Tag: November 2009

Tiny Homes to Meet Global Housing Crisis

Post author By David South Consulting
Post date 17/11/2022
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By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

More than 1 billion people around the world lack decent shelter. Of these, the majority live in urban areas, usually in slums and informal settlements (UN-HABITAT).

The world’s megacities – like Mumbai, India, where more than 22 million live in the metropolitan region – have to find a way to provide housing that is both affordable and does the minimum possible amount of harm to the environment.

About one-third of the world’s urban dwellers live in slums, and the United Nations estimates that the number of people living in such conditions will double by 2030 as a result of rapid urbanization in developing countries.

The fast pace of growth of India’s cities presents an enormous challenge: how to house so many people with dignity and to a good standard. India’s city slums are notorious and recently became the subject of the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire (http://www.slumdogmillionairemovie.co.uk/).

With a population of 1.2 billion, India needs to find 25 million homes a year to meet current demand, according to McKinsey and Co.

Housing prices have risen by 16 percent a year for the past four years. While the middle class – estimated at over 300 million people – has piled into high-end apartments and houses, it has been the country’s low-income people who have been frozen out of the option of quality homes.

The concept of targeting those at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BOP) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortune_at_the_Bottom_of_the_Pyramid) has drawn attention to the estimated 23 million poor urban dwellers in India, and 180 million rural families, who have savings and want to own a home. Monitor India (http://www.monitor.com/in/) believes these people have annual earnings between US $1,400 and US $3,000.

The Indian manufacturing powerhouse Tata – which this year launched a BOP-focused car, the Tata Nano – has designed and is building, Nano Homes – small apartments outside Mumbai for US $8,600 (http://tatahousing.in/pages/home.php). It also hopes to expand to other major Indian cities as well.

The Nano homes are built on a modest scale: there are three sizes with the smallest measuring 67 square metres. They consist of a single room that doubles as a bedroom by night with a sink, bath and toilet behind a partition.

Criticisms include location – on the edges of major cities – where residents would have to commute long distances to get to their jobs.

Even so, Nano apartments are so popular buyers are being chosen by lottery.

“India’s housing crisis lies in the fact that the poor in the cities are priced out of the market,” Sundar Burra, an adviser to the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centre, a Mumbai-based housing rights organization, told Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper.

“State supply of housing for the poor is woefully inadequate in relation to the need. Slums proliferate as a solution to this state of affairs.”

People can get a mortgage for the homes from Tata Home Finance.

Tata is not the only company targeting this market. India’s Matheran Realty (http://www.tmcity.in/) is building what it claim is India’s largest affordable housing project, Tanaji Malusare City, in the villages of Shirse and Akurle of Karjat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karjat). The 15,000 homes would house 70,000 people and would sell for US $4,698.

Another developer, Godrej Properties (http://www.godrejproperties.com/), is building a BOP housing development outside the city of Ahmedabad with apartments costing US $11,749.

“(Property) developers have recognized that the real demand no longer lies in the premium segment and are opting to build smaller, no-frills apartments,” said Deepak Parekh of the Housing Development Finance Corporation (http://www.hdfcindia.com/).

It estimates the affordable housing market will be worth US$ 110 billion in India by 2013 and will account for 80 percent of India’s housing market.

“Affordable housing is not about box-sized, budget homes in far-flung places where there is no connectivity to workplaces and little surrounding infrastructure,” Parekh told HDFC’s shareholders. “Affordable housing has to be able to cut across all income segments and has to make economic sense in terms of proximity to the workplace.”

Published: November 2009

Resources

1) Building and Social Housing Foundation: BSHF is an independent organisation that works both in the UK and internationally to identify innovative housing solutions and to foster the exchange of information and good practice. Website: http://www.bshf.org/home.cfm

2) Tiny House Design Blog: The blog is full of ideas and plans for making small homes cheaply. Website: http://www.tinyhousedesign.com/

3) A blog detailing the Tata dwellings in diagrams and photographs. Website: http://www.tslr.net/2009/06/tatas-nano-homes.html

Debt-free Homes For the Poor

Energy-Efficient Wooden Houses are also Earthquake Safe

Making Bamboo Houses Easier to Build

Rammed-Earth Houses: China Shows how to Improve and Respect Traditional Homes

Rebuilding After Chinese Earthquake: Beautiful Bamboo Homes

Securing Land Rights for the Poor Now Reaping Rewards

Smart Cities Up Close | 2013

Solar Bottle Bulbs Light Up Dark Homes

3D Home Printing Landmark: 10 Houses in a Day

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.

