iDEas in iNNOVATION

World Water Day 2012 day of service – in Denver today, March 22!

I’m sitting here at Green Spaces Denver, campaign headquarters for our Water4Food 2012 day of service in honor of United Nations World Water Day, which this year is focused on food security. As our readers know, that’s iDE’s main focus.

There’s a lot of excitement and momentum from volunteers showing up to help spread the word in our local community.  We’re going out and hitting the streets with postcards, stickers, tee shirts to share facts like these:

Did you know that it takes 635 gallons of water to produce one hamburger? Or that 397 gallons of water are needed to produce 35 oz of cane sugar? The truth is, without water there is no food. Water scarcity already affects every continent and more than 40 percent of the people on our planet. This year’s International World Water Day focuses on the critical relationship between water access and food security.

iDE, along with Card Gnome, Green Spaces, and our event sponsors, brings Water4Food 2012 to the Denver area to raise awareness for this issue and money to prevent famine for families in West Africa.

What can individuals do?

• follow a healthier, sustainable diet;
• consume less water-intensive products;
• reduce the scandalous food wastage: 30% of the food produced worldwide is never eaten and the water used to produce it is definitively lost!
• produce more food, of better quality, with less water.

Join Us
There’s still time to volunteer! If you can spend a couple of hours taking stickers and information sheets to Denver area businesses, sign up at volunteer.water4food.com. All volunteers are invited to join us at the Water4Food 2012 party tonight at 5:30pm at Green Spaces.

Can’t volunteer?
Purchase a Water4Food 2012 greeting card plan at Card Gnome, and 50% of the proceeds will provide families in the Sahel region of West Africa with the tools and knowledge needed to create and sustain a sustainable income from small plot farming, enabling them to increase food security and lift themselves out of poverty.

Your plan allows you to send 25 cards throughout one year. You choose the perfect card from Card Gnome’s selection of thousands of cards for all occasions; write your personal message and Card Gnome mails it for you. You can even schedule cards for delivery a year in advance.

With the purchase of a card plan, you gain a ticket with a guest to the party at Green Spaces tonight. Just show up and we’ll have your name on a list along with others.

If you would like to donate directly to iDE, please click here.

There are many ways to get involved in this issue, no matter where you are!

Visit the U.N.’s World Water Day site (www.unwater.org/worldwaterday/) to find World Water Day events all over the world, downloadable informational materials and more.

Twitter: Join the conversation using #Water4Food and #WorldWaterDay and give a shout to @CardGnome and @ideorg or any of the other great sponsors listed below.

Facebook: We love sharing water4food information and you can visit our pages to access videos, pictures, blog posts and other items we’ve been sharing recently:
https://www.facebook.com/ideorg
https://www.facebook.com/cardgnome

Our Sponsors:

Green Spaces  greenspaceshome.com
Silver Bullet Water Treatment, LLC  silverbulletcorp.com
Colorado Water 2012  water2012.org
Colorado Public Television 12  cpt12.org
Elephant Energy  elephantenergy.org
Inspire Commerce  inspirecommerce.com
Edge of Seven  edgeofseven.org
Ellen Bruss Design   ebd.com
Conscious Coffees   consciouscoffees.com
Sticker Giant   stickergiant.com
Rage Unlimited   rageunlimited.com
Runa Tea Company   runa.org

I’m incredibly inspired by all of these volunteers who are taking time out of their busy days to help us tackle this issue.  Thank you to our sponsors, partners staff, volunteers, and news media who are working hard to spread the word on this very important day.

Art is Creative Problem Solving

“Design is creative problem solving. Art is creative problem solving.”

So says iDE founder Paul Polak in a new interview with Colorado Public Radio’s Ryan Warner. Paul gives the reporter a guided tour of the just-opened Design for the Other 90% exhibit–along with a demonstration of a treadle pump in action!–while covering such topics as how iDE came about, the role of design in improving livelihoods in developing countries, why we don’t give products away, and what a collection of affordable technologies is doing in an art gallery.

You can stream the full interview here.

Swiss Parliament Gets Irrigated

Drip Irrigation in Front of Swiss Parliament

by Urs Heierli

SDC – the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and is using the occasion to launch an initiative to educate the public about its work. As the Global Water Initiatives Division of SDC has launched a major cooperation program with iDE, SDC has included information about more efficient irrigation systems targeted to reach the poor. As part of a rotating exhibition in major Swiss cities, an iDE Family Nutrition Kit was shown as a model and attracted quite some interest. In late May, the exhibition was in Berne on the Federal Plaza, just in front of the Swiss Parliament. The Swiss parliament has recently increased the development aid budget from 0.4 to 0.5% of GDP and a major focus of the increased resources will be targeted to water projects. There is an increasing awareness that global water scarcity will severely affect all societies if “business as usual” policies are pursued. iDE has a lot to offer in this domain: affordable drip and sprinkler irrigation systems and other productive water technologies for small farmers provide really interesting solutions.

iDE’s SDC-supported program “Scaling up productive water technologies” will develop dissemination programs in several regions, including Central America (Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and later Mexico), West Africa (Ghana, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Chad) and Asia (Kirgizstan, Vietnam). Together with the Gates Foundation, It also supports the global dissemination of productive water technologies.

