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A group of trainees in Kailahun Town. Photo by Simon Taylor

Kanneh has just completed a two-year training programme to become a mechanic. He is one of the 145 young men and women who have benefited from a UNIDO project, funded by the Government of Japan, in Kailahun and Koindu in eastern Sierra Leone, a rural area bordering with Liberia and Guinea. The project, which ran from March 2011 to September 2012, provided on-the-job training for apprentices to learn various entrepreneurial skills, including carpentry, smithing, welding, auto mechanics, tailoring and weaving.

In the first stage of the programme, UNIDO selected eleven talented Sierra Leonean master-craftspeople to pass on their skills to others who had no experience of their craft, and then equipped them with the tools they needed. These trainers were taught teaching and coaching skills, both to help them to teach better, and also to reinforce the message that their apprentices would be there to learn, not to work as low-paid labour.

In the second stage, these craftspeople passed on their skills to others, like Kanneh, who would otherwise have not have had the opportunity to learn a skill. By using this apprenticeship method, which is well-established and understood in Sierra Leone, both trainers and trainees knew what was expected of them.

The project has been a great success, with about 70% of the trainees starting their own income-generating activities or finding jobs with existing businesses. In a further boost to the local economy, eight of the 11 trainers are in the process of using the experience gained during the programme to create new self-sustaining enterprises.

To give a voice to some of those trainees who now have a livelihood thanks to the programme, Kanneh and others in Kailahun District, in eastern Sierra Leone, were interviewed and photographed. The following extracts were taken from the Voices of Kailahun blog.

Malikie Kanneh, apprentice mechanic.

“Now that I have learnt this, I can see that my future is bright.”

“For me, learning was not just about making money but it was also to avoid becoming a thief. I have never stolen anything, but I used to see the boys I played football with resort to that. I am a careful person and I don’t like stealing, so I wanted to go and learn something.” – Malikie Kanneh is originally from Shegbwema, several hours from Kailahun Town, but he left home to come to Kailahun Town when he heard about the mechanics apprenticeship. Before the training, he didn’t know anything about mechanics or how to save money or develop a business. After two years of training, he is now able to repair machines even without his trainer present, and he now knows which steps to take to start his business.

Now the training has ended, this cheerful young man, who has started saving a part of his salary, wants to open his own shop and pass on his newly acquired skills to others. “I can go and teach my own friends so that we can all be working for the development of the country and ourselves. When I help my friends, I am developing the country.”

Since the end of the civil war in 2002, rural eastern Sierra Leone has recovered slowly. A generation of young people experienced a decade of conflict which severely disrupted their education. Kanneh is convinced that by ensuring a livelihood for people he can play an active role in maintaining peace in Sierra Leone. As he puts it, “If someone said to me, ‘go and fight over there’, I would sit and think to myself, ‘Am I going to leave my garage, where I can earn 10,000 Le (€1.86) per day, just to go and fight over there?’ I wouldn’t do it. With all the learning, I don’t think that I will be influenced by anyone to do such things.”

Mary Sesay, gara tie-dyer master

“What makes me feel good is the way the trainees act. I am proud of them. This project really did well for us. The hopelessness we had before has changed, and we see that we can do things by ourselves.”

Mary Sesay, a renowned gara tie-dyer, lives in the remote eastern town of Koindu, on the border with Guinea and Liberia. UNIDO invited Sesay to participate in the training of trainers, as a master-craftsperson. She recalls the benefits of the training, “They taught us about how you sell, how you save money, and how you have to write everything down, and how, if you are in a group, you have to appoint someone to take care of the money. At that time, we didn’t know anything about business economics but they taught us all that.”

Like many others in Sierra Leone, Sesay had fled to the neighbouring country of Guinea when her town was overrun by rebels during the war. In 2007, when she returned to Koindu and to a plundered home, she brought with her the technique of gara tie-dying that she had learnt in Guinea. Her skill has helped her to fund the restoration of her home and to take care of her family: “I sent my son, Came, to Ethiopia to study computer engineering, and all through my gara tie-dying. For this reason, I take it seriously because I know what is has done for me.”

Having successfully completed the teaching and coaching programme, Sesay was eager to help other women in her community develop their skills. She informed the whole town that she was looking for apprentices, “We called a meeting and 500 people came! We told them that this skill would help their home to have peace in it, because if you have a problem with your husband or you lose your husband, the group will support you and help you to know that there is hope.”

She has successfully trained many members of her community, and now she wants to take the next step and open a training school.

Theresa Jackah, one of Mary Sesay’s apprentices

“Everybody can do petty trading but, when you learn a skill, you can be self-reliant. Petty trading is plagued with debt, but gara tie-dye is bought by rich people who are respected and who pay.”

Jackah learned a lot during her apprenticeship with Mary Sesay, “She trained me to inject the ink, to tie the cloth and dunk it, and how to colour it. She also showed me how to use candle wax and mashed cassava to change the designs. She showed me how to use the right amount of ink for people that want their cloth to be rich, and how to design a cloth that will be expensive, as well as how to make cloth that is cheap.”

Today, Jackah runs her own business and has become well-known for her work. Mary Sesay considers Jackah to be her star pupil. Jackah’s life has changed with her new skill, “Gara tie-dying helps me a lot. I have made a set of cloth for my parlour. That alone can boost your morale. If somebody comes to your house, he or she will recognize straight away that you are doing gara tie-dying and be impressed. My life is changing, I thank God. Life will be better. I feel good. I feel proud.”

Umaru Aruna, blacksmith and trainer

“I don’t know a lot and I am not educated but I can sit where educated people sit and the community values me. The skills that you learn take you a step ahead. I have been recognized in the community more than before. I am proud of that.”

Thirty-eight-year-old Umaru Aruna is a successful and passionate blacksmith in Kailahun Town. The craftsman, who developed his interest for blacksmithing at a young age, even talks about his profession in a weekly broadcast on his local radio station.

When just a child, Aruna had approached a neighbouring blacksmith to help him learn about the process. He recalls, “You could say that I was raised as a blacksmith because I was not even 10 years old when I started practicing it. I really liked the work when I saw it, so I said to myself that this is the job that I should do.”