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© David South Consulting 2023

African Countries Re-branding for New Economic Role

Post author By David South Consulting
Post date 20/10/2022
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By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

Africa’s diverse countries have been subject to years of negative stories in the media. The effect on global audiences has left many to cast the whole continent in a bad light and to know little about the individual countries and cultures.

This has damaged business confidence over the years. Just like products and people, nations need to have a strong and positive brand to do well in the global economy. Nation branding, the process by which countries alter people’s perceptions, has taken hold in Africa as the continent seeks to reverse the bad vibes.

South Africa is the continent’s leader in nation-branding, and countries including Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana are newly pursuing it. South Africa’s ‘Proudly South African’ (http://www.proudlysa.co.za/) campaign is known around the world.

The past decade has seen economic growth and rising tourism in many African countries. But the reality that many people around the world can’t tell the difference between most African countries, or have mostly negative impressions formed from news reports, means they are unaware of the positive developments and opportunities.

Author and researcher Simon Anholt, in his book Brand New Justice, claims Africa’s biggest obstacle to growth is the image of the continent itself. He argues that in a globalized world it is the responsibility of good governments to understand, measure, and exercise control over a country’s reputation if it is to prosper. However, he has criticized nation-branding if it is just a marketing strategy without substantial changes to how things are done in a country.

And it is clear the winners in nation re-branding will be the countries that prove on the ground that they are changing and living up to the fine words and catchy phrases.

In Nigeria’s Lagos State (www.lagosstate.gov.ng), Governor Babtunde Fashola – known as ‘Nigeria’s Obama’ – has launched a campaign to turn around the country’s long-standing reputation for corruption. Using the slogan Good People, Great Country, the city of Lagos has set itself ambitious goals that are dependent on significant increases in investment.

Lagos wants the city to be transformed into a place anyone can do business and be attractive to tourists.

The city has seen its population triple in the last 50 years and is on track to be the third largest city in the world by 2015. Thinking long term, plans are in place for the city to eventually be home to 40 million people.

Critics are blunt about their hostility to the re-branding exercise: “How do you re-brand a product when the content stinks?” asked Akinola M.A. on news website Mynaija News. “I can’t understand the meaning of this project when basic facilities like good roads, water and electricity are virtually not available.”

Supporters say the governor’s strategy is based on action, not words. Investment is going into a Rapid Bus Transit (BRT) system, traffic management, security, street lighting, beautification, and public-private partnerships to improve services.

“Nigeria cannot wait until it solves all her problems before it can stand to give serious thought to re-branding its battered image,” Nigeria’s information minister Dora Akunyili told Online Nigeria. “This is because our development is tied to our image. This negative perception has had destructive effects on our people and stymied our growth and national progress.”

Showing the power of trans-African approaches, the Wisdom Keys Group, a Nigerian company founded in South Africa (http://www.wkg.co.za/network.html) and working in 16 countries with partners, was contracted to do the campaign.

As the pioneer of brand power in Africa, South Africa’s International Marketing Council (http://www.imc.org.za/) heads a relentless campaign to engage an international audience and expatriate South Africans. It is a sharp, multi-media outfit tackling every aspect of South Africa’s domestic and international reputation. Products include e-newsletters, campaigns to lure back expert South Africans, a vast network of web content, and a highly targeted advertising and marketing campaign that lures businesses and tourists to the airport (via ads on taxis and in subways) and on to flights to South Africa.

For Kenya (http://www.brandkenya.go.ke/), the focus is on instilling pride within the country. As Kenyan media consultant Kwendo Opanga told the Nation Branding website, “it is not branding Kenya for foreigners that is difficult. It is branding Kenyans for Kenya and Kenya for Kenyans that is a tough call.”

“We even work with the school system to ensure that this is in the curriculum so that children are told that they need to start living dignified lives.”

