Development Marketplace Helps Scale up Grassroots Innovation that Reduces Poverty

In 1999, when Ian Thorpe was teaching English in rural Zimbabwe, two pupils at his primary school died of dysentery after drinking water from a local well into which a snake had fallen and decomposed. Thorpe was shaken by the incident, and upon learning that it is commonplace in Africa, investigated water technologies that might prevent such tragedies. Within less than a year, he raised funds from contacts in his native Britain to launch Pump Aid, a charity devoted to bringing appropriate-technology pumps and wells to low-income communities in Africa. Since then, its work has resulted in delivering clean water to over 80 villages in Zimbabwe and Malawi.

PumpAid found its driving purpose in an ancient Chinese pump that used bamboo for pipes, sisal rope and discs of leather to raise buckets of water. The PumpAid team—Thorpe and his former teacher colleagues, Tendai Mawunga and Amos Chitungo—adapted this simple technology to develop the $400 “Elephant Pump.” It can deliver safe drinking water to 200 people—just right for many rural African schools, which is where many of the Elephant Pumps are now located.

“We adapted the design to make it robust enough for constant use in schools and villages,” Thorpe said. “Local people can make the parts and build it themselves, and a child as young as five can draw water from it.” Wells are usually dug by hand, with the location determined by geological formations and vegetation growth, as well as advice from the Pump Aid team. The pump’s concrete casing prevents contamination, and ensures a clean and sustainable supply of water.

Successful testing of the Elephant Pump prototype prompted Thorpe to submit the innovative idea to the World Bank’s Development Marketplace global competition in 2006. Development Marketplace, a grant program administered by the World Bank, has awarded over $50 million to some 1,000 early-stage, innovative projects worldwide since its inception in 1998.

Winning the DM grant of US$120,000, allowed PumpAid to expand its nascent program installing 1,000 pumps and benefiting 250,000 Zimbabweans. DM funds were also used to create the Elephant Toilet, an innovative, low-cost, low-maintenance approach to sanitation.

Just two years later, Pump Aid has secured an additional US$25M in funds that will support expansion of both the water and the sanitation programs to reach an additional 8 million people in Zimbabwe and Malawi over the next 5 years.

2008 Development Marketplace highlights agriculture

Thorpe was back to tell this story at the most recent Development Marketplace global competition, held at World Bank headquarters in Washington in September 2008. The event, co-sponsored by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the German development agency, GTZ, had agriculture as its theme. The hundred finalists were selected from over 1700 proposals as the most innovative and well designed projects to address the challenges of linking small-scale farmers to markets, improving land access or tenure for the poor, and promoting the environmental services of agriculture in addressing climate change and conserving biodiversity.

	2008 Development Marketplace

Among the 22 winning ideas—selected by a jury of 36 development experts—were milk coolers that adapt beer-cooling technology for use by Ugandan farmers, rice fields that serve as fertilizer for cost-effective and environmentally sustainable farming in Ecuador, leasing mechanisms for unused dry riverbeds that permit migrants and displaced persons to cultivate fresh produce in Nepal.

Daniel Bode, a mechanical engineer, teamed up with community organizer Saidou Ba, to propose another winning project in which an outboard motor that runs on local oilseeds will allow farmers to power their own riverboats along Senegal’s lower Casamance River, so they can get their groundnuts and millet to market. If successful, the project could double their incomes—and more—as the farmers would no longer have to rely on expensive truck transport for their produce.

Bode developed a prototype of the motor at a boys’ vocational school he runs, and plans to use the prize money to have his students produce more of them. Saidou Ba, meanwhile, is organizing some 40 farming and river-fishers’ communities to join a microcredit scheme to finance their shared access to the biofuel-powered riverboats, and increase their harvests and catches, thereby seizing the opportunity offered by Bode’s outboard motor.

“Now is the moment of responsibility,” Ba said upon learning that his project with Bode had been selected for a $160,000 award. “We have presented the idea, now we must direct its implementation.”

Digitization delivers jobs for the disabled

For Jeremy Hockenstein, winning a Development Marketplace award in 2003 was a watershed in a journey that has culminated in a multi-million-dollar social enterprise that mobilizes the skills of disadvantaged workers—including landmine victims, disabled people and women—in Cambodia. Hockenstein, a former strategist with McKinsey and Co., created Digital Divide Data (DDD), a company providing high-quality technology services to the global market. Joined by social entrepreneur Mai Siriphongphanh in 2003, the firm applied an innovative and sustainable work/study model, offering good wages and educational benefits to its Lao and Cambodian workers. This enabled them to speed up development of local IT industries, while also giving them the skills to hold lasting jobs. In addition to salary, the workers’ studies are subsidized by matching scholarships from DDD.

Based in Phnom Penh, DDD delivers multiple back-office services including data entry for digital library, legal, media and other research projects. For example, when the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University, in Boston, wanted its literary classics texts digitized, they turned to Digital Divide Data for help. DDD scans the text images, converts them to text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, and transforms them into high-quality documents tagged so that they are accessible through Perseus’ databases.

DDD has already benefited 7,000 workers and generated $14 million in increased wages, while also shaping a new corps of leaders empowered to shepherd their countries' development. In March 2008, DDD won a Skoll Foundation Award for Social Entrepreneurship, worth $1 million over three years.

Development Marketplace competitions are also held at country and regional levels, with plans underway to tackle the challenges of youth and employment in the Middle East, and the food crisis in Latin America, among others. By stimulating competition among innovators, and applying the World Bank’s expertise and convening power to highlight the best among them, Development Marketplace has nurtured ideas, helping to transform them into major projects, NGOs, social entrepreneurship ventures and established practices. The 2009 global competition’s call for proposals, launched in January, seeks innovations that address the challenges of climate change adaptation, with a focus on three sub-themes:

1. reduce impacts on indigenous peoples;
2. provide co-benefits for sustainable resource management measures including biodiversity conservation actions;
3. support actions that build on and address disaster risk management, while improving resiliency of communities to future changes in climate.

Effective aid ultimately depends on mobilizing ingenuity, combined with insight into how the world’s poor actually live. A decade after its launch, Development Marketplace, by linking such ingenuity from grassroots practitioners with funds and macro-level development experts, has proven in itself, to be an innovation in scaling-up and delivering on the Accra Agenda for Action.

Elena Altieri is Communications Officer for the Development Marketplace, and
Christopher Neal is Senior Communications Officer, The World Bank Institute.

The contribution of Kristina Stefanova, former DM Communications Officer, is gratefully acknowleged.

Visit: www.developmentmarketplace.org to learn more about upcoming competitions, share your knowledge of social entrepreneurship on the DM Blog, and gather more information about the Development Marketplace program. Specific inquiries can be sent to: dminfo@worldbank.org

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