Because of this enthusiasm for his craft, UNIDO chose Aruna to become a trainer and taught him new craft skills, like how to build a cassava-grinding machine, an essential food processing tool. He also developed a different approach to business during the training, “Any business should not stay still; it should grow, so they taught us how to keep documents, how to control the site, to know if you are making profit or loss, and even how to talk to customers.” He says that before, he only had few customers, but as he learned how to write contracts, his business area enlarged.

Thanks to the training, his life changed significantly, as Aruna reports, “I didn’t use to save anything, but when I came back from the training, the first thing I did was open a bank account and not only that, but I also joined a credit union. So, now whatever we make, I make sure I save some.” Through the credit union he gets loans to buy additional equipment. That is an extraordinary achievement in Sierra Leone, where owing a bank account is still unusual.

Umaru Aruna encouraged his trainees to follow his example, “What I did to convince them was that I opened an account not as an individual but for us all. So, when we did some work, we saved some money, and then when we were given a loan based on our savings, we gave them 150,000 Le (€27.90) each to pay back in six months. They all saw it was a good idea and started saving on their own. Some have now opened their own accounts.”

Aruna has become a very popular trainer, passing on all his crafting techniques, from manufacturing cutlasses (machetes)and steel doors to musical drums, as well the newly gained business skills. He beams when he states that the apprenticeship with him increased his trainees’ well-being. “Before, they were living apart, lonely, but now they are part of the community. They felt bad about themselves. Now there are some who have built their own houses, or who through the work have bought land for themselves.”

Momo Lansana, one of Umaru Aruna’s apprentices

“In the next 10 years, I want to see electricity all over this town, and taps for us to drink clean water. I’d like everyone to have enough food so we can eat with our stomachs full, and not struggle so much anymore.”

Lansana hopes that with the development of his country even the remote Kailahun Town will change for the better. The father of two children knows that his skills can contribute, “When I look at my work, I see how blacksmithing work is very close to agriculture. Agriculture is at the roots of the country. We even say ‘No agriculture, no development’, because we all need food.”

At his father’s farm, there was no work for Lansana, who therefore had no means to support his own family. Lansana and his wife decided to leave their small village six miles away from town, when they heard about Umaru’s workshop. “I heard people saying that the workshop would be different from the local workshops that we used to have. I also heard that there would be training there.”

After one year of training, he did find a way to contribute to his father’s farm by producing cutlasses (machetes) for the workmen. His whole family benefits from his apprenticeship, as Lansana enthuses, “My wife is very, very happy about this job, because I can make things to sell in the market and we can use the money for the family. Through the work I do, I have money to send my children to school.”

- A version of this article was first published on the UNIDO website.

■ See also Learning by the ‘midnight sun’ in Sierra Leone.

● Mira Kapfinger is an intern at the Advocacy and External Relations Group at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO). Previously, she worked as an environmental issues editorial staff member at the European Energy Radio Campaign. She holds a bachelor degree in Environment and Bio-Resources Management from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria.

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I am pleased to have stumbled across the work of the Eco-Innovation Observatory, a platform for the structured collection and analysis of an extensive range of eco-innovation information gathered from across the European Union. The Observatory defines eco-innovation as “any innovation that reduces the use of natural resources and decreases the release of harmful substances across the whole life-cycle.”

There are two items on the website of particular note.

One is the recently published annual report (and a rather neat audio-visual presentation). The Eco-Innovation Observatory’s third annual report looks at how eco-innovation can lead to and create structural change. It argues that strategic partnerships between policymakers, businesses, citizens and researchers are key to developing, implementing and applying eco-innovation. The report begins with a vision of a resource-efficient Europe, presents the current state of eco-innovation in the European Union, and asks how eco-innovation efforts can be both increased and intensified to play a larger role in the transition to a green economy. Especially interesting are the examples of eco-innovation good practices – for example, check out the UK’s National Industrial Symbiosis Network, or Austria’s green technology cluster, Eco World Styria.

The other is Eco-innovate!, a practical guide to eco-innovation for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The booklet overviews the emerging business opportunities that eco-innovation has to offer to companies that reconsider business models, develop new products, technologies or services, or improve production processes. The guide summarizes key business issues, questions and lessons learnt for SMEs, as well as presenting selected eco-innovation good practices.

Plenty of good stuff here. It dovetails well with UNIDO’s Green Industry Platform which recently convened a forum in Paris, France, where French government officials, and representatives of international and non-governmental organizations and the private sector agreed that green growth is the path to follow to achieve a global transition to a green economy and called for a shift away from labour- and resource-intensive production towards resource-efficient productivity.

● Charles Arthur is the editor of UNIDO’s Making It magazine.

Further reading:
Green growth: from labour to resource productivity.

Integrating Resource Efficiency, Greening of Industrial Production and Green Industries – Scoping of and Recommendations for Effective Indicators.

The European Commission’s Online Resource Efficiency Platform.

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In the 20 years since the first Rio conference, global emissions have risen by nearly 50% and 300 million additional hectares of forest have been destroyed. The population has increased 30% to over 7 billion; one-sixth of them still malnourished.

The urgency of another conference was clear enough but the verdict on the outcome was ambiguous. It depended on how high you had set the bar on your expectations. Greenpeace must have anticipated a sudden epiphany by world leaders when it dubbed the meeting a “failure of epic proportions”. Others – mainly UN insiders, including veterans of UN conferences – agreed that a “pathway for a sustainable future” had been laid down. But no one could conceal a measure of disappointment, compared with the urgency of facing up to the huge tasks of turning around a deteriorating global environment.

The private sector was strongly in evidence. That was a potentially good sign for the interests of sustainable industrial development, and perhaps one of the real strengths of Rio was that, like its predecessor, it succeeded in corralling a range of interested parties, all focussed on similar concerns. However, there was little for ‘business and industry’ to take away from the rather lame outcome document which, in accordance with hallowed UN practice, only governments can be involved in.

