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NAIROBI/TRANSMARA, Kenya – Two years ago, fed up with a husband who drank too much and provided too little, Julie Amunga, who lives in the sprawling Mathare slum in the capital, Nairobi, decided to start a business that would enable her to support her family.

“My friends and I all had husbands who drank too much and beat us at home and yet they were not providing anything for the home,” she told IRIN/PlusNews. “We would sleep with other men secretly to provide for our children but we realized we were not helping our children because prostituting would only make us acquire HIV and die early.”

Amunga and five friends decided to pool their savings and use them to start small businesses; they also got a microfinance loan from the Jamii Bora Trust, which works to empower youth and women in Nairobi’s slums.

While she and another woman have managed to sustain successful small businesses – she grows and sells vegetables and fresh fruit juice in the local market – the other three found it much harder to make the loans work for them.

“Their husbands cheated them and took all the money yet we were supposed to pay back the loan,” she said. “Others took the money without knowing which business they want to start, so … they ended up spending the money.”

According to Joseph Kwaka, executive director of Community Aid International (CAI), an NGO that runs a micro-credit programme in Nyanza and Nairobi provinces, making micro-credit available to women – and especially widows – helps cushion them from poverty, but without proper preparation and training, can just as easily backfire.

“Our experience with offering credit facilities to women is that many take the money and end up using it to buy family needs like food, clothes, without even starting a business for which you gave them the money,” he told IRIN/PlusNews. “Others will tell you the husband took all the money and used it for drinking or maintaining another woman, forgetting that this money should be repaid and the only way you can repay it is by starting a business enterprise.

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In the a quiet and laid-back Coastal Region, a pioneering new project involving poultry farming is giving ordinary people a chance to lift themselves out of poverty.

Research Into Use (RIU) is a programme based in Dar es Salaam which aims at promoting innovations and utilisation of new knowledge and research output, to eradicate poverty.

RIU has so far enabled a community in the Rufiji District to rear a hundreds of chicks each with the intention of selling them at markets in six month's time.

The location poses lots of challenges to the farmers because of the distances people have to travel in order to access the necessary support services like buying chicks, feed, vaccines and other veterinary drugs, as well as competing in at the market-place.

By developing sustainable local systems and capacities to provide such services at affordable prices, entrepreneurs in the local chicken industry have the chance to create a small business and improve their lives.

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Their mission is to bring light to millions of households that do not have access to electricity. Betting big on solar lighting products, Sam Goldman and his team have embarked on an enduring journey to remove darkness from the remotest corners of the world.

Sam was moved by an unfortunate incident, while working as a US Peace Corps volunteer in the West African nation of Benin between 2001 and 2005, which led him to focus on this segment.

"My neighbour's son in Benin was badly burned by a kerosene lamp. It was disturbing to see that when we made so much progress in terms of technology, we still did not have a solution to this grave problem. So I had made up my mind to provide a source of light that is safe and cheap."

He then joined Stanford University to pursue an MBA in social entrepreneurship. The idea got a fillip at the 'Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability' class at the Stanford University's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.

Sam Goldman then joined hands with classmate Ned Tozun to start D.Light Design, a company that makes affordable solar lighting solutions to serve the bottom-of-the-pyramid households in India and other markets across the globe. The initial research and early prototyping of what became D.light products, began in 2006.

The company was officially founded in mid-2007 with the ambitious mission to reach out to about 1.6 billion people in the world without electricity, and another billion or more who have unreliable electricity.

The company's latest product, Kiran (which means a ray of light), is a low-cost solar lighting solution, designed especially for households without access to electricity. Dubbed the 'kerosene killer', Kiran is priced at Rs 499 ($10) making it the most affordable, quality solar lantern in the world.

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FORT COLLINS – Engineering researchers at Colorado State University have found a new way to detect traces of tuberculosis bacteria in fluids that would allow for a more sensitive and accurate detection of the deadly disease.
The research by Diego Krapf, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and a faculty member in the School of Biomedical Engineering, was recently recognized by the Optical Society of America for its potential use in developing countries that face a greater risk of TB and its prospective use to detect latent cases of TB.

Working with Krapf on the research are Mike McNeil, Mike Scherman and John Spencer in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology at Colorado State.

The end goal of the project is to develop a platform for the detection of TB that is portable, affordable and does not require highly trained personnel.
Krapf has developed a biosensor that uses a combination of chemistry and lasers to isolate proteins prevalent in TB. Krapf mixes a sample with fluorescent antibodies for the targeted TB proteins and coats the glass slide with a molecular brush that will stick only to those proteins. Using a home-made microscope, Krapf can determine whether a large number of the proteins are present, which indicates the test is positive for TB.

Also on Krapf’s team, working on this project, are biomedical engineering graduate students Kristen Jevsevar and Aubrey Weigel. Undergraduate students Jeremy Stone and Nathan Proper are working to develop a smaller and cheaper version of the biosensor – now tabletop size – to use in the developing world.

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Cassava's profile as a food security and poverty-reducing crop got a boost with the commissioning of five new processing centres in Sierra Leone, thanks to the Common Fund for Commodities (CFC), International Institute of Tropical Agriculture and Sierra Leone Agricultural Research Institute and other partners.

"It will also improve livelihoods, and incomes of farmers and stakeholders in the cassava enterprise," says Prof Lateef Sanni, project coordinator, for the CFC funded project. "More importantly, this will create markets and drive the production of cassava."

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By Ketaki Gokhale

Mahabubnagar, India

The practice of making tiny loans to poor people, or microfinance, was supposed to help drive traditional village moneylenders from rural India.

