Lars Johannes's Posts - Urgent Evoke2024-03-29T07:14:49ZLars Johanneshttp://www.urgentevoke.com/profile/LarsJohanneshttp://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/2209243172?profile=RESIZE_48X48&width=48&height=48&crop=1%3A1http://www.urgentevoke.com/profiles/blog/feed?user=05edf74tt1pda&xn_auth=noBiogas: clean energy that also produces fertilizertag:www.urgentevoke.com,2010-04-02:4871302:BlogPost:769292010-04-02T00:30:00.000ZLars Johanneshttp://www.urgentevoke.com/profile/LarsJohannes
The <a href="http://www.gpoba.org/gpoba/node/219">Nepal Biogas Support Program</a> is a project helps poor Nepalese farmers to build household size biogas plants that provide fuel for cooking and lighting. Biogas is a flammable gas that is a byproduct of anaerobic decay of organic matter. <a href="http://www.aidg.org/biodigesters.htm">Biogas digersters</a> are typically fueled with cow manure, but can also be connected to latrines. Two additional advantages are that fermentation kills germs, so…
The <a href="http://www.gpoba.org/gpoba/node/219">Nepal Biogas Support Program</a> is a project helps poor Nepalese farmers to build household size biogas plants that provide fuel for cooking and lighting. Biogas is a flammable gas that is a byproduct of anaerobic decay of organic matter. <a href="http://www.aidg.org/biodigesters.htm">Biogas digersters</a> are typically fueled with cow manure, but can also be connected to latrines. Two additional advantages are that fermentation kills germs, so that biogas plants can help to improve sanitation and that the fermented slurry can be used as fertilizer, thus improving food security for beneficiary households.<br/>
<br/>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; text-align: justify; line-height: 12pt;"></p>The other food crisistag:www.urgentevoke.com,2010-04-01:4871302:BlogPost:766122010-04-01T19:22:13.000ZLars Johanneshttp://www.urgentevoke.com/profile/LarsJohannes
<p><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #5e5e5e; FONT-FAMILY: 'Arial','sans-serif'">In my community food security is not issue, but that does not mean that people are not dying from laco kf adequate nutrition. Very few people where I live are not able to afford decent and nutritious food, but that doesn’t mean they do</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #5e5e5e; FONT-FAMILY: 'Arial','sans-serif'">I see four main issues:…</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #5e5e5e; FONT-FAMILY: 'Arial','sans-serif'">In my community food security is not issue, but that does not mean that people are not dying from laco kf adequate nutrition. Very few people where I live are not able to afford decent and nutritious food, but that doesn’t mean they do</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #5e5e5e; FONT-FAMILY: 'Arial','sans-serif'">I see four main issues:</span></p>
<p><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #5e5e5e; FONT-FAMILY: 'Arial','sans-serif'">* People don't know decent food when they see it</span></p>
<p><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #5e5e5e; FONT-FAMILY: 'Arial','sans-serif'">* People prefer to spend their money on other stuff than edible food</span></p>
<p><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #5e5e5e; FONT-FAMILY: 'Arial','sans-serif'">* People are lazy</span></p>
<p><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #5e5e5e; FONT-FAMILY: 'Arial','sans-serif'">* It is too easy to make excuses</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #5e5e5e; FONT-FAMILY: 'Arial','sans-serif'">It starts with people not knowing what to eat. While it is true that you can easily blow half a paycheck on one visit to Whole Foods, there are alternatives to that and most supermarkets have reasonably decent food at prices that are generally affordable. However, you have to spend <em><span style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Arial','sans-serif'">some</span></em> money on getting food that does not kill you and if you don’t have a lot of money, but need to buy all the plastic junk your neighbors have and all the garbage on the shopping channel, you are likely to have little money left to buy decent food. What is worse is that most of the bad food is “convenient”. Convenient is another word for “lazier than is good for you”. You don’t need to cook, you don’t need to wash the dishes, and you don’t even need to chew. People here can easily ingest the calorie daily intake of an African family in one evening on the sofa. At the same time the daily caloric expenditure has dropped precipitously. People take their care everywhere instead of walking and now supermarkets have electric carts for people who are too chubby to walk safely. Meanwhile you don’t even have to make excuses for being overweight and lazy; the companies selling the junk to you do that for you. It is considered rude to confront people with the truth if it is uncomfortable.</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #5e5e5e; FONT-FAMILY: 'Arial','sans-serif'">I don’t think any of this is to change any time soon. People with healthy eating habits and the ones without seem to see each other now only at the supermarket check out and with the trend towards organic supermarkets and healthy restaurants continuing, even that may be soon a thing of the past.</span></p>At the source alreadytag:www.urgentevoke.com,2010-04-01:4871302:BlogPost:763902010-04-01T16:30:37.000ZLars Johanneshttp://www.urgentevoke.com/profile/LarsJohannes
My wife works at the development market place (and is a facebook friend), so I don't need Twitter to be aware what is going on there.
