Madécasse makes chocolate, adds value to local economies in Madagascar

For GOOD, I profiled Madécasse Chocolate Co., one of the few companies processing chocolate in Africa, where 70 percent of the world’s cocoa is grown. An excerpt:

Prime chocolate-making cocoa needs to ferment for at least six days and dry for six more. Madécasse’s partner farmers don’t have enough cash flow to hold onto their crop for nearly two weeks—they want to sell immediately after harvest. Furthermore, farmers had no frame of reference for quality control in the beginning. “You have farmers farming cocoa,” McCollum says, “who have never eaten chocolate.”

So Madécasse created an incentive structure to improve their lagging quality. The company offered a 50 percent bonus for delivery of high-quality beans and agreed to give farmers a portion of their payments up front and pay the rest upon delivery, and provided farmers financing for storage sheds, fermentation vats, and drying trays.

Read the entire thing here.

Photo courtesy Madécasse Chocolate Co.

‘This is Africa’

I recently profiled Oliberté Footwear for GOOD magazine. The company piqued my interest because, although it markets “Africa” in its tagline, it strives to present a nuanced narrative about the continent that doesn’t rely on stereotypes oft-cited in media reports. In doing so, it eschews portrayals of Africans as down-and-outs dependent upon Western aid.

“I’m proud our shoes are made in Africa,” Oliberté founder Tal Dehtiar told me when I interviewed him. “We don’t want pity purchases.”

Like mosquitos to uncovered ankles, Westerners have been drawn to Africa in efforts to help locals since at least the late 15th century, when Portuguese missionaries settled in Mbanza Kongo, near the mouth of the Congo River, in hopes of converting locals. Today, whether through shoe donations or shoe-manufacturing jobs or countless other endeavors, it’s evident that the mystique of “Africa” continues to captivate Westerners.

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How do you transform AK-47s into watches? Very carefully, let’s hope

Would you buy a watch that used to be part of a Kalashnikov? Peter Thum hopes so.

Thum, who founded Ethos Water in 2001 before selling it to Starbucks four years later, recently co-founded Fonderie47, an NGO that has destroyed more than 3,000 AK-47s and other assault rifles in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The organization buys firearms from African governments and other groups and then uses the leftover scraps to make “exceptional jewelry, watches, and accessories,” as Thum said at the recent UN Social Innovation Summit. Fonderie47 will use proceeds from sales to fund more weapons buying in Africa. Thum said that the group is currently destroying 1,000 guns a month and has raised half a million dollars in venture capital.

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A day without shoes, more days without dignity

Today TOMS Shoes is celebrating its 4th annual “one day without shoes.” Westerners will go barefoot today in an effort to raise awareness about the plight of children without shoes, increase TOMS’ sales, and allow the company to give away more shoes. The campaign, which features a video of celebrities and TOMS’ founder hyping the cause, will help lots of Westerns sleep well tonight. But one day without shoes for college students and celebrities means more days without dignity for “Africans” pitied by the West to the point of patronization.

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A spectrum of social entrepreneurship: TOMS, Indego, and Henry Ford

Businessweek hails Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS Shoes, as one of America’s “most promising” social entrepreneurs. An Inc. feature is one of many that explains how Mycoskie “built a lifestyle business based on social entrepreneurship.” The TOMS founder just gave a keynote address at SXSW about the company’s model and hinted that it will soon expand it’s scope of one-to-one giving beyond just shoes. TOMS’ model is based on its reputation of social entrepreneurship — customers compare TOMS to a competitor’s shoes, and they buy TOMS because of the social cause that the company has wrapped itself in.

But TOMS’ model is just one example that falls on one end of a wide social entrepreneurship spectrum. There are various combinations of business and social change models on this spectrum.

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