GreenMicrofinancing

J2008 Tech Awards TONIGHT!  Join a Live Webcast   7:00 pm PST

Mr. D. Vidya Sagar, Director of SKG Sangha, INDIA, is part of an esteemed group of 2008 Tech Laureates, who were selected from hundreds of nominations representing 68 countries.  Today, twenty-five innovators from around the world, recognized for developing and applying technology to benefit humanity, will receive the 2008 Tech Award in San Jose, California.  

These Laureates have developed new technological solutions or innovative ways to use existing technologies to significantly improve the lives of people around the world.  This year, the 2008 Laureates represent the truly global vision of the program, spanning countries such as Senegal, Peru, Hungary, Canada, Namibia, Germany, Egypt, India, United Kingdom, Laos and the United States. Their work impacts people in many more countries worldwide.

Professor Muhammad Yunus, pioneer of microcredit and founder of Grameen Bank, is the recipient of the 2008 James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award. Dr. Yunus will accept this distinguished honor during The Tech Awards Gala tonight! 

GreenMicrofinance team welcomes Mr. D. Vidya Sagar, this coming weekend to Philadelphia as our guest.  On Saturday evening, we are hosting an event, Harnessing Clean Energy to Microfinance: Waste is Wealth, during which Mr. Sagar will be sharing on biogas technologies that address a range of issues including energy, sanitation, poverty, health, and education.  Please check Betsy Teutsch's blog post for more information on our First Delaware Valley Event.   

Our road to the NetImpact conference was very fortuitous.  Listening to WHYY (our local NPR radio) on a roadtrip in July, I heard a great interview with Muhammad Yunus.  One of the call-in questioners was Emily Schiller, a Wharton student who mentioned that she is the chair of NetImpact's national conference entitled "The Sustainable Advantage: Creating Social and Environmental Value".  Since GreenMicrofinance is based in the Philly area, not far from Wharton, I scribbled Emily's name down and tracked her down to meet.  Over coffee I realized that the July broadcast was actually a replay of Yunus' January visit to Philadelphia - he spoke at the Free Library, and I was there.  Fortunately it was not too late for us to be included in the NetImpact program, since our missions match so perfectly.

My session, a Friday lunch RoundTable, is titled " Microfinance Meets Climate Change: How OffsettingYour Ipod Can Provide Clean Energy for the Bottom of the Pyramid".  When I began to learn how big a difference just a minuscule amount of locally generated clean renewable electricity can make in the life of microfinance clients, by lowering their overhead and expanding their use of lights and light appliances like cellphones or radios,  I was astonished.  Wouldn't it be great if we could somehow share some of our electricity, which we take for granted and use quite wastefully?   Kind of like when your mom scolded you about wasting food, when children were starving in Armenia....

Microfinance can actually make this possible.  We'll kick around the numbers at the session, seeing how to balance an average American household's electrical consumption (about 11,040 kWh a year) with an entry level solar system for a microfinance client's 74 kWh a year.  Small as that sounds, it  is enough  to power four hours of lights, charge a cellular, and play a radio or energy-efficient computer! 

After a fair amount of research, we can say with confidence that the amount of energy used in charging an Ipod for four hours daily for a year - get this - would power a third world family for 3 1/2 weeks!

Stay tuned!  

Photo from AME SUD.

The GreenMicrofinance team, based in Phoenixville, PA, but international in reach, is excited to invite you to our first public Greater Delaware Valley event.  Our mission is at the sweet spot of environmental concern and poverty alleviation: bringing clean, affordable, renewable, local energy to the 1.8 billion people lacking access to grid-distributed energy.  It is a gargantuan task with the potential for equally spectacular benefits – helping hardworking families out of poverty while furthering climate change solutions and environmental stewardship.

In 2002 when we began our mission of bringing environmental responsibility to microfinance, eco-issues were considered a luxury.  Now there is a global consensus that clean energy is THE CENTRAL ISSUE of the 21^st century, for rich and poor countries alike.  In Thomas Friedman’s recent book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, he states that the “task of creating the tools, systems, energy sources, and ethics that will allow our planet to grow in cleaner, more sustainable ways is going to be the greatest challenge of our lifetime.”

Through both our non-profit GreenMicrofinance Center and our GMf business side, we are launching many complementary initiatives which we are eager to share with like-minded friends, donors, and potential Socially Responsible Investors.  You can already access our vast, open-source online library, right here at our website.

On Saturday, November 15, 2008, at 7:30 PM we invite you to join us to learn more about our pioneering initiatives.  We really feel that after six years of groundwork laid by many cutting edge microfinance and environmental experts  and now joined by an expanded team (many of whom you will meet),  our time has come!

We are delighted to feature our Indian colleague, the esteemed Vidya Sagar, winner of many international awards for his work in bringing biomass energy to scale.  We are honored that Mr. Sagar is making a special stop on his American tour to meet with GreenMicrofinance in Philadelphia.  While GMf advocates for all clean energy technologies – solar, hydro, wind as well as biomass – we are especially wowed by Mr. Sagar’s accomplishments and vision and are sure you will be, too.

The event, while graciously hosted at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Phoenixville, is open to the public and is completely non-denominational.  There will be no solicitation of funds.

Please come meet the GMf team, Mr. Sagar, and learn more about our audacious goals, as well as impressive track record!

