Activity Description: ISI has identified a unique niche market that it believes will translate into a promising business opportunity. In both the U.S. and in Mexico ISI is formalizing agreements with organizations that currently cater to or want to offer products and services to the Latino market. These include hometown community organizations, local and national money transfer, check-cashing and pay-day loan organizations, and local and national convenience store and pharmacy chains. Mexican companies such as Gigante, Elektra and Novamedic are already part of the program.

Activity Description: Mexico City is built over an ancient lake, yet in recent years has found itself facing a serious water scarcity problem. This is due in part to the city’s drainage system, built to prevent flooding, which directs the area’s water more than 250 miles away into the ocean. The result: Mexico City is sinking and its water tables are running dry. Government officials estimate that more than 95 percent of the city’s water is not returned to the region’s aquifers and in some places the water tables are dropping three feet per year. When Nestor de Buen, and his co-founders discovered EcoCreto in the lab, they thought their product might be the perfect solution for this environmental challenge.

Activity Description:

Proteak’s founders, Hector Bonilla and Javier Diaz Calvo have created a profitable, sustainable teak company in a sector otherwise marred by illegal logging and corruption. Hector’s talent for spotting market potential led him to create three startups before a drive past a plantation in Mexico inspired him to research the sizable $12 billion global teak market. Both Hector and Javier were impressed by teak’s price, which is increasing at a rate of six percent annually and commonly sells at $12 per board foot, as compared to $2-$7 per board foot for most other woods.

Proteak’s vision is to operate as a business that addresses social, environmental and economic concerns. Because of its commitment to sustainable business practice, Proteak serves as a model in an industry in which illegal logging runs rampant and the major regions of production in Southeast Asia experience deforestation rates of about one percent per year. Hector candidly asserts that he does not see a separation between profits and sustainable practices. His group is committed to promoting responsible forestry practices and soil management. The 820 hectares of land that Proteak has planted are treated with the minimum possible amount of chemicals, and the trees populating these plantations take in the equivalent of 5,000 cars worth of CO2 emissions every year. The company is also committed to providing benefits for the local community; it is working to reinvigorate agriculture in a region where manufacturing has come to dominate, and Proteak employees receive better pay and benefits than the average worker in their sector.

When discussing these social concerns, Hector is quick to add that he and his board are fundamentally “all about numbers,” and argues that his 50 investors have been drawn in primarily by the 24% projected return on investment. Hector credits his management team with being one of the best and most knowledgeable in the industry. The company has bolstered its marketing strategy with extensive support from New Ventures, a program of the World Resources Institute dedicated to spurring investment in sustainable enterprise. With these strong management and marketing abilities, Proteak has raised $4 million of capital in five successful rounds of investment. In a sector notoriously controlled by inefficient, state-run companies, the Proteak team’s impressive private sector background makes them stand out as a highly productive and profitable enterprise.

Proteak’s superior business model and experienced team combine sustainable practices and solid leadership to create a reliable strategy for growth. This approach earned the company recognition as a winner in the 2005 New Ventures Mexico Investor Forum and ensures that as it sells its first trees on the open market next year, Proteak will continue to thrive.

Activity Description:

Several years ago in Los Mochis, Mexico, an early morning fire in an agrochemical warehouse released massive amounts of toxic fumes into the environment, causing serious health problems for the local population. This was the first in a series of ecological disasters that convinced Jorge Berni, a longtime resident of the agriculture-dependent community, that farmers needed a safer solution for crop control than the heavily toxic pesticides upon which they had relied.

Berni combined his training in chemical engineering with his twenty years of experience as an organic farmer to produce Bug Balancer, a chemical solution that serves to repel harmful pests that destroy farmers’ crops while attracting beneficial insects that are the natural predators of those pests. Local farmers quickly became interested in this solution when they began noticing that while their crops were being ravaged by insects, Jorge’s remained relatively unaffected. Word quickly spread of the benefits of this new, safe formula, and Jorge created Berni Labs in 1994 to increase distribution of the increasingly popular product.

Bug Balancer is an ideal solution for Mexico’s numerous small farmers. The formula is cost effective, as its price is ten times lower than some of the leading pesticides and it eliminates the need for expensive spraying equipment, reducing the cost of application by 20 percent. Bug Balancer is also safe for the environment and for the health of agricultural workers who have been forced to utilize traditional pesticides for a lack of competition. The natural formula includes a number of herbal extracts such as garlic, and it can even be applied with workers still in the field.

