.”

The Himalayan terrain is one of the harshest on Earth and its inhabitants have displayed incredible ingenuity in adapting to that environment, sheltered by their woven yak-hair tents which last for 20 years and whose fibers swell to keep out the rain.

The design of the SolSource Cooker through close collaboration among villagers, students, and development workers, is an attempt to continue a traditional line of local innovation. It merges design principles of traditional nomadic tents with those of synthetic high-altitude hiking tents to produce a light-weight, portable, and weather hardy solar concentrator that enables the maximum range of cooking styles including stir-frying.

Field tests have yielded 28% efficiency compared to 20% efficiency of butterfly cookers tested simultaneously. The most recent iteration of the SolSource solar cooker reduced its weight to 6 kg. Although staking down the bamboo legs gives the device excellent stability against the wind, many villagers thought that it was too light and were worried that it would not last long under windy conditions. We plan to revert to several elements of our previous prototype design which bring the weight of the device to 8 kg.

The other element that we changed during our recent tests was the design of our thermoelectric component. The feedback was that the previous prototype which was slightly less efficient but which allowed people to boil water while also generating electricity was highly preferred by villagers.

We have partnered with four communities to begin local manufacture and income generation of the SolSource 3-in-1 over the next year.

>Pictures are coming soon when I have a good internet connection...

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank ( OED website; OED blog; OED facebook page; Twitter @OneEarthDesigns). Catlin will post on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find her on Twitter @CatlinPowers.

As a child, she tended yaks and goats on the mountainsides of rural Qinghai, China but things have changed since then. She still considers herself a nomad. Now, however, she is a nomad of business and it is solar panels and solar cookers she tends.

Dorma (卓玛) rose in the business world by migrating from trade to trade and from city to city; wherever opportunity presented itself. She is one of the few women of her ethnicity to run her own non-restaurant business.

One Earth Designs recently visited Dorma’s factory with local university students to negotiate solar technology prices. Seventy watt solar panels cost 2,000 RMB (293 USD) and 8 watt solar panels cost 400 RMB (58 USD).

As for solar cookers, China has a handful of standard designs that you can read about here. Dorma sells the two most popular designs:

(1) Concrete Butterfly Solar Cooker:

Butterfly solar cookers are asymmetric parabolas. In this solar cooker, the asymmetric parabolic dish is made from concrete. Small mirrors (usually 1”x 1”) are then pasted on the surface of the concrete parabola using tar or silicon adhesive. The base of the cooker is a circular concrete slab.

(2) Cast Iron Butterfly Solar Cooker

This is also an asymmetric parabolic solar cooker. The dish is made from two cast iron wings that unscrew for separate transportation. Mylar is pasted on the surface to boost specular reflectivity. Standard paper glue is used as the adhesive. The base is designed like a wheelbarrow in order to increase portability.

Although Dorma sells these cookers, she does not manufacture them. We went to visit solar cooker factories in Gansu, Sichuan, and Qinghai in order to compare prices and profit margins. Here, we report these values for the concrete solar cooker (only the government manufactures metal cookers as the unsubsidized cost of purchasing them is prohibitively expensive for most households).

The total price of manufacturing a concrete solar cooker averaged 84 RMB (12 USD). Profit margins for the factory owner ranged from 36 to 116 RMB (5-17 USD).

Many factory workers had recently relocated to urban centers from the countryside. Workers laying mirrors were able to make 6 cookers per day, thus earning 36 RMB (5 USD). If they work 7 days per week every day of the year they can make slightly more than 2/3rds China’s average urban income. The workers we spoke with had bandages covering cuts on their fingers from the edges of the glass mirrors.

Workers laying concrete were able to make 13-15 cookers per day, thus earning 39-45 RMB (6-7 USD). If they work every day of the year, they earn a few hundred RMB short of China’s average urban income.

