Children fill school libraries with their own stories. Photo: United Nations Photo (Flickr)

Developing countries face overcrowded classrooms and empty libraries. Students have started addressing this issue by filling shelves with their own stories.

Many children in developing countries do not have books to take home or read in class. If they do, they’re usually not translated into local dialects. This means limited use by parents at home, many of whom are also illiterate. UNESCO reported in 2010 that one in five adults is illiterate. Not only learning to read but having easy access to books and other printed material is imperative to improve this staggering statistic.

While some rural communities have access to e-readers, they're few and far between. This is where innovation and imagination come in. A primary school in Chingoe, Mozambique, is filling its library with homemade books, shaping young readers by allowing them to share their own stories. The Literacy Boost program by Save the Children applies this hands-on method and has seen results. Teachers write their own short stories, children draw illustrations that serve as writing exercises, or parents tell stories to their children for transcription. Add a little string for binding and you’re set. It's an innovative way to promote and combine oral traditions with basic education.

Writing can also help children cope after disasters or hardships. Drawing or writing out their experiences is a constructive way to process emotions. Sharing these stories with their peers helps in the recovery effort while simultaneously improving important written and verbal communication skills.

While some may not ascribe a homemade library the same prestige of traditional textbooks or literature, it provides an important foundation where needed most. Children are able to read at home, engage their family and community, and boost their learning skills. No matter who wrote it, taking a book home to read is the first step in realizing the magic of education.

Medic Mobile works with the simplest of cell phones to help provide health care to those far away from their nearest hospital. Photo: Fabiola Coupet/Mercy Corps.

In rural communities around the world, the virtual doctor is in.

The distance between far-flung communities and their nearest hospitals can be fatal. Medic Mobile bridges the gap using a common household item: the cell phone. It’s not the same as a living, breathing doctor, but Medic Mobile comes pretty close, and it does so using a list of platforms that is strikingly similar to what you might find on a smart phone. These seemingly-sophisticated technologies can work on even the most basic of cell phones and computers, just like those found all over the developing world.

Medic Mobile’s Sim Apps, in addition to open-source platforms like FrontlineSMS, OpenMRS, Ushahidi, Google Apps, and HealthMap, allow hospital staff sitting at a computer to communicate with multiple health workers in rural areas. The health workers’ phones are basic, but Medic Mobile uses a tiny parallel SIM card that fits between any GSM phone and a carrier’s cell phone to allow these phones to run the necessary apps. The Medic Mobile website provides a more in-depth description of the many technologies it employs. In a 2009 interview with GOOD magazine, co-founder Lucky Gunasekara described Medic Mobile’s importance:

We can communicate need in real time. Say I am a community health worker in rural Malawi and one of my patients gets really sick. Before this system came along, for a lot of clinics, the patient would die, because even though I have some basic health training as a community health worker, there is nothing I can really do. They're still just as disconnected as the communities they live in. Now with our system clinicians see things in real time and they communicate back.

In addition to saving lives, the program saves time: its website says that in six months, the pilot program in Malawi “saved hospital staff 1200 hours of follow-up time and over $3,000 in motorbike fuel” and cut 900 hours of travel time for antiretroviral therapy monitors by eliminating their need to hand-deliver reports to the hospital.

Since its inception in 2009, Medic Mobile has expanded to Honduras, Haiti, Uganda, Mali, Kenya, South Africa, Cameroon, India and Bangladesh. The platform is adaptable to different situations: it was used in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake to link first responders and locals in need of help. As a result of its successes, Medic Mobile was recently named one of the Top 11 in 2011 mobile health innovators of the year by mHealth Alliance.

The proliferation of cell phones is sparking a revolution in developing-world health care. Innovators from all reaches of the globe have used the near-ubiquitous technology to increase health care affordability and access. By adapting sophisticated platforms to basic devices, they’re turning $15 cell phones into invaluable lifelines.