Today, Berni Labs has continued to achieve new levels of success as it taps into a growing demand for organic crop cultivation in Mexico. The company’s small team of 14 had its most lucrative year in 2005, generating nearly $1 million in sales by working with 17 distributors across the country. Berni Labs has also begun to expand its operations internationally, winning an enterprise competition with Mexico’s Ministry of Economics to receive government support for research and expansion into the Canadian market.

As Berni Labs continues to establish Bug Balancer as a safe and affordable alternative to pesticides, the company has begun research and field testing on other products to be released in coming years. This includes a formula for shrimp farmers to increase their yields that is based on Bug Balancer technology as well as a project to meet the needs of small ranchers that will inexpensively produce large amounts of livestock feed in a heavily condensed space.

Activity Description:

Aires de Campo taps into an emerging base of "conscious consumers" by selling locally produced organic food products at a competitive price.

When Pablo Muñozledo decided to build an organic store in 2001, there was no major market for such products. Unlike in the United States, where companies like Whole Foods were growing rapidly by appealing to eco-friendly consumers, these services were not in high demand in Mexico. It is in this environment that a pioneering entrepreneur created a company that sought to support local organic farmers by delivering their high quality products to the urban residents of Mexico City.

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: Adobeterra builds homes and construction blocks for building homes out of adobe, a tradional Mexican clay paste. This building material is inexpensive, environmentally friendly, and naturally insulating, but is not usually resistant to weight and humidity.

Now, however, with assistance from the Instituto Politecnico Nacional's Incubation Center for Base Technology Companies (CIEBT), Adobeterra has developed compressed adobe blocks that have the same resistance to weight and humidity as bricks and even concrete, but at 50% of the price and with none of the environmental impact.

Activity Description: Bioplaneta is a national network of rural sustainable companies and cooperatives. This network is allied to a broad group of institutions, educational and investigation centers, non-government organizations and people committed to sustainable development, quality of life and social and commercial fairness.

Bioplaneta is a tool for communities and their companies to improve and maintain quality using environmentally-sustainable methods, and to market products and services in the local, national and global markets in equitable ways.

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: Mi Farmacita Nacional is a nationwide pharmacy chain that provides low-cost generics, purified water and powdered milk, consultations, and pre-op services to underprivileged individuals. To supplement their income, the independent franchises also provide additional services such as telephone and Internet. Each pharmacy serves an average of 2,500 households.

The government of Mexico supports the venture by providing generous tax exemptions to franchised networks.

Activity Description: Indoor air pollution (IAP) kills more than 1.6 million people each year - one person every 20 seconds -- and some two billion more are at risk. To address this problem, the Shell Foundation has committed US$ 10 million to tackle IAP through its Household Energy and Health Programme, branded as "Breathing Space."

According to Shell, the programme is funding, "pilot projects in six focus countries: India, Mexico, Guatemala, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Ghana. These projects aim to increase the demand for household energy solutions amongst poor households through social marketing, guaranteeing the supply of improved devices and fuels and providing consumer financing for poor households to purchase improved devices. A monitoring programme for stove performance, emissions, exposure and health assessment is also in place to provide standardised information on the results from all these projects.

Activity Description: ComCare International's solar rechargeable Model GLW hearing aid provides a low-cost solution for millions of the world's poor who do not have access to the continual supply of disposable batteries necessary in more common, and more expensive hearing aids.

Activity Description:

A pilot project in low-income housing by Mexican entrepreneurs Real Paraiso, the community of Real del Sol in Tecamac boasts 1,800 newly-built homes, ready equipped with high-speed Internet, a Mexican Texa PC, and wireless connectivity service tagged at $18 per month. In a city that until recently had no phone line service, features of the wirless internet service include a neighborhood portal allowing online purchases from local stores and internal communication amongst neighbors; a security system; an e-mail account, and more.

Activity Description: Makes primarily debt investments in small businesses which demonstrate impacts on biodiversity conservation in global priority areas. Starbucks uses it to allow small farmers access to credit.

Activity Description: Todito.com, a Monterrey, Mexico-based company, is implementing a cross-border e-commerce venture. The idea is that Mexican workers in the North, instead of sending money through notoriously expensive transfers, would buy products such as refrigerators and stoves on the Internet, which Mexican companies would then deliver to their families in Mexico. Relying on massive promotion over Hispanic television in the U.S.