Harvesting Energy Out Of Human Waste

Refugee Camps. Image via DW-WORLD.de

Environmental engineers in Germany are designing portable lavatories which can produce energy out of methane produced by human excrement. The energy can then be used to light up the camps at night for better safety and for cooking meals without relying on limited fuel supply or firewood.

Refugee camps typically house thousands of people in a small space of land, where energy shortage and poor sanitation are common problems. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), some 2.4 million people around the world are currently living in about 300 refugee camps. Averaged-sized refugee camps hold about 20,000 people.

Innovating for the Kitchen and Environment

The Envirofit Clean Cookstove

Creative ideas are amazing. Even better, if they were channeled to fixing social and environmental problems.

The Envirofit does both.

Families in developing countries traditionally cook with fire and stoves, using wood, dung and crop waste for burning, sometimes for hours every day. Lethal fumes from these cooking fires claim the lives of 1.5 million people a year worldwide. Due to their presence in the home, women and children make up a large bulk of these numbers.

The company’s solution is a “clean cookstove”, which significantly reduces smoke and harmful gases, biomass fuel and cooking time.

Envirofit currently sells mostly in India, and has delivered 100,000 stoves over the past year.

Also worth reading, is this interview with Envirofit CEO Ron Bills on selling to the bottom of the pyramid.

Vision 2020 for the Poorest 1 Billion

Photo by Michael Lewis from the BBC website.

Every now and then, we bump into stories of social entrepreneurs with interesting projects that truly inspire. They aren’t just about fancy ideas or even making a lot of money – but we love it for the simple fact that it creates impactful change amongst communities that are “left behind”. Here’s one of them, as reported in the BBC.

British inventor Josh Silver is on a quest to help the poor in developing worlds see – without the need for trained specialists or opticians to prescribe glasses.

Silver might have an answer. It takes the form of DIY-adjustable glasses that hold fluids in the lenses, which can be added or reduced with a simple dial on the sides. The amount of fluids affect the power on the lenses.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

Not resting on his laurels, Silver has an audacious plan – to offer his glasses to a billion of the world’s poorest by 2020. The big challenges? Scaling the entire process and make the glasses less dorky!

Read the full article on BBC

How to Make Money and Change the World

“Raised with volunteer trips abroad, climate change on TV and everything ’save the world’, today’s generation is more aware of the world and doing good than ever before. When it comes to getting jobs, however, we are still trying to figure out one simple thing: how do you make money and change the world?“

Quite possibly the best thing I’ve read in a long while! Great for social entrepreneurs and folks aspiring to more meaningful jobs off the beaten path, “Occupation: Change the World” is the result of a year-long research to find answers to the golden question above.

The book is available as a free PDF download at www.myoccupation.org. It’s also meant to be shared, so pass it on!

p/s: Thanks to Azlan Petra for the heads-up!

Re-innovating the Wheel

Sometimes, the simplest form of innovation can go a long way, as demonstrated by the Q Drum.

Climate change has required people in developing nations to travel greater distances to retrieve water for everyday use. The Q Drum eases the task, even for children, to fetch up to 50 liters of water over flat terrain.

The Q Drum was designed to be simple, cost effective, keep the weight on the ground, be durable, and to have no moving parts or handles that could break.

More details at greenUPGRADER.com

YSEI Results Announcement

Back in May, we were one of 19 ventures shortlisted from applicants all over Asia to attend the Youth Social Entrepreneurship Initiative (YSEI) Fellowship in KL. The 5-day workshop paired entrepreneurs with mentors and industry experts who grilled the participants on their ideas and business plans.

Entrepreneurs then get to pitch their ideas for seed / start-up financing which offered up to USD 60,000 over 1.5 years, alongside other benefits such as mentorship, knowledge and networks.

Today, we received an e-mail from YSEI announcing the results. Ten ventures were chosen for the 1st round of seed financing which offered USD 5,000 plus 6 months of mentorship. Some of the ventures were from Thailand, Pakistan, India and Philippines.

How did Elevyn do? We’ll leave it to you to find out

The Killer App for Facebook?

Who hasn’t heard of Facebook by now? It’s a social networking tool to connect and keep in touch with friends. According to Wikipedia, the website has 43 million active users worldwide with memberships close to 60 million.

So how does this relate to Social Entrepreneurship? Well, the appeal of Facebook is that it expands to include applications develop by external software programmers. This allows people to group around applications instead of just their friends. I took a look at 3 applications: Causes, Change.org and Groups.

A rudimentary search showed about 7 groups were created to support Social Entrepreneurs with about 220 members. Groups included meetups as well as those exploring the possibility of Social Entrepreneur degrees.

Change.org displayed only 1 group but it had 188 members while the Causes application displayed about 8 Social Entrepreneur causes with around 580 members. But this is not counting specific groups, such as those built around the Homeless World Cup (582 members), Kiva.org (groups alone numbering about 60, some with over 4,000 members) and Play Pumps International. Include this, and the scope just grows much bigger.

Even with this numbers, I feel Facebook lacks that killer application to convert active membership to actual benefits. Causes, for example, has an application that allows members to donate to a cause. Take for example, a cause to “Support Independent Film” has 24,712 members but only $80 donated.

Maybe, these applications need to move beyond charity expected from members (which obviously isn’t working as well as their moral support, myself included). That means open up the APIs further and allow software developers to work on tools to monetize and kick start solutions to causes immediately.