One Earth Designs is inspired by Dorma’s success and saddened by the low wages and poor working conditions faced by rural peoples relocating to urban areas (those few able to find city jobs). We are working with local development organizations, universities, and communities to nurture a new generation of nomadic entrepreneurs skilled at merging traditional design practices and materials with modern needs and urban capacities.

Stay tuned for an introduction to our novel solar cooker design, the SolSource 3-in-1, and its potential as a local income generator.

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank ( OED website; OED blog; OED facebook page; Twitter@OneEarthDesigns). Catlin will post on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find her on Twitter @CatlinPowers.

I heard a joke last night. A Ugandan man speaking to a group of men and women from England. The Ugandan man, laughing hysterically, said: “Thank you for your language [pause] and that’s it.”

Arbitrary lines drawn on the map of Africa during the late nineteenth century Scramble for Africa was not only a race between European nations to colonize Africans, but also a formation of artificial boundaries that “scrambled” African ethnic groups by dividing and combining communities. The lasting legacy of European influence in Africa today illustrates the longstanding consequences of colonization. The present environment and culture of Uganda is formed by history and therefore to successfully effect change, the history of colonization must be remembered in any conversation about the future. While it should be part of the conversation, it should not be a limiting factor because. As Obama said in his recent address in Ghana, “Africa's future is up to Africans." While the definition of  community is dynamic, a few things remain consistent. Because community is simply a word to describe the relationship among a group of people, when populations develop a new personality, it is the people themselves who dictate that personality.A nonprofit hot-spot since the 70s and 80s and the era of Ida Amin, this country has been an easy place for English speaking do-gooders to come and give the non-profit world their best shot. This influx of a population of westerners “solving the social problems of Ugandans“ is, in a sense, another form of colonialism. Yet the ex-patriot community here is largely comfortable and kindly accepted. As the social sector turns more toward social enterprise, and as models of dependency are slowly diminished, the presence and role of ex-patriots should evolve as well. With that in mind, a successful development project should be defined as such: when a project, program, or organization has fulfilled it’s mission, the external aid should no longer be a necessary component of the community. And this is the necessary future for the relationship between Uganda and western countries: a future of appropriate design, innovative infrastructure, competency building and job creation.

It’s really exciting to be among a group of innovative, practical, and change focused individuals. Professor Musaazi, his two sons, a few interns and the rest of Technoloy 4 Tomorrow, are an invigorating bunch. They see a problem, and look for a solution. Their solutions embrace concepts of “Design for the other 90%” (read this book) and are realistic, simple, and accessible. MakaPads is only one of their many solutions. Interlocking bricks, efficient mixing contraptions made from recycled materials, incinerators, and much more in the incredible innovative minds of these individuals at Makerere’s Faculty of Technology (click here to see more of their products).

Their minds are always working on the next practical solution. Nonprofits alone will not save the world. They have an important role, but keeping a critical eye is important to ensure practical, measurable, and significant change…remembering to avoid into the pitfall of some nonprofits: “the need to be needed” and instead to strive to be essentially unnecessary.

September 2008 was the first time I came to Honduras on behalf of Global Brigades. I spent the first full day in the country completely immersed in communities, learning first hand the operations of our Health programs. The night before our trip into the communities I spent packing bags of medicine with our Medical Brigades chapter from the University of Washington. Over and over again, I counted the same quantity of pills to be separated into plastic bags and labeled with dosages. I also sat with a Public Health Brigades chapter as they reviewed the method for constructing ecostoves. I watched the excitement of the groups as they prepped all night for their first day out in the field.

The next day we was long and exhilarating. I spent the first couple of hours helping a Medical and Dental brigade set-up and sat back to watch dozens of community members line up to be seen by our doctors. I was astonished to hear that some women had walked over 3 hours to receive something as simple as tylenol. The process was very structured, you walk up to intake, give your name and information, go into triage to have your blood pressure and other stats taken, then see a doctor who proscribes you and sends you to the pharmacy station to pick up your meds. Yet, something that one would see as simple is the difference between life and death for some of these people.

