The Other Entrepreneurs: Turning Trash Into Art in the Solomon Islands

By Chandran Nair

The World Post 

Wally Faleka, 46, has run Village Level Art and Graphics since 1989 in his home village of Fo’ondo on Malaita, one of the Solomon Islands. An artist, screen printer, sign writer, teacher and occasional taxi driver, he lives and works in a small house with his wife and seven children, four of them adopted from other relatives.

Despite the island’s lack of running water and electricity, Wally has developed his own screen printing technique, recycling x-ray plastics and surgical knives from a nearby hospital for making and cutting his stencils. Whenever he can get his hands on some emulsion, he uses sunlight and water from his water tank to expose his designs onto cloth screens.

Through the year, he designs and paints banners and T-shirts for events and meetings held on the island. Every Christmas, he creates his own collection of special T-shirts that he sells in Auki, the provincial capital.

Since he bought an old car several years ago, he has also travelled around the island giving free workshops in which he shows women how to dye and screen-print beach wraps known as “lava-lavas.” Afterwards, many of these women carry on creating their designs and products that they then sell. When orders dry up, Wally works as a taxi driver, earning enough to pay a mechanic to keep his car maintained.

Malaita, The Solomon Islands | Photographer: Jouk Inthesky

“The Other Hundred” is a series of unique photo book projects aimed as a counterpoint to the Forbes 100 and other media rich lists by telling the stories of people around the world who are not rich but whose lives, struggles and achievements deserve to be celebrated.

The second edition of “The Other Hundred” focuses on the world’s everyday entrepreneurs. The book offers an alternative to the view that most successful entrepreneurs were trained at elite business schools. Here are people who have never written a formal business plan, hired an investment bank, planned an exit strategy or dreamt of a stock market floatation. Find out more about the upcoming third edition, “The Other Hundred Educators,” here.

The Other Entrepreneurs: A Disappearing Peru Folk Art

By Chandran Nair

The World Post

Mabilón Jiménez Quispe survives in one of Lima’s poorest areas thanks to his handicraft — making retablos — a folk art derived from traditional Catholic church art.

The floor of his workshop, on the roof of his family’s house in the San Juan de Lurigancho neighborhood of the Peruvian capital, is cluttered with small wooden retablo boxes, some unpainted, others decorated with colorful flowers. The interiors of most of the boxes are filled with biblical scenes in which Jesus, Mary and Joseph are portrayed as indigenous people, and llamas replace camels.

Mabilón was born in Ayacucho, an Andean city known for its handicrafts, into a family with a long tradition of making retablos. He fled to Lima after a Maoist guerrilla group, Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, launched a brutal insurgency leading to tens of thousands of deaths in the highland region around the city in the early 1980s.

Mabilón sells his work in Peru and overseas. But the earnings from this time-consuming craft are meager, and many other retablo-makers have abandoned the craft to take up other work. Today, only around 50 families in Lima make retablos, just half of them working by hand as Mabilón does.

Lima, Peru | Photographer: Jesper Klemedsson

“The Other Hundred” is a series of unique photo book projects aimed as a counterpoint to the Forbes 100 and other media rich lists by telling the stories of people around the world who are not rich but whose lives, struggles and achievements deserve to be celebrated.

The second edition of “The Other Hundred” focuses on the world’s everyday entrepreneurs. The book offers an alternative to the view that most successful entrepreneurs were trained at elite business schools. Here are people who have never written a formal business plan, hired an investment bank, planned an exit strategy or dreamt of a stock market floatation. Find out more about the upcoming third edition, “The Other Hundred Educators,” here.

Book showcases 100 humble entrepreneurs with 'heart'

Yahoo! Finance 

The conventional view of entrepreneurs is that they are heroic millionaires. Words like “businessman” and “finance” and “statistics” may come into mind — all of which can seem pretty mundane and meaningless to the man on the street.

“The Other Hundred Entrepreneurs” is a unique book that turns that stereotypical view on its head. Helmed by Chandran Nair, the project portrays the inventiveness and ingenuity that ordinary entrepreneurs from around the world bring to bear as they find the means to support themselves, their families and communities.

