Challenge

Waste management is a major challenge in developing countries such as Kenya. This is a particular problem in rapidly growing urban centres like Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. Nairobi produces around 1’900 tonnes of waste per day. Only 33% of the waste is collected for disposal at Nairobi’s only official dumpsite, Dandora. The rest is littered on hundreds of illegal dumpsites, next to houses or burned. Uncollected waste and reckless dumping result in severe health and environmental problems.

Current approaches by the various stakeholders in waste management are unsuccessful. The public sector cannot cope with the problem due to poor planning and lack of finances. The private sector’s existing approaches to waste management are not able to treat waste as a valuable good: Waste is only collected to be disposed at Dandora dumpsite. The potential income from recycling and composting is lost. Consequently, waste collection and disposal becomes unnecessarily expensive, which only 33% of Nairobi’s citizens can affordF. The Informal sector is unable to take advantage of the value of waste. Waste pickers on dumpsites are only able to recover a small fraction of recyclable waste. This is because waste on dumpsites is mixed waste, i.e. organic waste not separated from inorganic waste. Consequently, separated recyclable waste is contaminated and has little economic value.

Innovation

TakaTaka Solutions is a social enterprise that collects and recycles waste. It aims to bring about social and environmental change through a commercially viable business approach, in particular:

-          Affordable waste collection services to all income areas

-          Recycling and composting of up to 85% of collected waste

-          Job creation in the informal sector

-          A cleaner and healthier environment

TakaTaka Solutions will achieve this by reusing as much waste as possible using state of the art technology, while minimising transport costs. It will collect separated waste from its clients, i.e. organic waste separated from inorganic waste. It will compost the organic waste to organic fertilizers, which it will sell to Kenyan farmers. TakaTaka Solutions will recover the recyclable waste (paper, plastic, glass and metal) from the inorganic waste. The recyclable waste will be sold to recycling industries. This will leave only 15% of residual waste for final disposal.

TakaTaka Solutions will use two adapted business models, one for higher income areas and one for lower income areas.

In higher income areas, TakaTaka Solutions will collect waste from clients. It will compost the organic waste at its Composting Facility, while it will recover recyclable waste at its Recyclable Waste Separation Facility.

In lower income areas, TakaTaka Solutions will partner with youth groups who will collect waste. The youth groups will sell the organic waste and the recovered recyclable waste to TakaTaka Solutions. For this purpose, TakaTaka Solutions will own and operate decentralised waste processing facilities, called “TakaTaka Points”. As the TakaTaka Points will be situated within lower income areas, youth groups incur low transport costs. This enables them to offer affordable waste collection services to the local community at USD 1/household/month.

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Malo Traders LLC brings to bear the talent and dedication of highly skilled individuals with global perspectives and grassroots knowledge, a socially conscious business model, and cutting-edge technology on the problems of post-harvest losses and malnutrition in Mali.  Working in partnership with the Program for Appropriate Technologies in Health (PATH), we believe we can produce and market rice fortified with essential micronutrients in Mali in commercially viable manner while at the same time increasing the income of farmers and saving consumers money due to our human and technological approach.

 

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Doctors do their bit for society, teachers make their contribution. All of them use their skills to give something back to a society which has made them who they are.

As business students we need to do our bit.

This is the emotion behind SIFE-CBS which is shared by all its members. The project aims at developing a business which would be managed entirely by women. Hence, it will enable women to develop major entrepreneurial skills.

Sanitation Solutions aims at ensuring the use of hygienic sanitary napkins by women in slums across Delhi and providing a sustained means of livelihood to slum women. The project also aims at helping these slum women learn the basic skills of selling and encourages them to be independent in financial matters. Regular awareness camps about sanitary hygiene are held in various slums of Delhi to teach them the basics of hygiene and answer their queries about the same.

Sanitary napkins are procured from the manufacturers directly, thereby reducing the cost, and these are given to the sellers in the slums who in turn earn a reasonable profit margin. The product is available to the slum women at a price which is much lower than the market price and at the same time the quality is not compromised with.

The basic idea of the project is to provide healthy sanitary conditions to the females living in slums while giving them an opportunity to earn a livelihood for themselves.

Females are provided with resources and infrastructure to set up their own business of making sanitary napkins and selling it in their own local slum. The women are taught how to manage the finances of the business, thus making them financially literate and enabling them to manage their own income and household’s income effectively and efficiently. They are also taught inventory management and supply chain management.

Women are provided with basic marketing and selling skills. This allows them to think innovatively to ensure maximum sales and steady growth of their business. They will also be able to develop soft skills while interacting with various kinds of customers and the suppliers.

This enables the women to achieve close interaction with the users, which otherwise cannot be achieved by the current forms and channels of marketing. Since all women will be working together for 2-3 hours a day cutting across barriers of caste, religion might foster means of social interaction amongst them and develop harmony within the slum dwelling. They also develop major entrepreneurial skills – by managing and running the business independently.

At the same time, we also fulfill our responsibility towards the environment.  All sanitary pads are provided in a plastic cover (LD type plastic which has a capacity to decompose) which can be used for the purpose of disposal of those pads, hence not harming the environment in any way.  The sanitary pads are made up of cotton and other organic material which is biodegradable. This minimizes any long term harm on the environment.

