In the United States, faith, along with the rest of American culture, has been industrialized, and is now manufactured and sold in the mega-church, an odd cross between a sports stadium and a big box store. But thankfully, for those of us who can’t find salvation beneath blaring florescent lights, we can at least get a semblance of it by purchasing the latest line of scientifically tested diet pills. So while many of us have shunned faith, often under the guise of science and enlightenment, we have created other modes of living, like diet pills and energy shakes, which are no more rational.

Historically, India, with its four-armed gods and sacred cows, has been one of the west's irrational, orientalist fantasies, that has been sought out by anomic Americans. But as India looks to take a leadership role in the 21st century, embracing cellular and wireless technologies, among other new innovations, its exotic elements are starting to look, well, a lot less exotic. This might be a bad thing for the imaginations of many Americans and other westerners, but in all likelihood it will be a boon for many people in India.

Feet are important to discussions of the BOP hypothesis. I’m not talking about feet as in the unit of length, but rather as those awkward appendages connected to your legs. From a base of the pyramid vantage point, which is the best foot forward?

I did some thinking about this, and decided that there are two ways to view feet through the BOP lens. The first is negative, and has to do with the penalty poor people are subject to by virtue of their poverty. We all know, for instance, that those lacking access to basic services (water, energy, healthcare) must walk long distances – a scene from the HBO movie "Yesterday," where the title character must make a day-long walk (twice) to visit a once-monthly health clinic, comes to mind for healthcare in particular.

But your feet aren’t only for walking, nor are they simply an illustration of poverty – there is another foot forward. Feet can also be powerful instruments of change at the base of the pyramid, when enabled by the right technologies. Step-action generators charge cell phones in rural Rwanda and treadle pumps irrigate Kenyan farms – there’s a whole list of so-called "leapfrogging technologies" (not necessarily foot-powered) that are covered well by Alex Steffen over at Worldchanging. Here are some reviews and updates of a few good foot-related projects that have been in the news lately: Freeplay and Kickstart.

“Shit business is serious business,” explains Otunba Gadaffi, founder of DMT, a Nigerian based mobile toilet provider.  And he is right—poor sanitation is a major problem in this burgeoning nation of over 130 million, causing an array of preventable diseases like dysentery and cholera.  In fact, an editorial published last month by the Daily Champion, a Lagos based newspaper, laments the lack of publicly available toilets in Nigeria’s cities and the unsightly occurrences that result: “…Nigerians suffer the undignified sight of citizens urinating and defecating in open spaces to the embarrassment of onlookers, foreign and local.  No sight or sign is as defining of a people's level of being as that of sane, adult Nigerians openly answering the call of nature without qualms or embarrassment. This is a daily occurrence in all major city centres in the North and South of the country.”  Fortunately for everyone involved, if Mr. Gadaffi gets his way, rogue and shameless defecators, like the ones described the Daily Champion, will have a new and private place to relieve themselves.

One of China's most popular programs right now is a reality-show called "Win in China," a sort of spin-off of the Apprentice model only with minimal shady dealings and fortunately no appearances by Donald Trump. The basic idea is that 108 aspiring entrepreneurs battle to sharpen their business plans, prove their managerial talents and even endure some physical challenges to compete for the CEO position of a company and RMB 10 million of its stock. While many readers out there might be wondering how "you're fired" translates into Mandarin (by the way, it's "ni bei kai chu le"- yes, I actually looked it up), what is really interesting about the program is that it has brought some sustainability issues to the forefront that would not have gotten much attention several years ago.

In a report published last month, Matt Fellowes of the centrist Brookings Institution documents a "ghetto tax" paid by lower-income consumers in the United States – essentially, proof that poor people in underserved areas pay more for basic goods and services. Sound familiar? In 2002, Allen Hammond (of WRI and NextBillion) and C.K. Prahalad published similar data on the high-cost economy of the poor in Dharavi, India. Prahalad later included these data in his 2004 book. Whether you call it a ghetto tax (Fellowes), poverty penalty (Prahalad), or BOP penalty (Hammond), the central point is the same – poor people are often trapped in poverty because of the high-cost economies in which they live.

Changemakers is at it again. Loyal NextBillionites might remember that Changemakers is an innovation-recognition initiative of Ashoka, the award-winning social entrepreneurship incubator. CM runs contests awarding the best entrepreneurs in a given sector – previous competitions have included How to Improve Health for All and How to Build a More Ethical Society – and the winners each receive $5,000 cash prizes. Talk about incentives!

The latest contest is called How to Provide Affordable Housing, and the contest organizers are eager for more entrants. To be eligible, an organization must be doing actual, on-the-ground work in affordable housing. Winners will be judged based on four factors: innovation, impact, strategy, and sustainability.

I’m not much for public ego boosting, but a couple newsworthy items regarding the NextBillion.net crew have come up today, and I figured some of y’all would be interested.

First, Derek Newberry’s latest post, "TV Hit Proves Sustainability Will 'Win in China'" has been named by Treehugger as its "favorite green of the week." Check out the original post on NextBillion as well as the feature on Treehugger. Nice work, Derek!

