Dowser - The Site for Solution Journalism

Ties Kroezen lives in the Netherlands, but the fruits of his labor are in Africa. His company, NICE International, brings IT services and clean energy development to The Gambia and other African countries. Kroezen was selected to represent NICE at this year's Unreasonable Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where he was able to spend part of the summer with social entrepreneurs from around the world. He spent some time recently talking with Dowser about his company's work in Africa.

Dowser: Can you describe how NICE works?
Krozen: NICE International is based in the Netherlands, where I am. We have a subsidiary company in The Gambia called NICE Gambia. We're in the process of setting up a company in Tanzania, and next year we'll set up one in Zambia.

In these countries, we are building a network of NICE centers, which are retail outlets powered with solar energy. Inside these centers, you find two areas. One is an area with computers, typically between 15 and 30 computers connected to a server and to the Internet. The other area is a cinema, where we use flat-screen TVs to show content to larger audiences. It depends on the center, the biggest cinema can sit up to 200 people, but on average it's about 70 people that can sit in a cinema.

These NICE centers are retail outlets. We try to sell products and services that help people in their development. Sometimes we call ourselves a supermarket for development. Currently we sell IT accessories like USB sticks and telephone cards, but we're in the process of expanding our portfolio of products. We are working on selling computers, new and secondhand; we are in the processing of offering a portfolio of solar products -- solar lamps, solar chargers. We're also looking at things like water filters, cookstoves, etc., so typical products that target the "base of the pyramid" consumer, those are the kinds of products we want to sell through these NICE centers.

Read more

The United States has a topsoil problem. About 75 percent of it is gone, primarily because the large, single-crop farms that dominate American agriculture rely on chemicals and synthetic fertilizers to produce their harvests, depleting natural soil systems in the process.

John-Paul Maxfield thinks compost can help solve this problem. Environmentalists love compost for several reasons, including that it helps divert waste from landfills -- the world's largest source of human-produced methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. But for Maxfield, composting organic matter isn't so much a waste-reduction issue as it is an ecological and agricultural one. He wants to create a market solution to get compost back into the soil.

He's part of a small but growing community of people and companies around the country that recognizes the lifecycle of the food supply, and the need to link the production of food with what happens to the scraps of food after it is consumed.

"We have been losing topsoil across the planet at an alarming rate over the past 50 years, largely due to poor agricultural practices," Dan Sullivan, managing editor of BioCycle magazine, said in an email. "Amending our soils with compost, basically recycling organic waste back into the earth just as natural ecosystems such as forests function, is really the only way we can correct that damage."

He said he's starting to see a transition even on conventional (non-organic) farms from petroleum-based farming to compost, largely because of increasing costs of petroleum, but also because the advantages of compost are becoming ever-clearer. "Compost use improves water infiltration and storage capacity, thereby protecting agricultural lands long-term from drought, while chemical farming tends to dry out the soil, deplete nutrients over time and cause erosion," Sullivan said.

Read more

January is Human Trafficking Awareness Month, a time to educate people that slavery exists today and build support for the fight to stop it. But this January also happens to be the month that a new law in California has come into effect, the first of its kind in the U.S., and one that has the potential to do more than just raise awareness of human trafficking and actually make a real dent in the problem itself.

Human trafficking and forced labor are largely hidden problems, but they persist in just about every country in the world (including in the U.S.) whether it's in cotton fields that feed our demand for clothing or in factories where our electronics are assembled. As consumers, we are all connected to human trafficking and slavery through the goods we use every day. But a large hurdle in eradicating slavery is how disconnected those final products are from the conditions that produced them.

The supply chains that companies rely on to bring consumer goods to the market have become so fragmented that a grocery or apparel company has no idea -- sometimes by design, sometimes inadvertently -- that it is enabling the forced exploitation of workers. The retail clothing chain Gap was the target of activist campaigns and got a lot of bad press in the late 1990s for using exploitative child labor in factories that produced Gap clothing. But because stores like Gap outsource labor to factories and do not own them outright (and Gap was never the only one to take this route), they can shirk responsibility for what happens within those facilities.

A new rule in California seeks to put some of that responsibility back into the corporate offices of large businesses, so that it's no longer enough for a company to say it doesn't know the conditions in which its products are grown or manufactured. The California Transparency in Supply Chains Act, which was signed into law last year but only went into effect this month, requires companies to disclose, in a prominent place on their websites, what they are doing to combat forced labor and human trafficking in their supply chains.

Read more

Jennifer Chan founded Exhibit Change to encourage impact through design thinking and to promote community building. The organization serves as a think tank for people to share ideas and designs, and to create healthier communities and neighborhoods. Here she tells Dowser what she learned in getting Exhibit Change off the ground.

Dowser: What's something concrete and tangible you've learned in the last three months?
Chan: Make your ideas happen. I had an idea floating around in my head for a few weeks and I realized that the impact could only truly be realized when I set my fears aside and pushed forward, asked for help and executed my idea into an event. The event was called 'Greening Ward 27', it was a hands on community design charrette where we hosted 40 people. We brought together city councilor candidates, school trustee candidates, residents, activists, business owners and facilitators to talk about our vision for Ward 27, a downtown Toronto neighborhood with a wide range in economic status. We focused the areas live, work, play, eat and learn, around the concept of greening. We were able to get hundreds of community led ideas generated and a proposal of 5 project areas to increase community development and civic engagement.

Read more

Online learning can't replace the classroom experience, but it could replace the burden of student debt.

