[ excerpt from developer's web site ]

Provides UTF-8 conversion for perl versions from 5.00 and up. It
was mainly written for use with perl 5.00 to 5.6.0 because those
perl versions do not support Unicode::MapUTF8 or Encode.

Unicode::UTF8simple is written in plain perl (no C code) and will
work with any Perl 5 version. It is just slightly slower than Encode

WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Unicode-UTF8simple/