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.

The Other Entrepreneurs: Giving Ailing Newborns a Fighting Chance From Vietnam

By Chandran Nair

The World Post

Every year, more than three million babies die in their first month of life. Most of these deaths could be prevented if appropriate technologies were available in the hospitals of the world’s poorest countries.

Nga Tuyet Trang, the founder of Medical Technology Transfer and Services, or MTTS, is trying to make this happen.

After spending a year studying in Denmark in 2003, Nga returned home to Vietnam imagining a world where every infant, no matter where they were born, had an equal chance for a healthy life. Assembling an international team of specialists in biomedicine, mechanics, electronics and industrial design, she tasked them with adapting developed world medical equipment and practices to meet the needs of treating the most common problems affecting newborn babies at hospitals and clinics in developing countries.

Twelve years later, the outcome is MTTS’ range of low-cost, high-quality neonatal intensive care equipment. All made in Hanoi using readily available materials and parts, the machines are durable, easy to use and do not require expensive materials. Installed in more than 250 hospitals, MTTS equipment has so far been used to treat more than three-quarters of a million babies suffering from infant respiratory distress system, jaundice or hypothermia.

Hanoi, Vietnam | Photographer: Gregory Dajer

“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: Perfecting Coffee and Chocolate in São Tomé and Príncipe

By Chandran Nair

The World Post 

Claudio Corallo, 64, has 40 years of experience producing coffee and chocolate in Africa, working first in Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of Congo) and since the 1990s in São Tomé and Príncipe, a tiny archipelago off the coast of Guinea in West Africa.

Born in Florence, Italy, Claudio moved to Zaire in 1974 when he was 23. After several years working in the coffee trade, he bought a run-down plantation in the center of the country, reviving it to produce high-quality coffee that he exported to the world.

Forced to leave in the mid-1990s after rebel forces launched a civil war that would end in the toppling of Mobutu Sese Seko’s government, he moved to São Tomé and Príncipe to continue his plantation career, this time growing cacao trees, the plant that produces the bean used in cocoa and chocolate. Today, he grows his own cacao beans on Príncipe, then ships them the 90 miles to São Tomé where he runs a processing plant.

When he started out, his greatest challenge was removing the characteristic bitterness of the variety of beans grown on his plantation. He set up a laboratory beside his home, testing and experimenting with new ways of fermenting the beans until he eventually came up with his own process for producing bitter-free cocoa. Today, he sells his dark chocolate to gourmet buyers, mainly in Europe, the United States and Japan.

São Tomé and Príncipe | Photographer: Alex Masi

“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: The Daredevil Painters of India

By Chandran Nair

The World Post

Avid Kumar runs a four-person business painting the exteriors of high-rise towers in Kolkata, the capital of India’s West Bengal state. Painting a building typically earns him around 10,000 rupees — about $145 — far more than he could earn by taking on many smaller projects. Even so, he cannot afford proper safety equipment for himself and his team.

Avid was born in Kolkata after his parents moved there from the state of Bihar, West Bengal’s western neighbor. He was raised and still lives in one of the city’s many slum districts. His first job was carrying live chickens to a market on a bicycle. But as the rising popularity of Western-style supermarkets cut demand at the market, he switched to painting when he was 19. Although he relies on his personal connections with staff at the huge property companies that manage the blocks, his biggest worry is getting paid on time.

Kolkata, India | Photographer: Dripta Guha Roy

“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: The Resilient Farmers of Timor-Leste

By Chandran Nair

The World Post

Maria Fatima is the chief of Maudemo, a village in Timor-Leste where life has long centered on small-scale farming.

“Farmers are important, because they are the ones who provide food for the other people,” she says. “If there are no farmers, there will be no food.”

But with output from village farms facing rising competition from cheap, factory-processed foods, Maria spends much of her time helping her community look for ways of producing better tasting, higher-value food both for them to eat themselves and sell in nearby markets.

The villagers have had some success with snails. Long considered nothing more than a pest, they now collect and prepare them in a way that they can be eaten. Treatment of cassava is also undergoing a rethink. Long the third most important source of calories after rice and maize for people in tropical regions, traditionally villagers would just peel it, boil it and then eat it. Now, says Maria, they prepare it into chips that are both tastier and retain more nutrients.

These photographs are drawn from a series commissioned by Oxfam Australia, which is working with local partners in Timor-Leste to reduce hunger and malnutrition.

Maudemo, Timor-Leste | Photographer: Rodney Dekker

“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.