In addition, iDE is launching a “Fair Trade Water project” funded by the Sustainability initiative of the Swiss retail chain COOP aimed at increasing the water efficiency of Fair Trade Cooperatives in Central America. COOP is the second largest retail chain in Switzerland and was selected as the world’s most sustainable retail chain, especially for the chain’s attention to the farmers who supply them. This project will be operating in Central America and will deliver affordable irrigation to small farmers belonging to Fair Trade cooperatives, with a special focus on diversification.

Water Into Wine

Ed. note: World Water Day is Tuesday, March 22. Here’s a post on the subject from iDE CEO Al Doerksen’s blog:

Tuesday is World Water Day. iDE is planning to launch a new program to turn water into wine; a replication of the famous miracle at the marriage celebration feast at Cana several centuries ago. To explain how we will do this, and actually, how we are doing this already, I have to start with this last week’s visit to the state of Orissa in India.

It is many months past the monsoon season in India, and the season for rain fed agriculture is also long past. By far, the majority of fields are laying fallow waiting for the next monsoon, still some time away. In Phulbani, however, there are more than a few enterprising smallplot farmers who have dug open wells on their own one acre farm sites. The next thing is to add a surface treadle pump, a simple and inexpensive device which lifts the water out of the well – water which is a key ingredient for irrigation, and also the miraculous transformation to wine.

The results are dramatic: aubergines, potatoes, beans, chilies, cabbages, cauliflour, tomatoes, okra – we saw them all. No grapes (but we will get to that). These horticultural crops are carefully tended with local organic fertilizer applied. Weeding is manual. The result is three crops annually in place of the usual single rain fed crop. Annual farm income goes from $200 per family member to $600 per person; for the family of five approaching $4000 from one acre of land. In nominal terms, that makes these farmer almost $2/day; still poor but no longer at the subsistence level. Children are going to school. Family nutrition has become a lot more adequate. There is no longer the need to migrate in search of day labor opportunities in the dry season. There is even a little money left over for jewelry and cosmetics – witness the feet of the female farmer on her treadle pump. These are great indicators.

Now to the wine dimension. Also cultivated to a small extent around the edges of the field is a small fruit which is ideal for a local fermentation process. The result is somewhat akin to wine. iDE is not promoting home brewing per se, but we do realize that people around the world like to celebrate their farm successes, and doing so with a little wine, homebrew or local hooch is rather common.

It starts with water. In so many parts of the world, providing access to irrigation water and accompanying technologies for lifting and distribution is the single greatest point of income leverage for small plot farmers. iDE develops these technologies, and arranges for their distribution through local market channels. Local farmers assess the opportunities, invest and harvest the results. Worth celebrating?

May I offer you a glass of wine to celebrate World Water Day?

An Art Gallery Growing Tomatoes?

A two-part gallery exhibition of affordable water technologies and artwork from developing countries where Denver-based IDE works to cultivate prosperity, The Art of Dirt opens August 6 at the EventGallery 910 Arts, running through September 25. The show allows visitors to experience how simple, affordable technology design can improve the incomes and lives of the millions of people at the base of the economic pyramid through The Art of Dirt. The exhibition includes photographs, videos and a tomato garden growing in the gallery that is irrigated using IDE water technology.

IDE is dedicated to creating income opportunities for poor, rural households in the developing world. “The Art of Dirt” showcases some of the simple technologies, such as the foot-powered treadle pump, low-pressure micro-sprinkler and affordable drip irrigation that IDE has made available to poor, rural families, allowing them control over their water supply and opening up a new world of income-generating possibilities.

Many of the technologies in the show were selected by the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum for its recent Design for the Other 90% exhibition; this is the first time that they have been exhibited in the Denver area. The Art of Dirt incorporates photographs and videos of farms, farmers and irrigation in some the countries where IDE works; after Sept. 1, the exhibit will also include artwork by artists in these areas, which will be available for purchase through a silent auction benefiting IDE’s programs.

During the show’s run, IDE and 910Arts will host a number of special events, including First Friday open houses, film nights, and a gala event honoring IDE founder Paul Polak. For more information on these events, please visit www.artofdirt.org.

EventGallery 910 Arts is located in the heart of Denver’s art district at 910 Santa Fe Drive, Denver, 80204.

A New Growing Season

At the beginning of growing season 2009, we hosted a program called “Drip Kits for Donors” in which interested donors to IDE received, as a thank you gift, a version of our family nutrition kit which retails for $3-5 in the Asian countries where we work, and is designed to irrigate “kitchen gardens” of around 20 square meters in size. We had a lot of interest in the program here in Colorado and other states, but also from as far away as Mongolia where a Peace Corps volunteer wanted to test drip irrigation on tomatoes at a friend’s greenhouse in Muron, Khovsgul Aimag where she serves as a business advisor. In fact, our Mongolian Peace Corps Volunteer got the last kit we had in stock here in Denver.