After being completel awed by the Medical brigade, I then spent time with a Public Health brigade team as the constructed ecostoves for some of the people in the same village. After seeing hundreds of patients, Global Brigades saw that a large problem in these communities is respiratory related, and after spending time in the communities, they saw that it mostly came from the stoves that were being used. With lack of access to information or education, some people in the communities don't realize that the smoke being trapped causes their respiratory problems, and more so the design of their stoves takes an excess amount of wood and a long time for cooking. To combat this problem, Public Health Brigades was formed to find solutions to problems like this; to build ecostoves, latrines, and any thing else that could help these communities.

A few months before I came to Honduras I went to a event hosted by the Seattle Microfinance with our CEO of Global Brigades. The event was showcasing a Seattle-based organization called Microenergy Credits. The firm bundles carbon credits for different non-profits so that they can be sold on the carbon credit market. After listening to their presentation, we instantly knew that our Public Health program could benefit from their services. Now, only a few months later and after a few emails and phone calls, we are beginning to track our ecostoves in our communities to start receiving carbon credits. We have to continuously make sure that the ecostoves we put in place are working, and we randomly get audited once a year. However, with some of our communities being hours away, and with the number of ecostoves being implemented growing exponentially, how do we track everything? What is the most effective way to make sure that the ecostoves are working and so that they money received from the carbon credits is worth all the tracking?

The innovations that gave birth to the world’s ancient civilizations are fading into dust.

Basillica Cistern, Istanbul, Turkey. Photo: Tyler Durden

The Greater Tragedy: Not only are we losing the knowledge and inventions that first allowed humans to adapt to life in the world’s great deserts and on its snow-capped mountains, but the communities responsible for these innovations now feel ashamed of them.

In many regions, advertisements of foreign cities and technologies have generated a sense of inferiority that has discouraged even the most talented traditional craftspeople from continuing their trades.

Nowhere in the dialogue are these traditional lines of innovation labeled ‘science’ or ‘engineering’. Instead, they are called ‘history’, ‘art’, or ‘culture’, put in museums rather than studied in workshops. The great irrigation systems of the Incas that allowed them to flood the Ollantaytambo valley (Peru), drowning their conquistador rivals, have not made their way into contemporary texts on sustainable agriculture.

Valley beneath Ollantaytambo, Peru. Photo: Luke Redmond

Our task is to inspire confidence within communities to recognize the contemporary usefulness and future potential of their design traditions. We do not want to preserve cultures, but rather to reinvigorate them.

Although all our efforts aim towards this goal, one is deserving of special attention, our engineering workshops run by One Earth Design’s (OED’s) Chief Engineer, Amy Qian.

Amy Qian holds up disassembled early prototype of the

SolSource 3-in-1. Photo: Scot Frank.

The daughter of two computer scientists, Qian began her career as a mechanical engineer as an eight year old; by whittling pointy sticks in her backyard. She graduated to carpentry with power tools in her garage, then to the metal shops of her high school and the robot building laboratories of MIT (Media Lab).

Qian’s passion for practice and design has never waivered because “it has given [her] the power to build tangible solutions for the problems [she is] presented with”. Now, she is working to inspire that same passion in others and to empower those around her to engineer solutions for their own communities.

Last week, Qian held a series of design workshops that seemed to be destined for failure. A landslide blocked her way into the city for the workshop, forcing her to spend an extra hour crossing the nearby river and finding a car to take her the rest of the way. At the markets, none of the vendors wanted to sell a duffel-bag full of wood to a woman, and for various reasons the location of the workshop had to be changed three times just hours before the sessions began.

Finally, the group gathered. The son and daughter of a carpenter who had been sent away to school as young children, two women’s group leaders from farming families, and a nomadic man who started a rural education association huddled around Qian, listening attentively to her explanations of wood working tools and design principles. Then, they built.

