Technology & Social Innovations

Hi Rosa,

P-CED has been longstanding advocacy for digital inclusion as the vehicle to replicate the social enterprise model. It began with our founding paper which made the call for a new economic paradigm.

http://www.p-ced.com/1/about/history/

With little interest here in the UK prior to the credit crisis we focussed on Ukraine, making the case for affordable broadband access as part of a multi-component approach to economic development and eradication of poverty. applying our 'social business' model would yield funds for supporting other social components.

http://www.p-ced.com/1/projects/ukraine/national/

We direct our efforts in advocacy to enable infrastructure which all social applications need as a prerequisite. So we tend to be coming from a different angle to the nonprofit approach of using the web for fundraising applications.

In the terrotory where we work, what isn't talked about enough is the problem of dealing with corruption. It tends to be something that social enterprise in general shies away from.

Jeff

  


      

Jeff,

Interesting stuff. There were several things that you mentioned that were discussed at Tech4Society. In particular, building an enabling infrastructure, and innovative methods of finance (fundraising). One session was focused on mobile technologies, where the transformation that cell phones has brought to remote rural areas, especially in rural India and Africa, has been a critical component of recent economic development.

Regarding corruption and the need for good governance, this was discussed, especially in the Africa trends section. There are several Fellows working on transparency issues to improve governance. I hope some of the attendees of those sessions will chime in with more comments.

Rosa

Hi Rosa, with invention-led development, I agree with Jeff 'monies should be directed into community development funds.' You're right, there are as many creative possibilities for this as there are technical solutions. I guess the impetus of opportunity is with wireless connectivity, allowing for much more creativity. The barriers and issues blocking distribution etc, could have more to do with general cultural norm resistance than anything, like with venture capital, faith is a bigger pull than doubt... just some thoughts.

A good point about wireless connectivity, Jo. It was one of the issues identified in the Ukraine paper

"The communication infrastructure that can most effectively and quickly facilitate these efforts does not exist. Nor are there any serious plans for it. Draconian barriers stand in the way of progress. In Ukraine, people can be fined or jailed for operating simple wi-fi devices, which are common and unlicenced in all democracies and developed nations. In Ukraine, a license to operate a simple wi-fi device is required. Licenses are costly and almost impossible to get through a central-controlled Ministry."

We were making the case for this as part of a strategy to develop the economy and create jobs in a country with problems before the credit crisis.

Consider the news today from Intel in the same development context for post-crisis America:
    
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10458171-76.html

Jo Davidson,

You are definitely echoing themes that were discussed. In particular, the importance of community-led or community-included efforts, especially in the governance of the funds. One Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow, Gustavo Gennuso of Argentina articulated this well when he mentioned that he works to "maximize inclusion" and to develop and deploy new technologies together with the community.

One thing that I was struck by, was the tough external environment that some of the participants face every day. For example, Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows Doug McMeekin and Andres Martinez both work in the Amazonian region in Ecuador. These communities are accessible by a 2 and 8 hour trip respectively, by motorized canoes. Under these conditions, connectivity takes on an added dimension of complexity, as well as utility.

Rosa

I believe when micro-finance personnel understand the principles of business process re engineering, there will be a big breakthrough in helping the poor grow food. Before lending money, micro-finance institutions should have a list of all the business processes, equipment, support systems, and data BOP farmers will need to run their business successfully. When equipment and support systems are not available, micro-finance personnel need to solve the problem of getting the equipment and support systems before making a loan that will cause the BOP farmers to take high risks. More information is given on my website at http://home.comcast.net/~prigter/site/. See especially the "Poverty" paper.
The challenge is setting up a supply chain and support system that will provide the equipment and support at a reasonable cost to BOP farmers. A second challenge is that most social entrepreneurs don't have any training or experience with business process re engineering, tropical and arid land agriculture, setting up better business processes and supply chains, etc. ECHO has solved some of these problems (see http://www.echotech.org/mambo/). However, until BOP farmers have all the equipment, support system, and supplies they need, they will continue to take high risks and often fail.