Which brings us to the nub of the sustainable industry challenge: industry depends on the conditions that surround it, and whether an enterprise is state-owned or fully private, those conditions are strongly influenced by government policies. This is the most important meaning of public-private partnership: the nature of that nexus determines industrial fortunes. Or stated even more starkly: there is no successful industrial development without public enablement. Hence the two statements in the outcome document: from government to industry, “we support national regulatory and policy frameworks that enable business and industry to advance sustainable development initiatives.” And from industry to government, “we also invite business and industry as appropriate and in accordance with national legislation to contribute to sustainable development and to develop sustainability strategies that integrate, inter alia, green economy policies.”

In the interests of industrial sustainability, the most critical policy change which governments could have taken at Rio would have been to agree to phase out subsidies (and increase taxes) on the production and consumption of carbon fuels. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has estimated that, in the absence of reform, these subsidies could reach almost $US600bn by 2015, equivalent to 0.6% of global GDP. Subsidies are often developed in the interests of the poor as consumers. But they represent a huge burden on national exchequers, distort market signals and are ultimately unsustainable economically. Will reform come? The outcome document asks only that governments “reaffirm the commitments they have made” to phase out fossil fuel subsidies. But who is watching? Compared with the much stronger language on fisheries subsidies, this is tantamount to the policy status quo, which the IEA predicts will see fuel subsidies grow further, encouraging rather than inhibiting the use of carbon fuels in industry and electricity generation.

There was also an onus on business and industry to make commitments, but the World Resources Institute found few of any significance. The Natural Capital Leadership Compact committed several global corporations to account for natural capital as a business imperative – several others declined. The 45 CEOs who are part of the UN Global Compact’s Water Mandate committed to working with governments and other partners to “help solve the global water crisis”. More meaningful still would have been a universally binding commitment by global firms to report on the sustainability of their operations by measuring resource use, including in particular environmentally significant emissions and pollutants. The outcome document asked industry to “develop models for best practice and facilitate action for the integration of sustainability reporting….” This almost meaningless formulation is scarcely a call for disclosure. In 2013, the UK will require publicly-listed companies to fully report their greenhouse gas emissions. But how many other countries will follow voluntarily?

Rio+20 was another UN conference on an automatic decennial rota, and the timing was inauspicious. Green economics continues to be a genuine stumbling block for private companies, particularly in straitened financial times. Sustainability does not currently sell well on the stock market. Winning over shareholders will require leaders in the private sector who can make a convincing case for the advantages of sustainability over short-term gain. More positive activism by consumers, favouring greener producers, could also help.

Should we have expected more from this UN summit? Probably not. Timing was only one of the problems. The impuissance of successive climate change conferences-of-the-parties (17 and counting) is a good indicator of how poorly inter-governmental policymaking works in practice. The best that can be said about UN forums is that they are universal. But, almost paradoxically, rather than forging agreements based on the world’s best practices, or even making decisions by majority votes like every parliament in the world, the UN works by consensus, and thus effectively gives a veto to each of its 193 constituents.

The real outcomes of Rio will not reside in language of convolution and compromise. Even if the final document had had the status of a blueprint – or a roadmap for that “pathway”, the UN (Secretariat) has a poor record of developing mechanisms of monitoring and ensuring compliance.

Any positive results of Rio will take time to show, and they will most likely come from a more organic “bottom-up” process of showcasing. The large presence of NGOs and private sector did not just raise awareness of the issues, it helped to advertize some of the ways that people are finding solutions to producing in a sustainable way. Ultimately, it will not be inter-governmental bodies but the ingenuity and innovation by individuals in supportive environments that will point to the future we want.

● Stephen Browne is the director of the Future of the UN Development System project, and author of the recently published, United Nations Industrial Development Organization: industrial solutions for a sustainable future (Routledge).

Check out this interview with Stephen Browne on his UNIDO book.

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When we first encountered Lèt Agogo (“Milk in Abundance” in Haitian Creole) at the supermarket around the corner, I assumed it was simply a delicious Haitian product. To this day, a quart of Lèt Agogo strawberry yogurt can always be found in our refrigerator at home. Nutritious, not too sweet, balanced, made completely from local ingredients, and full of vitamins, Lèt Agogo yogurt makes for the perfect breakfast on a sunny morning in Ayiti Cheri.

Little did we know Lèt Agogo is much more than a quality product made in Haiti. Lèt Agogo provides essential nutrition for tens of thousands of schoolchildren everyday across the country. Lèt Agogo has shown that it is possible to scale up local production adapted to infrastructural realities in Haiti, using very little electricity and integrating traditional Haitian agricultural practices. Lèt Agogo offers a new model for national food sovereignty. When you buy Lèt Agogo, you are not only choosing a quality product that tastes good, but you are also choosing to support an alternative, sustainable model of agricultural development in Haiti.

After the 2011 Investment Conference in Haiti, Dr. Michel Chancy, the brains behind the Lèt Agogo operation, invited the BrandHaiti team to tour one of the dozens of laiteries (milk production centres) around the country. A veterinarian by training, Chancy and other young Haitian professionals conceptualized the project while working at the Haitian NGO, which supports sustainable rural agriculture development projects. Created in 1991, Veterimed empowers the 700,000 families which are responsible for over 90% of livestock production in Haiti by increasing their income and improving their technical capacities in the domains of animal health and production.

Maintaining livestock and earning a profit is extremely difficult for an individual farmer, especially since the international community slashed tariffs for foreign dairy products and decimated local production. Indeed, Haiti belongs to a small minority (7%) of countries in the world that are not self-sufficient dairy producers. Paradoxically, Haiti imports the vast majority of its dairy products, despite the fact that Haitian dairy farmers are quite capable of producing milk nationally. As such, Veterimed conceptualized Lèt Agogo’s cooperative system of pooling small farmers together to change this reality. Together, farmers are guaranteed a steady income and earn much more as a cooperative than they do trying to survive—and compete—individually. The initial laiterie built over a decade ago was so successful that Veterimed quickly built three others, and the project became sustainable shortly thereafter. Today, fourteen laiteries around the country form the Lèt Agogo diary cooperative, and the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission recently provided funds to construct four more facilities over the next three years. Chancy’s innovative rural development project was so successful that President René Préval appointed him to the Ministry of Agriculture in order to scale up his food sovereignty model. After being elected, President Martelly retained Chancy from Préval’s administration, an extremely rare occurrence. To this day, Chancy remains the Secretary of State for Animal Production in the Ministry of Agriculture.

