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_outlineSmallholder farming in Africa is a precarious existence. Low economies of scale, commodity price swings, out-of-date agronomic practices, and the effects of climate change conspire to trap farm families in a never-ending cycle of poverty. At the same time, Africa’s booming youth population is entering a saturated workforce without enough jobs to absorb them. In Nigeria, the continent’s most populous nation, that has led to a surge of gang violence and a wave of insurgencies over the last two decades.
Kola and Lola Masha, a Nigerian-born and US-educated couple, set out in 2012 to help mitigate the spread of both economic and physical insecurity. Their social enterprise, Babban Gona (“Great Farm” in the Hausa language), offers a rare model that not only makes farming lucrative and an attractive opportunity for Nigeria’s youth. It also has become a profitable and bankable business for commercial lenders. For the first time, they are committing capital to support smallholder agriculture at large scale—and in the process, potentially creating a pathway out of poverty for millions. Highlights of this episode include:
- why smallholder farming is central to the poverty problem in Africa (3:42)
- the wave of violence in Nigeria fueled largely by unemployed youth (7:21)
- the Mashas’ rigorous process to identify agriculture as a job-creation engine (9:44)
- Trust Groups, or mini-cooperatives, and other core elements of the Babban Gona model (14:22)
- the impact on the lives of farm families (25:39)
- how Babban Gona is raising capital to super-scale the model (32:36)
- and how it mitigates climate change and other risks (39:39).
For the full transcript go to: https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/from_plow_to_prosperity