Winners at the Grass Roots

If you've had your legs blown off by a land mine in Cambodia's Mekong delta, how do you exercise your basic human right to take part in daily life? Tun Chunnareth knows. The ex-soldier received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 on behalf of the International Committee to Ban Landmines. He sits in a three-wheeler 'Mekong' wheelchair developed by the Bristol-based charity Motivation.

Its wheelchairs have benefited 18,000 people in 14 developing countries over the last 10 years. Motivation's co-founder, David Constantine, who is himself wheelchair bound after a diving accident, received the Worldaware Innovation Award for 2001, which was presented by Britain's international development minister Hilary Benn in London last January.

Motivation sets up local, self-sustaining workshops and, in Cambodia, the Mekong wheelchairs are built by disabled ex-soldiers in a workshop run by the Jesuit Service. They are made with cycle wheels and a local hardwood, instead of more costly steel, and cost GBP55 each to make compared with GBP1,200 in Britain.

Each year, the Worldaware Business Awards honour private sector businesses, non-profit organizations and charities for their contribution to sustainable development in the world's poorest countries. As a British charity, Worldaware used to focus on Commonwealth countries, but last year for the first time it opened the competition to the world. Sponsors ranged from Shell International and P&O Nedlloyd to the Department of Trade and Industry and the British Council.

Worldaware's Chairman, Sir Jim Lester, says that best practice needs to be honoured and celebrated. The engine of private growth in the developing countries contributed to a 'safer, more prosperous, more equal world'.

Hilary Benn set the awards in the context of globalization - 'the big political and social debate' following the end of the Cold War. People were more and more concerned about 'the disparity in wealth, opportunity and aspiration'. Business had an important role and 'economic development is every bit as important as aid'.

Take the situation facing small-scale farmers in Northern Nigeria. How do you sell your tomatoes, spinach or aubergines at market if they rot within hours or days in temperatures of 40C? Another of this year's award winners, Muhammed Bah Abba, 37, who lectures in business in Dutse, has come up with a simple but revolutionary answer: the desert cooler.

Any new idea, he realized, would have to win over conservative Muslim communities. His brainwave was to put his grandmother's large earthenware pots to new use. If you put one pot inside another and insulate the space between the two with wet river sand, then the smaller inner pot stays cool: evaporation from the sand conducts heat out of the inner pot. Now spinach can be kept fresh for over a week, and tomatoes and aubergines for up to three weeks.

As well as being cheap to make and sell, this 'breathtakingly simple' pot-in-pot design has had a major knock-on effect, said Mark Wade of Shell International's Sustainable Development Group, who sponsored Bah Abba's award. Young girls had been missing out on their education while they hawked their rotting produce at a poor price. Now their parents can make a good price at home or at the weekly Dutse market which attracts 100,000 people. And the girls are freer to attend school.

Bah Abba publicized his invention by videoing a drama group using the pots. Armed with a generator, he travelled the region, showing his film in villages as an evening entertainment. Now his company, Mobah Rural Horizons, sells some 30,000 desert coolers a year, including some to the neighbouring Niger Republic. Potters make four or five pairs of pots a day at 150 naira (about GBP1) a pair, which are then sold at 180 to 200 naira.

The Crown Agents Foundation Award went to Emelda Nyamupingidza, from the Zimbabwean capital, Harare. Her family business, Nyaya Industries, began making drip-free candles in 1995, for use in rural areas where four-fifths of the population live and where there is no electricity. Now she and her husband employ 150 people and Nyaya is the largest candle maker and second largest polish maker in Zimbabwe, producing three million candles a month. They export 56 tonnes of candles each month to Malawi. 'This business has changed me, changed my family and many people in Zimbabwe,' she said. 'When I heard I had won the award it gave me new energy. I am ready to go on for another 20 years.'

The award for infrastructure development went to Crewe-based Bombardier Transportation's joint venture with Uganda Railways, for its locomotive workshop in Kampala. Claiming to be East Africa's best industrial workshop, it has improved servicing and the average time between engine failures had risen from 800 hours to over 4,000.

Anca Colibaba, Director of EuroEd in Iasi, Romania, won the British Council Award for the effective transfer of English language skills. EuroEd teaches English to 1,000 Romanians each year in one of the nation's poorest regions. Learning a foreign language is seen as a passport to economic development. The EuroEd Foundation has also trained teachers from 37 schools in Moldova, whose border is only 10 miles from Iasi.

But perhaps the most colourful winner was Gustavo Tuquerres from the Sierra Norte on Ecuador's border with Colombia. He is President of Quesinor, a band of cooperative dairy farmers which sells $40,000 worth of cheese a month locally and in the big cities. Receiving his award from Hilary Benn, he wore a black trilby hat, a red wool scarf round his neck, a cape over his shoulders, white trousers and white leather sandals, with a black shiny pony tail hanging down his back - the epitome of Latin American attire.

This was grassroots, bottom-up development at its best and his speech, in halting English, roused the audience to long applause.

www.worldaware.org.uk

By Michael Smith