The simplicity in design of Lèt Agogo’s business model is also the source of its ingenuity. Lèt Agogo organizes these cow and goat farmers into a cooperative around local laiteries. Farmers register at a local laiterie, where they bring all of the milk they have produced at the end of each day. At the drop-off window, the number of gallons of milk is meticulously recorded and tracked. Simultaneously, another technician tests the quality, acidity, and sub-density of the milk using testing probes in the distillation centre. As such, the milk is standardized to guarantee safety and quality. If a farmer has a problem with his or her livestock, they may use this time to explain the circumstances, and Lèt Agogo will send a veterinarian to provide the necessary services, such as vaccinations, to guarantee the health of the farmers’ animals and ensure the quality of their product. This system also creates a new job market for Haitian veterinarians.

At the entry of the facility, we are required to remove our shoes, sanitize our hands, and dress in Lèt Agogo uniforms. We enter the laiterie and find ourselves in the reception room, where a variety of milk, yogurt, and cheese products are found. Each laiterie is constructed identically such that the architecture of the building flows according to the stages of production, which guarantees maximum production. Chancy brings us a handful of local ingredients that are added to the milk to create the Lèt Agogo taste in accordance with Haitian tradition: vanilla, sugar, anise, citronella, and cinnamon, among others. All of these are produced locally, and the increased demand aids in creating yet another job market, this time for spice farmers.

We continue into the pasteurization room, which consists of several gas stoves. After the milk is tested, it is pasteurized and spiced in a large pot over the burner, a process which takes approximately twenty minutes. Chancy enters the next room, where the cooling process takes place, and strikes up several conversations with the workers, asking how their families and jobs are going. He also shows us the refrigerator where syrups used to flavour the yogurt are stored, which include locally-produced strawberry, guava, lemon, vanilla, and orange extracts. In this room, the workers strain the heated milk in large buckets to remove the cinnamon and vanilla remains. Another person begins bottling the milk by hand in a special container and placing them into a crate. After filling a crate, the bottles are hand-capped using a simple press. Lèt Agogo employs personnel to recuperate the standardized glass bottles, which creates more job opportunities for those involved in the cooperative. To aid in this process, recycling programmes have been arranged in schools to ensure that the glass bottles are more easily collected and reused.

Once the bottles have been successfully filled and capped, they are returned to the pasteurization room for a second round of sterilization. For another twenty minutes, filled bottles are placed in a high-temperature cooker to kill any remaining bacteria. Finally, the bottles are placed in a large metal basin full of cold water, which brings them back to room temperature. With the specially sealed bottle caps, the milk can remain at room temperature without spoiling.

In the last room, milk bottles are labeled for schools, and the yogurt is labeled for commercial retail. A giant cooler full of yogurt, a refrigerator full of cheese, and a water pump are the only appliances in the entire facility that require electricity, which is generated by a solar panel on the roof of the building. Beyond that, a Lèt Agogo facility functions using natural lighting and manual labour, which means a laiterie can easily be opened in the countryside where electricity is scarce and the sun is abundant.

Each facility is an autonomous enterprise that employs locals for every stage of production. The national programme managed from the Ministry of Agriculture and Veterimed provides a model to scale up these facilities, and the brand label “Lèt Agogo” is provided free of charge for these local sustainable enterprises.

To date, Lèt Agogo is the only Haitian dairy product sold nationally, despite difficult conditions of road and electricity infrastructure. As we saw, the pooling and scaling up of local dairy production easily overcomes these traditional challenges in a profitable way. No other programme has yet replicated Lèt Agogo’s low-electricity, cooperative, sustainable model. Perhaps this milk production model is the only beginning of food sovereign Haiti, but the question remains: can these mechanisms be replicated in other fields of agriculture, such as vegetable and grain?

Lèt Agogo is not seeking to export, as the domestic market has not yet been saturated, especially since 80% of the products go directly to schools and are not for commercial sale. With the expansion of commercial sales of Lèt Agogo milk, yogurt, and cheese, this farming cooperative is only in an early stage of development. Scaling up has also rendered sustainability somewhat difficult. While each laiterie generates approximately four million Haitian Gourdes (US$100,000) profit annually, the cost of a new laiterie is roughly six million Gourdes. For the moment, the Haitian government subsidizes a portion of the construction of new laiteries until commercial operations can generate a sufficient profit. Nonetheless, the more Lèt Agogo can scale up production, the less the Haitian government will need to subsidize the programme in the future.

Regardless, it should be clear that Lèt Agogo is not just another state-run programme that is losing money. When strictly discussing accounts, one can prematurely reach this conclusion; however, this price tag for the State is a minimal cost given the long-term benefits of the programme. The Haitian Government spends a large percentage of its budget on importing food to Haiti, which is entirely illogical given that Haiti is an agricultural country. If Haiti can achieve food sovereignty, the government will spend hundreds of millions less on importing foreign dairy products—among others—each year. Furthermore, no monetary value has been calculated for Lèt Agogo’s school programme, which provides thousands of children with access to essential calcium and protein nutrition, nutrition to which they had no access prior to the programme. Health care costs for treating protein- or calcium-deficient children are being lowered, and arguably even more beneficially, between 50 and 75 families are employed in each laiterie, which has an enormous environmental and economic impact on Haiti. For every family employed, they no longer cut down trees to make a living. Given that 98% of Haiti has been deforested, the long term environmental impact of Lèt Agogo is necessary for Haiti’s future development.

Traditional economic profitability schemes do not take into consideration these social and environmental impacts on the economy. Yet, in a country in which complicated problems require even more complex solutions, we must start thinking beyond red and black accounts. “We are not worried,” Chancy concludes. “The State needs to construct for now, and profitability will inevitably come.”

When environmental, social, health, and political benefits are added into Lèt Agogo’s books, this farming cooperative is far beyond profitable. Something as important as producing one’s own food does not have a price tag; neither does turning the tables on deforestation, nor does providing school children with one of their only stable sources of nutrition. When you choose Lèt Agogo, you are choosing much more than a brand and a quality product; you are choosing a new future for Haiti based on a local, sustainable economy.

