BOS Founder Willie Smits - Finalist in BBC World Challenge
Programme airs 20th and 21st October, on BBC World
http://www.bbcworld.com/Pages/Schedules.aspx?
World Challenge 2007 is a competition aimed at finding individuals or groups who have shown enterprise and innovation at a grass roots level.
This global competition seeks out projects and businesses that not only make a profit, but also put something back into the community. The competition is all about rewarding individuals or groups that truly make a difference through enterprise and innovation at a grass roots level.
The programmes will feature the twelve finalists whose innovative projects or ideas are benefiting communities socially, environmentally or financially.
Viewers will have the chance to vote online and pick the winner who will be featured on a special programme from the Awards ceremony shown on December 8th. The winner will receive a US$20,000 award to benefit their project, while two runners-up will each receive $10,000.
To vote for Dr Smits’s project, please go to http://www.theworldchallenge.co.uk/voteform.php and click on Steaming Ahead.
About the project: Steaming Ahead
Extracting the sugar from sugar palm requires a good deal of heat. For the farmers of Tomohon, a mountainous region of Indonesia, timber was the obvious source. Seeing the damage being done to his beloved rainforest, conservation expert Dr Willie Smits hooked the palm farmers up with a local geothermal power project. He established a factory that uses waste steam from the power plant to heat the sugar palm sap. The resulting high-quality product is now being successfully exported – with all profits going direct to the farmers’ cooperative. Some 6285 poor farmers and their families are now benefiting from the project, and around 200,000 square metres of forest have been preserved. Dr Smits believes his business model could serve throughout Indonesia as a sustainable alternative to the destructive Palm Oil trade.
Note from the Director of Orangutan Outreach:
If you care about orangutans, this project offers a solution that can not only impact the lives of orangutans but countless other species that depend upon the rainforest, including humans. Alternatives to the currently unsustainable production of palm oil are essential to saving the forests of Indonesia and Malaysia, the only places where orangutans live in the wild. Please vote.