Paul,
Partnerships that bring together the technology providers and the financing are critical. Harish Hande at <a href ="http://www.selco-india.com/index.html">Selco India</a> has an innovative program for financing of solar lighting.

Although I have seen examples like Selco which is more in the consumer products/microfinance level, an area that seems to be in need of funding are for amounts larger than typical microfinance, say for capital equipment. I would be interested in hearing of examples for these larger amounts.

I do not know the answer to your question since I am only working with BOP personnel. In particular, I am working with personnel at the University of Cordoba developing a new field called “low cost supply based economics”. To date we have started the following projects:
1. Creating tropical fruit tree and moringa “jungles” using seeds from Banana-Tree and ECHO to grow the initial set of trees. We are currently testing the use of micro-irrigation equipment and hope to test sleeve pumps in the future. This could be a multi- million dollar industry. The jungles also provides food and water security for both animals and humans.
2. Building a golf course for less than $200. We use used pitching wedges and putters ($10 each found on U.S golf courses), practice golf balls (so they won’t go too far ($20)), a pin set ($20), and the local soccer field. We hope to have more golf courses than Donald Trump. The “Ocean Course” is more difficult to score on than Mr. Trumps golf courses since our course is environmentally friendly (native grasses and trees, no pesticides, etc).
3. Starting a high quality softball and Frisbee team using equipment from US basements that were no longer used. Our uniforms are Barack Obama picture buttons ($0.25 each from Ebay after the election). We hope to have more sports teams than George Steinbrenner. We do have a problem that our top athletes are recruited for state and national teams. We feel we have better athletes than Harvard, Princeton Yale, Colombia, MIT, etc
We realize that if we have success with “low cost supply based economics” that professors ideas may prove to be too costly and old fashioned and that they may not have anything to complain about since we spent almost no money. This may make it difficult for them to get Government research grants and tax treatments in the future. However, we have been waiting for more than 50 years and no one has showed up in our region. This is probably due to the drug dealers, FARC terrorists, Venezuelan guerillas, and Cuban guerillas in the area. Also we don’t have luxury hotels holding high-priced conferences on helping the poor. Instead, we help the poor.
We feel we have a huge intellectual advantage since the University of Cordoba conducts BOP outreach programs every week in the growing season so that they know the problems that BOP personnel face. Our students also grew up in the region so they know the problems BOP face while American students have no idea. See http://home.comcast.net/~prigter/site/ for more information.

There are some organizations who have been working to address those exact gaps that are mentioned. Villgro Innovation Foundation (www.villgro.org) for example, has been working for the last decade in India to incubate innovation solutions for the rural poor. Their primary mission has been to identify innovations with a rural social impact and provide funding and support to grow those innovations into viable businesses.
More recently, they have started a separate retail distribution entity to help bring the innovations to the end consumer and address the "last mile" problem. One of the solutions that they have come up with to increase adoption by the local communities is by engaging a representative at the village level to test and advocate potential products. I think this last part is absolutely crucial, because innovations are unproven for the rural population. Testing and demonstrating the effectiveness of the product by someone of their community helps to build that trust and eventual adoption of that product.

I strongly encourage people who are trying to address the gaps in investment in rural innovations and distribution of those innovations to take a look at the work that Villgro has been doing.

Jeanne,

Thanks very much for sharing about Villgro. The community representation you describe seems quite effective. With recent progress and focus on remote rural populations by entrepreneurs and policy makers, I would expect models like this to proliferate.

Another technology that I feel is the very promising is growing moringa. This technology will help the poor and rich once big cattle ranchers in tropical areas realize that moringa can increase their beef and milk production and small BOP farmers realize they can dramatically increase their nutrition by mixing moringa leaves and pods with their food. In addition, small BOP farmers may be able to increase the quality and availability of feeds for small ruminant animals in the dry season using moringa fodder trees and shrub forages. Most moringa trees and shrubs are easily propagated and do not require high management inputs (fertilizer, pesticides, etc.) or advanced technology. If I am correct, the use of these trees should dramatically increase the number of jobs available in the tropical regions. The technology already has been proven in a number of tropical areas.

