It's been one week since the category 2 Hurricane Irene hit the tropics and spiraled up the East Coast. It’s strength did diminish into a category one hurricane as it ripped up the coastline, but the devastation it left behind, although not as bad as expected, was still tremendous. 

Congrats to our friends over at Grameen who are featured in this article by Deobrah Bassett for Huffington Post! Fenix is excited to be supplying Grameen CKWs with ReadySet kits to charge smartphones. [Link to Grameen Blog Post]

In Uganda, smartphones are being used to help farmers get access to more agricultural information, through conversation with one another and applications on the phones. The Grameen Foundation's Application Laboratory (aka AppLab) created an app for its Community Knowledge Workers (CKW), called CKW search. It's an application that informs farmers about crop failure, pests, weather and more. This helps farmers to take precautions and also determines where to invest their money. 

This NPR article presents an overview of the stoves program at Aprovecho in Oregon, and mentions the enormous scale required: a need for 500-600 million cookstoves is estimated. Fenix similarly is working hard to scale its energy solutions for the 1.5 billion without electricity.

Melinda Gates explains what non-profits can learn from Coca-Cola