In other words, it shows the “heart” of the entrepreneur. The humble background of these entrepreneurs proves that one does not have to be rich and famous to be noteworthy.

The book looks at 100 ordinary people from 95 countries, all of whom contribute to maintaining the global economy and creating jobs.

Here are some of the interesting profiles featured in the book:

ASIA — Orchard Road, Singapore

Allan Lim, 42, founder of Comcrop, Singapore (Photo: Richard Koh/The Other Hundred)

Allan lim, 42, is the founder of Comcrop, an urban farm spread across a 6,000-square-foot roof-top on Singapore’s downtown Orchard Road.

Comcrop, a social enterprise, uses “aquaponics” – a system of hydroponics – the process of growing plants in sand, gravel, or liquid with the use of nutrients – that uses broken down bio-waste from fish and aims at recreating the eco-system of a freshwater lake.

The farm’s output includes a range of herbs and vegetables, including basil, peppermint, spearmint, and several varieties of tomatoes.

Allan, who is also CEO and co-founder of Alpha Biofuels, a bio-diesel business, and co-founder of The living! Project, a collective of artists, social innovators and designers graduated from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University in 1999 with a degree in engineering.

Comcrop’s staff include two young Singaporeans, one a recent graduate and another about to begin her university studies, helped by a group of local senior citizens who help with harvesting and packing.

AMERICA — Buenos Aires, Argentina

Dani with one of a half-made pair of shoes, Buenos Aires, Argentina (Photo: Anatol Kotte/The Other Hundred)

Nearly six decades ago, in 1955, on a small street in Buenos Aires’ Palermo district, Felix Correa founded Calzados Correa, a maker of men’s shoes. He opened a workshop, hired the best argentine, Spanish and Italian craftsmen he could find, then started selling the shoes they made by walking up and down the streets of his neighbourhood, knocking on doors in search of customers.

Slowly, his reputation grew. “You are going to be the best craftsman ever,” his customers told him. “We will still wear your shoes when you are gone.”

Felix spent much of his free time outdoors, with football a particular passion. In 1992, in the middle of a game, he had a heart attack and died. His son, Dani, then 32, inherited the business. As a boy, Dani had spent all his hours after school sitting alongside his father, watching and learning. He promised to run Correa with the same passion and spirit as his father.

Today, Correa employs a dozen staff. A pair of its off-the-shelf shoes takes around two weeks to make and sells for around US$350. Although Dani continues only to make men’s shoes, his younger brother has opened Correa ladies across the road from Correa, a separate business specialising in women’s footwear.

Dani, now in his mid-fifties, sometimes wonders about Correa’s future. “What will happen when I’m gone?” he asks. The answer, he knows, lies with his older son, Juan, now in his early 20s. He understands the spirit of the company, says Dani. “Be creative. Follow your instincts. Be genuine,” he advises his son.

EUROPE — Ulldemolins, Spain

Maialen, 27 and Andrés, 35, members of Engrama band, Ulldemolins, Spain (Photo: Edu Bayer/The Other Hundred)

Maialen, 27, and Andrés, 35, are the two members of Engrama, a popular band in the virtual world of second life. From their home in Ulldemolins, a tiny Catalan village in north-west Spain, wearing headphones and playing electronic instruments, their eyes fixed on a laptop screen, they have given more than 2,000 concerts in the last five years.

Developed by Linden Lab, a company based in San Francisco, second life has acquired around one million regular users since its launch in 2003. As well as being a place where people can meet and socialise online, it also has it own currency, the linden, which can be exchanged with real world currencies such as the dollar and euro.

Through their concerts and a virtual fashion store where their followers can buy “clothing” and other accessories for their second life avatars, Maialen and Andrés earn enough to support themselves, Maialen’s parents and her sister.

AFRICA — Johannesburg, South Africa

Philani, 24, makes a living selling books on a Johannesburg street corner, South Africa (Photo: Tebogo Malope)

Philani, 24, makes a living selling books on a Johannesburg street corner. To attract attention from passers-by, he offers them free reviews of any of the titles in the pile of works next to him. If someone likes what they hear, they can then buy the book.