More great news about sustainable business trends in China- check out this article on how the country's organic food exports have surged, increasing at a 50% annual rate. An amazing story related to this development that you should read as you head out for the weekend: Jiangyou Xun Pai Organic Agriculture Co.

This Sunday, the New York Times Business section ran a front page article -- Coffee, and Hope, Grow in Rwanda -- on the remarkable story of Gemima Mukashyaka, an orphan of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, who has returned to her parents former coffee farm and, with the help of USAID and a local cooperative, has become part of a thriving coffee trade, which produces premium quality beans for export to the United States. As the Times notes, there are many small farmers like her who are also reaping the benefits of Rwanda’s booming coffee business: “Rwanda, a tiny East African country recently rent by a famously savage civil war, has found hope in that most colonial of crops: coffee. By riding booming demand in the developed world for specialty brews — and, to a certain extent, by turning its own challenges to its advantage — Rwanda has made premium coffee-growing a national priority. That has not only brought in a trickle of money to a country with little else to trade, but provided a stage on which one-time blood enemies can reconcile their terrible history.”

Since covering the lighter side of sustainable enterprise in China last week, I thought it would be helpful to discuss a more practical effort underway to make social and environmental impacts a mainstream consideration among businesses in the quickly developing East Asian region. ASrIA has recently published a new clearing house for climate change information and strategy on their website.

 

This comes at a crucial moment for business strategies on global warming. Recent PR blitzes on this issue surrounding events like "An Inconvenient Truth" have helped to create a sense of the immediate necessity to act on climate change, but there is some amount of difficulty in taking the first step. As the Post recently noted, that is the "inconvenient" part of the film. Fortunately, there are signs that the general public is taking this dilemma seriously, and the private sector is very much involved. As ASrIA notes in an introduction to their Climate Change Portal, there were about $12 billion in trades on different carbon markets last year. The will on the part of many businesses and governments is there- that ambition would turn to practice if there were a sense that collective action was underway.

Over at the Acumen Fund’s blog, Jacqueline Novogratz comments on the recent death of Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy – founder of India’s Aravind Eye Hospital. BOP practitioners and international development experts may be familiar with the hospital, which revolutionized eye care by applying profitable, assembly-line techniques to simple surgeries.

Part I of this series described Rwanda’s burgeoning cooperative movement and its thriving coffee industry, which have combined to alleviate crippling poverty and ethnic tensions in this country. Part II of this series places the current success of Rwanda’s coffee industry in a broader historical context and explains why export oriented development might not be such a good thing after all.

Part II
Coffee was introduced to what is now present day Rwanda by Belgium colonialists, who, in 1933, made it compulsory for Rwandan’s to grow coffee on at least a quarter of their land. Even today, more than forty years after independence, coffee has the foul aftertaste of colonialism here and many Rwanda’s refuse to drink it, opting instead for tea. But for highbrow American connoisseurs, Rwandan coffee is a delicacy. Premium coffee roasters, with snooty names like Intelligentsia, are coming to Rwanda in droves and paying upwards of $3.50 a pound for high quality beans. And with entire armies of coffee-sipping yuppies taking over neighborhood cafes in the United States, Rwanda’s coffee bean growers, who now produce some of the world’s highest quality beans, are finally seeing this vestige of colonialism pay off.

I don’t know how I managed it, but I burned through my summer reading list in record time earlier this month.  Perhaps it was a week spent on vacation in Northern Michigan; maybe the heat has kept me inside more than usual.  In any case, I figure folks might be wrapping up their own summer reading and interested in some additional recommendations, so over the next couple of days, I’ll chime in with some ideas.

First up is a back issue of the Inter-American Development Bank’s in-house magazine, IDBAmerica.  The July issue is anchored by BOP content, which makes it a must-read for NextBillionaires.  (Side note – NextBillionaires or NextBillionites?  I can’t decide – comment away if you have a preference).  Anyway, highlights include:

To paraphrase Nestor Canclini, Argentina’s celebrated cultural critic, what happens when an anthropologist reads the Harvard Business Review and the McKinsey Quarterly, two publications that advocate selling to the poor?  From what I can tell, there are three common reactions.  The first reaction is characterized by a sudden burst of apoplexy.  As anyone who reads these publications knows, capitalist pigs, who play on consumers’ insecurities to sell their products, are now employing the same manipulative tactics in the developing world.  The second response is marked by moral indignation, topped off with a dollop of self-righteousness.  If the corporate board room understood the value of culture and operated more like an Anthropology Department, things would be a whole lot better, even if meetings became significantly less efficient.  And the third response would call for calm and order, suggesting that low-income consumerism be examined within its broader political context.  This is exactly what Nestor Canclini does in his insightful book, Consumers and Citizens, which provides a new and refreshing look at the rise of consumer culture in Latin America. 

A column in today’s New York Times suggests Indian microfinance institutions might soon be subject to regulations, such as interest rate caps, that would force them to dramatically reduce or even halt operations. Why must governments see the private sector only as a threat, and never as a partner?

Read past the break for excerpts from the article and my analysis.