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On Thursday, December 14th, key players in Brazil’s financial and private sectors met at the 3rd Annual New Ventures Investor Forum to discuss the state of business and environment in the country. Representatives from such corporate and financial leaders as Wal-Mart Brazil, Stratus Investimentos, and ABN AMRO discussed topics from the ecological impact of international supply chains to regulations of small enterprise, but the main issue on everyone’s mind was “Will society [and the private-sector] respond in time to the sustainability challenge?”

Posed by Andre Mariano of AxialPar investments, this may be the most important question of 2006, and it was answered by four of Brazil’s most promising small enterprises. These winners of the Investor Forum were:

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One World Projects was founded by Phil Smith, a pioneer in the Fair Trade world before it was hot. Originally conceived as a sustainable alternative for communities living in rainforest areas, Phil worked directly with communities to create crafts from renewable resources and then sold them to the US market.

The company has grown and changed over the years to become an established player in the Fair Trade crafts arena. Phil and his partner, Liz Wald, now work with more than 11,000 artisans in more 20 than developing countries. OWP has been working longer than most of its competitors, creating long-lasting relationships that truly transform communities.

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While it may seem cliché, I’ve always enjoyed the proverb advising that "when life deals you lemons, make lemonade." The phrase was my first thought when I saw a recent story out of Ethiopia about Azmarew Zeleke’s burgeoning coffee business; in this case, replace "lemons" with "spent mortar shells" and "lemonade" with "coffee machines". It may not have the same ring as lemons-lemonade, but you get the idea.

At a time when most of the coffee-related news out of Ethiopia has to do with a nasty trademark dispute between local farmers and Starbucks, Zeleke's story stands out for its inspirational tone. He and his six staff take spent shells left over from the 1998-2000 Eritrea/Ethiopia conflict, transforming the shells' aluminum cylinders to channel water, milk, and coffee instead of explosive powder.

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I've recently been reading through some past blogs, keeping a keen and curious eye out for activities to add to NextBillion's activity database...care to see what I found? Some very interesting, and of course worthwhile projects...

ZENUFA Laboratories - Tanzania

Zenufa, a pharmaceutical company, is settting up one of the first Tanzanian pharmaceutical plants complying with the WHO Current Good Manufacturing Standards. The project is being supported by BIO (Belgian Investment Company for Developing Countries)

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. In addition, this plant will improve the access to essential drugs, will help reduce prices and will offer opportunities to launch more sophisticated drugs. Zenufa will create about 150 new jobs, most of them for women.

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The crop duster crashing and dumping pesticides into the Los Mochis water supply was bad enough. But when a warehouse blaze released toxic agrochemicals into the air, causing respiratory illnesses among farmers and their families in the area, Jorge Berni knew there had to be a better way.

Jorge had twenty years of experience as an organic farmer but in the wake of this series of ecological disasters, he decided to apply his chemical expertise and his principled stance on sustainable practices to form Berni Labs and create a pesticide alternative. His product, Bug Balancer has expanded its appeal as a safe, highly effective agrochemical from the local agriculture community in which he works to the far corners of Mexico, and more recently to the international market.

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UPDATE: Michael Jarvis has posted notes from another meeting, this one called Business Reaching the Poor. Based on his post, it sounds like the second seminar was more focused and less rhetorical than the first (although that's not saying much.

Thanks to PSD Blogger Michael Jarvis, we have a short update from the World Bank – International Monetary Fund annual meeting, currently being held in Singapore. Jarvis attended a seminar entitled "Raising the Stakes: New Frontiers for the Private Sector in Development", and has this report:

Prahalad called for consumption-led, not investment-led, development, with business providing greater choices to the poor and helping reduce the poverty penalty where the poor pay more for the same goods than the wealthy. [He] argued that boardroom debate no longer focuses on the "why" of reaching out to 5 billion poor consumers - it just makes sense - but on the “how”. Innovation is required in marketing, pricing and across company operations.

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We’ve discussed the World Bank’s Doing Business report previously on this blog, and now the WB has made it so you can continue the conversation on their website. Check here for a link to the Doing Business discussion forum, open to thoughts and analysis from the general public.

There is plenty of good conversation fodder here- for one, the report finds, unsurprisingly, that the least amount of reforms were made by governments in the areas of labor laws and that 85% of reforms happen in the first 15 months of a new government. No big shock that business reforms are highly political, and that voters might take issue with their government making it easier for them to be fired or paid a low wage.

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As the flow of remittances has expanded massively in recent years, many in the private sector have taken advantage. While this has positive effects for facilitating formal transactions (rather than, say, having your cousin deliver money by hand), there has not been enough competition to keep prices reasonably low. Transfer services such as Western Union can take as much as 15% of the money a migrant worker sends his family in Nicaragua from the US. Rates this high hurt the ability of remittances to have positive development impacts and give senders incentives to transfer their money through informal networks.

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We've talked a lot on NextBillion about the selling and re-selling of mobile phone minutes, whether its the phone ladies of Grameen Telecom or the sari-sari street merchants of Smart Communications. Now Kevin Kelly (of Wired Magazine and Whole Earth Catalog fame) points us to a cool phenomenon in China - small stores letting customers use their land-lines for a fee. Check out the picture, nabbed from Flickr via Kevin's blog.

(Via Smart Mobs)

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First of all, a big pat on the back for Ecocreto gaining recognition for its work on NPR recently. Secondly, a disclaimer: As I write this posting about water conservation issues in Mexico City, I realize that not too long ago, I also discussed the City's air quality problem. I feel bad picking on Mexico, home to one of the greatest places on Earth, but this warrants some attention - besides, the story of Ecocreto is an optimistic note in all of this.

I was reading Joel Makower's recent post on how water issues could become the next big enviro-development crisis. Though the blog was devoted to how "rich" countries are plagued by unclean water, it reminded me of how someone from Mexico City had commented on my DryWash piece, asking if this waterless carwash service would be available in his area, where people are worried about an impending water shortage and sanitation crisis. Apparently he is not the only one to notice this; one person interviewed in this BBC story laments that "the city was built above a lake, and yet we have no water!"

Clearly, the government needs to begin looking at a number of solutions, but one promising fix that has popped up is the use of permeable concrete, invented by the founders of Ecocreto (I told you there was a happy ending). I was delighted to find that this New Ventures Mexico partner was featured recently on NPR's "Living on Earth" program. The report details how in the midst of worries about Mexico City's aquifers draining by 1 meter per year, chemist Jaime Grau inadvertently devised a type of concrete that was strong enough to hold heavy traffic loads, yet could allow four inches of water per minute to pass through.

As Mexico City grows and develops, creating new roads and repaving others, Ecocreto offers a revolutionary new way to allow rain water to reenter the ground, allowing the reservoirs to be refilled and stopping the urban infrastructure from slowly sinking. A massive overhaul would be costly for the city, but so would having more roads crack and buildings lean as the water is sucked out from under them. I especially enjoyed learning about the Ecocreto segment not just to get our outstanding NV enterpreneurs some well-deserved exposure, but because it shows that small businesses have a great capacity to solve major problems through the innovative tendencies and flexibility inherent in them. Be sure to check out the full NPR piece here, or visit the company's website. It makes me wonder- with Ecocreto tackling water problems and Vehizero fighting Mexico City's infamous air pollution, when do we get services like that operating in DC?