Advancing Economic Objectives while Demonstrating True Social Responsibility

Pierre Duponchel and his organization, Le Relais, founded in 1984, collect, sort and recycle second-hand textiles and paper. Doing so, the business has created 1,500 jobs in France and Africa for people who have been excluded from society. At the same time, Le Relais has become a major industry, recycling more than 85% of the 60,000 tons of textiles collected every year.

Using the Power of Soccer in the Fight Against HIV and AIDS

"Founded by former professional soccer players in 2002, Grassroot Soccer (GRS) trains African soccer stars, coaches, teachers, and peer educators in the world’s most HIV-affected countries to deliver an interactive HIV prevention and life skills curriculum to youth."

Good News on the Front Page... finally!

The International Herald Tribune of 15 April 2010 actually includes a positive headline: Sharp drop in maternal deaths is reported. Good to read good news on the front page, usually relegated to the back! So the number of women dying from pregnancy and childbirth worldwide is falling. Positive news indeed, even if "some advocates for women's health tried to pressure The Lancet into delaying publication of the new findings, fearing that good news would detract from the urgency of their cause"... Apparently, those working on maternal health were concerned that reporting the declining number of deaths could take away from the problem. Not to be deterred, the journal's editor commented: "My view is that actually these numbers help their cause, not hinder it."

Water Wise

In every region of the world, there are areas of severe water stress. Ten years ago, the Center for Environmental Systems Research at the University of Kassel in Germany released a ranking of countries according to the percentage of territory where water consumption exceeded 40% of supply. The list was topped by Israel and Trinidad and Tobago at 100%, followed by Syria at 99.6%, Nepal at 98.1%, and Kuwait at 97.7%. In Western Europe, the country under the most water stress was Belgium (7th in the world ranking) at 93.9%, with Spain coming second (26th globally) at 72.3%. Other notable countries on the list: India (23rd) at 80.2%, South Africa (28th) at 68.5%, Turkey (29th) at 61.7%, China (36th) at 44.7%, Chile (38th) at 41.1%, the United States (42nd) at 31.3%, the United Kingdom (51st) at 21%, Japan (62nd) at 9.5%, and Russia (70th) at 3.8%.

What this means in human terms is that nearly one billion people do not have access to water and more than 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation. This has far-reaching implications for everything from food production to education. About 80% of health problems in developing countries and the deaths of 5 million people a year, including 1.8 million children, are linked to water scarcity and poor sanitation. Africa loses an estimated 5% of GDP annually because of fatalities related to dirty water and the absence of adequate sanitation. Health and nutritional deficiencies are linked to social problems including poor education, skills shortages and rampant population growth.

The question for every community and every country that is confronted by water stress is how to improve access and to manage the limited supply. The numbers suggest that for a third of the world’s population the situation is bleak – many areas including parts of the developed world are heading for permanent drought. If people do not become more savvy and resourceful about water management, the result could be conflict. Water scarcity has already led to violence in hotspots around the world, notably in South America, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Could disputes over what many now call “the new oil” lead to full-blown war?

There is no way to answer that dire question, but a recently published book by San Francisco-based water expert James Workman has offered a glimpse into what a world of permanent drought might be like and how we can deal with it. In Heart of Dryness: How the Last Bushmen Can Help Us Endure the Coming Age of Permanent Drought, Workman chronicles the conflict between the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the government of Botswana when water supplies were destroyed and deliveries to reserves stopped and how the Bushmen have managed in a hard-scrabble world of dryness. In a compelling account of his interaction with the Bushmen in 2002, Workman write of how he witnessed “the predicament of a thousand indigenous people suddenly forced to submit, die, or adapt once again to the Great Thirstland.”

