Activity Description: The scheme was launched for the farmers of Karnataka who are members of agricultural cooperative societies. In the event of a sudden health problem, even the farmer who has some land and cattle finds himself at the mercy of the local moneylender who charges exorbitant rates of interest when he needs to deposit money for treatment. The scheme has proved to be a boon to the rural community who spirals into depths of debt and suicide, due to the illness, crop failure, famine and drought.

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Wulff Capital assists African entrepreneurs in commercializing their health innovations. These innovative products can improve wellbeing and lower health costs on a global scale. Product commercialization can create new jobs and protect botanic diversity.

 

Due Diligence
Their extensive network of business incubation professionals recruit the best innovations and entrepreneurs to participate in Wulff's program. They screen these entrepreneurs for passion, expertise, and ethics. Then they screen their products for market demand, competitive environment and profit potential.

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Population Services International (PSI) is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. that harnesses the vitality of the private sector to address the health problems of low-income and vulnerable populations in more than 60 developing countries. PSI achieves its mission principally through social marketing of family planning and health products and services, and behavior change communications.

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.

Activity Description: With three quarters of its national population living in rural areas, access to primary healthcare is one of the most pressing issues facing India’s businesses and policymakers. Further complicating this picture is the fact that the government has so far had difficulty making a sufficient financial commitment to fund free, needs-based health services. Although currently on the rise, this spending only accounts for less than one percent of the gross domestic product. Private healthcare groups have also been unable to fill this gap in a country where nearly a third of the populaiton lives in poverty. The entrepreneurs behind Gram Mooligai found a unique opportunity within this seemingly insurmountable challenge to deliver much needed health services to India’s rural poor while tapping into new markets underserved by public and private actors alike.

Activity Description: DSM is a German company that creates and innovates products and services that promote a healthier, more sustainable, enjoyable, and efficient way of working and living. DSM's Nutrition Improvement Program, which focuses on the fortification of foods with vitamins and minerals in order to prevent disease and mortality due to malnutrition, is DSM's first initiative in the context of the 'Base of the Pyramid'. This is a new development in the field of sustainability to which the company will increasingly be paying attention. The 'Base of the Pyramid' concept involves the development and implementation of new, innovative business models in developing countries in order to profitably serve the needs of the four billion people living on at most a few dollars per day.

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Medicine Shoppe India, the second largest pharmacy chain in India, is establishing health centers in rural India aimed at providing high quality yet affordable health services for poor and marginalized rural consumers.

Medicine Shoppe India has considerable success serving India’s urban populations – with a strong emphasis on safety and quality – and with the help of Acumen Fund’s expertise will be able to expand into rural market.

In addition, Medicine Shoppe India has innovated a new store format where health services would be offered at no cost, but medicine or other pharmacy products would be sold at affordable prices. To build awareness of their products and services at the village level, Medicine Shoppe India hopes to partner with one or more rural ICT network orchestrators.

The Challenge
In India, close to 12% of rural income is spent on healthcare and 66% still do not have access to critical medicine.Hospitalized Indians spend on average 58% of their total annual expenditures on healthcare, with over 40% borrowing heavily to cover expenses and over 25% falling below the poverty line because of hospital expenses. Almost 7 out of 10 medicines sold in rural India are either substandard or counterfeit.

The Impact
The company currently operates 103 stores across six states, mainly in urban areas as of May 2006. Over the course of the next five years, Medicine Shoppe will establish 130 health centers in rural areas.

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Belgian Investment Company for Developing Countries (BIO) is supporting the development of high-quality pharmaceutical manufacturing in Tanzania by providing a US$2.5 million long-term financing to Zenufa, a company that is setting-up one of the first Tanzanian pharmaceutical plant complying with the WHO Current Good Manufacturing Standards.

This investment will allow to renovate unoccupied former premises, to equip the plant and bring the site to CGMP-standards (Current Good Manufacturing Practice). The Sponsors are experienced in manufacturing and distributing pharmaceutical products in Africa and will provide half of the financing needed for the project. The plant will manufacture generic drugs including antibiotics, anti-malaria- and anti-parasite drugs, drugs against pain and fever, etc.

Although the economic growth in Tanzania is very encouraging, aid epidemics are a constant threat to the country. Thanks to the government and international donors support access to health care has been improved. Zenufa has a long-range plan to produce more innovative drugs, not yet manufactured in Tanzania, such as ARV drugs for aids patients. Zenufa will sell most of its products in Tanzania but will also target other neighbourhood countries.

The creation of this pharmaceutical plant in Tanzania will improve the access to essential drugs, will help reduce prices and will offer opportunities to launch more sophisticated drugs. Moreover Zenufa will create about 150 new jobs, most of them for women. Zenufa also pays much attention to environmental aspects and the project has been designed to mitigate major environmental impacts. Zenufa will also have an important development impact by professionalizing the supply chain, stimulating the demand and raising the quality standards.

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The Full Belly Project, spearheaded by Jock Brondis, an ex-Peace Corps volunteer and light and sounds engineer, is a non-profit organization that designs and delivers simple agricultural machines to people in developing countries around the world. This project teaches people how to build hand-operated machines with common materials.

The peanut industry is not only huge in the Philippines but the reach goes as far as the different corners of the hemisphere, to almost 100 countries, feeding 500 million people and making it a great source of protein. It is also a cash crop which provides livelihood for poor people of developing countries.

But for such a big industry, the agricultural technology of peanuts is still trailing behind. People are still shelling peanuts by hand, painfully one by one. In Africa, most of those who do the work are women. (To save on fuel, peanuts are left dried under the sun which makes their shell hard to open.)

Jock Brandis, on his way to visit a friend in Mali, saw the heart of the problem and decided to use his technical skills to provide an agricultural solution. Thus the Universal Nut Sheller was born.

Invented by Brandis, the nut sheller can work 40 times faster than by hand. This coincided with the establishment of The Full Belly project spearheaded by Brondis which aims to “to relieve hunger through appropriate agricultural technology.” The goal of the organization is to distribute these machines around the world and make peanut a number one source of protein of third world countries. Brandis, out of his generous heart, didn´t patent his invention because he believes that it is “a gift to those in need.”

Not only can peanut provide livelihood but it contains highly nutritious properties which could solve worldwide hunger and eventually poverty-this time on a full stomach.

The machine is made of concrete and simple metal parts which only cost 50 dollars to make. It can shell “50 kilograms of peanuts per hour, and one machine can serve the needs of a village of 2,000. Its life expectancy is 25 years.” The Full Belly Project is now working in Uganda, Senegal, Zambia and Ghana. Filipino MIT graduate and Centromigrante head Illac Diaz has also collaborated with Full Belly Project with the help of a local cement company to teach locals how to build the machines.

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Multi-M is a pharmaceutical company distributing high quality generic drugs at affordable prices and currently operating in Africa. Operation began in Mali at the end of 1998 and by 2003 had expanded to Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, and Niger, with five warehouse locations serving over one thousand customers.

Products cover the entire pharmacological range and include all presentation forms: tablets, capsules, dry suspensions, syrups, solutions, ampoules, vials, IV-solutions, bags, crèmes, ointments, eye drops and lozenges. The medicines are tested by an independent Swiss laboratory. Due to poor transportation infrastructure, Multi-M often arranges distribution by its own means.

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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.