See http://www.treesforlife.org/ (especially PowerPoint slides)
http://www.moringanews.org/ (especially articles on the use of Moringa for increasing the growth of cattle and pigs)
http://www.echotech.org/mam[…]ew&id=89&Itemid=122
http://www.echotech.org/mam[…]ew&id=63&Itemid=140

Most social entrepreneurs don't have a background in tropical and arid land agriculture so they are of limited help to BOP subsistence farmers. Many social entrepreneurs want a computer solution, political activist, or policy change solution for everything because that is what they know.

We are also working on similar model as Villgro...Our focus is on technology innovations by grassroots innovators......we r bringing those products in the market by innovator themselves or by small scale entrepreneurs....We provide service from idea(prototype) to enterprise stage...we think if we can empower city/district/state level small entrepreneurs by licensing them technologies & provide other mentoring/incubation/funding support we can reach out to BOP mass ....we follow 1.5 Lakh database of National Innovation Foundation from 540 districts of different parts of India...out of which 30-40 are there in the market...another imp issue for grassroots innovators is most of them don't want to be entrepreneurs...they just want to do more & more research; I know one person who is doing research for last 40 yrs & innovated 200 technologies, but he sold out his home,cars & many other valuable things to do research; there are many villagers who faces various problems for lack of facilities, so to solve those problems they come up with inventions/innovations....they don't even think of it was a invention/innovation & doesn't care about it's business potential...So, if we could connect the trio(invention/innovation; entrepreneurs; investors)
[ Invention/Innovation


Entrepreneurs Investors]
by licensing technologies to large no. of entrepreneurs & handhold them we could solve some of these problems...

Jaydeep

I have been thinking about the questions above an others in terms of how can we achieve systemic change in the structure of reality creation, by seeding a new "healing model" stimulating higher-conscious human by putting the human on a path of self-emergence and sharing a dynamic of collective emergence. I came to the following tactical idea:

Construction of rural green estates/cells network, to be function as large-scale alternative co-creative grass-roots rural-to-global economy.

The basic of the network topology is a “healing cell”; An open-source eco-architecture of natural building to be rural green production and soft-industry estate. A multi-purpose intelligent ecosystem of production runs open rural grassroots co-creative economy/enterprise.

open-source <> transparent manuals, modular, tailorable and expandable can be seeded "every where", networked entirely to achieve sustainable self-growth/organization > Co-creative universal collective intelligence solution.

natural-building <> self-construction with local natural material

multi-purpose <> comprehensive function of living architecture, capacity and creative potential in rural ecology/society.

Ecosystem of production <> all activities high efficient interconnected, sustainable allow high participatory freedom with new definition of work and profession within the entire cycles of exchange. Technology will allow dynamic alignment of positions and jobs to be chosen freely.

Cells/Estates Network <> boarder-less cooperative resilient eco-social economic body

Business model based on "direct ownership" so that we turn the pyramid up-side down > meta-individuals and ban-hierarchy

Why constructing the "cell" rather than regeneration of villages?
It is easier to create new organ, the “healing cell” shared by village/group of villages, rather than re-generating the whole village and existing rural-life experience.

Some guiding links:

> Domains: http://twitpic.com/qh1iz (logistic and transportation are missing)

> cell-body: http://twitpic.com/hkyuf

Mind map in relation to my venture in Palestine http://www.mindmeister.com/maps/show/19349055

 
What do you think? Is the idea clear and innovative? Do you think we can attract eco-architects to develop a model-simulation can be presented to public?

From architectural eco-design we move to low-tech industrial and green-production design.
ICT is essential to provide transparency, collective governance, democracy, high efficiency and flexibility, ..

Looking forward for your echo ~

Many thanks

Wael Al Saad

Dear Rosa,

We are co-founders of Kopernik, an on-line store of innovative technology designed for the developing countries.

