Sustainable Agriculture: Food Is Security
February 13, 2010
Originally published at AshokaTech.
Joseph Sekiku / netnotwired, CC license
The panel The Ever Green Revolution: Trends in Agriculture featured Amitabha Sadangi, Tarcio Handel, and Ashoka-Lemelson fellows Joseph Sekiku and Muthu Velayutham. One of the key questions in the discussion was how entrepreneurs can empower farmers who may only be able to feed their families to develop their farms into sustainable businesses.
Amitabha is the CEO of International Development Enterprises India (IDEI), an organization that provides affordable technologies for poor families in India. In his portion of the panel, Amitabha stressed that problems facing farmers all have their roots in the lack of readily available, clean water. "Water is scarce in most parts of the country and most parts of the world," he said.
Tarcio discussed the distinction between farming to feed one's family and farming as a business. His organization, Agencia Mandalla DHSA, is committed to building the capacity of rural farmers in Brazil. He said that the goal of social enterprise in agriculture should be to help farmers adopt practices that will produce more good crops — first to feed their families and then for a profit. "We need 2300 caloriess per day to keep our bodies functioning," he said. "The first market is the family market." He told us that through his organization, families have gone from making nothing to making 1200 dollars a month.
Joseph educates farmers in Tanzania on adopting more sustainable, less expensive, and less environmentally costly practices. He explained that through a community radio station, he's able to provide information on sustainable, cost-effective farming. Farmers can send questions by SMS message and he and his group research and broadcast the answers. The system gives a large number of people access to a wealth of information for a small cost.
Everyone agreed that due to environmental and market problems, it's hard to make a living farming today, but that those same issues make farming more important today than it's ever been. "Food is security," Joseph said. "Places where food is lacking are the most dangerous. There are so many people in the world today who can't eat."
Mobile Science Lab and the Future of Science Education
February 13, 2010
Originally published at AshokaTech.
As an interesting complement to yesterday's Youth Venture presentations, attendants got a unique opportunity to see Ashoka-Lemelson fellow Ramji Raghavan's Mobile Science Lab in action. The Mobile Science Lab is a traveling science classroom that has reached over 700,000 children in India.
Students from a local school joined us and demonstrated Ramji's experiments. I was impressed with the kids' understanding of complicated concepts as well their ability to discuss and think about scientific issues rather than recite a script. The experiments covered a wide range of topics: centripetal force, magnetism, cell structure, astronomy, and much more. Without naming names, I'll say I saw a few people try to crack the kids by asking them hard and/or stupid questions, but nothing would faze them.
This morning at a panel discussion on cultivating the next generation of scientists through education, Ramji explained the ideas behind the Mobile Science Lab. He said that humans remember 5% of what they read, 50% of what they hear, 70% of what they discuss, 80% of what they experience (particularly if it's an emotional experience, positive or negative), and 95% of what they teach others. The Mobile Science Lab's priorities are arranged to mirror those statistics. The curriculum is based on empowering students through experience to teach science to other students, and even to teachers.
Similarly, Ramji's process for training teachers is based on a learn-by-teaching model. He said that when teachers are in the training program, they'll learn in the morning and then teach the same subjects they learned in the afternoon. Ramji stressed that for engaging with children, someone with energy and excitement about teaching is infinitely more valuable than a degree in science. "We require a B.E.E degree," he said. "A bachelor of electrical enthusiasm."
Ramji also insisted that for a change in scientific curriculum to have any lasting impact, it must have government support. The best way to receive government support, he said, is to stir a lot of enthusiasm in the community. He told a story of one tour he'd made with the Mobile Science Lab that reached a few thousand children. "But the tour generated a lot of excitement in the region. Students told other students about it, teachers told their administrators about it, and eventually we got a call from the state office asking how they could add this sort of program to their curriculum."
Javier Fernandez-Han: Spend One Hour Inspiring Someone
February 13, 2010
Originally published at AshokaTech.
One of the young inventors we met this morning was sixteen-year-old Javier Fernández-Han, who was both the winner and the youngest entrant of Youth Venture's Invent Your World challenge last year.
I sat with Javier and his wonderfully supportive dad Peter at the pre-conference dinner on Wednesday and again this evening. Not only is he already an extremely talented inventor; he's also among the very best at articulating and explaining his ideas, regardless of age. Javier's invention, dubbed the VERSATILE system, uses algae to treat waste and produce oil, oxygen, and food for humans and livestock. It's also completely greenhouse-gas neutral, even though it has a stove. In Javier's words, "Algae is nature's Swiss Army knife. It gets rid of many things we don’t want and produces many things that we need."