Rwanda, despite experiencing a horrific genocide in 1994, is gaining attention for turning its image around. It has taken a different approach and has targeted building powerful networks of support around the world to make deals. As Rwandan government adviser Elaine Ubalijoro told FastComany, “How do you take a country that’s been through hell and bring it to security and prosperity? This is about healing, and this is about hope. We think it can be done.”

The Rwandan strategy is hinged on exploiting a global network of high-profile and powerful contacts that includes former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and Google chief Eric Schmidt. The results include a training programme where British civil servants work in Rwanda. Starbucks, meanwhile, has become one of the top purchasers of Rwandan coffee.

Ghana’s newly launched Brand Ghana office was set up to coordinate the development of an engaging national image for the country. Its head, Mathias Akotia, told Nation Branding: “We are in competition with other nations for attention, wealth, tourism and for the export of products. Country branding is about the management of our national identity and values in a way that will take us forward.”

Still in the early stages of re-branding, Ghana plans to hold a national summit to draft a plan and identify the country’s values and identity.

Branding is not merely slogans and catch phrases. Word-of-mouth can radically change a country’s image, and its prospects. The international magazine Monocle (www.monocle.com), a publication that prides itself on spotting the next big thing, has highlighted the East African nation of Burundi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burundi) as the place to watch. The magazine thinks that by reinventing itself as a place of tourism, coffee and oil, with some of Africa’s best inland beaches and a wealth of art-deco architecture recalling Miami’s South Beach area, Burundi can distance itself from past conflict and become a must-see destination. At present, 80 percent of its earnings come from coffee and tea exports. It is hoping to become a tourist and transport hub with a new port, linking central and east Africa.

As the magazine says, “Bujumbura has got all the substance – and architecture – required to turn Burundi’s backwater capital into an African success story, and the country’s upcoming elections are a chance to create lasting peace after 15 years of civil war. But corruption could still derail the dream.”

The Nation Branding website (http://www.nation-branding.info/) (“everything about nation branding and country brands”) is the place to visit for all those interested in nation branding, country brands and how countries can improve their image abroad. Upcoming nation branding events can be found here: http://www.nationbrandingevents.com/nationbranding.

Published: November 2009

Resources

1) Monocle Magazine: Launched in February 2007, Monocle is a global briefing covering international affairs, business, culture and design. Developed for an international audience hungry for information across a variety of sectors, the magazine is a consistent champion of Southern countries and their economic opportunities. Website: http://www.monocle.com/

2) A BBC radio documentary on Nigeria’s experience of nation branding. Website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2009/html

3) Brandchannel: The world’s only online exchange about branding, packed with resources, debates and contacts to help businesses intelligently build their brand. Website: www.brandchannel.com

4) Small businesses looking to develop their brand can find plenty of free advice and resources here. Website: www.brandingstrategyinsider.com

5) Catwalk for Africa: A fashion show taking place from December 4-6, 2009 in Tunisia. Website: http://www.catwalkforafrica.com/accueil/accueil_en.php

African Breakthroughs To Make Life Better

African Bus to Tackle African Roads

African Culture as Big Business

African Hotel Boom Bringing in New Investment and Creating Jobs

African Ingenuity Attracting Interest

African Innovators Celebrated in Prize

African Media Changing to Reach Growing Middle Class

African Online Supermarket Set to Boost Trade

African Theatre Becomes European Success

African Tourism Leads the World and Brings New Opportunities

Happy Nigeria: West African Nation Has Good Attitude

Online Education Could Boost African Development

Woman Wants African Farming to be Cool

Southern Innovator Issue 2

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5311-1052.

© David South Consulting 2022

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Innovation Villages Tackling MDGs

Post author By David South Consulting
Post date 04/03/2021
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By 2014, Southern Innovator had published five issues and become a recognised global innovation brand.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

SOUTH-SOUTH CASE STUDY

The global economic crisis that began to roll across the world in September 2008 is threatening gains made against poverty and hunger all over the South. As Kevin Watkins from UNESCO’s Global Monitoring Report told the Financial Times, “With the slowdown in growth in 2009, we estimate that the average income of the 391 million Africans living on less than US $1.25 a day will take a 20 percent hit.”

How well millions of people survive the economic turmoil will depend on how local communities respond. And there are innovating communities across the South that show it is possible to succeed. By studying the microcosm of test villages, where quantifiable results are being tracked, lessons are being learned on how to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (http://www.undp.org/mdg/).