Thomas Israel, Board Chair                                          
Betsy Teutsch, Director of Special Projects

 GreenMicrofinance's Clean Technology expert, Kathleen Robbins, is known to many of you from her GMf blog posts about her work with jatropha in Haiti, as well as her reports from Bali, Vietnam and other locations her important work takes her.  Her passion has not gone unnoticed!  She is one of the recipient's of ConcernUSA's Brigid Award, which she will receive at their annual event this winter in Chicago.  Concern USA is part of Concern International, founded in Ireland in response to Biafra's famine in the 70's.  (For baby boomer like myself, this was a terrible, longterm crisis which motivated many young people to political action,  like Darfur is today. )  Concern International's mission is "targeting extreme poverty through effective programs" and they now operate in 28 countries around the world, both delivering help in the many global disasters which disproportionately effective the world's poorest, as well as providing programs to address the root causes of extreme poverty.

The award is presented annually to three outstanding women, honoring them for demonstrating justice, generosity and compassion in their lives and work.  " Brigid, a fifth century Irish woman, dedicated her life to helping the poor and the sick. She was a protector of the environment, a promoter of peace and reconciliation, a defender of equality, and an advocate of the less fortunate."  Kathleen (are you of Irish descent, Kathleen?) is being honored for her work in environmental issues and rural poverty.  Truly, her Jatropha project can address both ecology and poverty simultaneously.  We are so proud of you, Kathleen!

Wish we could all be there to see you receive this much deserved honor.

Fonkoze is Haiti's largest microfinance with over 50,000 borrowers, of which over 20,000 have lost most, if not all of their worldly assets due to four recent storms that have racked Haiti.  People were already reeling from the huge increases in food and fuel prices and these storms destroyed major sectors of their economic and food security. test

In the Artibonite Valley, which used to be Haiti's rice bowl, 75% of the crop was destroyed and across the island banana tree, laiden with fruit were sweep to the ground and will take years to recover.  And Gonaives, Haiti's 3rd largest city, which was devastated in 2004 has been flooded again, creating over 50,000 homeless, many of whom are Fonkoze clients.

Haiti had no reserves going into this hurricane session and now is a time when you dollars can make the critical difference to the poor of Haiti.  Please consider a donation to Fonkoze today; it will make a difference. 

Micro-Loans, Macro-Impact!  A conference hosted at the University of Illinois on 4 October by the National Organization for Business and Engineering (NOBE) and Entreprenuers without Borders, provided an opportunity for students to learn about microfinance and how in practical terms, it is impacting people in developing countries around the world. 

 We discussed Haiti and their 200 year descent from the wealthiest country in the French Empire to the the poorest in the western hemisphere, racked with poverty and environmenal devastation.  We talked about possible solutions to the poverty and envirnomental devastation, including the replication of the Grameen Bank Village Phone program, FonkoSel Aktive pa Digicel and the Jatropha Pepinye; a nursery to help local growers plant jatropha curcas for feedstock for biodiesel. 

Photo by Pamoj - women extracting jatropha oil

For those who live in the industrialized world, our experience of a non-electrified existence is very limited.  For many of us, the normalcy of turning on light switches and plugging in appliances to do our work goes back 3 or 4 generations.  Electrical access is so ubiquitous as to be virtually invisible.  So extensive is our lack of attention to electricity that when we lose it in, say, a storm-related black-out, we are surprised at how many of our systems stop working.  Landlines, boilers, hot water, in addition to the obvious refrigeration/freezer system, garage doors, and traffic lights – you name it.  Without electricity modern life quickly is dismantled.  Candles, flashlights, crank radios, and neighbors suddenly appear.  But such outages are temporary; in a worst-case dismal scenario, maybe a few days.

In the developing world, the absence of electrification forces 1.8 billion people to make do without the blessings so many of us take for granted, because we have never known life without them.  It means long, hard hours of physical labor, performing tasks that take us moments.  It means lugging firewood or dung to burn and living with smoky air.  Or using kerosene lamps and buying and transporting the fuel for them in small, expensive amounts.  It means going to bed when it’s dark.  It means using precious fuel to boil water, just to purify it, since if there isn’t electricity, there’s likely not running water either.  It means doing chores during daylight, instead of attending school.  It means dependence on generators or expensive, single-use batteries, since it’s not possible to recharge batteries without electricity. 

The overall term for this grossly inequitable distribution of the world’s power sources is energy poverty.  It is one of many ways that the world’s poorest remain so, in a discouraging cycle of hard work not yielding any way out of marginal existence.  It is both an ethical issue as well as a win-win opportunity for entrepreneurial solutions.  In a world which is meeting its maximum carbon load as well as peak oil, the future for the 1.8 billion without access to energy is undeniably through alternative, renewable, clean energy technologies, jumpstarted by infusions of capital.  Since third world families consume such modest amounts of energy relative to the West, small inputs of micro-hydro, solar, biofuel, or micro-wind generated energy have the potential to provide a crucial toehold on the ladder up out of subsistence, bringing enhanced health and literacy along, too!

Let us join together to not just solve these problems, but thrive together, on a greener, more just earth.

As the Japan Airlines 767 descended through the clouds to the runway in Hanoi, I remembered other days and other times. A not so long ago time when the US and Vietnam were at war. But instead of devastation, we pulled up to a modern terminal and 20 minutes later I found myself on a smooth, modern highway riding into a well light city. A marked contrast from my last ride into Port au Prince and my long held image of a city under aerial attack from the 60s and a stark reminder of the futility of war.

The next day, I wandered the streets of Hanoi, waiting for the conference to begin in the afternoon and visited what remained of the ‘Hanoi Hilton’. The French colonial prison, Maison Cetnrale where Vietnamese had been held by the French and captured American flyers were held by the Vietnamese. Most of the prison has been demolished to make way for a skyscraper, but enough remains that you get a good sense of the horror the place represented, in both colonial times and then following independence. It was clear that American prisoners were treated by the Vietnamese like the French had treated them; fortunately it seems the cycle of violence has finally been broken!

Maybe we can leaarn something from that suffering and break the cycle of poverty here at the Asia Microfinance Forum 2008!