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.