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Rags2Riches Empowers Impoverished Women to Turn Recycled Scrap into Haute Couture
Reese Fernandez-Ruiz was teaching children math, science, and reading skills in Payatas--one of the Philippines’ biggest dump sites--when she noticed something: local mothers were making foot rugs out of scrap cloth that was furnished to them by a group of middlemen, who got the cloth directly from a factory and retrieved the finished products to sell. The mothers made a total of 20 cents per day. Before the middlemen came along, the mothers took the scrap cloth directly from the local du...
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- Asia Pacific
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Rural Chinese Shake Off Poverty Through Self-Development
BEIJING, July 31 (Xinhua) -- On a muggy summer day in Xiuning County of central Anhui Province, Wu Fengfeng still chops wood with a five-kilogram carpenter axe in a workshop of the non-profit Desheng Carpentry School. The 18-year-old boy, who is from a poor rural family in Xiuning, said his only task now is to master the techniques of making the four-sided "immortal eight" table and palace chair -- two types of traditional Chinese furniture -- so that he can "graduate soon and make mone...
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- Asia Pacific
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Bringing Light to the Poor, One Liter at a Time [Video]
A bottled liter of water with a few teaspoons of bleach is proving to be a successful recipe for dwellers in the light-deprived slums of the Philippines. The simple technology is spreading sunlight in places where it has never been, and saving residents money at the same time. Gemma Haines reports. ...
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- Education
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- Asia Pacific
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Nestl? to Continue (BoP) Expansion in Philippines
Consumer goods giant Nestlé Philippines Inc. will be investing more in the country in the coming years, in a bid to offer new products to more markets, particularly consumers on the extreme top and bottom of the economic pyramid. In an interview with the Inquirer on Thursday, Nestlé Philippines chairman and chief executive John Martin Miller said the company, while already serving a wide spectrum of Filipino consumers, still had markets that were largely untapped. "W...
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- Asia Pacific
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Roads and Rice: How Innovation and Infrastructure Can Feed the World
As a new diplomat in 1968, I was assigned not to the chandeliered ballrooms of Europe (as I had hoped) but to the Mekong Delta of Vietnam , as a rural development adviser. The green revolution was just beginning to spread around the world, and a new "miracle rice", known as IR-8, developed at the International Ric...
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- Asia Pacific
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Closing the Loop between Sanitation and Food Security for the ?Base of the Pyramid?
If consumers in the advanced Western economies have a hard time swallowing the idea of drinking water recycled from sewage, that may be nothing compared with what those in the Philippines have to go through when they consider eating foods raised from fertilizer recycled from human wastes. But that´s exactly what a local foundation based in the boondocks of Mindanao has been advocating, and is now actively looking for "technology off-takers" who are willing to partner with t...
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- Asia Pacific
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The Path From Charity to Profit
By Tina Rosenberg On Tuesday I wrote about Kedai Balitaku , a for-profit company started last year by the development group Mercy Corps in Indonesia. Mercy Corps took...
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In ?Food Deserts,? Oases of Nutrition
Poor urban neighborhoods in America are often food deserts - places where it is difficult to find fresh food. There are few grocery stores; people may do all their shopping at bodegas, where the only available produce and meat are canned peaches and Spam. If they want fruits and vegetables and chicken and fish, they have to take a bus to a grocery store. The lack of fresh food creates a vicious cycle; children grow up never seeing it or acquiring a taste for it.&...
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- Asia Pacific