|
The Fellows |
|
|
Current Fellows
Andrew Youn works with farm families living in permanent hunger conditions in Kenya. Recognizing that 80% of the extreme poor in Africa are farmers, he is demonstrating a model that increases food production for these farmers by 4x immediately, and brings them within reach of high value export markets. His organization, One Acre Fund, provides small holding farmers with a complete solution, starting from 1) organizing producer groups, 2) providing appropriate capital and technology, 3) extension services, and 4) harvest consolidation and sale. The target social impact is 300% growth in farm income, and 50% reduction in child mortality rates. Importantly, Andrew also hopes to show that this can be done at a profit, by recapturing a portion of the farmers' harvest. This creates a) sustainability (non-reliance on donor funds), and b) scalability (potential for private sector replication). Andrew graduated from Yale with honors, and is a former management consultant. He received his MBA in 2006 from Kellogg School of Management, and launched his demonstration work the same year, in January. He has experience in scaling up community-based AIDS treatment programs in South Africa. www.oneacrefund.org
Losang Rabgey is a founder and executive director of Machik, a non-profit organization whose mission is to strengthen and revitalize rural communities on the Tibetan plateau through innovative strategies that promote the sustainable development and strengthening of local communities. The fund prioritizes community-based, environmentally sound initiatives that draw on socially innovative and entrepreneurial solutions to education, environmental protection, women’s empowerment, economic development, and health issues. Born in a Tibetan refugee settlement in India, Losang moved early on to Canada where her parents became factory workers. After years of balancing doctoral studies with advocacy work, Rabgey began to explore new pathways for creative social engagement. With a doctorate in Tibetan and gender studies from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, she has since co-founded an award-winning primary school in her father’s village in Kham and has established an innovative Tibetan cultural center and trilingual library.
www.machik.org
Kurt Kuhlmann spent the better part of his post-graduate career designing systems ranging from advanced military applications to general industrial, telecommunications and consumer products. Inspired by his participation in the BASES project at Stanford University, his energies are now focused on bringing affordable, lighting and water sterilization to the developing world through his company, Meridian Design as well as through partnerships with Cool Earth for renewable energy systems for that same market. Kurt is also CTO of LRI, a leader in LED lighting products. Meridian Design has produced solar recharged LED lights that mitigate against the costs and bad consequences arising from the use of indoor kerosene lamps. Our main efforts at present are a pair of technologies, UV and saline electrolytic, in the field of compact water treatment systems since bad water is such a massive killer worldwide. We aim to improve on the available technology at a size and price point that is appropriate to our customers living under adverse conditions. Our smallest UV system, for instance, is a ruggedized, 4W system with integral Li-ion battery and auxiliary LED light that weighs 2.5oz and can be produced for under $10. Meridian is partnered with Niparaja, IDE, and igniteinnovations providing technology support for their respective efforts. www.uvaquastar.com
Liza is Country Director for Child and Family Wellness (CFW) Shops in Kenya, a project of The HealthStore Foundation®, which has combined established micro-enterprise principles with proven franchise practices to create the CFWshops™ micro-franchise business model. Franchisees operate small drug shops or clinics strategically located to improve access to essential drugs. HealthStore clinics and shops enable trained health workers to operate their own businesses treating the diseases that cause 70-90% of illness and death in their communities while following HealthStore drug handling and distribution regulations calculated to ensure good practice. Liza earned her MSc. in Health Services Management from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, an MBA through United States International University in Nairobi and she holds a BS in Finance from the University of Connecticut. Prior to joining The HealthStore Foundation®, Ms. Kimbo served six years in senior management at Standard Chartered Bank in Kenya and established and managed a retail pharmaceutical company with 13 outlets. Liza is currently the Chairperson of the Kenya NGOs Alliance against Malaria (KeNAAM).
www.cfwshops.org
Pascaline Dupas works to make sure that proven health interventions get to the people who need them. After a master’s degree in economics and a stint as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard, Pascaline decided that she’d had enough theory and left for rural Kenya, where she worked for a year monitoring and evaluating development programs . It was there that she got the idea for a project to distribute free mosquito bed nets to pregnant women at rural prenatal clinics where they could be tested for HIV and treated for endemic malaria. Designed as action research, Pascaline’s project showed remarkable success in getting women into prenatal care, families under mosquito nets, and antiretroviral drugs into the hands of HIV-positive mothers. Now she has established Tam-Tam to scale up this model, and to explore other ways to ensure the effective application of other proven interventions. This work is integrated into Pascaline’s PhD research, and she collaborates with other members of MIT’s Poverty Action Lab to establish methods and standards for rigorous evaluation of social interventions. As a whole, her work promises to develop and prove critically important strategies to ensure that emerging tools and technologies will create lasting change.
Aaron Bruner
Aaron Bruner is a conservation economist working to make conservation the best option for rural communities and landowners. His model focuses on conservation incentive agreements that specify community commitments to conservation and provision of lasting benefits in exchange for delivering on those commitments. This model recognizes that local people often preserve biodiversity--a global good—at local cost, and it provides a way to turn conservation into a net benefit by creating sustainable development.