Sometimes I do believe, that part of the problem is that solutions just aren’t exciting enough. Let’s re-look at the “Support Independent Film” cause. Now let’s say, within this cause, a suffering film maker could go in and post the sypnosis of the film along with certain elements of the script. He could also do a 2 minute pitch on video. Further, he could post up that he needs $45,000 to do the short film (not for an NGO, but the film maker himself needs that amount!).

In return, he / she can select 2 options for funding the film. One option is that anyone who contributes to that cost stands to make a percentage profit of that contributed. Another possible option, is that members to that cause can “pre-book”, by buying tickets to the film online. Once that amount is reached, the film maker can work on launching the film, at the same time updating members of the progress, creating a “buzz”. Now, the solution may not be easy, but isn’t it exciting…

Creative Capitalism by Bill Gates

When one of the world’s great business personalities presents an idea that could change the world, it’s worth a read!

In “Making Capitalism More Creative”, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates touched on the success of capitalism, and how it has improved the lives of billions. Unfortunately, billions have also been left behind – stuck in a life of poverty, diseases and suffering.

The solution? Creative capitalism, as Bill Gates calls it.

“Creative capitalism: an attempt to stretch the reach of market forces so that more companies can benefit from doing work that makes more people better off. We need new ways to bring far more people into the system – capitalism – that has done so much good in the world.”

So how does it work? As Gates tells it:

“A few years ago I was sitting in a bar with Bono… we’d had a few drinks, and Bono was all fired up over a scheme to get companies to help tackle global poverty and disease… Bono’s persistence soon gave birth to the (RED) campaign. Today companies like Gap, Hallmark and Dell sell (RED)-branded products and donate a portion of their profits to fight AIDS.”

“It’s a great thing: the companies make a difference while adding to their bottom line, consumers get to show their support for a good cause, and – most important – lives are saved.”

“In the past year and a half, (RED) has generated $100 million for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, helping put nearly 80,000 people in poor countries on lifesaving drugs and helping more than 1.6 million get tested for HIV. That’s creative capitalism at work.”

You can read the full article here – it’s long but touches on a lot of good ideas and possibilities!
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1828069,00.html

Note: Quotes above are fetched directly off the article, and have been edited for length and clarity.

YSEI – Into the Finals!

The Elevyn project stretches far beyond web programming and development. In fact, the website and its platform make up only a very small percentage of the workload.

Most important is the groundwork that needs to be done in order to reach out to the REAL PEOPLE in the communities, and in working with field partners and volunteers who will help ensure the success of the project.

With that in mind, we decided to submit the idea to the Youth Social Enterprise Initiative (YSEI) some months back. We wanted to put a foot into the social entrepreneurship scene, and see where it would lead us.

YSEI is a social venture program for emerging young social entrepreneurs in developing countries. It aims to invest in young visionaries who have big ideas and who need crucial startup support to turn their ideas into action. The start-up support includes:

* Startup financing up to USD15,000
* Essential development knowledge & tools on social entrepreneurship
* Technical consulting through mentorship
* Access to diverse networks

We received the good news a few weeks back that we have been shortlisted into the final 19, sorted from applications all over Asia!

The reward? A 5-day Capacity Building workshop that will have a team of mentors and industry experts helping us to refine our business plans, and the opportunity to pitch for a start-up financing grant of up to USD 15,000.

The money’s nice to have, of course – but we’re looking beyond that. From what I’ve gathered from DS so far, the mentorship and network opportunities are amazing – especially when you’re sharing ideas with folks who’ve been in the scene for decades and are already very successful!

Coincidentally, the event would be held in KL itself, so it was quite a blessing in disguise that we need not fly out of the country in the middle of this hectic period.

Our man DS is already having sleepless nights, having to juggle between the workshop that started since Saturday and preparing presentation slides well into the wee hours of the morning and getting by with 3-hour winks!

The periodic updates that I’ve received so far has been very encouraging. We’ll wait for his full report when he gets back and has fully recovered from the ordeal!

Social entrepreneurship is NOT a charity or NGO!

YSEF Declaration Ecard from ideals creatives on Vimeo.

Many conversations that I’ve had with friends on my latest venture revolves around the idea of social entrepreneurship – essentially, what is social entrepreneurship? How is it different from the work that NGOs do? Should you even make money out of it?

Some have also inadvertently call Elevyn my “charity project”. So I thought a blog posting might go a little in clarifying the issue of what’s social entrepreneurship!

For a start – think of how normal businesses are run. They offer a product or service that the market wants, and charge for it. Revenue is then ploughed back into the business so that it can be sustainable. Ultimately, the target is to reach profitability and grow the business so that it can reach out to more people!

Now, social entrepeneurs operate on the same level – the only difference is that their purpose is not only to make money, but to also solve a social problem. Economists refer to it as the “double bottom line” – measuring the company’s performance financially AND its social impact.

Social entrepeneurs find opportunities in various fields – poverty (The Homeless World Cup), education ($100 laptops), environment (free cars, anyone?) and many others. The projects could be either for-profit or non-profit – but what’s for sure is that they are all borne out of its founders’ business acumen and entrepreneurial qualities.

Interested in learning more about social entrepreneurship? Here are some resources to get you started:

• Global Knowledge Partnership
• Youth Social Enterprise Initiative
• Skoll Foundation