Development Marketplace 2008 Cultivates Agricultural Innovations
Among the 22 winning projects in the DM2008 competition was Agricultural Cooperatives for Biodiversity Conservation in Cambodia. Enterprise Planner Adviser Karen Nielsen and Technical Adviser Tom Clements collected the award.
Global competition awards grants to best small-scale development initiatives
100 finalists (19 are from East Asia) offer practical solutions to food crisis
Six of the 22 winners are from the region (Cambodia, China, Mongolia, Vietnam)
September 26, 2008 — The energy at the atrium of the Bank’s main complex building is extraordinarily vibrant this week. The 2008 Global Development Marketplace (DM2008)—an annual grant competition that offers a unique opportunity to turn innovative ideas into reality—brought 100 finalists from 42 countries to Washington DC this September. The three day event showcases promising solutions to help communities struggling with the current food crisis, following the theme “Sustainable Agriculture for Development”.
This year’s finalists were competitively selected from the 1,800 grassroots proposals that came in. “It is encouraging to see that nineteen out of the 100 finalists came from the East Asia,” said Jim Adams, the World Bank’s Vice President for East Asia and Pacific. “This region has always been home to grassroots innovations, especially in the field of agriculture. Globally, this sector is a potential pathway out of poverty for the 75 percent of the world’s poor who live in rural areas.”
The DM2008 is looking to support innovative projects linking farmers to markets, improving access to land and tenure, and addressing climate change and biodiversity. If selected, an idea can receive up to US$200,000 in grant funding for implementation over two years and 22 winners will be chosen. A total of about US$4 million in grants will be awarded this week. The World Bank, Global Environment Facility, International Finance Corporation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and GTZ are co-sponsoring this year’s competition.
"We know the reality and we know the crisis: 2.1 billion people still live on less than $2 a day and three out of every four of those poor people live in rural areas. We have an obligation to search for new and better ways to fight poverty,” says World Bank Vice President for Sustainable Development, Katherine Sierra. “The Development Marketplace is a launching pad for new approaches to development; it has the power to focus attention on the kind of originality that can deliver tangible benefits to those struggling with poverty in rural areas."
Six of this year's winners are from the East Asia Pacific Region.
Since its inception, the Development Marketplace has awarded more than $46 million in grants, supporting more than 1,000 initiatives through their proof-of-concept phase. Using the grant funding as a launching pad, projects often go on to scale up or replicate elsewhere, winning prestigious awards within the sphere of social entrepreneurship. These competitions—held at the global, regional, and country level—attract ideas from a range of innovators, including civil society groups, social entrepreneurs, academia, and businesses.
Innovative proposals this year include enabling the subsistence of more than 200 Maranao Moro farmers in the Philippines’ Mindanao region to produce high-quality halal-certified indigenous foods for exports through business incubation initiatives. A group in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, promoted a sustainable oil palm plantation model that provides land access security while still conserving agro-biodiversity. In Vietnam, a group proposed a biofertilizer technology that reduces chemical contamination while increasing rice yield.
“This is indeed a great opportunity for grassroots initiatives to flourish,” says Gusti Zakaria Anshari of West Kalimantan’s Center for Wetlands Community and Biodiversity. “Just to be in the finals is an accomplishment of its own, it’s a great opportunity to network worldwide. It’s not every day we have the chance to be in a congregation of innovators”.
When the winners of the DM2008 were announced, six of the winners came from East Asia. Bravo, well done!
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