Powering Needs, Empowering Lives
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Some 800 million people globally – as many as a quarter of them in India – have no access to electricity. Far more suffer routine brownouts and power cuts. The result puts the rural poor, who are most impacted, at a severe disadvantage in every way: Health-care services are crippled, education is compromised, and entire communities are cut off from modern industrial and digital livelihoods. In short, a key determinant of social equity goes missing. Harish Hande, an energy engineer, started SELCO in 1995 to pioneer the delivery of decentralized solar power to India’s rural...
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Healing From Trauma
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Glasswing International teaches Latin American communities to understand and recover from the impacts of trauma induced by chronic and acute violence.
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From Plow to Prosperity
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Babban Gona provides the capital and means to move Nigeria’s poor farmers from a life of subsistence to economic security.
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A Fair Deal for Coffee Growers
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Vega Coffee lifts up struggling coffee growers in Latin America by enabling them to roast, package, and ship their own beans directly to US customers—and reinvents the supply chain in the process. This episode covers Vega's story.
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The Business of Water
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Jibu franchises make clean drinking water affordable for Africa’s booming urban populations and provide economic opportunity to a new generation of entrepreneurs. Hear from the father-and-son team, Randy and Galen Welsch, who started Jibu in 2012. The social enterprise is now a leading purveyor of bottled water in four countries and growing rapidly in three more.
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A Global Movement for Environmental Justice
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Namati provides legal knowledge to communities around the world to help them defend their land, environmental, and other civil rights against abuse by commercial and political aggressors.
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The Healing Force of Family
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Even before the pandemic, India’s public hospitals struggled with overcrowding and stretched resources. Noora Health is helping by training family caregivers on simple medical skills to help patients recover at home. This is the second episode of a two-part series about raising the quality of health care in the developing world.
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The Videos Saving Lives in the Developing World
Uncharted Ground With SSIR
Global Health Media marries video technology with compassionate instruction to address a quality crisis in the delivery of frontline health care. This is the first episode of a two-part series about raising the quality of health care in the developing world.
info_outlineFrom coal plants to large-scale agriculture, industrial activities contributing to the environmental crisis tend to concentrate in minority communities with little power, wealth, or legal knowledge to defend themselves. The consequences to health and livelihoods are frequently devastating. To help them protect themselves, the nonprofit Namati trains paralegals to educate and organize ordinary citizens to fight for justice within the legal system and change the laws that threaten their well-being.
This episode tells the story of Namati and founder Vivek Maru’s lifelong campaign to give the vulnerable a voice in the legal systems that impact their lives. Now, as climate change exacerbates nearly every form of social injustice, Namati is doubling down on the threats to land and environmental rights by forming a coordinated movement of environmental justice organizations around the world. This episode:
- begins with a landmark land-grab case in Sierra Leone that illustrates the power of a community exercising its rights (0:06);
- explains how years of deep experience in individual cases can lead to systemic changes in laws that benefit entire societies (07:21);
- traces Maru’s personal history from the influence of his grandfather, a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, through his college studies of the social movements of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X (09:00);
- describes the origins of the Namati strategy in 1950s South Africa (11:52) and Maru’s first experience in combining law and community organizing in Sierra Leone (12:47);
- chronicles the work of Namati on abuses of land, citizenship, and other rights from Myanmar to Kenya, and the formation of an international network of justice empowerment organizations (16:47);
- highlights Namati’s plans to turbo-charge its response to land and environmental abuses (22:05); and
- how Namati is now transferring its experience in developing countries back home to address environmental injustices in the United States (26:18).
Additional Resources:
Source articles for this episode include:
- Justice for All, the report of the Task Force on Justice, details the “justice gap” around the world.
- The Impact of Legal Empowerment on Barriers to Health Care describes Namati’s impact on health care rights in Mozambique.
- Justice and Identity in Kibera chronicles the efforts of paralegals to win Kenyan citizenship for the Nubian minority.
- The Escazú Agreement about the landmark regional treaty for environmental defenders.
- The Justice Gap Report of the Legal Services Corp. details the lack of access to justice in the United States.
- Financing People-Centered Justice in Africa unveils plans for the new Grassroots Legal Empowerment Fund.
The full transcript of the episode can be found at https://ssir.org/podcasts/category/unchartedground.