My wife works at the development market place (and is a facebook friend), so I don't need Twitter to be aware what is going on there.Innovation - stand back and let the cool stuff happentag:www.urgentevoke.com,2010-04-01:4871302:BlogPost:753742010-04-01T02:30:00.000ZLars Johanneshttp://www.urgentevoke.com/profile/LarsJohannes
While I agree with most, if not all, what was said in the Innovation in Africa tips blog post, my personal lesson in life is that you seldom succeed if you set out to be innovative. Ethan is right, good innovation comes mostly from constraint (and sometimes from opportunity or from just taking stuff and using it for something else than the intended purpose). However, most of what drives the world forward is not necessarily impressive or even new. Often small adjustments have a huge impacts or…
While I agree with most, if not all, what was said in the Innovation in Africa tips blog post, my personal lesson in life is that you seldom succeed if you set out to be innovative. Ethan is right, good innovation comes mostly from constraint (and sometimes from opportunity or from just taking stuff and using it for something else than the intended purpose). However, most of what drives the world forward is not necessarily impressive or even new. Often small adjustments have a huge impacts or the innovation is consist of applying tired and tested concepts to new contexts. In that sense I guess the only way to learn innovating are computer games, as they constantly make people think outside of the proverbial box (think of RPG-jumps in Quake III or similar abuse of intended game play).<br/><br/>Anyway, innovations can be warming up pretty dull stuff. One of the most compelling innovations in development aid, micro finance, can be seen as a new lease on life for cooperative and savings banks (not very glitzy, are they?). However, these banks were the basis for much of the development in Europe and the US in the 19th century - usually not the kind of development you read about in books, but the kind of development that lifted millions out of poverty.<br/><br/>My personal attempts at being innovative consist mainly of trying to avoid interfering. I work on piloting a way of delivering development aid called output-based aid (OBA for short). The idea is to agree with a service provider to pay an amount of money per output delivered (let's say a medical treatment or a functioning water connection - including water provided for x months to make sure service is available sustainably). How the output is delivered is up to the provider, who needs to incur the costs of producing an output and thus bears the operational risks of the project, as failure to deliver will result in non-payment. <br/><br/>The power of this approach is amazing, but it is a power of small incremental changes and it takes a lot of those to amount to something you would call an innovation. Service providers come up with all kinds of incremental piecemeal solutions to provide services better (and cheaper). A project in Kenya works with community-based water providers who receive 80% of project costs as a loan from a micro finance bank (and have to come up with 20% themselves). If water providers can provide clean water to the beneficiaries in rural Kenya, we buy down half of the loan. The micro finance bank was brought in to address a very specific issue, which is that the community-based providers did not have any money. It's purpose was to fork out cash up-front and to be repaid later. However, in the process of the project the bank made all kinds of efforts to help the project, it hired an engineer to advise on technical solutions, it negotiated bulk supply rates to make inputs cheaper, none of this was part of the project design, none of this was in and of itself novel. However, it addressed issues that the project manager from his office, hundreds of miles away would have had an incredibly hard time addressing. <br/><br/>Another example for this is that of a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=watcK8hi5RA">natural gas company in Colombia</a>, which provided poor households with subsidized gas connections. The company gave poor households piggy banks to show them that they actually could afford monthly bills - gas was the first utility service beneficiaries were to receive. The project resulted in a marked decrease in upper respiratory infections in mothers and children and was well worth the expense just taking into account savings in the health care system.<br/><br/>OK, we also have the traditional type of innovation (that is, the kind involving cell phones). A health project in rural Uganda speeds up the billing process of dispersed service providers by using a <a href="http://www.urgentevoke.com/photo/sms-received?context=user">text message system</a>. The important part as with most things, this was never part of the project proposal and takes a <a href="http://www.urgentevoke.com/photo/sms-received?context=user">technology for sending bulk SMS</a>, mostly used for spamming huge numbers of people, and puts it to a productive use.<br/><br/>Examples of this kind abound. They are usually are about somebody seeing something small, make a tiny choice here and there, finding better ways to do things. In short, they innovate, even if their individual actions would not necessarily qualify for the label "innovation". The innovation of OBA itself is mainly that the project sponsors agree with implementer on results, but other than that stand back and let cool things happen.<br/>