Editor’s note: For more information on the connection, check out A Medical Lab in the Palm of Your Hand, A Dose of Cell Phone Surveillance Helps Aid Workers Save Lives, and Paging Dr. Smartphone, to name a few.

Women in Ghana conduct business. Photo: IITA Image Library (flickr)

This article was republished in The Christian Science Monitor.

Ghanaian women are mothers, daughters and wives. Add entrepreneurs to the list. Female entrepreneurs are flourishing across Africa, but Ghanaian women are leading the pack.

Education, national stability, and microfinance have spurred their success.

Ghana’s government recognizes the important role women play in reaching the country’s development goals. “No nation can move on without emphasizing the education and emancipation of women,” said Vice President John Dramani Mahama.

One result of that attitude is an increase in women’s education, and the cornerstone of further education is literacy. The literacy rate among females between the ages of 15 to 24 is 78 percent, according to UNICEF, up from 16.6 percent in 1970. This is an impressive jump in the time span of one generation and demonstrates how many more Ghanaian women today can access the kind of skills needed for running a business, like accounting, marketing and management.

Ghana’s stability has also helped catapult its business environment forward. It was the first nation in sub-Saharan Africa to achieve independence in 1957. In the 1970s and 1980s, political instability took its toll on the country. But since then, Ghana has regained political stability and goodwill from the international community, providing an environment ripe for business growth and development. As a result, investor confidence has increased. Rising investment has influenced Ghana’s economic prosperity, and the country is currently the fastest-growing economy of 2011, growing 20.2 percent in the first half of the year, according to Economy Watch.

Ghana's natural resources also boost its per-capita GDP, which International Entrepreneurship reported is twice that of its poorer West Africa neighbors.

Finally, for decades Ghana has been reaping the benefits of microfinance, a tool that may be especially effective in empowering women. As described by the Economics Web Institute, Ghana provided subsidized credit in the 1950s, established an Agricultural Development Bank in 1965 for fish and farm loans, and required commercial banks to set aside 20 percent of their portfolios for agriculture and small-scale industries in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The result? Today, the female labor force participation rate in Ghana is estimated at 50.1 percent—and women account for about 50.2 percent of the entire population of Ghana. With improved education, the prosperity of the country, and a stable microfinance sector, the women of Ghana are making an impact in the entrepreneurial world that cannot be denied.

Wind catchers on a cistern near Yazd, Iran, that help to keep the water cool. Photo: birdfarm (flickr)

Part of a Global Envision miniseries about Portland State University's effort to become the "Consumer Reports" of developing-world technology. Read the introduction.

Sometimes, it turns out that the wisdom of the ages is wrong. Portland State University’s Green Building Research Lab is out to tease science from superstition.

Cultures around the globe have adopted unique tricks for coping with the peculiarities of their local environments. But how much of the wisdom behind conventional designs and survival methods is rooted in real science?

That's the question that led PSU researchers to the Persian wind catcher.

Long before the unprecedented heat waves of the last decade, whose increased frequency National Geographic links to climate change, both the Middle East and the American Deep South developed building styles that allow for greater air circulation. The American dogtrot house, recently profiled in an article by The Atlantic, is a bit hard to find since the advent of air conditioning, but Persian wind catchers have been around for several hundred years and still dot the arid landscape around the Persian Gulf. The idea is that open-faced towers on the ends of a building draw in cooler, moving air from high above the ground; the air is pulled through the lower portions of the house and then up and out another tower.

Both the dogtrot house and the wind catcher are culturally accepted ways to beat the heat, but PSU asked: How well do they actually work? They put tiny models of each house into a self-constructed wind tunnel that can measure exactly how—and how well—they work to circulate air. A machine attached to the tunnel creates bubbles that lack an electromagnetic charge, which means that they simply float along on the air currents, providing a seemingly magical way to visually track airflow through the models. Researchers hope they can use the test results to help develop new building designs.