This is what they had to say after completing the woodworking portion of the workshop:

This is a small start but, to us, it is a beautiful one.

It all started with three small seeds, teachers in a provincial university in China. One teacher loved music, another photography, and a third writing. Their passion and dedication inspired generations of students to pursue these arts and the Plateau Cultural Initiative (PCI) was born.

The Plateau Cultural Initiative

With used cameras, recorders, and computers in hand, PCI’s students have found ways of keeping their diverse cultures alive by documenting knowledge that is being lost, and by seeking ways to employ these traditional wisdoms in adapting to changing global circumstances.

For the past two days, we have been teaching these students how to build their own websites so that they can display their work. Although it took us years to learn HTML, CSS, and PHP, these students—many of whom have only recently learned how to use computers—were able to understand the process of making a website and creating content of their own with remarkable speed. One student had already mastered six human languages (Kham, Amdo, Namuyi, Yi, Mandarin, and English) when he entered our workshop and is now well on his way to adding three computer languages to his repertoire.

Although the students were excellent, we realized that our teaching left much to be desired. We found our initial lecture-style workshop format to be ineffective. Employing smaller topic-based work stations with hands-on activities proved a better method. The topics we covered were:

How to start a simple Website:
1) Rent a domain name
2) Rent server web space from a web host
3) Decide on a content management system and install it
4) Transfer information to servers
5) Download a website theme
6) Enter Content
7) HTML, CSS, and PHP for content and theme manipulation

[Our instructional materials (videos, screenshots, and handouts) will be posted on our website shortly. We are interested in working with others to develop good training materials. Please send us suggestions.]

Hard economic times have hit rural students, like PCI’s members, the hardest. With few job opportunities, one student wrote, “Seeing so many unemployed graduated students in the past made me realize that I must have a skill that others don’t have in order to find a job and I must help others know that I have this skill by making a website”.

Many students also wanted to help the world know more about their local traditions and ways of life. They were sad to see things changing so fast and to realize that so much of their grandparents’ knowledge has not been passed on to their parents.

Still more students wanted to create new knowledge through online tools. One student is working to create an online tagging system for four languages not included in the global forum. A team of students will work together to translate Wikipedia into local languages. One student will work to create an online learning platform for languages currently not taught by mainstream texts. Another student wants to develop a market price transparency system and use cell phone SMS messaging to ensure that rural farmers can sell their produce for a fair price.

Some may wonder why I wrote ICT for D in the title of this post. We are not inventing new communication technologies nor distributing cell phones to rural communities that never had them before. Instead, the goal of these workshops is to teach people how to use communication technologies to create their own online tools; ones that can help them implement local solutions and exchange ideas globally.

***

The Plateau Cultural Initiative is struggling to stay alive in today’s difficult economic climate. You can help by:

1) Donating your used cameras, recorders, and computers
2) Hosting an exhibition of their photographs, music, and writing
3) Financially supporting their work

Please contact me if you are interested in helping out in any of these ways, and stay tuned for links to PCI’s up-and-coming websites!

One Earth Designs (OED) was founded in 2007 by Catlin Powers and Scot Frank ( OED website; OED blog; OED facebook page; Twitter @OneEarthDesigns). Catlin will post on Mondays and Wednesdays. You can also find her on Twitter @CatlinPowers.

In a world of ever-increasing consensus about the benefits of free (re: fair) trade policy to the developing world, there may still be room for good-old protectionism.  I do not mean the sort of ISI development strategies that led to the growth of post WWII Germany, or the United Kingdom's pre-industrial revolution strategy of high tariffs for industry development to a internationally dominant level before exposure to the economic world.  In fact, I am not even talking about national level barriers to imports.  In line with the ABCD approach to community development, I am talking about the village.