Workman draws lessons from the Bushmen’s predicament for Americans and others who face a future of permanent drought:

“To be sure we will not soon abandon eBay or Wal-Mart to hunt and gather in foraging bands. Nor should we feel the need to. Yet the Bushmen code of conduct may help us escape a Hobbesian or neo-Malthusian nightmare. Prepared for extreme deprivation, Kalahari Bushmen chose the hard responsibility of a dry reality over a government-dependent fantasy of water abundance. Outside of their reserve the so-called civilized world found that for all our military might and Internet bandwidth, certain things still lie beyond our grasp. We discover we cannot ‘regulate’ barren rivers and depleted aquifers any more than we can ‘regulate’ our climate, clouds, or rain. Out here, while elected leaders kneel to pray for a thundershower that will provide temporary relief, the increasingly dry hot wind whistles through the thorn trees in the central Kalahari and whispers the ancient secret those last defiant Bushmen never forgot.

"We don’t govern water.

"Water governs us.”

In the epilogue to the book, Workman offers a shot of optimism to counter the widespread pessimism typical of anybody aware of the world’s water predicament. Scarcity need not lead to conflict, he argues. “If our competitive demand for scarce water drives us apart and escalates tensions, this same finite supply of freshwater is also itself what ultimately drags us back and binds us together. We may not like the rule of increasingly scarce water, but at the same time we cannot escape it.” A fundamental principle of adaptation that Workman learned from the Bushmen: “not to organize and mobilize physical resources to meet expanding human wants, but rather to organize human behavior and society around constraints imposed by diminishing physical resources.”

The Bushmen, as Workman demonstrates throughout his engaging book, base all their choices - from what and how much to eat to what kinds of medications to use - on their need for water, their need to live. They accept interdependence and organize networks to exchange and share water resources within bands of Bushmen and between them. “Conservatives call these informal markets, while liberals see a reciprocal system of egalitarian barter,” Workman explains. “Regardless of ideology, such exchanges emerge only when a society collaboratively agrees to define and defend a water resource that could be divested. Rain belongs to everyone and everything, but Bushmen honored long-standing individual and group rights to water resources: a sip-well, a pan, a buried and labeled water canteen, a field of tsama melons, a grassy hunting territory favored by eland or gemsbok, a wild cluster of fruit or water-filled trees growing along a seep line. Extending rights beyond kin to strangers not only reduced short-term hostility and resentment but also helped expand an informal safety net of grateful recipients – a reliable form of drought insurance.”

Workman asserts that the principles that guide the Bushmen in coping with water stress in Thirstland can be adapted to life in a place as far removed from the Kalahari as California. If they ran America’s waterworks, “what would the Bushmen do?” he asks. His answer: manage water by allocating to each person enough for drinking, cooking and sanitation and then letting individuals trade any of their allotment with others, depending on whether they need more or less. An independent water consultant, Workman is not surprisingly promoting just such a community-based scheme where he lives. He believes that such a mechanism would make people realize the true worth of water and would inevitably lead to more conservation and reduced demand. The frugal could provide for less thrifty friends or family – or sell their surplus to the wasteful.

This market could be instrumental in heading off water-related disputes, concludes Workman. “By redefining water as an owned and tradable right that turns costly conflict into symbiotic cooperation, security analysts suggest that exchanges like those among Bushmen could alleviate national security tensions over border-crossing aquifers and streams from the Rio Grande and Colorado to the Great Lakes and Columbia, perhaps even in the Middle East. In other words, land-locked Botswana could learn from the Bushmen living within its dry heart how to break the quiet siege imposed by rival African states surrounding it.”

Pick up a copy of Workman's book - great reportage and a rich source of fascinating wisdom from the Bushmen of the Kalahari for coping with our water-scarce future.

Simply Improving Children's Health and Education

Four hundred million school-age children are infected with parasitic worms worldwide, which both damage their health and limit their access to education. Yet studies prove that deworming is the most cost-effective way of increasing education. Doing just that, Deworm the World is helping to improve children’s health and education by massively expanding deworming initiatives. It has helped establish programs that have dewormed millions of children in Kenya, and over a million in Andhra Pradesh, India. This will undoubtedly have a strong impact on their educational attainment.
Such a simple and inexpensive solution to a huge problem!