Born in Kwazulu-Natal, a province on South Africa’s east coast, Philani moved to Johannesburg in his early teens. He says he discovered the value of reading after self-help books helped him recover from drug addiction.

He sells his books – most of which are given to him – for between US$2 and US$9 each, earning enough to rent a flat as well as buy enough food to eat. Although he refuses to name his favourite book, John Grisham is his favourite author.

For more information about the book, visit http://www.theotherhundred.com.

The Other Hundred Entrepreneurs Featured on CNN

CNN 

The Other Hundred Entrepreneurs Featured on Forbes.com

By Johan Nylander  

Forbes

In business schools, the potential leaders of tomorrow are taught that every business project starts with a plan; a strategy based on market research and data analysis. But for most entrepreneurs and start-ups, that’s not the case.

A new photojournalism book and online project by The Global Institute for Tomorrow, a Hong Kong–based think tank, feature 100 unique stories about entrepreneurs from 95 countries.

By highlighting everyday businesspersons, the organisation aims to show the true faces of those responsible for creating the majority of jobs around the world. Although these people aren’t likely to find themselves on the world’s rich lists or celebrity websites, they are the ones that hold the global economy together.

"Here are people who have never written a formal business plan, hired an investment bank, planned an exit strategy or even dreamt of a stock market floatation”, said Chandran Nair who headed the project called The Other Hundred Entrepreneurs.

“Some work for themselves, others employ a few people, still others a few hundred. These are the people behind the statistic that small and medium-sized businesses contribute half of all jobs in Africa and two-thirds in Asia."

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are a very important part of Asia’s economy. In China, they account for around 80 percent of manufacturing employment and are estimated to create 80 percent of new urban employment. In Southeast Asia, SMEs make up about 96 percent of all firms.

A global survey published in Harvard Business Review concluded that about 70 percent of those entrepreneurs who had a successful exit – that is, an IPO or sale to another firm – did not start with a business plan. Most important, the authors concluded, was for the entrepreneurs to have “heart, smarts, guts, and luck”.

Here are three unique cases of entrepreneurs from China:

BEIJING, CHINA

Photographer: Robin Mas

Who wouldn’t want to work at Internet search company Baidu , China’s answer to Google GOOGL -0.05%? Song Xin and Luo Gaojing for two, both of whom quit jobs as finance officers to open a snack shop just around the corner from their old office in north-west Beijing’s Wudaokou district.

After mastering the art of making the perfect roujiamo – a kind of meat sandwich based on a traditional snack from Shaanxi, a province 800 kilometres south-west of the Chinese capital – they started testing it on the same people they had once worked with. It was an instant hit, and within a few weeks their shop had become the must-visit place for local IT workers looking for a filling snack.

Song and Xin have now opened a second shop in Beijing, and already have plans to build a nation-wide chain within a few years.

XIAHE COUNTY, GANSU, CHINA

Photographer: Tashi Dorjee

Ma Xiancheng, 66, has worked at the entrance to Labrang Monastery in Gansu’s Xiahe County in west China for more than 30 years. Arriving each day at eight o’clock in the morning, he stays at his stall, repairing boots and shoes for monks and other people living nearby, until six o’clock in the evening.

Labrang Monastery, founded in 1709, is one of Tibetan Buddhism’s most important monasteries outside Tibet. At its heyday, it had more than 4,000 monks. After being forced to close during China’s Cultural Revolution, it reopened in 1980, and is now home to 1,500 monks.

CAUSEWAY BAY, HONG KONG

Photographer: Leo Kwok

Raymond Lun runs his fashion store on Haven Street, a quiet back street just a few hundred metres from the heart of Causeway Bay, one of Hong Kong’s busiest shopping districts. A fashion designer and tailor, after graduating from fashion design school, he worked with a local tailor for six years, then went and lived in Australia for a year.

Returning to his hometown five years ago, he decided to launch his own brand of tailor-made suits and leather shoes for men. The first several months were tough for a “no-name” fashion designer, but slowly his designs and craftsmanship attracted recognition. Now in his mid-30s, his clients include a handful of local celebrities and performing artists.

The Other Hundred Entrepreneurs on Bloomberg

Bloomberg