● Nick Stratton, is President of BrandHaiti, a global, student led non-profit business marketing organization that re-brands Haiti’s negative image through highlighting the country’s strengths and comparative advantages to foster pro-Haitian business investment and revitalize a non-exploitative economy. This article was originally published on the BrandHaiti website on 10 March, 2012, and is republished here with the kind permission of BrandHaiti.

● To learn more about Lèt Agogo, please visit their website.

Also check out the video, Milk Agogo.

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The phrase ‘Industrial Revolution’ may be hundreds of years old, but it will be reborn in the 21st century. Europe is investing in – and relying on – re-industrialization to foster economic recovery, ease environmental strain and solidify Europe’s standing as a global industrial leader.

And while the last Industrial Revolution gave birth to modern technology, the next Industrial Revolution will help create future technology.

Europe needs its real economy now more than ever to underpin our ongoing economic recovery. As such, actions should be designed to reverse the current downward trend and to promote the re-industrialization of Europe. Industry currently accounts for about 16% of EU GDP. Therefore, the European Commission has set its goal that industry’s share of GDP should be around 20% by 2020. This will be achieved through a series of measures designed to stimulate key markets, particularly clean, green sectors.

Europe’s industry is well placed to assume this role: Europe is a world-leader in many strategic sectors such as automotive, aeronautics, engineering, space, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Industry still accounts for 80% of Europe’s exports, while 80% of private sector R&D investment comes from manufacturing. If confidence comes back, and with it new investments, Europe’s industry can perform better and start growing again.

“We cannot continue to let our industry leave Europe,” said European Commission Vice-President Antonio Tajani, Commissioner for Industry and Entrepreneurship underlined. “Our figures are crystal clear: European industry can deliver growth and can create employment. Therefore, we tabled the conditions for the sustainable re-industrialization of Europe, to develop the investments needed in new technologies and to rebuild a climate of confidence and entrepreneurship. By working together and restoring confidence, we can bring back industry to Europe.”

Revolution required

By encouraging and enabling Member States to implement the changes required to improve sustainability and resource efficiency, Europe will be tapping into a booming sector. After all, the global market for clean production technologies, currently €380 billion, is expected to more than double, to €765 billion, by 2020. Certain markets, such as automatic waste separation, will grow at an even greater rate.

Of course, as important as international markets will be, the next Industrial Revolution requires a solid foundation here in Europe. And the Commission is ready to help European industries nurture this stability. Ideally, the Internal Market could account for as much as 25% of GDP, but right now it is only 21%, meaning there is ample room for growth.

The EC will improve the Internal Market by standardizing regulations, which are currently dominated by national regulations – or no regulations at all. In addition, the Commission will address the need for improved access to finance, which has been lagging since the financial crisis struck in 2008. In 2007, gross fixed capital formation of GDP was 21.3% of GDP; in 2011, it was just 18.6%. The EC will help reach pre-crisis levels within the next three years and average more than 23% through 2020. And in an effort to improve productivity and introduce new technologies, policy actions should contribute to growing investment in equipment from its current level of 6 to 7% of GDP to 9% of GDP until 2020.

From digital agenda to nanotechnology

Recognizing the need for technological evolution, the Commission has created a Digital Agenda designed to increase the number of small firms engaging in e-commerce. With the digital Single Market expected to grow by 10% each year through 2016, the EC plans to strengthen protection of intellectual property rights, including IPR help-desks designed to support SMEs. These measures will ensure that intellectual and financial investments are duly rewarded, thus encouraging both investors and entrepreneurs to lead the re-industrialization effort.

In addition, the Commission will help reshape EU industry with the formation of new goods, services and business models that would have seemed like science fiction during the first Industrial Revolution. 3D printing technologies, for example, are used to make plastic and metal production parts for the automotive industry, aerospace firms and consumer-product companies. The printers used to exploit this technology utilize ultra-thin layers of powdered materials that are then fused by lasers or electron beams. The process conserves raw materials, saves energy and creates products that are perfectly 21st century.

Key enabling technologies, or KETs, will be another cornerstone of the new Industrial Revolution. Used in a variety of applications – from corrosion-resistant nano-materials for bridges to heat-resistant materials for aircraft – KETs will once again make Europe a hotbed for production processes that have been outsourced to third-world countries.

Repeating by leading

Europe’s next Industrial Revolution is an enormous opportunity created by a pair of equally enormous challenges – the necessity of more environmentally friendly production, and reversing the ongoing slowdown caused by the global financial crisis.

The re-industrialization of Europe will ease the strain caused by each of these burdens, enabling more efficient, less material-intensive manufacturing techniques. These same technologies will help drive drown productions costs, which will have a multitude of knock-on effects: making Europe a cheaper place to invest in industry; easing the burden on European consumers; bolstering European exports to countries outside the Single Market.

The new Industrial Revolution will no doubt be different from the first one. But one thing will be the same: Europe is leading the way.

● Originally published in Enterprise & Industry magazine (http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/magazine/index_en.htm),  © European Union, 2008 – 2012

The Enterprise & Industry online magazine provides regular updates on policy development, on legislative proposals and their passage to adoption, and on the implementation and review of regulation affecting enterprises. Articles cover issues related to SMEs, innovation, entrepreneurship, the single market for goods, competitiveness and environmental protection, better regulation, industrial policies across a wide range of sectors, and more.

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Precious Molobane Mamogale, 42 years old and a mother of four children, is from a village around 500km from Johannesburg, South Africa. She was a member of one of a number of small groups of women from countries across Africa who travelled to India in September 2011 to receive training at the Barefoot College. Six months later, she emerged as full-fledged, trained solar technician, ready to return home to electrify her home village for the first time.

“I want to go back to my country and bring light to my province – and want to open a college like this there, so that I can train more women,” she explained as she reflected on her experience at the end of her training in Tilonia, a small town in the state of Rajasthan.

Another participant, Stella, a grandmother from a village in Malawi, said, “I never imagined that technical knowledge like this would be open to women who were illiterates, like us. But coming to Tilonia has given us this confidence that we can learn about new things and make our lives better.”