During his portion of this morning's presentation, Javier attributed much of his success as an inventor to Ashok Gadgil (see previous post). Javier explained that he first learned of Gadgil's work at an exhibition sponsored by the Lemelson Foundation. When Javier was nine years old, he and his family met Gadgil at his lab. Gadgil spent an hour explaining the UV Waterworks system to Javier. Javier says that this meeting was what made him realize that he could spend his life creating inventions to improve living conditions for others.
Javier asked a very concrete favor of all of the inventors in the room: spend one hour inspiring someone. "Think not only of investing in inventions, but also of investing in people's lives."
Reaching for Economies of Scale at Tech4Society
February 13, 2010
Originally published at AshokaTech.
Today was probably my favorite panel discussion so far, Reaching for Economies of Scale: Mass Production. "Scale" is a word that's been used many times at Tech4Society, but like many ubiquitous words, part of why it's used so frequently is that it's difficult to define.
The panel was moderated by Tim Prestero of Design That Matters. Joining Tim were Anita Moura, Rakesh Pandey, and Ali Ansari. The panelists tried to examine the various types and shades of scaling. Should we strive to bring a single innovation to as many people as possible with one centralized means of production and distribution? Or should each community be taught to produce and distribute the invention internally? Or for that matter, what if a village adopts your invention without asking? Is that necessarily a bad thing?
Ali told a story of some students he'd worked with through Engineers Without Borders. The students had developed a system for producing bio-fuel from industrial and cooking waste. As the students were developing the idea, Ali challenged them to think about how to get the optimum impact from the invention: would it be better to create a scaled system in which a factory in each community handles the waste, or should the organization teach people to use the system in their own homes? Now, women and children in Kabul are being trained to use the system, and some are using it to start their own enterprises. "I’m a Ghandian at heart," Ali said. "I have a cautious approach to industrialization."
"While I'm also a Ghandian at heart," Rakesh said, "I tend to think of mechanization as a good strategy for higher quality production." He also suggested that there are a lot of possibilities for hybrid models in which parts are manufactured globally but products are assembled locally. This can offer employment opportunities for a community while (potentially) keeping costs down.
Anita offered an interesting perspective. She works with Ashoka-Lemelson fellow Howard Weinstein at Solar Ear, a company that manufactures solar-powered hearing aids. As deaf people often have highly developed hand-eye coordination, Solar Ear employs only deaf people in assembling the devices.
Anita stressed that Solar Ear doesn't protect its products and designs from competitors. "We want other companies and organizations to use this," she said. Compellingly, she suggested that having others reuse your designs actually is a form of scaling. She also offered that they're protected by their own ability to continue to innovate.
There was also much discussion of finding and working with suppliers and manufacturers. Everyone agreed that it's best to work with vendors who share your enterprise's values and goals. Rakesh told a story of a supplier who'd suggested changes he could make to a design to lower his costs. "When you work with vendors who share your values, they'll trust you with their knowledge. Partnerships require risk, and both sides have to risk something."
Demedicalizing Medicine
February 13, 2010
Originally published at AshokaTech.
Photo: BBC World Service Bangladesh Boat, CC license
I had an interesting discussion earlier this afternoon with an Indonesian medical doctor named Bachti Alisjahbana. In a great visual illustration of the concept of social enterprise, he handed me two business cards — one for Pakar Biomedika (.com) and one for Frontiers for Health (.org) — and said, "I'm working on getting all of this onto one card."
In short, Dr. Alisjahbana is working on making medical supplies more available to rural villages in Indonesia, with a hesitant eye toward expansion. Having heard a fair amount of talk about medical supplies in the past few days, I was curious to get the perspective of a physician working in social enterprise. Yesterday, I heard David Green and Anita Moura both use the word "demedicalize" in describing their distribution models. By going through nontraditional vendors of medical supplies, they're able to keep the prices down — not to mention bringing their tools to people who don't have access to traditional medical care.
"Demedicalizing is very important," Bachti said. He explained to me that in Indonesia, doctors typically stay in a community for only a year before leaving for a more prestigious post (the equivalent of residencies in the US), whereas nurses and widwives stay for their entire careers. "The nurses know the patients much better," he said. "They're better at counseling patients than doctors are." Legally, they can't counsel patients, but he laughed, "When you get into the rural villages, the law doesn't matter as much."
One of the big points in yesterday's discussion on economies of scale was the question of whether scaling means growing a centralized system of distribution or replicating the smaller distribution in new regions using local materials and talent. "I'm more interested in the latter," Bachti said. "Getting things through customs in Indonesia is very difficult. That's why Indonesia has the most expensive medicine in the world. And besides, we've developed a system that works for Indonesia. When we move somewhere else, we want to make a system that works there."
I appreciate that perspective a lot. I think there's a danger in taking a system that developed organically in one community and imposing it onto another. Or as Tim Prestero said in a panel earlier this week, "Saying you’re going to build a global product is like saying you're going to build a car that swims and flies. You're forcing people to pay for features that they're not going to use."