Testing traditional solutions to timeless problems like this one not only tells us something about other cultures; it also shows how old design principles could be melded with current technology to produce more efficient, livable, and sustainable spaces. And if the PSU labs are onto something, maybe your children—or grandchildren—will grow up in a house with a wind catcher.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.

Girls who lack access to sanitary pads may miss up to 40 days of school a year. Photo: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps.

In the United States, missing close to two months of school every year might get you expelled. For millions of women and girls in the developing world, it's a routine.

They lack access to something many modern women in the developed world probably take for granted: sanitary pads. Even when pads are locally available, many girls simply can’t afford them: UPI reports that in South Africa, a pack of 10 might cost $2. In many areas, that is more than a day’s worth of wages, according to North Carolina State University. Girls who don’t have access to pads during their period miss school due to embarrassment, fear of being teased and cultural taboos. Some try to use newspaper, old rags, or mud instead, methods that pose health risks and barely even work.

Many girls fall behind in school or drop out entirely as a result of this simple problem. For a variety of reasons, it’s one that’s not often discussed openly. So how do you solve a problem that no one wants to talk about? Fortunately, many businesses and organizations are looking for solutions.

At the same time that FemCare, a part of Procter & Gamble, sells Always-brand sanitary pads in U.S. supermarkets, it seeks to provide the same products to African schoolgirls. But the problem is thornier than you might expect. Beyond a simple lack of supplies, schools also often lack the facilities that allow girls to use feminine products in the first place. They need private spaces to change pads during the day and running water to wash their hands. To address this, FemCare built bathrooms and constructed water pipelines to schools, says the New York Times. They also provide disposal containers and have taught teachers how to incinerate the waste. Of course, there’s something in it for P&G, too: they hope that girls in Africa will become lifelong users of their products.

The problem has also inspired a great deal of innovation as individuals attempt to design new products that can be manufactured more cheaply and sustainably than name brands. Swedish university students used water hyacinth, an invasive species that chokes off Kenyan water routes, to create the Jani pad. In a double whammy, It’s both biodegradable and made from a seemingly endless resource that no one likes.

Starting in 2008, Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE) tried another tack: it designed a manufacturing process that anyone could replicate. Their award-winning approach makes pads from readily available materials like banana-stalk fibers, which are then processed on inexpensive machines that local people can purchase. Hopefully, SHE’s innovations will better enable people in developing nations to start their own businesses to manufacture the pads. This also lets the finished product be tailored to the needs of women and girls from diverse cultures.

Other projects are born from the creativity of local entrepreneurs. Makapads, invented by a university professor in Uganda, are made from papyrus and waste paper and produced on locally manufactured machines, reports IRIN.

Often, trying to solve a problem in the developing world is like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube. Each group toggles the pieces a bit differently. Hopefully, in the end, someone makes them all line up.

New organization Solar Sister is empowering women in rural Africa to star their own solar lamp businesses. Photo: IvanClow (flickr)

A new organization seeks to light up the night in rural Africa by putting a twist on an all-American idea: the Avon lady.

Night in rural Africa is a night much darker than that to which the developed world is accustomed, as many communities lack electricity. In rural Uganda, the number is as high as 95 percent, as Katherine Lucey told Dowser.org. Without electric light, people must rely upon kerosene lamps, which are expensive and belch toxic fumes.

These create a bevy of problems, especially for women. Girls are often expected to help with chores when they return home from school and don’t have time to do homework until after dark. Either they sit inhaling fumes and burning up cash with the family’s kerosene lamp, or in many cases, they simply don’t study at all. Solar lamps solve this problem by extending the work day.