The Barefoot College in Tilonia was established in 1972, and since then has been providing basic services and solutions to problems in rural communities, with the objective of making them self-sufficient and sustainable.

As the school’s founder, Bunker Roy, explained in his 2011 TEDTalk, Learning from a barefoot movement, “The College teaches rural women and men – many of them illiterate – to become engineers, artisans and doctors. There are only two rules for enrolment – you must be poor to attend and you must take your learning home to your village.”

Roy says his low-cost, community-driven approach “capitalizes on the resources already present in the villages.” The college’s ‘barefoot solutions’ can be broadly categorized into water, education, health care, rural handicrafts, people’s action, communications, women’s empowerment, and wasteland development, but perhaps the most dramatic of all is the programme to empower marginalized women across the world and help them start to drive their local green economies.

The programme, running since 2004, teaches solar engineering skills to illiterate older women from rural communities – a particularly vulnerable group worldwide – before equipping them with solar lamp kits to assemble and install in their own and nearby villages.

Any woman over the age of 35 from a remote, inaccessible, non-electrified area can enrol for the international course, provided she is backed by her village. As Roy says: “It makes sense to choose women, especially older women, as they are more loyal to their roots and less impatient to try out new pastures, which men are wont to do as soon as they are given a certificate.”

Between 2004 and 2009, 141 women from 21 countries in Africa received six months of training at the Barefoot College, learning how to construct charge controllers and inverters, fabricate circuit boards, carry out testing and wiring, and install repair and maintain solar panels and solar lanterns. The women learn by listening and memorizing, using colour-coded charts that help them to remember the permutation and combination of the wires without needing to read or write.

Each woman participating in the training course is selected or nominated by their local community, and supported by a variety of local and international organizations, and in some cases, by their governments. The success of the scheme has led to support being provided to participants in the form of Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation grants from the Indian government’s ministry of external affairs, as part of its South-South cooperation programme.

In an interview given in April 2011, Bunker Roy explained how India’s contribution to the programme works. “This unique collaboration through ITEC with the government of India allows the selection of a village-based, illiterate grandmother from any of the Least Developed Countries around the world. As part of this South-South effort, the Indian Embassy or High Commission is obliged under the agreement to issues free visas, a economy ticket and six months training costs to enable the awardees to come to India and live in the Barefoot College.”

In recent years, the programme has been extended to include dozens of women from Afghanistan, Bhutan, Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala and Jordan, and now UN Women is also supporting the programme. Another 25 women from countries in Africa completed the training course in March 2012 and, in September, ten women from Fiji graduated. (See this story from UN Women Pacific.)

On their return to their home countries, the women have the potential to light up their communities with solar energy, using equipment that is sent by the College even before they themselves leave Tilonia. Follow-up records maintained at the Barefoot College reveal several notable success stories. Fatuma Ababker Ibrahim, from Beyahile village in the Afar region of Ethiopia, returned to her village to install 90 fixed solar units, and also helped start a rural electronic workshop in her village. Gul Zaman, a 26-year old from Afghanistan, came to Tilonia with her husband. They returned to their community to provide solar electricity to around 50 houses.

Those women, who decide to use their training as a means of generating income, are encouraged to develop the Barefoot College model, whereby local households pay a monthly fee, based on how much they would have spent on kerosene, batteries, wood and candles, and in return get solar energy set-ups installed and maintained. Some of the money goes towards the solar engineer’s monthly stipend, while the rest pays for components and spare parts.

The impact of the programme is being amplified by bilateral programmes between India and the solar engineers’ national governments. The idea is to establish vocational training centres where the returning solar engineers will impart their knowledge to local people, creating a snowball effect.

For example, the government of India is helping its counterpart in Liberia to set up five vocational training centres to take advantage of the skills acquired by the eight women who returned from the Barefoot College in March 2012.

In October 2012, Jiko Luveni, Fiji’s minister of social welfare, women and poverty alleviation, announced a partnership with the Barefoot College and the Indian High Commission to establish a regional training centre in Fiji. Luveni said, “This initiative will see more women in Fiji and the Pacific being trained as solar engineers,” adding that, once the centre is established, Fiji’s 10 solar engineers will provide training not only in solar electrification, but also in building solar-powered desalination plants.

A similar scheme is already underway in the village of Konta Line in the Port Loko district of Sierra Leone, where the national government has invested in the establishment of a college to provide four-month residential training courses in solar engineering for 50 students. Training is being provided by the 12 women who returned from India in 2011. Around 1,500 household solar units will be installed by the newly-trained engineers but Nancy Kanu, who was trained in India, is already thinking bigger. “Once these units are installed, I think we’ll need an investor to manufacture solar units here to make them affordable for everyone. There’s nothing we can’t learn now to make our lives better. We have the power to change our villages.”

The Barefoot College international training programme is a shining example of what can be achieved by South-South cooperation. The question must be why can’t the Barefoot College approach be scaled up across the developing world?

Watch the trailer for No Problem, a new movie about the Barefoot College.

Watch the 60 minute film, Solar Mamas. Rafea is 30 years old, with four children and a husband who is eager to take a third wife. She is a Bedouin woman living in a small Jordanian village close to the desert. With encouragement from the country’s Ministry of Environment, she leaves her village for the first time to go to the Barefoot College in India to train to become a solar-energy engineer. She is the first Jordanian woman ever to attend such a programme, and she dreams of returning to bring much-needed income and talents to support her family and village.

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Photo: Soma Mitra Mukherjee (CARE/WFS Media Fellowships)

In the 1980s, while there was much critiquing and challenging of the development paradigm and what was called the ‘modernization project’, it was feminists of the South who first established an intellectual identity for the South, pinned on the understanding of women’s poverty and on its removal. They then challenged the development transfers, which were derived from the characterization of women of the South in the image of their northern sisters.

As the eminent development economist, Louis Emmerij, said back in 2002, “What is amazing when it comes to development thinking by and within the United Nations system is the dominance of Western ideas in an organization that is now composed of almost 200 nations and even more cultures. Starting with modernization theory, all the development approaches are “Western” and are dominated by economists. This remains true, even with strategies conceived by thinkers from the South or the East.”