It’s clear that we received so much interest in this initiative as a result of what can be fairly termed a snowball effect occurring in vegetable gardening and small-scale urban farming over the last couple seasons here in the developed world.

On a project level, this year we’re hearing from even more individuals and orgs interested in collaborations with us, whether they be small NGOs in African villages working on entrepreneurship education, foundations in Asia promoting best practices in “Bottom of the Pyramid” BOP design, or larger agricultural concerns looking to give back to the developing countries they source from by supporting more sustainable income generation models we at IDE specialize in.

From this desk, I can definitely say that awareness of, and interest in, our work and model has grown exponentially from last year. The emails and phone calls are streaming in.

So, as a small inspiration for the fast-approaching gardening season here in the US, see below for a few photos from last season showing the grassroots nature of the support for our model of development — from the mountains of Colorado to the Mongolian steppe.

IDE donors at Willow Creek Church in suburban Chicago set up an annual exhibit highlighting agricultural work in Africa.

Tim and Mary Taylor's elk proof, IDE drip-irrigated vegetable beds in the Colorado Mountains

Nick Gruber of Produce Denver packs up some harvested crops grown with IDE drip irrigation for his urban CSA.

Produce Denver's James Hale fills an IDE header bag in the front yard of a client who has given over land to their urban CSA.

IDE Wins 2009 AGFUND Prize

IDE is extremely pleased to announce that we have been awarded the 2009 AGFUND Prize (First Category) from The Arab Gulf Programme for United Nations Development Organizations (AGFUND) for successful implementation of our PRISM method in ten developing countries. The Prize has been awarded annually since 1999.

Below is text from AGFUND’s official announcement in Istanbul.

The Arab Gulf Programme for United Nations Development Organizations (AGFUND) announced the winning projects of its International Prize for Pioneering Development Projects, 2009, in the field of Development of Agriculture through Technology, at its meeting, which was held under the chairmanship of HRH Prince Talal Bin Abdul Aziz, AGFUND President, on 14 October 2009, in Istanbul.

The Prize Committee approved three winning projects from among 39 projects from 33 countries on four continents:

The First Category Prize: allocated for “The role of international organizations in supporting the developing countries’ national policies and programs to improve agricultural output through adoption of innovative technology solutions” was won by PRISM (Prosperity Realized Through Irrigation and Smallholder Markets), implemented by IDE – International Development Enterprises in 10 developing countries: Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Myanmar, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Nicaragua.

The AGFUND International Prize is not only a developmental tool for highlighting successful examples and their propagation among peoples, but is also an instance of developmental support introduced by the Arab Gulf Program. The organization of the prize ensures the funds allocated are utilized to further develop winning projects, and to increase the beneficiary categories.

The AGFUND International Prize Committee membership is comprised of a number of renowned world figures, namely: Mrs. Mercedes Menafra de Batly, former First Lady of Uruguay, President of the All for Uruguay Foundation; Baroness Emma Nicholson of Winterbourne MEP, Vice President, Foreign Affairs Committee, European Parliment; Dr. Ahmed Mohammed Ali, President of the Islamic Development Bank Group, Professor Muhammad Yunus, Founder and Managing Director of Grameen Bank; Dr. Y. Seyyid Abdulai, former Director General of the OPEC Fund for International Development.

Drip Irrigation for Donors

Since April, we’ve been offering a “Family Nutrition Kit” as a thank you to anyone who has donated $40 or more in support of our Affordable Technologies Initiative. These gravity-fed drip irrigation kits cover 20 square meters (the size of a typical kitchen garden), and their header bags are made from recycled sacking material. In Asia they retail for around $5 USD, and can be easily adapted to various intensive row and mound produce growing techniques.

So, with the upsurge in the Northern Hemisphere’s interest in sustainable, urban, and other small-scale agriculture, we thought we’d get a little spillover curiosity in a kind of reverse technology transfer. That turned out to be an understatement. We have just sold out of our kit supply here in Denver, and there are now 44 new small-scale farmers in our network using drip irrigation. Most are here in the US, but we’ve sent kits as far as France and even to a Peace Corps volunteer who will be doing experimental drip with farmer friends in the grassland steppe of Northern Mongolia.

Among several individuals here in Denver, an urban farming company, Produce Denver, is now using our systems in various restaurant rooftop gardens, greenhouses, and front yards given over to vegetable crops for an urban CSA they offer. So, if you happen to find yourself at a Denver restaurant famed for its commitment to using fresh, local ingredients this season, there’s a chance you’ll be dining on local produce grown with IDE drip irrigation.

Needless to say, this response—this connection from local to global, back to local again—has me very excited for the growing season. Aside from the obvious benefit to people’s gardens in our industrialized part of the world, I’m hoping the recipients of these donor kits will also gain a better understanding of what it takes to make a living off the land. Even with drip irrigation, it’s a lot of consistent hard work and determination.

We’ll be checking in with our local farmers throughout the season, posting photos and reports here. And, stay tuned for tasting reports on heirloom melons, squash blossoms, Roman radicchios and other “high value” crops from my own IDE drip-irrigated garden.

— A.G. Vermouth, IDE Director of Communications