One problem commonly facing local, village level development is that the profit of expenditures by local residents often go into the hands of outside actors, in that money flows out of the community much more often than it flows into the community.  If we look at these local expenditures from an export/import model, frequently there are significantly high levels of "village debt" incurred against a community because of the trade imbalance.  This can be extremely detrimental to local development.  If money stays within the community, it can have a compounding effect, essentially adding communal value to individual consumption and production.  So what, if anything, can be done to promote this?

The message is rather simple.  Buy local.  Buy goods, buy services, buy labor, local.  The prices may be higher in the short run, but the benefits outweigh the detriments in the long run.  Of course, I am not disparaging the purchase of technologically advanced products, such as computers, cell phones, ect. from outside sources.  These are necessary expenditures that cannot be produced in most local communities even in the United States.  However, villages should realize their comparative advantages.  If a member of a village grows grain, it would be beneficial for the other members of the village to buy their grain from their fellow community member.  In turn, the seller of the grain should hire local labor to harvest the grain.  In order to offset the higher price, NGO's or local governments could even subsidize production costs to keep prices artifically low in the short run, like the U.S. government does for agricultural production of American farmers.  (Note: subzidization is not a sustainable long run technique, and can in fact be dangerous.  I suggest it as one alternative, not a necessary component.)

This form of communal identity can be extremely beneficial for ABCD development practices as well.  If villages consider themselves as a competitive unit, they are more likely to realize shared values, ideas and methods.  They will be more willing to work together to realize and nurture their assets.

Once again, this is not the solution, and, in fact, local purchasing already is practiced unintentionally in many parts of the world.  But, it can help.

I invite you to criticize this approach.  I am sure it does not sit well with many of you free-traders out there, and I would love for a dialogue to start about the positives and negatives of locally centered economies.

I have learned three very valuable lessons since arriving in Thailand yesterday.

1. Before committing yourself to the restroom, check the walls and ceilings for unsuspected voyeurs, namely geckos or, as the Thai call them, “jiing jook”.
2. Watch where you’re walking at all times, or two things could potentially happen to you: 1, you step in a still-warm pile of dog excrement or, 2, you fall off the walkway and into the opaque, still-waters that run beneath nearly every home. Though you probably wont die, you’ll want to die.
3. Perhaps most vexing of all, however, is that to the Thais, I am not here to serve them. I have learned that I’m here for them to serve me.

Though the first two lessons are extremely important for survival in Thailand and warding against unexpected surprises, the last has left me thoroughly troubled. Today I was taken to a local salon and had my head and neck massaged, and my hair washed and styled. Though I have offered on more than one occasion to do my own dishes, my efforts have been rebutted, and it seems as though I can’t even be burdened with moving my own luggage from one room to the other.

Contrary to what you might think, I am not currently staying in an extremely affluent part of Thailand. Note the following pictures to help get an idea of Nonthaburi.

I’ve seen pictures like these before, around in the Internet and in newspapers, and I, as an American, automatically assumed that people living under such conditions would appreciate all the help they could get. Having my help rebutted is one thing, but being pampered more than I have ever been pampered in my entire life is another. It’s baffling and leaves me conflicted. On one hand, I am extremely grateful and feel very blessed to be in the company of such wonderful, generous people. On the other, at this moment my very reason for being in Thailand feels compromised, somehow cheap. And there is very little I can do to change this.

Tomorrow I travel to Taphanhin and then to Phitsanulok, where I will start teaching at a local primary school on Monday. Maybe I’ll find a place for me, where I feel my work will be wanted and I’ll be able to help in ways that I’ve dreamed about since being accepted into this program. Or maybe I’ll grow to accept that what I want for these people is not what they want from me and for themselves, and inevitably learn to live and grow with them, not against them. Global service is often romanticized into extravagant projects conducted by selfless martyrs that ultimately lead to thousands of changed lives. But in reality change is gradual, not dynamic. It’s possible that through this service project that the LE team is hoping to create, hundreds of kids will be inspired to continue their education or explore other, previously unknown options after college. It’s also very possible that after this first year, only one child will be inspired. Whatever it is, it’s enough.

