Once the home of a coal-fired power station, the London Sustainable Industries Park (SIP) at Dagenham Dock, in east London, is going to be the UK’s largest concentration of environmental industries and technologies. It provides occupants with access to national and international networks and world class research teams to support their development, which is helped by an onsite centre of excellence, the Thames Gateway Institute for Sustainability (LTGDC) – a UK government agency tasked with overseeing regeneration of areas all over east London.

“We’re putting in a lot more landscape infrastructure creating an environment which is much more business park than industrial estate,” said Mark Bradbury, LTGDC’s deputy director of development. A heat network is being installed allowing some of the energy produced to be shared by businesses on site.

So far there is only one tenant at the London Sustainable Industries Park. It is Closed Loop, a company that originated in Australia and that was the first in the world to use the latest technologies to recycle 35,000 tonnes of used plastic bottles a year into new, food grade PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate) and HDPE (High Density Polyethylene).

The project is to transform the area into a clean-tech hub. Other companies are set to move in this year. Waste-management company Cyclamax is scheduled to install a renewable-energy power plant creating 16 megawatts of electricity, while TEG (an organic waste recycler) has been given the green light to develop an anaerobic digestion plant.

A Brazilian residency has recently been introduced by the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business as part of its Global Executive MBA (GEMBA), a programme designed for full-time managers. The students will go to Brazil and attend a two-week course there to gain an insight into the Brazilian business environment. There is also an Executive MBA programme for the Americas which is being developed by Canada’s Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University, in collaboration with São Paulo’s FIA Business School, Mexico City’s ITAM and Nashville’s Vanderbilt University.

Brazil’s economy is changing: family-based businesses are being replaced by more professionally managed companies, who are looking for management talent more than ever before. 90% of the students enrolled in the OneMBA program at Brazil’s FGV Business School are funded by their companies, so applications to this programme have doubled in the past two years. In America and Europe, those interested in getting an MBA has fallen over the same period, and the share of students funded by their employer is about a third of the Brazilian one.

Since then, CARE and other NGOs, including Plan International, Oxfam US, Catholic Relief Services and the Aga Khan Foundation, have promoted village savings associations. The schemes are so successful that savings groups now have 4.6m members in 54 countries.

A village savings scheme involves a small group of 15-30 people who pool their savings. Each buys a share in a fund from which they can all borrow. All must also contribute a small sum to a social fund, which acts as micro-insurance. If a member suffers a sudden misfortune, they will receive a pay out. Returns on savings are extremely high, generally 20-30% a year. Borrowers typically pay interest rates of 5-10% a month on loans that usually have to be repaid within three months.

At the end of a cycle (usually about one year), all the money accumulated through savings and interest is shared out according to members’ contributions, and a new cycle starts. Once members have got used to the system, their groups can also perform other tasks, such as providing training in agriculture, health, leadership and business.