The challenge of matching improving living standards and quality of life with environmental sustainability has been taken up by one village in Colombia. The technologies it has developed over the past few decades have been adopted around the country.

In Las Gaviotas, Colombia a unique experiment was hatched at the end of the 1960s: to see if a village could survive – and even thrive – while eschewing fossil fuels and industrial agriculture. It found its first test in the oil crisis of the early 1970s. For Las Gaviotas’ survival, meeting energy needs became paramount.

One of the simple concepts the community applied is a take on the physical reality that energy is never created or destroyed, it just moves from one medium to another. Las Gaviotas believes in using all the sources for energy that can be found in a local area first, before seeking out others.

Founded by development specialist Paolo Lugari,Las Gaviotas(http://www.friendsofgaviotas.org) is located in a desert region of Colombia. The area covers a vast territory comprising three-fifths of the country but is home to just 10 percent of the population. To Lugari, the harsh environment is a challenge to be overcome. To begin to reverse the arid environment at Las Gaviotas, the villagers reversed the dry climate by planting trees.

This had the effect of increasing local rainfall by 10 percent, making it possible to do other economic activities.”The only deserts that exist in this world are deserts of the imagination,” Lugari told the New York Times.

The 200 people living in Las Gaviotas have been able to get by without guns, police, a mayor, cellphones, television or the Internet. Nobody uses a job title — instead the adults in the community rotate jobs.

While the villagers do not use many of the technological tools people associate with modern life and prosperity, they do have a culture of invention. The inventions they have come up with include a solar kettle for sterilizing water and a 8,012 hectare pine forest which is harvested for resin to make biofuel for trucks and motorcycles. The resin is also used to make varnishes and linseed oil.

For years Colombia’s ongoing civil war raged around the community. Violent drug traffickers and private armies destabilized the country for decades. But despite this mayhem, Las Gaviotas has attracted rural peasants seeking to double their wages (US $500 a month) and enjoy the quiet life away from the war.

“We try to live a quiet life, depending on nothing but our own labor and ingenuity,” said Teresa Valencia, a teacher who has lived in Las Gaviotas for three decades.

Other products developed by the village included a turbine powered by a small, one metre high dam that produced 10 kilowatts of electricity, a windmill that was able to spin despite light breezes, and a pump strong enough to draw water from the hard-to-reach savannah water table.

Pride of place was the village’s hospital. Despite hot temperatures and high humidity, the hospital used clever technologies like subsurface tunnels and double ventilation systems in the walls to cool its operating theatre. The roof slid off to allow ultraviolet sunlight to disinfect rooms. After healthcare reforms in Colombia, the hospital was closed. Undefeated, the village turned the hospital’s kitchen into a potable water bottling facility, and reduced the need for hospital visits by making sure everyone in the area had access to clean water.

The community’s approach inspired scientists and architects, who came to design homes, laboratories and factories for Las Gaviotas.

One significant success has been the windmill-driven water pumps developed by Las Gaviotas. Invented by Jorge Zapp, head of the mechanical engineering department of Bogota’s Universidad de Los Andes, it is a lightweight windmill unit weighing barely 45 kilograms. The blades use the airfoil found on airplane propellers to make the most of light breezes.

In the 1980s, UNDP hired the Gaviotas team to install water and windmill pumps in other places in Colombia. Thousands have now been installed in Colombia and the design has been copied throughout Latin America.

Other inventions include a solar-powered kitchen, a water pump powered by a children’s see-saw, and a zeppelin that floats above the savannah plains to detect forest fires.

While the community has been able to forge a success, it can’t avoid the ups and downs of the global economy entirely. Competition from cheap imports of pine resin have pushed down the price the community can charge.

But in a topsy-turvy world, and surrounded by a civil war, what Las Gaviotas has achieved still seems impressive. “We have survived,” said Andrea Beltran. “Maybe, at this time and place in Colombia, that is enough.”

More recently, a much-publicized experiment is also underway in the Millennium villages. The Millennium Villages (http://www.millenniumvillages.org/index.htm) is a joint project between Columbia University’s The Earth Institute and UNDP, and is a bold experiment working with villages in Africa to identify and test solutions to help in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (http://www.undp.org/mdg/).