However, feminist scholars and advocates revealed how the “characterizations” of women’s economic roles were dramatically different from the roles being played by their sisters in the North. At the same time, there was great similarity across the continents of the South. For example, women vendors were a part of the market scenario in most of these continents – the higglers of the Caribbean islands, the market women of Ghana and Liberia, and the street vendors of South and South-East Asia. In many parts of these regions, women were, and are, the principal wholesale and retail traders. They are also the informal banks. Home-based production was another critical economic characteristic of women in the continents of the South. Women in these continents were engaged in cultivation of food and cash crops, often owning land too – all very different from their Northern sisters.

Women for a new era
This characterization, apart from the identity it established, generated both an organized voice and theoretical intrusions into the concept of development. For example, a feminist network of the South, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), identified the “crises” in the regions – Africa’s food crisis, Latin America’s debt, South Asia’s poverty, and the militarization of the Pacific Islands – as the frameworks within which the efforts to enable women to move out of poverty needed to be located. Poor women in these regions were not only totally engaged in the economies of these countries but were suffering from, and also responding creatively to, these onslaughts. A new framework began to emerge.

DAWN’s analysis noted that only a few countries that had pursued export-led strategies for growth had gained systematic results. In fact, countries that had experienced economic booms were the same ones that had a record of growing inequality. It located the structural roots of poverty not in insufficient economic growth but in “unequal access to resources, control over production, trade, finance, and money and across nations, genders, regions, and classes”.

The South Commission
The next challenge to what could be called the “given gospel” of macro-economic reasoning came from the South Commission (1987-90), initiated by the Non-Aligned Movement and chaired by the late Dr Julius Nyerere, former President of Tanzania. At the very first meeting, the members, all economists from the continents of the South, proposed that the very language, the whole package termed “progress”, as generated by Eurocentric thought, needed to be challenged. As the world economy ran into trouble with the crisis starting in 2007, feminists of the South, in partnership with scholars from the North, analyzed the sources and offered ideas for reconstructing the very basis of economic reasoning, as well as measures of progress.

In India, for example, the potential for generating sustainable growth of output along with jobs, livelihoods is tangible. Data from official sources on the output of the small and medium enterprises, as well as hand-driven sectors, reveals a steady contribution to the output of the industrial sector, even without the support of strong public policy initiatives. Women are the predominant labour force in these forms of production and exchange.

According to Arjun Sengupta’s National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector report (published in 2009), of the total workers in the unorganized sector, 148 million (32.3%) are women. More than half of them, nearly 80 million women, do home-based work.

Even though household industry is undervalued (and not supported either), it is household savings that contribute to domestic savings, and as YV Reddy, the former Governor of India’s central bank, has pointed out, it is “domestic savers who, in any case, finance over 90% of investments…”

Wage-led growth
The South then has the potential to redesign and relocate its engines of growth. By firing these engines, it is possible to generate what can be called wage-led growth, as distinct from capital-led growth as a paradigm, and shift from the current, so-called, market-led growth – a misnomer, as markets are a lifeline for the poor in developing countries.

One of the most inspiring economic programmes for building growth and progress that is spread out has come from Gandhi himself. I call his ideas for economic progress, the ‘bubbling-up theory of growth’, as a way of challenging the current ‘trickle-down’ theory of growth. The bubbling-up theory argues that the process of the removal of poverty can itself be an engine of growth, that the incomes and capabilities of those who are currently poor have the potential to generate demand. This demand, in turn, will drive production, but the production of goods that are immediately needed by the poor, who are currently peripheral in production. The ‘oiling’ of this engine will bubble up and fire the economy in a much more broad-based manner. Unlike export-led growth, it will not skew production and trade to serve the interests of the elite, a trap which is accentuating disparities and creating discontent.

Inclusive growth
Countries of the South, and women in them, are a fertile field right now for generating industrial growth that is inclusive, in other words, which generates employment, as opposed to industrial growth that is jobless, and tends to create corporate empires and gross inequality.

Feminists of the South have revealed that women are the principal actors, but are underpaid and unrecognized in the so-called emerging economies, where success is built on the provision of cheap, unprotected labour. This phenomenon, if converted into a value through recognition, as well as through building another theory of growth, such as the bubbling-up theory of growth, means that UNIDO can fly a flag for ‘industrial development for economic justice’.

The author acknowledges the assistance provided by Deepshikha Bathej.

● Devaki Jain is an Indian activist and a development economist, best known for her work on poverty, employment and the empowerment of women. She was one of the founders of a wide range of institutions, such as Development Alternatives for Women for a New Era and the Institute of Social Studies Trust – a research centre in New Delhi where she was Director until 1994. She has served as a member of the South Commission, established in 1987, and various other committees, such as the Advisory Committee for the UNDP Human Development Report on Poverty, 1997. She has been a member of many policy- and programme-designing task forces and working groups with special reference to women’ s economic empowerment set up by the Government of India.

#6 Joel Mwale (Kenya)

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When Joel Mwale was hospitalized with dysentery, his doctors advised him to focus his energies on making a full recovery. The 18-year-old Kenyan student had caught the illness after consuming contaminated water during the country’s annual dry season. As he lay in bed, Mwale came up with the idea that would provide his community with access to safe drinking water and put him on the road to becoming one of Africa’s most promising young entrepreneurs.

As he told CNN, “I thought that what if this thing keeps on happening, year in, year out. What if next year the same problem happens.” On his release from hospital, Mwale invested his life savings, 10,000 Kenyan Shillings (US$95), in building a borehole in his village. Four years on, and the project has been so successful that it still provides clean water to around 500 households.

Galvanized by his DIY borehole success, Mwale set about planning bigger projects and investigating how he could bring safe and reliable drinking water to the wider Kenyan population.

With the help of a financial loan from a local farmer, Mwale began investing in the necessary equipment and business infrastructure to put his idea of harvesting rainwater into action. Within a matter of months, he had founded Skydrop Enterprises – a company that captures falling rain water in a series of giant tanks, before purifying and bottling it for sale on the commercial market.

