"I love that you've brought this to attention. An extensive database of uncommon but resistant and hardy plants/foods could be developed and organized by climate. Ease of growth and processing should also be taken in to account. I will try to…"
A crash course in changing the world.
Gcobani Qambela: Favorite "secret" Innovation :-)
By: Gcobani Qambela
:-)
I personally loved Amy Smith's on rules for design in the developing world:
- Try living for a week on $2 a day.
I love this particularly because world policy makers rarely understand what it is really like to live like the poor. The help from most developers is always top-down, and this is not only in relation to Africa but always to marginal groups whether it be in American ghetto's, the favelas in Brazil, "slums" in Kenya etc. Developers always assume that they know know what is best for "dear old poor/marginal/African people" whereas they do not live in the lives of these people.
We recently had the minister of Human Settlements in South Africa visiting the township in South Af... and spending the night in the township. The next thing is that he will say that he actually knows what is best for people in the township after just one day spent in the township, and yet he does not live like them everyday, when he left the township he still went back to his lifestyle, what Zukiswa Mqolomba terms the "ANC's Gucci cadres" lifestyle - signified by excessive wealth.
So what I Ioved the most about this social innovative "secret" is the fact that it taps into the heart of the matter, the heart of the issue. The fact that policy developer's fail to take the first hand account of people living in abject poverty. The assumption is always that marginal/poor/African people want mansions, expensive cars, etc whereas people just want to live comfortably.
If I were thus policy making, I would hold more meetings with the local people to find out what their needs are from the bottom-up level. I think the one thing one would find is that marginal people, dispite the horrendous lives they live, do not want a lot from policy makers. They want clean streets, proper education for their children, adequate housing - I would thus instigate approaches that engage more with the poor, rather than assuming for them what their needs are - and there would also have to be more participant observation; rather than once off visits, continuous weekly visits to monitor the considitions
Views: 29
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Comment by Sarah Shaw Tatoun on April 21, 2010 at 9:18am
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Good choice. In the US organizations often choose an amount of money equal to the state assistance given to families without other resources and ask people to try and live on that for a week. This is a powerful way to answer the questions that better off people often ask themselves, about why people in poverty can't easily get out.
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