Britain’s Guardian newspaper has also been sponsoring and tracking changes in the villages of Katine sub-county in Uganda (http://www.guardian.co.uk/katine). Comprising 25,000 people, the project began in October 2007, and is conducted in partnership with the African Medical and Research Foundation (Amref) and Farm-Africa in Katine.

What is useful to people looking for solutions is the way the project is being tracked in detail on the newspaper’s website.

In India, the Model Village India (www.modelvillageindia.org.in) concept pioneered by Rangeswamy Elango, a head of the village of Kuthampakkam near Chennai, has now expanded to 30 model villages. Its approach is about being positive, eschewing griping about problems and instead getting down to work to solve them. Its success is based on an ancient Indian self-organizing model, the Panchayat, and Elango has modernized it to become what he calls The “Network Growth Economy Model” – a direct challenge to the “special economic zones that benefit only capitalist owners,” he said.

Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World – 10th Anniversary Edition by Alan Weisman details further the achievements of the village (www.amazon.com)

Published: November 2009

Resources

1) Unleashing India’s Innovation: Toward Sustainable and Inclusive Growth, a report by the World Bank. Website: http://www.worldbank.org/

2) NextBillion.net: Hosted by the World Resources Institute, it identifies sustainable business models that address the needs of the world’s poorest citizens. Website: http://www.nextbillion.net/news

3) Model Village India: Drawing on self-organizing methods used in India since 1200 BC, the Model Village India is based around India’s democratic system of Panchayats: a village assembly of people stemming back to pre-colonial times. Website: http://www.modelvillageindia.org.in

4) Maker Faire: The African Maker Faire has tapped into Africa’s well-entrenched do-it-yourself development culture. It went looking for more inventors like those celebrated on the website AfriGadget (http://www.afrigadget.com/), with its projects that solve “everyday problems with African ingenuity.” The Faire works with the participants to share their ideas and to find ways to make money from their ideas. Website: http://makerfaireafrica.com/

5) eMachineShop: This remarkable service allows budding inventors to download free design software, design their invention, and then have it made in any quantity they wish and shipped to them: Amazing! Website: http://www.emachineshop.com/

6) The red dot logo stands for belonging to the best in design and business. The red dot is an internationally recognized quality label for excellent design that is aimed at all those who would like to improve their business activities with the help of design. Website: http://www.red-dot.de

Landmark Study Finds Simple Toys Key to Boosting Educational Development and Meeting MDGs

Press Release 1 | Southern Innovator

Press Release 2 | Southern Innovator

Press Release 3 | Southern Innovator

Southern Innovator Issue 1

Southern Innovator Issue 2

Southern Innovator Issue 3

Southern Innovator Issue 4

Southern Innovator Issue 5

Study Finds Simple Toys Key To Boosting Educational Development | January 2007

War, Peace And Development | May 2018

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UNRISD Blog

Organised by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), Geneva, Switzerland. Held at the Palais des Nations.

Just as this chart showed at the time of the Global Financial Crisis, the countries in “The Ring of Fire” have experienced exceptional turbulence and turmoil in the years after the crisis. For example, the UK has had austerity budgets, a no-growth economy, Brexit and the ‘shock therapy’ of the COVID-19 pandemic. The US, on the other hand, has clashed with its allies, seen a new cold war emerge with rivals China and Russia, and experienced significant domestic unrest, culminating in the storming of its seat of Government, the Capitol.

Just as now (2021) 2009 was a year in which the questions revolved around receiving a vaccine (for H1N1) and how best to affirm a person’s identity and citizenship. Photo: David South

Iceland saw its banking system collapse during the Global Financial Crisis, sparking demonstrations (October 2008-2011) and the “Pots and Pans Revolution”. Photo: David South

A conference in Geneva struck a pessimistic note on the current global financial crisis and any hope for a new social and economic order. The conference asked “whether current policy reforms are conducive to a transformative social change or if they only reproduce the status quo.”

A March 2009 IMF report on the downturn’s affect on the Global South and developing countries found that “fluctuating commodity prices, high fuel costs, the rise in food prices in addition to a decrease in remittances, foreign direct investment and aid flow could mean an increase in the financing needs of low-income countries by at least US $25 billion.”