Most of the people I know have debt from education. And they were reluctant to take it on—but, many of them tell me, they felt that their choices were either to pay big bucks for a solid education, or not to have one at all. Given the competitive nature of our society, it seemed better to accept years of debt than not to go to school.

Some universities, like Stanford and MIT, are showing that there might be another option out there—thanks to the Internet. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently announced the spring 2012 pilot of an online learning initiative called MITx, which will offer the online teaching of MIT courses free of charge to anyone who wants to take them. Those who are able to exhibit a mastery of the subjects taught on the platform will receive an official certificate of completion, bearing, rather than MIT’s coveted credential, the MITx name (there will be a small charge in exchange for a certificate acknowledging completion of a course).

Read more

Two Years Later, Haiti is Regaining her Strength

Two years ago, a 7.0 earthquake shook Haiti, destroying the country and killing over 300,000 people.  Then, the country faced another disaster-  a devastating cholera outbreak.  Today, however, the news is more optimistic.

Wash Post reports: "Almost a million people have moved out of the increasingly dangerous tent cities. Some were pushed. But most were pulled away by programs that offered rent subsidies or home-repair assistance.

But 500,000 people remain under tarps. About 20,000 still live in a squalid camp in downtown Port-au-Prince, their once-crisp tents, stamped USAID, now soiled gray and sagging in the heat in front of the collapsed National Palace.

Some of their kids are at least going to school. Haiti is providing free education for 900,000 children, many of whom have never been in a classroom before. The program is immensely popular, as are the free school buses."

Guardian points out that Haiti, which has been largely aid dependent to get back on its feet, is moving away from that model to one of sustainability and self-sufficiency.  How so?

Read more

Cheryl Heller's background in business consulting taught her the importance of collaboration and a client-focused perspective.

These days, it’s a tough decision to go to graduate school: with unemployment still near nine percent and the prospect of a lifetime paying off student debt, many young people are uncertain that a graduate degree is worth the trouble.

A former graduate student (and student debtor) myself, I am skeptical when I hear about new programs. Why, I ask myself, should students trust that this program will get them ahead in life—and that it will be worth the price tag?

What makes me warm up to a program is one thing: an emphasis on practice alongside theory, or, more specifically, a way for students to do concrete work that matters before they finish their degrees. In previous centuries, young people would have become apprentices to masters of their craft, gaining valuable experience doing real tasks while learning along the way; graduate programs that replicate this model are, I believe, most likely to lead their participants to successful careers.

Cheryl Heller, the pragmatic dreamer who created and will be chair of the new MFA in Social Innovation program set to launch in 2012 at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City, couldn’t agree more. After years working as a consultant to Fortune 100 companies as well as non-profit organizations with a social change focus, Heller had seen various approaches to ideas like sustainability. It was enough to make her skeptical toward the whole concept. “With sustainable design, we either don’t go far enough, or we are in danger of convincing ourselves that just focusing on sustainability is enough,” she told Dowser. Heller had seen how “sustainability” could become one of those soundbites our culture loves—like “green,” and like “social innovation.” Read more

Allan Chochinov, chair of the new MFA program in Products of Design, at SVA in New York

Once upon a time, to be a designer meant that you made things—chairs, for example—and, in some cases, that you were focused on the needs of the wealthy, who could afford stylish or well-made objects. In recent years, the field of design has undergone a revolution, spawning new, interdisciplinary territories where the tools of design are applied to streamline experiences, navigate problem areas in society, and promote sustainability in consumption of goods and materials. Allan Chochinov, Editor in Chief of Core77 and chair of the new MFA program in Products of Design, which will launch in fall 2012 at the School of Visual Arts in New York City (and is accepting applications with a priority deadline of January 15^th), is exuberant about the possibilities of design as it forges new paths. Below, he shares with Dowser some of his personal views about design’s potential for mitigating social problems, and outlines how the program he’s chairing will enable students to become adept at applying design tools toward social good.

Dowser: What are some of your experiences as a design educator that you will apply to the new Products of Design program?
Chochinov: I teach in the MFA Designer Author program at SVA, which attracts a lot of graphic designers and people with an entrepreneurial spirit. I always do a big social impact project with them, and it invariably changes what they think the territory for design is. We recently did a project around humanitarian aid workers—a strategic toolkit for them—with input from people at the UN, strategists in Washington, and big philanthropy. And it was just unbelievable what, in six weeks, these designers were able to bring to the table. A couple of years ago I did a project around prosthetic arm design, and last year, one on girls and women. These have all been formative teaching experiences.

Designers have an interesting approach to social problems—they don’t target one ‘bad guy,’ like the government. How would you describe the approach?
Social problems are fundamentally systemic, so even our language for problem-solving is not helping. I’d argue that you don’t necessarily ‘solve’ problems—you negotiate problem spaces. Our language is actually limiting our abilities, often making us feel helpless and hopeless.

What does it mean, concretely, to ‘negotiate’ a problem space, versus solving it?
Designers take on projects that they’ve never done before. In any other discipline, that’s a ridiculous proposition; in design, it helps you to be fresh. It’s about an ability to speak to multiple stakeholders, multiple constituencies. But that means that a designer needs to be highly skilled in speaking the language of marketing and business while speaking to manufacturing and sustainability and labor practices and supply chain management. Designers need to be in that first meeting, instead of that last meeting—the one about making an object pretty and likable and, you know, consumable—and they can’t be in that first meeting unless they can earn the respect of the other people in that meeting. And other people in that meeting have been in that meeting a long time. They don’t particularly want iconoclasts. Read more