Butterfly Works

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Ineke Aquarius spoke at Tedx Women Amsterdam (7 December 2010) about branding to reduce poverty.

Ineke Aquarius spoke at TEDx Women Amsterdam on December the 7th.

This international event is was held at Sotheby’s Amsterdam, which is the oldest auction house in the world. On the 7th and 8th of December 2010 the spotlights were on female and male thinkers and doers. 50 International sprekers took to the stage in Washington DC during TEDWomen. Holland is one of the many countries that is participating in the international program of TEDWomen, under the name TEDxAmsterdamWomen.

The title of Ineke's talk: 'Branding out of poverty'

Here is a nice report about her presentation and an interview with Ineke Aquarius.


TEDxAmsterdam 2010 took place today at the Stadsschouwburg. The stage of this beautiful city theater was reserved for the ideas of revolutionary thinkers and innovators in the fields of technology, entertainment, design, art, science and business. For one day, this monumental city theater turned into “a theater of the mind”.

Emer Beamer talked about fighting poverty by Co-Design and how that plays out in our work. Our model begins with adressing a specific social need and works because we find a solution together with the people involved by which they can produce revenue streams, in order to create income that leads to a longer-term solution.

Here is the Video of her talk, a blog post by the Tedx Amsterdam team TedxAmsterdam and reactions on Twitter.

One project that illustrates this approach is 'Play and Learn with Miffy'. This early child development program started in Venezuela and is grounded on the legacy of Dick Bruna. We discovered that Dick Bruna, creator of the Miffy character and books (Nijntje in the Netherlands), is a goldmine of inspiration for best practice in early childhood development. We began our co-design proces by asking children form Venuzuela to draw their favourite animal. The sloth came out and the team created a new character, Yoyo, which will be used in an awareness campaign about the importance of early childhood education, and also to create books for sale to generate revenue for other projects.