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Ideas into action: Real help for developing nations
by Adelheid Fischer
On a sleepy Saturday morning in 2006, ASU professors Mark Henderson (engineering), Brad Rogers (engineering), David Jacobson (sociology), and Rajiv Sinha (marketing) met for coffee at a Tempe Starbuck's. They had just read Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid by C.K. Prahalad.
The professors were eager to debate the author's premise. Prahalad argues that the billions of dollars spent by philanthropic organizations have done little to improve the lives of the world's 4 billion people who live on less than $2 per day. He maintains that market-based solutions could provide better and more lasting improvements for people on the lowest economic rungs of society, what he calls the "bottom of the pyramid."
Prahalad's book made for lively discussion. But sometime during their conversation, the ASU professors crossed the line from talk to action. They decided to pool their intellectual resources to formally tackle some of the developing world's most intractable problems. The kernel of a social entrepreneurship program began to sprout. It became known as GlobalResolve.
Just three years after that fateful discussion, GlobalResolve has cobbled together seed funding and the occasional grant to amass an impressive list of accomplishments in Africa. The group is developing designs and business strategies for a clean-burning cooking technology in the villages of Ghana.
Their next challenge is creating an evaporative technology for producing clean drinking water in rural villages. They also are conducting experiments with a common African plant known as jatropha. Inedible and easily cultivated, the plant sprouts oily seeds that could be used in biofuels without displacing the crops that feed people.
Word has spread about GlobalResolve. ASU faculty and students have stepped forward from departments all across campus.
"Doors open," says Henderson. "It's amazing. People approach me all the time saying, How can I help? The projects just touch a nerve."
Read about GlobalResolve's work in Ghana in "A measure of global resolve."
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