Here is a very encouraging story from Newsweek about social entrepreneurship and the kind of change that is possible when thinking outside of the box. The story highlights the innovative work of José Roberto Fonseca that is revitalizing the agricultural sector in one of the poorest districts in Brazil. Using a combination of solar energy and a process known as hydroponics, José has been able to create sustainable solutions for agricultural problems that inundate this arid region of Brazil.

But where others saw privation, Fonseca saw opportunity. "Poor people in the sertão have been farming beans, manioc and corn the same way they have since Brazil was discovered, and poverty is as bad as ever," he says, waving at the monotonous expanse of balding scrub and cactus. "It's time they tried something different."

Now the parched acres of Baixas are flush with red, orange and yellow hot peppers, which women painstakingly sort, chop and bottle with vinegar for sale as gourmet vinaigrette. Clean water flows from household taps and bare light bulbs blaze from dozens of windows in Baixas, defying the long night of the sertão. "Everything has changed," says Josefa Silva, a 52-year-old mother of eight, who used to weave palm fronds into brooms for 12 cents apiece until peppers came along. "We even have television."

Baixas's secret, oddly enough, is water. "The problem of the sertão is not lack of water, but the inability to manage it," says Fonseca. His answer was hydroponics—suspended gardens where plants sprout not from the ground but in water laced with nutrients. Nestling in planters fashioned from plastic Coca-Cola bottles, the pepper vines sprawl over a simple wooden trellis, crisscrossed with a web of ultra-thin irrigation tubes. At first, Fonseca's team drew well water and filtered away the salt (a vestige of the ancient sea that once covered the sertão), using a solar-powered desalinator. Now the community taps a natural spring from a nearby hillock, letting gravity whisk the water to the gardens below. A bank of photovoltaic panels there powers pumps that keep water flowing through the pepper garden, into buried cisterns and back into the holding tanks. The tidy recycling system avoids evaporation and cuts waste to a minimum.

Another crucial element to Mr. Fonseca’s success was his ability to connect the different levels of human capital. A network was created to address the many facets of the commodity chain.

An agronomist and an engineer designed the hydroponic gardens, while a nutritionist taught villagers the secrets of making spices and condiments. An economist worked up a business and marketing plan, while Fonseca began building a distribution chain with start-up money from international benefactors.

This model can succeed in other emerging markets, as evidenced by the fact that international NGO’s have already contacted José to inquire about his projects.