Developing World Healthcare
As a child I grew up with a cohort of cousins. Swimming was a common pastime in the summer. As a young boy, I could not help but notice, my cousins slightly older than me had a circular scar on their arm. Me and my younger cousins did not. When I was told it was because of an inoculation that they received that I did not, I was quite relieved… I hated shots and I reasoned that anything that left a scar like that must have been nasty. My grandfather was twice inoculated and had 2 of the circular scars. He said it was because he was twice as bad as the normal kid. For readers younger than me, I am of course talking about the smallpox vaccination. Turns out that I was spared by the thinnest of margins, less than a year. My cousin 11 months older than me got hers. She was one of the last. By the time that I came of age, the disease was declared eradicated in the US and the inoculation was no longer given. READ MORE
Water. The essence of life. Living in Western Pennsylvania, we are blessed with an incredible supply. Three major rivers flow through Pittsburgh and in years like 2018 we are overly blessed as record rains have caused major flooding and infrastructure damage. However, much of the world suffers from the opposite problem. Flying around the world, I am amazed at how often looking out the window the predominant color one sees across much of the globe is brown, often with only narrow strips of green following a river valley or irrigation trenches. Flying out west in the United States, I was initially perplexed at the geometric patterns I often saw, a perfect brown square with a green circle in the middle, until I learned that was how farmers irrigated. A central well and a giant rotating radius of a sprinkler system bringing life to near desert conditions. READ MORE
Is it hot enough for you this August? As scientists warn us about global warming, without a doubt, heat is going to play a major role in how we live and work. As a professor living in the northern latitudes and working largely in climate-controlled buildings, at first glance this is little more than an inconvenience. But what will it look like around the globe? My own travels have taken me to some rather hot cities. I spent a sweltering week working in New Deli, India and while working in Guangzhou, China, I decided to play tourist one afternoon and visited the Nanyue King Tomb just to get 60 feet underground to get away from the heat. I also remember walking around town at 11:00 PM and experiencing temperatures still in the 90s with the streets still full as most people’s apartments were too hot to sleep! READ MORE
This past December, I was teaching at our partner’s campus in the West Bank and had the opportunity to visit Bethlehem just before Christmas. My thought was how perfect… I would buy all of my Christmas gift recipients a Christmas ornament from the place where it all started. I happened upon a craft fair selling various handmade wares and one table had just what I was looking for. I didn’t want “Made in China” ornaments that were sold to me in Bethlehem and I found the real deal. I was told by the merchant, “Genuine wool from Bethlehem area sheep formed into ornaments by hand right in the city.” However, that was only a small part of the story. READ MORE
Be the issues short or long term in nature, unless a government pursues policies that support the commercial initiatives of their people as well as help provide for their basic needs, BOH and similar principles will face an incredible uphill struggle. The principles of BOH can be effective in both wealthy and poor regions of the globe, but face extremely difficult barriers when the government either fails to serve its people, or even worse, diverts needed resources from the people or even creates barriers to the efforts of the population to develop a more prosperous society. READ MORE
One of the key contributors to the Business of Humanity project, Dr. Ashok Jhunjhunwala, along with his colleagues Aditya Lolla and Prabhjot Kaur, recently published an article in IEEE Electrification Magazine (June 2016) on solar microgrids for Indian homes. In this article, these authors assert that energy is the key to socioeconomic development and it is documented that the country of India has the largest population of individuals lacking electric service, with 237 million people affected. However, this figure does not account for the other segments of the population who only have intermittent service. India lacks the capacity to supply the amount of electric power demanded by the population (although that gap has narrowed in recent years) and even in villages that are on the electric grid, it is common that the majority of homes in the village lack an electrical connection. Ultimately, when one looks at the economics of the situation, many of the households cannot afford to pay for power, even at India’s highly subsidized rates and even if their homes were connected to the grid. READ MORE
Solar power is poised for a very big year in the United States. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) suggests that the booming solar sector will add more new electricity-generating capacity than any other source, including natural gas and wind. The EIA anticipated 9.5 gigawatts of utility-scale solar as compared with 8 gigawatts of natural gas and 6.8 gigawatts of wind power. This only includes large utility–scale solar arrays and does not account for fast growing rooftop solar, which will add several additional gigawatts. READ MORE
Bopaya Bidanda, Kristy Bronder, John Camillus, John Lipinski and Louis Luangkesorn
The central and globally relevant focus of the DC-HEaRT initiative is a catalytic community center (CCC). The intent is to employ the intrinsic advantages of DC power to respond to the needs of communities across the world. The challenge is to do so in an economically sustainable fashion that attracts investments by business organizations. READ MORE
Bopaya Bidanda, Kristy Bronder, John Camillus, John Lipinski and Louis Luangkesorn
All of us are engaged in the Business of Humanity® Project which sponsors the DC-HEaRT Initiative. We thought that for this first commentary we would provide some of the background and context of the Initiative. READ MORE