Outside Innovation

Educating Kids to Be Change Agents

My most recent trip to URDT in Uganda was the most satisfying of the five trips I've made there in the past four years. In the past, I've been able to go on field trips into the bush to see firsthand the differences being made in the lives of local people and to talk with them directly. This time, I took four field trips to meet and talk with people who are taking the initiative to change their lives from living conditions that are extremely primitive to near-middle-class lifestyles. I also interviewed and solicited essays and drawings from the 262 students in the URDT Girls School. 

The three secrets of success of this integrated rural development program are:

1. Using a visionary approach-focusing on people creating the outcomes they want to achieve.

2. Girls and young women as change agents-in a culture in which women are treated as second-class citizens and are under-educated.

3. Community radio to engage citizens in strategic conversations about the issues that matter most to them.

As many of you already know, I am midwifing a children’s book that will be written and illustrated by the girls at the URDT Girls School—the 10- to 18-year-olds who are becoming effective change agents. In doing so, I have learned much more about their school, their stories, and their lives. It's amazing how much you can learn from and be inspired by a motivated young person!

Although I have written about the URDT Girls School before, I had never really analyzed it to understand HOW these girls (and their families) are educated and how they catalyze change in their households and communities. As you'll see, this is a true "path of least resistance" story. At the Girls School, URDT has created a structure and an environment that makes it logical and easy for people to improve their sanitation, nutrition, and basic living conditions so that they can aspire to and create productive lives for themselves and their families.

Supporting Online Collaboration in Bandwidth-Challenged Areas

Have you noticed the ways that your work patterns have changed over the past five years? Instant messaging, tweeting, SMS, email, and chat, combined with smartphones has enabled us to be "always on." It's now easy to strike up a collaborative working relationship across organizational and geographic boundaries—by messaging, emailing, conferencing, and sending pictures and files back and forth.

Everyone is now reachable much of the time by mobile phone. The modalities of collaboration are becoming richer, and, at the same time, more ad hoc. You can get a quick answer via Twitter, SMS or instant messaging.

Having recently returned from rural Africa, I was amazed by my ability to stay in touch through my Blackberry email in the remotest locations.

For example, last week, I was sitting outdoors in a freshly-cleared area under some shade trees in a remote village we had reached using 4-wheel drive on abominably muddy and potholed dirt roads. I was listening to local Ugandan women describe what they had learned about land rights.

These 30 local women from three different villages had been researching Uganda's four different types of land ownership to discover that none of their families owned titles to the land they lived on and cultivated. Having uncovered what steps would be required to convert their property from absentee-landlord-owned land to freehold land and then to acquire land titles, they revealed that owning their own land had become so important to them, they had started earning and saving money. They had formed three separate Savings and Credit Cooperative Organizations (SACCOs), and one group of women had already saved 1.5 million Ugandan Shillings ($750 U.S.) in just a few months. They planned to build up their collective savings and then lend money out to one another to buy their land titles.

These women gave credit for the establishment of their Savings Co-Ops both to the young women Rural Transformation Agents from the nearby African Rural University (ARU) who had jumpstarted this participatory action research project on land rights. They also specifically mentioned Dave Willett, a retired credit union executive who has been volunteering in this district to help the ARU students and the community members learn how to set up their own Savings and Credit Cooperative Organizations (SACCOs). I knew that Dave was in California and probably wasn't aware that these SACCOs had gotten off the ground since his visit in November 2009, so I quickly emailed him the news from my Blackberry. He promptly replied, asked some questions, and promised to send along some additional background materials for a community banking workshop the ARU interns would be attending this week. Sure enough, within a day, we received the new training materials from Dave.

This is a great example of the kind of ad hoc collaboration that's taking place all around the world, around issues of importance. What impressed me was how easy and seamless it was for us to coordinate, despite the fact that the only Internet access I had was via mobile phone and wireless modem.

This is one of the proud women who know owns the title to her property!

Creating AIP UniPHY, a Social Network for Professionals

Last week we wrote about the importance of creating a 360-degree view FOR customers of their information. The American Institute of Physics' UniPHY portal does that and more. If you are a professional physicist, one of the things you care about the most is your professional reputation as exemplified by the seminal research you have published. AIP provides each published author (their customers) with a view of all their published papers. But UniPHY doesn’t stop there; AIP's published authors can not only see their articles, they can see all their co-authors' articles, and all the other experts who have published on similar topics.

Further, API has taken a unique approach to social networking—one that seems well-suited to the behaviors and interests of their constituents: physicists, materials scientists, mathematicians, astronomers, and others engaged in the physical sciences. AIP has taken an existing implicit social network—people who collaborate and publish research together—and made it explicit.

There are a number of lessons to be learned from AIP’s experience launching and nurturing UniPHY:

• It pays to invest in creating a rigorous taxonomy.

• People care about people. People find each other much more fascinating than “things.”

• If people already have public personas and profiles, pulling that information together and presenting it in an easy-to-use manner is not likely to alienate them.

• Don’t underestimate customers’ pride of authorship and ownership.

• If you are in the publishing business, looking for new business models, consider offering free value-added services on top of your paid content.

• Be clear about which customer scenarios you’re designing for. If you design around customers’ critical activities, you are much more likely to be able to attract and grow a vibrant customer-centric ecosystem that will increase the value of your business!

AIP UniPHY: Creating a Professional Social Network
How the American Institute of Physics Is Creating Value Add for Its Members
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, March 4, 2010

http://www.customers.com/AIP_Case_Study.aspx

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Children Are Driving Innovation in Rural Uganda

I am spending two weeks in Uganda at the Uganda Rural Development and Training (URDT.net) programme. My goal on this, my fifth trip, to this incredible hotbed of grass roots, bottoms up innovation, is to midwife a book. The working title for the book is, "It Takes a Child to Raise a Village," a play on the famous book by Hillary Clinton, "It Takes a Village to Raise a Child."

This week, I am working with the 236 girls from the Girls School to help them write their own book—a rebuttal to Hillary's. These girls—who come from families who live on $1 a day in rural villages with no electricity, plumbing, or running water—know that THEY can make a difference in the lives of their families. They have spent the last 10 years becoming change agents for their families' farms and businesses. These 13 to 20-year old young women have the poise, the know-how, the humility, and the quiet determination to help their families create a shared vision of how they want to improve their livelihoods.

Each one of them has a wonderful story to tell about how they mobilized their family members to improve health, nutrition, sanitation, income generation, and family cooperation and harmony in their households. They also acknowledge that they (even at age 14 or 15) have become role models in their communities. People come to seek their advice. They are truly changing the cultural norms in their villages and their families. And they and their families are highly respected because of the role the girls have played in improving their families' incomes while they are attending school.

In so many poor regions of the world, children have to drop out of school and work to support the family. At URDT's Girls’ School, thanks to this unique educational experience, the girls are increasing their families' income while they're away at school by teaching their parents what they've learned about organic farming, sustainable agriculture, nutrition, sanitation, health, and community development. They've also taught their families how to create a shared vision for what they want to achieve and an action plan for getting it done. This is truly remarkable for a group of wonderfully ordinary teenagers in a rural, backward society and a "women don't count" culture.

I feel privileged to be working with these young women! I look forward to sharing the draft of the book with you soon!