Bill Clinton

Former president Bill Clinton has been beating the drum of alternative cooking fuel for Haiti since he became U.N. special envoy to the nation in 2009. With what he calls his “one cent solution,” Clinton has sought to replace charcoal with round cooking briquettes made of recycled paper that create ten to twenty times more jobs than charcoal production and are 80 percent cheaper for consumers.

L'Atelier du Chocolat is a gourmet chocolate factory in Mexico with $2 million in annual sales and 63 employees. Among the factory's clients is Liverpool, one of Mexico's largest department store chains, but L'Atelier du Chocolat can only supply seven of Liverpool's 130 stores.

"To be able to serve them all I would have to invest in machinery," says owner Marisol Alfaro. "But I don't have access to financing because I don't have the contract." And Alfaro can't secure the contract until she can prove that she has the means to fulfill it. "It is a vicious circle," she says.