Skydrop Enterprises has brought clean drinking water to a wide consumer base – selling 33,000 bottles across Kenya and into Uganda in the last financial year. Mwale hopes his success will inspire others in Africa to act on their ideas and become involved in different types of entrepreneurship. “I think there are many more youths who are sitting on their potential,” he said.

In September 2011, Mwale was selected as the recipient of the first Anzisha Prize for African leaders aged 15-20 who have developed and implemented innovative solutions to challenges facing their communities.

● Read more about Mwale in this Business Daily article from August 2012.

Check out this video, Meet Joel Mwale, Anzisha Prize Winner.

#5 Joseph Lim (Malaysia)

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The Kuala Lumpur-based company, Global Green Synergy (GGS), started out as an oil palm, dried long fibre trading firm, exporting mainly to China. It has since ventured into the development of oil palm biomass treatment and processing technologies to produce various value-added oil palm biomass products, such as briquettes and pellets, compost and palm kernel-shell char.

The founder and managing director, Joseph Lim, said, “When I established GGS, my mission was to make a difference and to mitigate environmental adversity. My initial objective was to utilize the oil palm biomass generated in the palm oil industry through innovative and creative technologies. Along the way, I realized the potential of converting oil palm biomass into renewable energy.”

GGS is now one of Malaysia’s leading solution providers for the treatment and processing of oil palm biomass to produce value-added biomass products. “We lack local supply of specialized machinery with higher efficiency, so GGS converts existing technology from the sawdust, wood chips or rice husk industry to process empty fruit bunch biomass,” Lim said. GGS works with local biomass experts to run higher efficiency systems and a certain percentage of revenue is reinvested into innovation and new technology, such as developing composite material to help address the shortage of wood.

In November 2011, Joseph Lim was announced the world winner of the 2011 Junior Chamber International (JCI) Creative Young Entrepreneur Award in Brussels, Belgium. The award recognizes exceptional young entrepreneurs and the role of creativity in their success.

● Check out this video showcasing the collaboration between GGS and the Malaysian Palm Oil Board to produce palm biomass, solid biofuel briquettes.

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By 2050, demand for resources is set to increase significantly as the global population grows to nine billion and becomes more prosperous. Global economic growth is being driven largely by emerging markets. Over the medium term, the World Bank estimates economic growth of 6% in developing countries, compared to 2.7% in higher-income countries.

This is good news: the leap forward in quality of life for so many millions is something to celebrate. But this growth could be jeopardized by the resource challenge being felt across the world. The expanding population will need 70% more food, and growing and processing this food will increase water stress. The Water Resources Group, of which SABMiller is a member, estimates that there could be about 40% shortfall between water demand and available freshwater supply by 2030.

SABMiller India has embarked on a natural recharge project in Rajasthan to protect the water supply for the Rochees brewery and local farmers. The project involves the construction of three dams in a wasteland area to facilitate natural recharge and replenishment of water aquifers using the natural terrain and geology to trap water. Photo: SABMiller/One Red Eye/Jason Alden

Water, food and energy are interconnected. Agriculture accounts for about 70% of global freshwater use and can pollute freshwater supplies if mismanaged. Water is also used to generate electricity: in the USA, power generation accounts for about 50% of all freshwater withdrawals, and drought in countries that use hydropower – Ethiopia and Ghana, for example – can lead to black-outs. Energy, in turn, is needed to fertilize and transport crops, which can themselves be used as biofuel to create energy. Large amounts of energy are also required to pump water to drier regions and, as water scarcity increases, so will the energy needed for technologies such as desalination.

Given these trade-offs and interactions, successfully addressing the triple challenge of water stress, food security and energy supplies means taking a holistic view and balancing the many competing demands. We call this interconnected issue the water-food-energy nexus and it is a buzzword which is growing in popularity.

If you were to search the programme at World Water Week in Stockholm held in August 2012, you would find 17 sessions containing the word ‘nexus’ – more seminars that a single person could possibly attend. It’s a good sign that policymakers, companies and non-governmental organizations are aware of and debating the interconnectedness of resources. But it is critical that there should be substance behind jargon. A nexus approach must result in positive action that enhances water, food and energy security for real people; or, at the very least, manages the trade-offs to minimize harm.

Forward-looking companies must assess not only the risks of mismanaging this resource nexus, but also understand and grasp the opportunities created by integrating resource-saving initiatives into long-term business plans.

And it’s already happening – companies across food and beverage, consumer goods, chemicals, engineering and many other sectors are making great efficiency gains and targeting even more. And through setting these targets and considering how we will meet them, companies often find hidden value they hadn’t realized was there – operating cost savings they might otherwise not have found.

At SABMiller, by reducing the water we use in brewing and packaging our beer we are then able to cut the amount of energy required for heating and cooling that water. We are also increasingly generating renewable energy from by-products of the brewing process, such as spent grain biogas captured during wastewater treatment. Of course just doing this within our own operations is not enough – global companies are now pushing these targets down into their supply chains – and this will have a big impact.

To improve resource efficiency in our supply chains the private sector needs support, particularly from governments. Companies can engage with suppliers and farmers directly, but to make a bigger shift will require resource scarcity to be priced into the cost of raw materials. For example, in agriculture, farmers use water for which they often pay very little, if anything, meaning that there is little economic incentive to grow more ‘crop per drop’.

To reach a point where resources are priced to reflect their scarcity, governments themselves need to work more effectively. Government departments work in silos – often with water, food and energy policy set with no or little regard to each other. An agriculture department may say they will double land under irrigation to maintain food security, whilst the water department says there is no more water available for irrigation and the energy departments might be promoting a huge biofuel plantation which will need irrigation. And climate change will mean there is less water available overall. All of those things cannot happen at once.

Governments must, therefore, become more connected – to use nexus thinking in order to help manage the inevitable tradeoffs between scarce resources, and to create a firm basis from which markets are better able to understand their true value. The nexus presents us all with an intimidating challenge. But the potential upsides are there for those organizations – whether they are .org .gov or .com – which approach it in a joined up way, to manage the trade-offs and reap the efficiency rewards.

● Andy Wales is Senior Vice President, Sustainable Development, SABMiller plc, one of the world’s leading brewers.