Speaker: Margaret (Meg) Brindle (Lecturer, School of Public Policy, UMD)
Title: Beyond Fair Trade: A methodology for producing sustainable income using Intellectual Property strategies in African exports and the Maasai cultural brand.
Approximately 10% of the world’s population live in poverty. As International development expands with efforts to alleviate poverty via trade strategy, when lower income countries produce and export more product, it is often met with challenges of price fluctuation and in supply chain inequity, as unequal profit goes to import and retail companies.
Professor Brindle has been engaged with a new approach to poverty alleviation with the Ashoka organization for a decade - an entrepreneurial trade approach to poverty alleviation in East Africa and the Caribbean. Using the growing asset of Intellectual Property, her work will present several completed projects that have returned substantial and sustainable income, such as over $100million additional income to the Ethiopian coffee farmers; Divine Chocolate; and her talk will focus on the demonstration of a method for many more potential initiatives in Africa; SE Asia and the Caribbean in specific.
She has been working with the 2 million strong Maasai tribe in Kenya and Tanzania to enable the Maasai to receive sustainable income via improved use of IP strategies, as the Maasai name and image is used by over 1,000 companies. Her work has been covered by the BBC and NPR and published in Fair Trade Journals. Brindle also published a book on poverty alleviation and a 6 step replicable method entitled Social entrepreneurship for development: A business model, by Routledge Press.
Professor Brindle teaches International development @ SPP; Leadership; Project courses and was formerly professor with tenure at GMU. She is co-founder of the African IP Trust (africaniptrust.org), a support organization and educator for Light Years IP (lightyearsip.net).