The presenters at the conference painted a picture of a robust neo-liberal economic order that is already in the process of dusting itself off from the crisis and restoring its dominance.

Bob Jessop, from the University of Lancaster, captured the paralysis of opposition to the neo-liberal order by saying “They are busy doing it and we are busy talking about it.”

To paraphrase philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, that which does not kill us makes us stronger. Neo-liberalism may in fact be strengthened by the crisis, according to presenters. It will evolve and take on new forms, they argued.

The world’s business elites have an enormous capacity to re-shape the rules of the economic game back in their favour. While the massive state support to the banking sector had led some to believe governments were restoring faith in public investments, in fact state support is seen as “timely, targeted and temporary.”

When asked about the future as the crisis passes and countries come out of recession, the presenters believed this was a short-term recovery, and that far worse economic crises would be coming in the next five to 10 years.

Andrew Martin Fischer, from the Institute for Social Studies at Erasmus University, believes the harmful effects of the bailouts will be pushed to the periphery over the next five to 10 years, harming the poor. He also believes a major financial crisis is brewing in China. He called ‘China the fault line in the future.’

The powerful, he pointed out, displaced the costs of their mistakes onto other people. Proponents of different approaches had missed the moment because they were not able to present off-the-shelf strategies that could be deployed in a crisis on short notice. Thus, they had left the field open to neo-liberal solutions.

The global crisis in the short-term has not been worse because of unprecedented global cooperation. Keynsian measures have been used to solve the crisis, but are also used to preserve Wall Street. Also, the enormous contribution of growth in China and India means there are other sources of wealth in the world than just the North.

Getting back to normal should not be what we are doing, the panellists concluded at the conference’s final session. Governments should look at new opportunities for social policy. The panellists were disturbed that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is seen as part of the solution. This means deep cuts in public expenditure are coming. There will not be a trickle down of wealth and the imbalances from before the crisis will remain. In short, the system was not working before the crisis.

Some policy suggestions put forward included: rural income guarantees, managed migration to support development goals, making a gender perspective critical to development. Governments should take a preventive approach to tackle future crises. Unfortunately, it now seems no money is left to address these problems. Yet business as usual is not an option with so many inequalities and imbalances.

“This conference on the social and political consequences of crisis is a critical subject for debate at this juncture,” said UNRISD’s director, Dr. Sarah Cook. “We are now at a point where many countries, particularly in the North, are emerging out of the severe shock of immediate crisis. Discussions of alternative policies and institutional arrangements at national and global levels may become less urgent; the status quo is reasserting itself and the space for ideas and policies that offer the possibilities of more stable, sustainable and equitable development will quickly shrink.”

Session 1: Impacts, Coping Strategies and Livelihoods

Session 2: Social Policy: Country and Regional Perspectives

Session 3: Social Policy: Global Perspective

Session 4: Political Economy Dimensions of Crisis

Southern Innovator Magazine was developed from 2008-2010 in London, New York and Iceland by the United Nations in response to the Global Financial Crisis and was launched in 2011.

Business Insider has reproduced a fascinating presentation about the crisis put together by the French bank, Societe Generale (SocGen). The presentation can be found here: http://www.businessinsider.com/socgen-prepare-yourself-for-the-worst-case-scenario-2009-11#first-it-starts-with-sky-high-public-debt-1

From 1997 to 1999, I worked as the head of communications for the United Nations mission in Mongolia. The country was already experiencing a severe economic crisis as a result of its transition to free markets and democracy from the Soviet economic system. The scale of the economic collapse following the fall of communism was described at the time as the worst peacetime, post-WWII economic collapse. On top of this challenge, the Asian economic crisis erupted.

You can read the Mongolia Update 1998 book I wrote here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/20864541/Mongolia-Update-1998-Book. It shows how chaotic events are in the middle of a major crisis. Some of the key lessons we learned during this time include: 1) transparency: trust was critical and all our work was done under the full glare of public and media scrutiny, 2) action: with our existing budgets we made sure to keep doing and spending to hire people, 3) strategy: to encourage the growth of businesses and innovation, in particular the take-up of new information technologies.

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A Report from the UN Conference on the Social and Political Dimensions of the Global Crisis: Implications for Developing Countries (12-13 November 2009)

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