Aaron is a key member of a team at Conservation International that has established the Conservation Stewards Program to apply and refine this model. The Program brings state-of-the-art development practices to bear in the service of conservation, and has established pilot projects in Ecuador and Peru, with scale-up planned to include numerous conservation hotspots throughout the world. Aaron’s work provides a critically important model for this leading conservation NGO, and for conservation efforts at large. Dave Jenkins wants to make Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands a healthy place to live, and in doing so create a broadly applicable model for self-reliant community health in remote island settings. A New Zealand-trained physician, he is the founder and medical director of SurfAid International, which has tapped the energy and resources of the surfing world to power their work in the Mentawai Islands off Sumatra. Dave’s work brings proven health interventions—especially in malaria—together with effective approaches to community mobilization in a way that generates self-reliant local action and makes existing services more effective. SurfAid has developed cost-effective solutions to the problems of working with remote and scattered populations; on the other side of things, they have pioneered a startlingly effective approach to fund-and-awareness-raising through a thorough understanding of a powerful affinity group—surfers—that includes a major recreational industry.
Ernesto’s model is a combination of academic rigor and NGO innovation. Through the Community Agroecology Network, he applies participatory action research techniques to 1) determine conservation and social needs, 2) find viable conservation livelihoods, 3) provide technical and other supports, and 4) develop viable business models. He and his colleagues have developed a number of innovative solutions, from new ways of doing participatory research to marketing mechanisms that allow farmers to sell directly to US consumers. http://www.agroecology.org/ernesto.html
The Care Group model adapts readily to a broad range of settings, and is especially effective in conditions of dire need. Melanie is guiding the expansion of the model to Cambodia, Malawi, and Rwanda, and she is focused on the further evolution of the model through the process. The thoughtful application of the Care Group approach to these new settings promises to produce an important influential new tool for community health in the world’s poorest region.
Ayesha is a co-founder and Managing Director for Environment Energy and Enterprise Ventures, Plc (better known as e3V), a New Delhi-based social venture capital investment and advisory firm dedicated to financing a range of ecologically sustainable business ventures, including cottage-scale ventures that process organic produce and are powered by renewable energy technologies. In respect to the Fellowship, the e3V model uses private and public capital in the design, development, and execution of financial instruments and advisory services to drive sustainable development in the mountain state of Some of the barriers to rural development in the Indian Himalaya—and settings like it—are the lack of awareness of market opportunities, the technical inputs and managerial/operational capacity to run appropriate ventures, and the capital to launch them. The e³V model expands on the traditional role of venture capital and other financial engineering instruments to find promising business opportunities and systematically work in partnership with local promoters to create the ingredients necessary for success. In doing so, e³V provides an important model to drive conservation-friendly development in mountain settings. The rural poor often lack access to essential goods and services, pay more for them when they can get them, and suffer higher transactional costs for everything they do. Kevin Crean and his colleagues at One Roof want to fix that while creating jobs and profits in the process. Their idea is to create profitable small businesses to sell goods and services that create social benefits. Using a micro-franchise model, One Roof will establish a core information technology business—like Kinko’s® for the rural poor—then use the established outlets to sell other profitable products with a positive social impact. Initial pilot work in India has demonstrated the viability of the core business model, and Kevin is working to refine the microfranchise model. A part of this is to develop a systematic approach to find, vet, and market profitable products—things like mosquito nets and clean water kits—that will meet demand and create social impacts. In 1996 David and his wife founded EcoSystems to design and market transport and energy solutions to Nepal's villagers and supporting organizations. EcoSystems plans to license its WireBridge, WireRoad and EcoPower technologies to entrepreneurs outside Nepal starting this year. David worked as an analyst and manager in the international operations of energy and food companies, and later with new technology businesses in Silicon Valley. This background has been of great value in the development of distribution strategies to these technologies. He is working on new approaches to public-private partnerships to ensure that public goods—bridges and transport systems—can tap public financing with private sector efficiencies and accountability, and on ways that EcoSystems technologies can be marketed as small business opportunities. In the coming year, EcoSystems will license its WireBridge, WireRoad and EcoPower technologies to entrepreneurs outside Nepal.
Too often, local people remain apart from—and even at odds with—parks and other protected areas, with predictably disastrous results. Bruce Downie works to bring park managers, local communities, and business owners together to make a healthy park a net benefit for local people. His model takes a systematic approach to: 1) bring local people and their needs into policy-making and management procedures, 2) maximize park-related jobs for locals, and 3) bring social and economic development to local communities as part of improved conservation practices bordering the park.
Bruce has many years of experience as a protected area planner, and has now focused his efforts on the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, where an enlightened park administration has created an ideal setting for the development of this model . He and several colleagues have established the Kesho Trust to bring key actors and proven interventions together to ensure a healthy future for the Serengeti and develop a model for similar protected areas initially in eastern and southern Africa and subsequently worldwide.
Past Fellows
Peru: A model for effective government primary health care Southern Africa: A model for successful investment of international public health resources
World-wide: A model for community-based conservation on a regional scale
|
