Obliterating Hunger: Groasis Waterboxx Grows Plants in the Desert

Pieter Hoff, a tulip grower from Holland, has developed a spectacularly interesting social innovation called the Groasis Waterboxx, which aims to address the difficulties associated with growing trees and plants in arid areas by capturing condensation and rainwater, and transferring this to the plant over a period of time without requiring any groundwater or electricity.

In a presentation he made at PopTech, Hoff describes how the problems of world hunger and global warming can be mitigated through harnessing stretches of desert. “One of six billion people on earth don’t get enough to eat,” he says. “There is a possibility to feed these people.”

After devising his invention in Holland, over a period of 4 years, Hoff tested it in the Sahara desert -- 88 percent of the trees he tried it on lasted. He then decided to market his invention for commercial use – the beginning of his company AquaPro Holland.

The box has a wide double opening, mimics a plants capillary action, by planting two seeds in a box on top of (rather than in a hole in) the soil. The box captures condensation and rain water, and distributes to this to the plant over a much longer period of time – one day or 4 inches of rain can be distributed over a period of one year. By this time, Hoff says, the plant or tree is far more established and is far more likely to be able to take care of itself thereon.

Giant Sniffer Rats Detect Landmines and TB

Image: APOPO

Rats have never been my favorite creatures, but an organization called APOPO that is successfully putting these furry rodents to work on rather noble causes, takes them up a notch or two in my books.

The Belgian-Tanzanian social enterprise trains giant African pouched rats to sniff out landmines and tuberculosis. According to the organizations website, the rats are far more efficient than humans – they can search 100 square metres of suspected land in 20 minutes, and can screen 70 human sputum samples for the TB agent Mycobacterium Tuberculosis, in 20 minutes – both activities that would take deminers and lab technicians two full days. 

The African giant pouched rat is particularly good at detection, as it is light enough to not set off a mine, cheaper than a sniffer dog, easily conditioned and has a heightened sense of smell.

The rats have an impressive track record: they have assessed 38.5 kms of highway in South Mozambique and have detected over a hundred landmines, explosive devices and ammunition. APOPO says the rats have an 87 percent overall accuracy in detecting TB (37 percent for microscopy), and have diagnosed 577 patients missed by microscopy. 

New MicroChip to Allow Paralysed to Move

EPSRC

British engineers have developed a new microchip muscle stimulator implant that will allow paralysed people to exercise their leg muscles.

A project of The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), research is being led by Professor Andreas Demosthenous from University College London. The new chip is expected to work where others have failed, due to its small size – the same as a child’s fingernail. It can be implanted into the spinal canal and incorporates the electrodes and muscle stimulator in one unit.

"The work has the potential to stimulate more muscle groups than is currently possible with existing technology because a number of these devices can be implanted into the spinal canal", said Professor Andreas Demosthenous in a written statement. "Stimulation of more muscle groups means users can perform enough movement to carry out controlled exercise such as cycling or rowing."

Named the Active Book, due to its shape, the device will be available for pilot studies sometime next year. It could also be used to stimulate nerve endings, helping with bowel capacity and incontinence. 

Are Skyscrapers the Farmlands of the Future?

Design by Olive Foster

Massive skyscrapers are more commonly associated with exacerbating, rather than mitigating, global warming. But if Dr. Dickson Despommier--author of The Vertical Farm, and professor of environmental sciences and microbiology at Columbia University--has any say in the matter, skyscrapers could play a big role in not just helping the environment, but also alleviating hunger. 

The main idea behind vertical farming is that fruit and crops will be grown hydroponically—nutrient rich water replaces the need for soil—in high-rise buildings. Planting, monitoring growth and harvesting would all take place within the building, and the cultivation process would employ what Despommier calls “close-loop agricultural technologies”: all water and nutrients are recycled substantially reducing runoff. 

According to Despommier, the benefits of vertical farming are manifold. Transportation and energy costs would reduce dramatically, since consumers would be located near by. Large tracts of land taken over for cultivation could be returned to their natural state, reducing carbon dioxide levels. Ancillary industries would burgeon around skyscrapers that specialized in one crop. Growing crops in a controlled environment would facilitate healthier, organic produce. Hunger would reduce: a 30-storey tower could feed upto 50,000 people.

“The biggest social benefit is that everybody gets fed healthy, clean food,” says Despommier. “The world would be a much better place if we had vertical farms.”

For-Profit Uses Carbon Credits to Provide Free Water Purification Systems

Image: Saabira Chaudhuri 

A for-profit social enterprise that provides free water purification systems to the poor in developing countries, is using carbon credits to finance its business.

New York Times contributor Tina Rosenberg has written a blog post about how Vestergaard Frandsen, the producers of LifeStraw (I’ve profiled them before for this blog and for Fast Company) – a portable water purification device that filters bacteria and contaminants from water, to make it potable. The company also produces a larger, fixed version of the device, called LifeStraw Family, which they plan on distributing for free in the developing world.