The Story of Our Chromosomes

Although they no doubt appeared in one form or another very early on in the evolution of life on Earth, human chromosomes (from the Greek for “colored bodies”) were first seen in the cell nucleus, under the microscope, at the end of the 19th Century. Their journey through the scientific realm proved difficult, as it was only in 1956 that their number, 46 in human cells, was correctly established, three years after the elucidation of the molecular structure of DNA.

Chromosomes are full-fledged entities with their own internal lives, as each of their units, or genes, spells out the synthesis of chemicals crucial to individual cell function. They also attend to their own duplication and continuity, and that of our reproductive cells, ensuring the future of our descendants. And they have a mind of their own!

Once their exact number in the human cell was discovered, it came as a surprise to learn that that number could deviate from the norm. Such deviations were observed in diverse congenital disorders, beginning with Down’s syndrome, the expression of a trisomy or condition in which a small extra chromosome, the so-called chromosome number 21, is present in all the cell nuclei of the body. (A normal chromosome pair is called a disomy.) It was then discovered that other numerical abnormalities exist, from either the addition or subtraction of a chromosome in each cell, which can result in viable life but most often causes early spontaneous fetal abortions. Geneticists then were amazed to learn of the high frequency with which such mishaps occur.

It is useful to recall that chromosomes are best observed during cell division and that, except for sex chromosomes XX or XY, the pairs are attributed numbers from 1 to 22 according to their size, from largest to smallest. The principle behind a chromosomal error is simple: each genitor or parent contributes a normal reproductive cell, either an egg or a sperm, to an offspring. Those two cells contain only half of each parent’s full chromosome set, i.e. one member of each chromosomal pair, for a total at fertilization of 2 x 23 chromosomes. That in essence is what normally happens at the onset of the development of a new being. Alas, as mentioned, all too often the conceptus, the embryo during the very early stages of development, falls victim to the loss or surplus of a member of a chromosomal pair, a condition that is always harmful.

But setting aside such mismatched cases, let’s consider the case at fertilization where the male or female parental germ cell possesses a surplus chromosome that, by sheer coincidence and luck, happens to be the very chromosome missing from the other parent’s germ cell (a reasonable possibility given the high frequency of chromosomally abnormal germ cells). All is well as a quantitative and qualitative balance seems achieved. Under the microscope, a sampling of such cells will not divulge that at fertilization both members of one of the 23 pairs of chromosomes originated from just one parent rather than from both. So in these cases two identical members exist – a disomy that originates from one parent instead of both, termed uniparental.

Just a few decades ago when uniparental disomy (UPD) was first identified, using molecular markers that were able to unveil the parental source of each chromosome through minuscule chemical differences, it caused quite a commotion in the field of genetics, not least because the concept goes against the classical, accepted Mendelian laws of inheritance. It further appeared that, depending on the particular chromosome, the chromosomal substitution could be inconsequential and inconspicuous or, on the contrary, detrimental and even catastrophic. Such a discrepancy needed explanation.

In some chromosome pairs, in situations where both members of the pair are received from only one parent rather than from both (and are thus uniparental), a pathological situation develops that is stereotypical in that the condition has been shown to be specific for the chromosome member involved and its parental source. This is the case for UPD involving chromosomes 6, 7, 11, 14, 15 and 20. For instance, UPD for chromosome 15 of maternal origin is responsible for a characteristic disorder that causes obesity, a voracious appetite, mental retardation, compulsive behavior and particular facial features among other anomalies, named Prader-Labhardt-Willi Syndrome, after the two Swiss and Belgian pediatricians who first identified it. This same UPD, from the duplication of chromosome 15 but of paternal origin, results in severe mental retardation and microcephaly, accompanied by seizures, specific facial features, repetitive gestures, spasmodic laughter and the quasi-total absence of verbal communication, a condition described by British pediatrician Harry Angelman and thus called Angelman syndrome. Its cause seems clear: in the case of chromosome 15, the normal paternal chromosome cannot assume the genetic function of the maternal chromosome it replaces, just as in the opposite case the normal maternal chromosome cannot behave as the fair substitute for the paternal counterpart. The genetic expression of chromosome 15 passed down by the mother is not the same as that transmitted by the father and vice versa.

