"For Africa, 'Energy From Dirt'" -- By Cate Doty, New York Times

START-UP companies around the world are looking at Africa — where 74 percent of the population lives without electricity — as a test market for new, off-the-grid lighting technologies.

Many of these efforts involve wind or solar power. But one group in Cambridge, Mass., is working to develop fuel cells made from the bacteria that occur in soil or waste.

“You can just literally make energy from dirt,” said Aviva Presser, a graduate student at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “And there’s a lot of dirt in Africa.”

Ms. Presser is one of the founders of Lebone Solutions, which is being financed by a $200,000 World Bank grant and private investments. Lebone’s idea is a microbial fuel cell, a battery that makes a small amount of energy out of materials like manure, graphite cloth and soil, which are common to African households.

But Lebone — which means “light stick” in the Sotho language — does not just want to make the batteries and sell them to African consumers. The group hopes that eventually, as the technology becomes more refined, each household will be able to build a battery at a one-time cost of no more than $15.

“Africans are very, very creative,” said Hugo Van Vuuren, a Lebone founder. “It’s very entrepreneurial, just not in the way we traditionally define entrepreneurial.”

Mr. Van Vuuren, who is from Pretoria, South Africa, and who graduated from Harvard last year with a degree in economics, likened the simplicity of the battery to “the potato experiment that most of us did in high school class,” a two-step reaction that produces a simple charge.

But the bacteria in a microbial fuel cell produce electrons while doing what they naturally are supposed to do: metabolize organic waste, like dead leaves or grass or compost, for energy. The electrons then stick to an electrode, like a piece of graphite, and the chemical reaction that follows creates a small charge sufficient to power a small lamp or cellphone.

“It can be made by people with minimal training,” Ms. Presser said. “It doesn’t take a massive investment.”

The founders of the Lebone team were classmates at Harvard, and looking at sustainable lighting technologies for Africa was their class project. Last summer, they took the technology to Leguruki, a village in Tanzania, to see how the batteries work in households. For three hours each night, six families used batteries made of manure, graphite cloth and buckets, and a copper wire to conduct the current to a circuit board.

While in Leguruki, Mr. Van Vuuren said, the group learned as much about the people who used the batteries as the batteries themselves.

“People walk an hour or more a day to the local high schools to get their phones charged for two or three days,” he said, noting that the phones were sources of light as well as communication devices. The batteries are also used to power radios, Mr. Van Vuuren said, as important a medium of communication in Africa as the cellphone.

Read the entire article here.

"An Even Poorer World" -- New York Times editorial

This editorial appeared in yesterday's New York Times. You also should read this article: "World Bank finds more people live in steep poverty." This editorial is based on that article.

And ... the NY Times is an excellent general source of news and editorial content. You can subscribe to get free online alerts about Times stories related to world poverty here.

There is a lot more poverty in the world than previously thought. The World Bank reported in August that in 2005, there were 1.4 billion people living below the poverty line — that is, living on less than $1.25 a day.

That is more than a quarter of the developing world’s population and 430 million more people living in extreme poverty than previously estimated. The World Bank warned that the number is unlikely to drop below one billion before 2015.

The poverty estimate soared after a careful study of the prices people in developing countries pay for goods and services revealed that the World Bank had been grossly underestimating the cost of living in the poorest nations for decades. As a result, it was grossly overestimating the ability of people to buy things. And the new research doesn’t account for the soaring prices of energy and food in the past two years.

The poverty expressed in the World Bank’s measure is so abject that it is hard for citizens of the industrial world to comprehend. The new count underscores how much more the developed world needs to do to help the world’s most vulnerable people.

It should also serve as a jarring reminder to the leaders of the world’s much-touted new economic powers — India and China — about the inequities growing amid their growing wealth. Forty-two percent of India’s people live below the World Bank’s poverty line, as do 16 percent of China’s.

The new data confirm the primary role that economic growth must play in lifting millions out of poverty. Fast growth slashed the number of Chinese living in extreme poverty by three-fourths in less than 25 years. Achieving broad-based growth will not be easy.

India, which has more people in extreme poverty than it did 25 years ago, must reform its farm sector to increase dismal productivity and broaden its narrow economic expansion. Sub-Saharan Africa — where 50 percent of the people live below the poverty line — requires stability, above all, to encourage investment. All developing countries must invest more in education.

There’s still a big supporting role for rich countries. Last year, development aid from the Group of 8 industrialized nations amounted to $62 billion — far below the $92 billion that was promised to be delivered by 2010. We hope the World Bank’s new poverty count finally shames the Group of 8 into keeping that promise.