The Dangers of Development-Talk: “Non-Emergency Emergencies”: Mark Arnoldy writes about how  development language can desensitize donors to emergency situations citing the WHO's stance on malnutrition in Nepal.

Microfinance: Wall Street’s Next Target: Lauren Vegter, working in Quito, Ecuador, questions how universally socially responsible micro-lending institutions really are.

The Connection of Communities and Individuals: Drawing from the childhood experience of her elementary school's exchange program with a school in Uganda, Alice Bator speaks of the value of cultural exchange and service not being a one-sided experience.

Consider this:

Throughout the next ten days, I will be studying the processes of economic and political development in developing nations at Northwestern University’s Chicago campus with a clear focus on the past and current state of Uganda. With this training and background knowledge, our efforts will be better informed and prepared to have a direct, immediate and positive impact on the people of Ugandan during out seven week stay. Since we will be working at the grassroots level, our work will focus on developing community, local institutions and infrastructure, meaning that my posts will tend to be micro examples of the role of either single individuals or small groups with the support of larger NGO’s on international development. I expect to have little experience with governmental influence, despite the tremendous role foreign aid currently plays in the Ugandan economy and political structure. Therefore, I would like to take at least this post to discuss the role of the international-state community in international development.

In the course of my preparation, I read “Foreign Aid and the Weakening of Democratic Accountability in Uganda” by Andrew Mwenda, originally a Ugandan citizen, currently serving as a John Knight Fellow at Stanford University. The article critiques the conceptual role of foreign aid in all African nations with Uganda as the case study.

Using a vast variety of statistics and intuitive reasoning, Mwenda concludes that in order to “promote democracy and accountability, the West should discontinue aid flows.” While this is a polemic statement, the notion firmly asserts the issue of Africa’s Western dependence created through the international community’s, the IMF’s and the World Bank’s good natured policies of debt forgiveness and governmental aid packages. Foreign aid ought to be renamed foreign relief to indicate the temporality of its presence. “Aid” creates dependence and destroys government’s accountability to its citizenry, derailing the democratic process.

In order to understand how drying up foreign aid might induce stronger and more sustainable growth, let us look at a few key statistics.

Foreign aid currently makes up “50 percent of the Ugandan government’s budget.” 12.5 percent of that same budget is spent on “political patronage” i.e. corruption. And with the 2005 G8 agreement to cut Africa’s debt and double foreign aid, erasing “80 percent of Uganda’s total debt,” administrative districts increased from “56 to 80” while public administration expenditures increased by “$120 million” out of a $8.5 billion GDP. These statistics combine to demonstrate that when large components of the national budget come from “unearned” sources, the government can rely on those external sources for purely political practices such as increasing the bureaucracy through fragmentation and creating more political positions for further patronage, meanwhile eschewing the needs of the citizenry.

While neither I nor Mwenda would argue that aid cannot have some significant short term benefits, such as providing “free primary education, basic health care, infrastructure rehabilitation and maintenance,” we assert that it simultaneously undermines the democratic process by attributing unearned development and accomplishments to the party in power, thereby distorting the political system. In Uganda, foreign aid disincentivizes important internal reforms in tax code, crucial to long term development, by forcing politicians to avoid losing elite patronage. Debt forgiveness only leads to future borrowing, like lax parenting of whiny children encourages further whining.

Overall, the argument against foreign aid draws strong parallels to the popular arguments against the American welfare system. It creates dependence by disincentivizing stricter self-governance and allowing individuals and governments to avoid personally and politically difficult issues.

I will return to this topic in next week’s posting, hopefully with some concrete answers into how governments, NGO’s and concerned individuals can continue humanitarian efforts but focus them towards more productive results.

Think about it.

- Aaron J.