As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been MIA while working on a BOP mapping project that will be publicly unveiled on June 12 at the IADB conference. Side note – have you seen the speaker list? Cardinal Maradiaga, Carlos Slim, Hernando de Soto, Nicholas Negroponte, Portia Simpson Miller, Bill Clinton, Hector Ureta...whomever’s put the agenda together has done a great job. Anyway, while I was crunching numbers, I managed to at least read some of my favorite blogs and web sites, and have kept tabs on some of the better BOP projects and news stories that have come across my desk lately. A snapshot:

About a month ago JP wrote about fuel efficient cookers , but they make me so giddy that I just had to write about them too, with a few fresh examples.  

If you're new to the concept and hear "fuel efficient cooker," you'll probably think "Great! Sounds eco-friendly." It sure is.  Solar cookers require no wood at all, while clay, biogas, and other kinds of cookers can alleviate deforestation by reducing firewood usage by 50% or more.  The reduced consumption of fuel means saving money, another benefit.  

Less need to collect firewood means more time to go to things like attend school, for children, particularly girls, are often the ones asked to perform this wearisome task.  The Near East Foundation estimates that in one Moroccan village where it introduced clay cookers, women aged 8 to 60 each day were collecting 20-30 kg of wood over 15 kilometers for a total of 120 hours a year.

Using non-wood powered cookers brings another physical benefit: fewer respiratory and eye problems. Burning wood, dung, and crop residues (biomass fuels used by 60% of Africans) indoors can irritate lungs and eyes, and the WHO reports, causes 1.5 million deaths (more than malaria) by indoor air pollution every year.

Browsing the morning headlines, I came across a startling and at first disturbing trend in the Indian tourism industry.  I had just finished reading a nice article on how the government plans to operate eco-tours of rural Jharkhand when I found a Guardian piece describing one community organization's forays into "Poorism." 

Proteak’s co-founder, Hector Bonilla is convinced he can defy a deeply engrained and concerning global trend in an extremely problematic sector. He operates within the law, practices responsible forestry and runs a transparent company. This might seem routine, until you consider what he does for a living. Hector is in the teak business. Do even a basic Google search on teak logging and you find plenty of evidence of the issues with harvesting this valuable wood. Article after article discusses the environmental devastation and social ills that arise from the massive illegal or forced logging among major teak producing countries.

Not an hour after Tuesday's post on an apparent remittance service offered by The Home Depot, I received an email, from their Media Relations Department, in reply to my request for more information.

Here's what The Home Depot had to say:

"On May 8, 2006, The Home Depot launched a pilot program in Washington, D.C., called MiCash. It is a program offering consumers the opportunity to purchase cards that can be loaded at The Home Depot and used as debit cards, ATM cards, telephone cards for domestic or international calls and as a money transfer product to send money instantly within the U.S. or overseas. Each package purchase includes two identical cards that can be used both domestically and internationally, allowing customers the ability to give one of the cards to a family member. A government ID is required to activate the cards. The pilot will be expanded later in the month to include The Home Depot stores in the Tampa market. There are no plans for further expansion at this time."

For many of us, the combination of economic data plus policy recommendations is the literary equivalent of NyQuil. Unfortunately, good research generally requires the presentation of both data and analysis. So how do we researchers and writers solve this problem? Increasingly, the answer is short and sweet: map it.

The Inter-American Development Bank has taken the mapping lesson to heart. Economists at IDB use maps to illustrate the massive amount of remittances flowing into Latin America. The remittance mapping project started a few years ago with a simple PDF graphic, and has since evolved into a stunning web site, complete with Flash animation and easy interactivity. That’s just one example – others are using maps to great effect.

This past Saturday, The Washington Post ran an article, Fighting Our Flux Fixation, on the increased use of eco-friendly toilets in the DC region. What piqued my interest was The Post’s discussion of composting latrines, which have the potential to improve sanitation in many urban and rural areas that are not part of a centralized sewer system. As described by The Post, composting toilets are a “high-tech version of an outhouse,” where waste is concentrated and gradually decomposed into fertilizer, which can be used to enrich soil and strengthen agriculture, the backbone of rural life.

