Activity Description: In developing countries like Cambodia and Laos, low levels of education and poverty reinforce each other. Young adults are often forced to forgo education and take unskilled low-wage jobs. The situation is even more difficult when compounded by a physical disability, deceased or missing parents, or when young women are subjected to the horrors of the sex trade. Digital Divide Data is connecting the power of education and training programs with real job opportunities for disadvantaged individuals.

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Based in Madras, India, the Foundation of Occupational Development, or FOOD, is a non-profit organization that works to implement sustainable development projects that often involve ITC.

In a recent project, FOOD provided cellular technology and marketing information so that urban women could receive higher payments for their domestically produced goods. FOOD in partnership with infoDev established a closed group communication network for community based women organizations to promote inter-city direct sales of products made by artisans and skilled workers. This is accomplished by providing the community based organizations (CBOs) with communications links by way of cellular phones to enable them to network for marketing their products. Existing CBOs are organized in such a way that products made by CBOs in one city will be sent to a CBO in another city for marketing in their area.

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In 1997, the NEF began working with 7 villages in Northern Morocco to promote female education and leadership by organizing local literacy initiatives and associating groups of rural women leaders.

The program has since expanded to 15 villages, and in collaboration with the U.S. State Department's Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), NEF seeks to establish income-generating projects with one or more parent-teacher associations (PTAs) within these communities.

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In 2001 the CROMABU project (www.cromabul.com) was designed to gather and disseminate relevant information regarding crop prices in local and international markets in English and Kiswahili to help empower micro and small enterprises. Youth, particularly ex-students from primary and secondary schools, are the key channel of communication between the CROMABU and the targeted small-scale farmers in Magu; they are employed as agents and use bicycles to collect and distribute all relevant documents to the villages.

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The Vestergaard-Frandsen group designs disease control textiles and distributes them profitably on a mass scale. One of their products, the LifeStraw, is a drinking straw with seven types of filters. It purifies up to 185 gallons of water, offering protection from waterborne diseases of major public concerns such as typhoid, cholera, dysentery and diarrhea. As a personal mobile water purification tool, LifeStraw is designed to turn surface water into drinking water.

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This seven-year project is being implemented in the recently reclaimed desert lands between the Suez Canal and the Nile Delta that are irrigated by the Al Salam Canal. The main objective is to support the settlement and agricultural production of about 26,000 families. Project initiatives include: building tertiary irrigation and drainage systems; providing safe drinking water to needy communities; supporting credit banks in extending their operations to the area; and establishing community organizations that can participate in management of the irrigation system.

Activity Description: Maternal mortality is responsible for over 500,000 deaths globally every year. Obstetric hemorrhage contributes to the greatest proportion of maternal deaths and, in developing regions of the world, women die because there are often long delays between the occurrence of hemorrhage and treatment.

Funded by a MacArthur Foundation grant, the Women's Global Health Imperative is studying whether the "Life Wrap," a simple neoprene and Velcro device (much like the bottom half of a wet suit), may fill this deadly time delay.

Activity Description: The Asian Alliance of Appropriate Technology Practitioners Inc., (APPROTECH ASIA) was established in 1981, to increase the access of the poor to technologies and processes appropriate to their increasing needs and expanding capacities. Its primary role is to facilitate the sharing of appropriate technologies and cooperation among its member and partner-organizations.

Approtech Asia has on-going initiatives on improved cookstove, gasifier, energy-efficient kitchen, clean indoor air, gender-energy-water-poverty, micro-small-medium entrepreneurs (MSMEs) and energy, biofuels and women and rural industry, water-sanitation-hygiene-energy and poverty, green health, community-managed production and processing of herbal medicine, among others.

Activity Description: In partnership with the Hospital San Vicente de Paul, the Universidad Nacional of Costa Rica is introducing a solar oven as an environmentally-sound and cost-effective method of sterilizing hazardous hospital biological waste.

Activity Description: Lead-Free Alliance Mexico has been a two-year project to use existing, inexpensive methods of pottery production to ensure lead-free ceramic sales by using new lead-free glazes that work with low-fired kilns, the kind typically found in Mexico. The project also links artisans to an international market that had previously not had access to these goods because of the presence of lead.

The goals of ATA's Lead-Free Alliance Mexico project are the revival of traditional Mexican pottery, improvement of the health of traditional Mexican potters and their customers, and the increase in potters' incomes while minimizing negative environmental impact.

Activity Description: Since 2001, The American and International Federation of Red Cross network has partnered with an outside NGO supply chain ( International Development Enterprises, IDE) in Northeastern Cambodia in the Prey Veng Water project, to provide over 9,000 portable, low-cost, ceramic water purifiers to poor households. Thanks to seed money from the World Bank Marketplace, the project succesfully transitioned from subsidized, import-driven sales to full-cost, locally-produced (by the Cambodian Red Cross) sales of ceramic filters. Earnings from sales now recover production and distribution costs. IDE is also developing larger ceramic filters to service communities.

Activity Description: In partnership with WWF Lao Program Office, Sunlabob Rural Energy Systems provides electricity to rural households in Lao PDR through affordable and reliable solar electricity rental services.

Sunlabob's rental model provides the benefits of solar lighting to rural customers, including increased productivity and educational opportunity, while removing the burden of purchasing the equipment, and guaranteeing regular servicing. Risk is transferred from the consumer to Sunlabob, as the latter do not pay for electricity when it is not available.

Activity Description: A joint project of the University of the Philippines Los Banos and the Provincial Government of Laguna, the Duck Ranger is a transportable duck shed facilitating the introduction of free ranging mallard ducks into pre-existing rice farming paddies in an effort to control golden snail populations.

The teacup-sized golden snails, an invasive species to the Philippines and destructive pest for rice farmers (destroying up to 60% of crop yields), are a favorite food of the water foraging mallard ducks. However in the Philippine lakes where mallards are commonly farmed, dredging and pollution have reduced golden snail populations.

Activity Description: The Center for Development in the Tensift Region is an NGO that partners with local research and other groups to initiate and co-fund economically sustainable projects. These projects focus on the improvement of the environment, education and business skills.
Some of CDRT's projects in the past years include:
-educating potters to use gas-powered kilns around Marrakech rather than burn tires. CDRT helped co-finance 22 kilns, which both improved the quality of the pottery and reduced harmful CO2 emissions by 12,000 tons. (2002-3)