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Problem

The World Bank believes that one of the greatest problems facing Africa is the severe lack of adequate access to educational, health, and social empowerment information for the majority of Africans. This situation severely restricts and hampers community self-development and is further exacerbated by the yearly decline in global book production as more content and information moves online.
Unless efforts are made to provide the necessary information in education, entrepreneurship, and social development, there will not be sustainable development in Africa.

Vision

http://www.vimeo.com/16103789

Our vision is one of empowerment through access. We aim to empower individuals and communities across Africa by delivering digitally-enhanced multi-use library facilities throughout Africa. Our vision is a modern application of the proven and phenomenally successful ‘Carnegie Formula’ for community development. 

Like Carnegie, LAA envisions that libraries are not merely a repository for books, but they are also a catalyst for community development and empowerment. By providing cost effective infrastructure and information solutions, communities will be empowered to address their own unique economic, educational, social, technological, and business challenges.

We believe that the ability to resolve your own challenges is the foundation of empowerment, and that empowerment is a combination of education and entrepreneurship. Fundamentally, we support the concept that education contributes to poverty reduction and community transformation; and it is entrepreneurship which is the optimum expression of this change.

The Solution

We plan to significantly advance the developmental capabilities of African communities by providing innovative, easily deployable enhanced Library solutions in African communities.
Each library is a streamlined facility for people to participate in both education and entrepreneurship in Africa.

LAA’s libraries are designed to serve both producers and consumers of education and entrepreneurship content.   Rather than simply deliver computers or Internet access, LAA provides a three component solution to the access and information divide. 


 
The first component, the Anchor, is a community provided space to house a physical collection of resources. The anchor establishes community ownership and demonstrates a commitment to the project. Each anchor will be environmentally appropriate, culturally relevant, and site specific. The Anchor will house the physical collection of volumes, and function as both collaborative and individual work environments.

The second component, the Agora, is the covered space adjacent to the anchor building. A lightweight, environmentally efficient roof will transform this space into a usable area for meetings and other activities. The Agora will have wireless Internet and be lit with low power solar lights. It is a flexible social environment that serves as a catalyst for community building.

The third component, the Hub, is a modified shipping container with technology infrastructure, workstations, reprographic equipment, and physical connections to the Internet. Each Hub will be wired to allow broadband internet access, as well as capabilities for wireless access in and around the unit. 

The Hub provides an economical solution to the technological backbone of the modern library and houses online journals, bundled content for Education, Commercial & Business, Health, Technology & Innovation, and Entertainment, and on-demand book printing and binding which allows a community-generated collection of knowledge specifically tailored to local interests. 
 

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Currently, women in developing nations cook food for their families using inefficient, unhealthy wood or coal burning stoves. And not just the women, but children are also exposed to this unhealthy environment. They have to inhale the poisonous fumes given off by the burning of the unrefined fuel sources. What if they could have a much cleaner and more efficient source of fuel? We, at the University of Michigan have designed a biogas digester that uses animal waste along with minimal amount of water to produce methane, a highly combustible gas that can be used to cook meals instead of using wood, coal or other unhealthy fuel sources. Methane, on combustion, breaks down into carbon dioxide and water and both of them are harmless gases. Also, the digester results in a nitrogen rich by-product that can be used as a fertilizer. What’s more is that if methane is used as the cooking fuel, the family saves on the money that it would otherwise spend on buying wood, or at the very least the time it took them to chop down the wood. Over the long run, this would lead to a decrease in deforestation, make the families more productive by freeing up some of their time, and improve their overall quality of life. adityabhandari230.0

The mission of Project Yele is to use renewable energy to bring prosperity and wealth to rural Sierra Leone in an innovative way. After a civil war that enveloped the country for over a decade, everything was destructed in Yele, a rural Village in Sierra Leone. Yele was chosen as the first village to pilot this concept because it is (1) ideally situated in the center of the country and (2) previously had a hydroelectric power plant that is currently being refurbished and will be opened on April 25, 2011. We helped rebuild the existing hydro power plant and want to make sure that once it is functional, the electricity will be adequately used for the betterment of the village. Project Yele aims to promote social and economic development through the planning and construction of a Community Bazaar that will act as the medium through which electricity will be converted into economic activity. By combining various strategic facilities in an innovative way, independent and sustainable growth can be achieved.

The Community Bazaar will be a marketplace where local entrepreneurs can start businesses using key facilities such as clean drinking water, electricity, Internet and refrigeration. Initially, sixteen shop owners will be housed in the bazaar, each of which will bring new products and services to the market that were not possible before due to the lack of electricity.

These are examples of businesses that could contribute to the development of the community:

Health and nutrition:

• Supermarket with refrigeration space (perishable foods can be sold)
• Pharmacy (cool-store medicine)
• Cooking stoves (replaces smoke causing fires)
• Public toilets

Education:

• Study room
• Internet facilities
• Selling point and charging station for portable LED lights

Others:

• Bank
• Toolshop

 

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Sanergy increases access to safe, affordable sanitation in urban slums. We are building a network of low-cost sanitation centers in every block of the slums of Nairobi, Kenya. We collect the waste from our network of saniatation centers at our central processing facilities where it is converted into biomethane, electricity, and organic fertilizer. Our innovative for-profit business model combats the challenges of sanitation, energy, and food production while generating local employment and improving living conditions. aniv60.0