We are partnering with a number of technology providers who possess innovative and appropriate products designed for the developing countries. When speaking to over 40 of these technology providers, two common challenges emerged, which are broadly in line with the findings you outlined.

One is the distribution channel. While the technology providers have a few distribution channels, they face difficulty with expanding them, due to lack of access to other countries beyond where prototype is tested. The other is the price. However they tried to make it affordable, the products will still be way more expensive than the poor people living under 2 dollars a day could purchase.

These are the gaps we are addressing at Kopernik. Kopernik showcases the innovative technologies designed for the poor on the site, and local NGOs will develop a proposal on how to use these technologies to serve their beneficiaries, and the proposals will be put on our site to get ‘crowd-funded’. As Kiva has demonstrated, collective power of small individual funds is large, and this will act as the ‘micro subsidies’ to lower the product price down, and make the products much more scalable. By connecting with the local NGOs who need the technology, distribution issue is also addressed.

Check out our site (www.thekopernik.org) when you have time!

Toshi/Ewa

Dear Toshi,

why not to enable the poor to develop their own appropriate equipment based on their indigenous knowledge and materials in their environment?
This way they will have strong relationship to them and make more value of them.
http://www.appropedia.org/
http://practicalaction.org/

I think we should change the mentality of consuming solutions into creating self-empowering solutions that can sustain and bloom. And here I see the poor as a human with very rich potential and high expressive capacity, will guide the future of the "rich".

There will be still need for high-tech equipment like for communication and connecting to digital world, But this can be exchanged to a service the "rich poor" can deliver. Yes, if we start looking to humanity as big family, it is not about the "rich" is helping the "poor", rather than activating relationship has been misused all over the time. The same logic also for ecology, which is ideally the uterus of humanity.

Wael

Dear Wael,

Thanks so much for your comments – yes, absolutely, we are a big fan of these organisations promoting local production of appropriate technology, and we would love to partner with them, to complement what we are starting with the existing technology. In fact, we are currently developing a new ‘service line’ that promotes and supports local development and production of appropriate technology.

Interestingly several of the products we currently feature are actually developed and produced in developing countries.

I wanted to add to what we said in the initial post though - what we are doing through Kopernik is not simply bringing the off the shelf technology developed in rich countries to the developing countries. We are also providing local organizations with choice of a range of products and technology – elements that are frequently missing in a development context.

All this is to say that yes, we are totally in agreement with you on this issue. Thanks for raising this important issue!

Toshi/Ewa

Hi Toshi,

Besides the issue of micro-subsidizing innovations and the problems that creates (see Paul Polak's great arguments in his book Out of Poverty), I think the other issue with a crowd sourced innovation model is that it doesn't quite solve the last mile problem. A crowd sourced innovation isn't necessarily going to be something that the rural poor of the country want, but rather something that the social entrepreneurship community thinks the rural poor wants. The practical challenges of building awareness for the product and then actually getting it into the hands of the rural poor are often overlooked.

For example, Villgro funded a really great product that was a manually operated milker machine for small acreage farmers. The product was cheap enough and the design was quite simple, but there was absolutely no demand for the milker. The current process of manual milking of cows by the farmers is infinitely cheaper than the milking machine, because it's completely free. We thought it would be a product that would be useful, since it reduces labor, but labor is not the problem. And the other benefits of more hygenic milk, etc. were all not useful to the farmer's needs. In the end, a seemingly good innovation hasn't worked before of that last mile challenge of actually getting farmers to buy it.

I'm not sure what your distribution methods are going to be for those innovations, but I'd recommend that you talk about it with some of the people who will be your consumers to get their feedback to see how you can make it work. Good luck with your venture!

Jeanne

Dear Jeanne,

Thanks so much for your thoughtful comments. We are in full agreement with you that the demands of the end users should be the starting point of any innovation of appropriate technology.

A core part of our kopernik model is that the local organisations (which are part of the communities) submit proposals for only those technologies that they believe will address their needs. They will also have an opportunity to rate and provide feedback on the products, which we will posted on the site (like Amazon).