Vestergaard Frandsen plans to adopt a carbon credit model, by which it earns credits for preventing the boiling of water (which can be very damaging for the environment) . Polluters will then buy these credits, providing a sustainable source of income for the company. 

“The company is on the way to getting approval from one of the carbon credit markets for the LifeStraw Family, and expects to win it in February,” writes Rosenberg. “Approval will provide a way for Vestergaard Frandsen to recoup its $24 million initial investment and to turn the product into a sustainable business ─ at no cost to users.”

Why Thomas Friedman's Protectionist Column on Innovation is Wrong

Earlier this month, the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman wrote a column about Indian startups called Do Believe the Hype. 

Friedman takes a rather extreme view of the burgeoning of India’s startups – calling this movement “scary” and “depending on your perspective…a sign of the apocalypse.”

I find this protectionist sort of viewpoint strange. Don’t social innovations, like mobile banking which enables people in rural or otherwise off-the-grid type areas access to institutionalized forms of savings and transfer of funds, benefit us all? If I can save more, transfer money more easily, become richer, and make my business more efficient, that’s good for GDP and the economy as a whole – domestic and global – as innovations can, and will, be exported.

500 Million to Use Mobile Health Apps by 2015

Mobile health applications could be the next big market for social entrepreneurs. While mhealth has been touted as a potentially billion dollar industry for some time now, a new report attempts to analyze the mhealth application market in particular.


 According to the Mobile Health Market Report 2010-2015, released in time for the DC based mhealth summit, which finished yesterday, 500 million of a total of 1.4 billion smart phone users will be using mobile health applications by 2015.


“Our findings indicate that the long-expected mobile revolution in healthcare is set to happen. Both healthcare providers and consumers are embracing smartphones as a means to improving healthcare,” said Ralf-Gordon Jahns, Head of Research at research2guidance, the company that issued the report.

Interview with Charles Fishman: Message in a Bottle

Image credit: Verne Equinox

The Writer

Charles Fishman has been a full-time reporter for Fast Company magazine since 1996. He is currently on leave, writing a new book, ‘The Big Thirst,’ which will be published next March.

An award-winning investigative journalist, Fishman is also the author of the ‘Wal-mart Effect,’ which appeared on the bestseller lists of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Business Week, and was rated one of The Economist’s best books of 2006.

Fishman grew up in Miami, Florida, and graduated with a BA from Harvard University in 1983. 

The Story

In July 2007, Fast Company magazine published an article by Charles Fishman called ‘Message in a Bottle,’ which looked at the economics and psychology behind what Fishman describes as “an unlikely business boom.” 

The article describes how bottled water, a formerly virtually nonexistent business, has become an “indispensable prop” for America: a transformation largely fueled by marketing and branding, which drive home ideas about the convenience, taste and health benefits of bottled water.

The Relevance of the NGO for Social Entrepreneurs

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Vladimir Delagneau, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Nicaragua based clean energy company Tecnosolucion, has written a blog post on the World Economic Forum’s website about the importance of NGOs in actualizing (social) business ideas in rural areas.

Delagneau, who has been named 2010’s Regional Social Entrepreneur of the Year in Latin America, emphasizes how NGOs can essentially broker alliances with local third parties who might otherwise be reluctant to adopt a new technology, regardless of how tried and tested this may be in other regions. 

“Often, when one embarks on an entrepreneurial endeavour, one thinks about the market opportunity (meeting the needs of a certain group of people) in constructing a business model that is functional and operational, while taking into account the financing needs of the business. However, in rural business activities, the alliances (that businesses form) with third parties are vitally important,” he writes. 

To me, Delagneau’s post embodies a crucial idea: partnerships between outsider companies and indigenous communities or businesses, established with the help of a credible, local body are an effective way to scale a social enterprise, while simultaneously staying both relevant and accountable to the needs of the community one is penetrating. An NGO, that might not have the funds or know how to conceive of and incubate technological solutions on its own could be an invaluable partner in actualizing a social enterprise, particularly one that involves outsider technology and ideas.

Gates Grants: Combating Malaria through Light, Drug Resistance through Gold

Image credit: James Gathany

The Gates Foundation has announced the second round’s winners of its Gates Grand Challenges Exploration Project, which aims to incubate projects that adopt innovative approaches to solving global health problems. 

 Nine projects have been awarded $1 million. Here’s the Gates Foundation’s description of a few of these:

• Dr. Mark Davis from Stanford University is working to create a new method to quantify and profile cellular immune responses to vaccinations, specifically for the influenza and rotavirus vaccines, to improve effectiveness;
• Dr. Dan Feldheim at the University of Colorado is exploring how small molecule-coated gold nanocrystals could be tailored to circumvent many viral and bacterial evolutionary drug resistance mechanisms;