Today we know that the altered genetic expression of two normal and theoretically alike chromosomes as described above results for some chromosomes from the erasure of various genes, depending on whether the germ cell transmitted originated in the egg or sperm. The phenomenon by which certain genes are repressed in a parent-of-origin-specific manner constitutes genomic imprinting. The rare atypical pattern of UPD transmission, hypothesized in 1980 (American Journal of Medical Genetics, vol. 6) and proven for the first time in the clinical field in 1988 (American Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 42), offers its clearest manifestation.

Such pathological conditions as those mentioned here and their related suffering for both the patients and their families serve to highlight the importance of genomic imprinting as a major process in the physiology of our genome or genetic makeup. In the long run and eventually as an approach to therapy, if applied early, pharmacologic attempts at freeing normal genes wrongly locked in cell nuclei because of the mistaken origin of one of the chromosomes in a pair might temper the effects of this error in the development of an affected child. Such efforts have a long way to go before reaching their goal but appear plausible. Therapy could perhaps also be fostered by the fact that “acquired UPD,” the exclusive doubling of an initially single, unmatched chromosome member in an erratic cancer cell clone, has now been observed among the intricate and pathogenic chromosome changes that occur in malignant tissues such as leukemias. We have also learned that a large number of UPD cases perceived in the human results from a trisomy’s very early reduction to disomy (in an attempt at rescue?), owing to the spontaneous loss of an extra chromosome. Indeed, our genome is more eruptive than we could ever have imagined and we should remember that, in health as in disease, genetics is in its broadest sense the study of variation!

Eric Engel, MD

This article, translated from the French, first appeared in the Journal de Genève et Gazette de Lausanne (No. 14) on 19 November 2009. Copyright © 2010 by Eric Engel. All rights reserved.

Positive Entrepreneurship

First Book is a social enterprise that provides books to low-income school systems and in the process identified a US$ 150 million annual market for the publishing industry in the US.

KickStart, a social enterprise that develops affordable technologies for small African businesses, has created over 800 businesses that together generate revenues equal to 0.5% of Kenya’s GDP.

International Women's Day - March 8, 2010

Featuring Camfed International: Dedicated to eradicating poverty in Africa through the education of girls and the empowerment of young women

Camfed International has successfully challenged the conventional wisdom that cultural resistance is at the heart of girls' exclusion from education in rural Africa, proving instead that chronic poverty is the main barrier. Since 1993, Camfed has pioneered a grassroots approach to advancing opportunities for girls and young women to guarantee a model that is locally inspired and owned. Camfed has proven that girls' education is the most effective means by which girls and their communities can break the devastating cycle of poverty that currently plagues sub-Saharan Africa. (From "Outstanding Social Entrepreneurs 2010", Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, p. 37)

Saath: Good News for India's Slums

Today, more than 60 million people live in slums across India, lacking access to healthcare, education, employment and housing. In 1989, Rajendra Joshi developed Saath, which uses public-private partnerships to improve the lives of over 40,000 people per year. In 2009, Saath’s employment programs with the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation placed 8,000 slum residents in jobs at firms like Tata Indicom and Kotak Mahindra. Its Slum Networking Program has improved the physical infrastructure of 6,000 households while its four Urban Resource Centers in Ahmedabad have given 22,000 slum households access to microfinance accounts, insurance packages, preventive and natal healthcare, and pre-school education.

The Kaïcedra Association

A new association has just been founded to support sustainable community initiatives in schooling, health and infrastructure. Currently active in Burkina Faso, Kaïcedra is working on a project to build a first grade class in Gorin in time for the start of classes in September 2010.