Thank you very much for sharing Villgro experience - if you have any reports on this, we would love to learn from it.

Best,

Toshi/Ewa
www.thekopernik.org

Toshi/Ewa, Wael, and Jeanne,

Thanks for the fabulous comments, lots of great discussion.

We've definitely seen that the end-user of the technology needs to have input in the development. Sometimes there are prohibitions, perhaps cultural, that are not well known to well-meaning outsiders. I am reminded of the effort to have an infant incubator, one that stabilizes a sick infant's body temperature, so that the infant can be transported to a hospital perhaps 6-8 hours away. The incubators were test-piloted in South Asia, where their white color was too reminiscent of funeral garments that mothers were hesitant to use them regardless of cost.

Jeanne, thanks for sharing the Villgro experience. The feedback you mention seems to be a critical component for successful outreach into these more remote communities.

Thank you for this insightful overview and the resulting discussion. Technology certainly has the ability to solve some of the world’s most significant problems, but as you mentioned, issues like access, design, distribution, and implementation often seem to be our opponents in the field. Ashoka’s Changemakers recently launched a global challenge to find innovations that are catalyzing the economic advancement of women through technology. Through the Women | Tools | Technology challenge, I have been inspired by innovators who turn some of these barriers into opportunities. For example, Solar Sister turns social norms and distribution challenges into opportunities by providing access to solar technology in an accessible, by-women, for-women, to-women program. Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow Hilmi Quraishi was one of the first to enter this global challenge, and I hope organizations like Villgro and Kopernik will follow.
  
This last topic about the end-user of the technology needing to have input in the development is so key. I would add that the end-user needs to be involved throughout the technology lifecycle, from problem identification and design through implementation and evaluation.

Thanks again for this exciting discussion!

If you’re interested here are some relevant links:
Women | Tools | Technology challenge: http://www.changemakers.com/technologywomen
ICRW White Paper, Bridging the Gender Divide: How Technology Can Advance Women Economically: http://www.icrw.org/docs/20[…]ance-Women-Economically.pdf
Solar Sister: www.solarsister.org

Dear Sarah,

please look closely to my idea. it is based on "structure evokes activity" and I am presenting a structure contains holistic approach in changing the world by providing new modular "environment" for economy, can be "seeded" every where and later "networked" to form new economic body world wide.
We need eco-architect's on first hand to design the space for the rural estate.
I am without institution (just all-life and the emerging universe)struggling for this concept to be an alternative in "Global Palestine"

in spirit,
Wael
Jenin-"Palestine"

SKYPE wael.alsaad

thanks Toshi .. i am very excited for your services and looking forward for cooperation on the ground in the near future.
Wael

Hi everyone!

Tom from Ashoka here. Great conversation! I wanted to invite you all to continue the conversation in real time on Twitter. From 4-6pm US EST on the first Wednesday of each month Ashoka hosts a real-time conversation called #SocEntChat and today's topic mirrors the one here: Invention and Social Innovation. Please join in by using the #SocEntChat hashtag.

Cheers!

Tom

I am building an alternative to the Internet for people who have only cell phones but no Internet access (that's about 3 billion people). It's called ShareTell (for details, please visit http://ShareTell.net)

It will allow people to call into a local access number and create their own miniature IVR programs ("press 1 for this, press 2 for that"). Each program is assigned a code number that the owner can then advertise to others, like we would advertise a web address. They can share any information they like, by voice, in their own language. They can also share numeric data, record messages from callers, provide code numbers that retrieve personalized information, or set up community bulletin boards.

This is a general purpose tool, and it will be provided free of charge (other than the cost to call the local access number).

I believe that this service could really help a lot of people by allowing them a way to share information without the need for internet access or knowledge of English. All they need is a basic cell phone.

This is a big project that is just getting started, and I'd love to get some feedback. If you have time, please visit the website (http://ShareTell.net) and share your thoughts, or tell a friend about it.

Thanks!