For years, Africans have had a big problem with solar power: it breaks. In an interview with Dowser.org, Solar Sister founder, Katherine Lucey, said that in her previous work with a nonprofit, the solar systems they installed in rural areas had a 50 percent rate of failure after just one year. Traditional solar power can be a hard sell for poor communities — it saves money in the long run, but it's pricey at first, and many solar panels often fall apart over time due to improper maintenance. The new lamps that Solar Sister uses are small, portable, and don’t require technological know-how to use — you simply place the lamp outside during the day, it absorbs the sun’s rays, and when night falls you turn it on.

Solar Sister uses a microconsignment model, meaning that its entrepreneurs don’t pay for their lamps until they actually sell them. If they can’t sell the lamps or decide they don’t want to, they can return them to the organization without loosing any money. It’s a low-risk endeavor that has so far empowered 107 women in Uganda, Ghana, and Sudan. Normally, these women wouldn’t have had enough money to create a business.

The lamps range from $15 to $50 at first, a large investment for most families. But, an average family spends about $2 a week on kerosene, so a family could save up to $85 a year just by buying a lamp, says TriplePundit. Solar Sister estimates that its entrepreneurs can actually double their households’ incomes while decreasing their household expenses by 30 percent. Some of the lamps can even act as cell-phone chargers. Not only can women with these lamps charge their own family’s phones; they often bring in extra money by charging neighbors’ phones. Otherwise, they’re left to travel to nearby cities whenever a phone goes dead.

The women who participate in Solar Sister can seem pretty ecstatic about their new businesses, as you can see in this clip below of Viola, one of the women selling solar lamps in eastern Uganda.

Solar Sister currently operates in Uganda, Rwanda, and South Sudan, and hopes to shine a light on other parts of Africa soon.

This has been reposted from the Mercy Corps blog.

On my first day in Zimbabwe, I went to visit some farm families in the town of Murejwa. People are poor there, and Mercy Corps is working with them to find ways to boost their incomes.

In this video, I'm with Fred and Beauty Jokonya, who live and farm on a half-acre on the outskirts of town. The star of this show, however, is a piece of basic technology: the treadle pump. As you'll see, this pump has made the farm and its owners a lot more productive.

I mention in the video that Fred and Beauty are looking after many of their grandchildren. What I don't mention in the video but want to note here is that the kids are AIDS orphans. In recent years, about 20 percent of Zimbabwe's adults have been struggling with HIV/AIDS and as a result there is a whole generation of kids being raised by their grandparents.

The use of sawdust stoves is making lives easier for small-scale farmers throughout the timber regions of Tanzania and Zambia, says an article in The Times of Zambia. These special stoves are a cheap, easy to use, sustainable alternative to using charcoal and are in many ways more effective.

According to the article, the sawdust stoves work well in this region because they run without electricity. Given that less than 20 percent of the population has access to electricity, it is necessary to have a non-electric source of energy like charcoal or sawdust.

Where sawdust stoves take a strong advantage over charcoal, however, is in its health and environmental impacts. A recent report on the health and environmental effects of cooking stoves describes how the charcoal trade is accelerating deforestation in the region, and the health problems caused by charcoal stoves, which includes, respiratory issues, eye irritation and carbon monoxide poisoning.

In contrast, the sawdust being used for these stoves is timber waste, so it provides a free and uniquely sustainable form of energy that would remain unused otherwise. According to the video below, the stove pays for itself in saved charcoal costs within two to four months. The stoves themselves are cheap and easy to make, which makes them accessible to those with very low incomes. In the video, cafe owner Roze Mgina explains the benefits of her sawdust stove:

I cook everything, rice, beans, donuts, using just one stove. If you put a bit of firewood in the vent, it gets hotter and cooks things quicker. When I use charcoal it gives me a headache if I stay a long time in the kitchen. With this one I don’t get headaches anymore because it doesn’t produce any smoke.

The Kisangani Smith Group, based out of Tanzania, won an Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy in 2008 for training blacksmiths to make and sell these sawdust stoves. The group has sold more than 3,500 stoves in Tanzania and elsewhere, and continues to provide jobs and training to aspiring blacksmiths.