World leaders arrive for final days of summit.(Chicago Tribune)

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa_Sustainable development doesn't come in a much neater package than Farouk Jiwa's Honey Care Africa business in Kenya.

Using $300,000 in private investment and a smaller start-up grant from the United Nations Development Program, Jiwa has distributed beehives to 2,500 subsistence farmers in Kenya, most of them with tiny half-acre plots of land too small to support their families.

As the bees do their work, the farmers harvest the honey and Jiwa buys it, providing a guaranteed market and distributor. Last year he collected and sold 80 tons of honey on the Kenyan market, and the farmers earned at least $360 each, doubling their income and bringing them for the first time above the $1-a-day international poverty line.

Just as important, the farmers are slowly paying back to Jiwa the cost of the hives, which they'll eventually own, and two years into the project, Jiwa finally is earning a salary. Even the investors are expected to get their money back, plus interest, within five years. And on the farms, the pollinating bees have raised crop production 15 percent.

"I'm not doing this out of the goodness of my heart. This is how to do the right thing for the community and still turn a profit," says the fourth-generation Kenyan whose project is among the success stories touted at the ongoing World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.

Business partnerships for development, from homegrown projects like Honey Care Africa to multi-million-dollar programs backed by multinationals such as Shell Oil, were on display Sunday as world leaders flooded into Johannesburg for the final days of the summit.

In closed sessions, negotiators were working overtime to settle the remaining contentious issues in the summit's action plan in time to have it signed by heads of state this week.