Instead, traditional moneylenders, who typically charge high interest rates, are thriving, even in areas most heavily targeted by microfinance, which was begun as a way to help combat poverty by granting the poor access to capital to start businesses. Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi founder of microfinance, won a Nobel Peace Prize.

Even as the government and nonprofit organizations came together to create the Indian microfinance market in the 1990s, traditional moneylenders' share of total rural Indian household debt grew to 29.6% from 17.5%, according to a government survey. Another recent survey by the Reserve Bank of India found that between 1995 and 2006, the number of registered traditional moneylenders increased 56% to 19,627 from 12,601. Though much harder to quantify, unlicensed lenders are believed to have made similar gains, the survey says.

One potential reason for their growth: Some microfinance borrowers say they need village moneylenders to help them pay their debts on time. Some academic researchers believe the moneylenders are keeping afloat many microfinance groups.

Peer pressure to pay back microfinance loans is intense, because microlenders almost always require borrowers to join small, tightknit groups. If one member defaults, none can get another loan. Microloans have a stellar repayment rate -- close to 100% -- and some analysts believe a hidden reason is the stopgap provided by moneylenders.

Microfinancing has boomed in recent years. Though founded as nonprofits, the Indian microfinance industry has been turbocharged by private-equity firms, nearly doubling in the year ended March 31, delivering $2.5 billion in loans. Many microfinance lenders have recently registered as for-profit finance firms with the Reserve Bank of India, the Indian central bank, giving them wider access to funds but limiting them to "reasonable" interest rates. Those rates are still high -- between 20% and 40% annually, according to the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, or CGAP, hosted at the World Bank.

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Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) -- India’s wholesale food prices rose at the fastest pace in eleven years, making it more likely that the central bank will raise borrowing costs to curb inflation.

An index of food articles compiled by the commerce ministry increased 19.95 percent in the week ended Dec. 5 from a year earlier, following a 19.05 percent gain in the previous week. A measure of fuel and electricity prices rose 3.95 percent, the ministry said in a statement in New Delhi today.

Policy makers in Asia have started to exit monetary stimulus as the global economic recovery causes the focus to shift from reviving growth to fighting inflation. Australia and Vietnam have already begun raising interest rates as inflation accelerates across Asia, with China’s consumer prices rising for the first time in 10 months in November.

“When growth is subdued, inflation can be ignored,” said Sonal Varma, a Mumbai-based economist at Nomura Holdings Inc., Japan’s largest brokerage. “However, with both growth and inflation surprising on the upside, we believe that a policy action is imminent.”

India’s economy expanded 7.9 percent in the three months to Sept. 30 from a year earlier, the fastest pace in 1 1/2 years, giving policy makers room to shift their focus to soaring food inflation that threatens to undermine the popularity of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Singh got re-elected this year on promises to alleviate poverty in a nation where about 800 million people live on less than $2 a day.

Parliament Disruption

Opposition lawmakers yesterday accused the government of being ineffective in tackling soaring food prices and disrupted parliament, forcing the speaker of the lower house to adjourn for the day.

A panel of Indian lawmakers said in a report presented to parliament today that the government “failed to intervene” in a timely manner to address this “burning issue.” The standing committee of finance demanded a probe into the surge in sugar prices and suggested developing a mechanism to provide food items directly to consumers to overcome hoarding.

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The Manipal - Philips BoP (Base of Pyramid) Centre has been granted access to a fund of 90,000 Euros, thanks to the European Union sponsored Manipal Centre for European Studies that was launched a few days ago at Manipal University.

BOP deals with designing technology that can help people who live at the base of the pyramid -- a strata that indicates their poverty-ridden lives.Some of the projects that have been developed under this concept include the Echaupal- Internet that connects rural farmers to the market without the middlemen and the microcredit finance system promoted by Grameen Bank in Bangladesh which won Prof Younus the Nobel Prize.

Ideas may be easy to generate, but it is a challenge to develop business plans to market them and work on making them economically reasonable for the poor.This was evident as experts and thinkers shared their ideas on the first day of the Manipal BoP Summit on Thursday. Experts who spoke included Professor Prabhu Kandachar from the Delft University of Technology, Netherlands and CEO of Philips Innovation Centre at Bangalore, Alexius Collette. Divvy Kant Upadhyay | ENS Manipal, December 18 THE Manipal - Philips BoP (Base of Pyramid) Centre has been granted access to a fund of 90,000 Euros, thanks to the European Union sponsored Manipal Centre for European Studies that was launched a few days ago at Manipal University.

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Even as large established developers shy away from the underserved affordable housing market in urban india, the shortage in the low-income housing segment — estimated to be around 2.1 crore households — presents a Rs 13 lakh crore opportunity for developers.

Housing finance for the low-income segment, defined as those with a monthly household income between Rs 7,000 and Rs 24,000, has been categorised as untested but relatively low-risk segment with significant business potential, according to a recent study by Mumbai-based Monitor Group, a global consulting firm.

The study has projected housing demand in different price categories and mapped the availability of housing finance for them.

At the bottom of the pyramid, with monthly household income levels between Rs 5,000 and Rs 20,000, the affordability of a house has been defined as between Rs 3 lakh and Rs 10 lakh. At this price, there could be potential of 21 million house buyers.

“Research shows that market-based solutions to address housing shortage for this segment can be found, which are profitable too,” said Monitor Group chief executive officer Ashish Karamchandani.

While financing is readily available for those with a monthly household income above Rs 12,000, the study shows that financing is negligible for those with lower household incomes belonging to the informal sector. The study defines affordability as households which have an equated monthly installment/monthly household income ratio of 40 per cent of a home loan which has a 20 per cent down payment on a home value.

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