I just read a news story describing how microfinance schemes in Ghana (and the banks providing them) are being undermined by a refusal to repay loans. According to the article, "The microfinance programme, which is the bedrock of rural banks, is being thwarted due to the attitude of some customers, which is creating many problems for the banks... some people had the perception that the money belonged to the government and was therefore free."

While working in India, I heard similar sentiments about repaying loans. In rural areas, there seemed to be a lack of consequences associated with failure to repay an institutionalized loan (as opposed to a local moneylender). This attitude may be the result of years of government rural development schemes in the form of grants rather than loans. Or it may be a lack of adequate enforcement outside urban areas. Whatever the cause, a cultural belief that money loaned by an institution need not be repayed is likely to slow the entry of larger commercial institutions into this arena, resulting in less microloans being made available to those who need them.

The solution proposed in Ghana was to provide adequate education to the groups and individuals before granting them loans, so that they know their repayments benefit others like themselves. But is this enough? I'm wondering if anyone else has had experience in this area. How widespread is this attitude and what is being done to combat it?

At a press conference in DC yesterday, the IDB unveiled a cool new interactive tool called “Mapping the Majority.” It’s an interactive Flash mapping tool – low-bandwidth readers, consider yourselves warned before clicking through. But for those of us with fast enough connections, I wholeheartedly encourage you to check it out. Similar to the remittance mapping that IDB’s done in the past, Mapping the Majority takes economic, demographic, and other national-level data and integrates it with a map of Latin America. Think proprietary mash-up and you’ve probably got the right idea.

In the next two decades mass human migrations from rural to urban areas are expected to radically transform the world’s demographic landscape. Much of this migration will take place in the developing world, where rural inhabitants now subsist on small scale farming. As these farmers migrate to urban areas, harnessing their skills through urban agriculture may prove to be one of the most effective ways to alleviate the crippling poverty that many will inevitably face when they finally arrive in cities.

I know it's considered rude to discuss political issues over meals, but I recently saw An Inconvenient Truth, and I've been on an environmental kick ever since. And so it was that last night in my apartment over a dinner of wine chicken marsala a heated discussion ensued that resulted in more than one mild insult traded by the time the bottle of Chardonnay was emptied.

If you’re a social entrepreneur interested in an MBA education at Oxford, the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship has issued a last call for applications for a full scholarship to attend Oxford University’s full-time, one-year MBA program. The Scholarship covers fees and offers a stipend for living costs. The application fee can be waived for candidates from developing economies.

For further information, see http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/skoll.

Looking to load your iPod with interesting content before the weekend? Check out the Social Innovation Conversation series, a project of Stanford’s Center for Social Innovation.

These podcasts feature social entrepreneurs – everyone from Jed Emerson discussing blended value to Ethan Zuckerman on “Why should we care about Africa?” (Side note – Ethan reports on the OLPC project at Worldchanging – a must-read). There are some great non-BOP offerings as well: Zack Warren, who recently set the World's Record for running the Philadelphia marathon – while juggling. I heard about the podcast series from Pablo Halkyard over at the PSD Blog; he mentioned that the World Bank joined the podcast world, too.

In an article published last month in the New York Times Magazine, Rob Walker explains how a group of hipsters are challenging consumerism by actually participating in it. As Walker reports, those who find a corporation’s business practices morally odious have turned to socially responsible brands and are now only consuming products made by these companies. “The marketplace itself is not the enemy in this situation” Walker writes, “it's a tool for expressing discontent.”

In the last several days we have talked a lot about our mapping project for the Inter-American Development Bank’s upcoming conference, “Building Opportunity for the Majority.” But as important as this conference is for the BOP, it should not overshadow other equally important events that we have penciled in on the calendar.