Outside Innovation

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!

Who Says Kids Can't Make a Difference?

Girls and womens' empowerment story that I submitted (#436)  to Nicholas Kristof's "Half the Sky" contest

Sanyu Provia’s description of her experience as a student at the URDT Girls’ School in rural, western Uganda. Sanyu’s schoolmates are girls from the ages of 12 to 18 years old, who come from low income rural families. Sanyu applied to be admitted to the boarding school, did well on the interview, and has been not only receiving an education in the 3R’s, but also in sanitation, nutrition, organic farming, carpentry, solar technology and visionary leadership. While in school, she has helped her family improve their income. She describes how this works:

"· The backhome projects have helped to increase our income. Our family got involved in sugar cane growing and out this we were able to buy a motorcycle (TVS); thanks to URDT.

· Backhome projects have improved our sanitation and health standards through improvements on our house, constructing a good drying rack, and a good birth room.

· We as family members we have managed to get school fees for our sisters who are in secondary schools to proceed with their education.

· Back home projects have helped my family to improve on nutrition, which has been done through planting different vegetable gardens and rearing some animals like pigs and goats.

· They have helped me to improve on the co-operation in family through working together to earn a living as a family.

· Back Home projects have helped me to increase on the relationships with our neighbours. This has been done through sharing with them what we have as they also get attracted and take these seeds to their families to plant them.

· I have also realized that the back home projects have helped me to have a shared vision with my family members. This is through bringing my suggestion towards our family as they agree after talking about it."

Young Girls Improve their Families' Income in Africa

Another inspiring story submitted (#434)  to Nicholas Kristof's "Half the Sky" contest. 

Here’s an example of 12-to 18 year old girls in Uganda who are increasing their families’ income through their schools’ projects. Most families expect kids to become productive members of society AFTER they graduate from school. At the Uganda Rural Development and Training (URDT) Programme’s Girls’ School, 240 girls increase their families’ incomes every year by training, organizing and inspiring their family members. Here’s one of their stories:

Namata Eva, a student at the URDT (URDT.net) Girls’ School, has witnessed changes at her home because of sustainable income- generating Back Home Project and she had this to share:

“Back Home projects are series of activities we do at home as we have learnt them at school. They are family projects because every member has a role to play in implementing these projects.

Earlier, our family back home projects were growing pineapples, sugar canes, beans, maize and other traditional crops. However, in 2007/2008 we were introduced to organic farming for income generation with a specific focus on Sesame and chillies. Our family chose to grow Sesame but did not abandon the pineapples.

Through back home projects, we have built a permanent house and can afford to save at least four thousand (4,000) per month through a revolving SACCO fund. We make other savings, pay school fees for other children in the family, and provide them with the necessary school requirement – this was not the case before I joined the URDT Girls school. The family is now proud of this saving culture because we meet all our needs without straining so much.

Through back home projects, we can afford a balanced diet because we grow a variety of crops including vegetables. Before these trainings, we used to depend on cassava as our daily meal. In brief I can say that the back home projects have become a backbone of our rural livelihood”.

Submitted by Alida Bakema, Girls' School Curriculum Development

It Takes an ARU Student to Change a Village!

 Great story by Matt Clark in the Christian Science Monitor on July 5, 2009 about "my" African Rural University for Women (ARU) in Uganda with wonderful photos by Mary Knox Merrill. 

Here, Charlotte Mbaine, who just completed her third year at the University, is being thanked by one of the women in the Village where she did her "senior project"-- spending one month helping villagers articulate their Visions and begin to achieve them by discovering and using their own resources and talents. Check out the full story and video African Academy Empowers Youths.

Photo: Mary Knox Merrill, Christian Science Monitor

I'll be heading back to Uganda for a visit with these recent grads in early November. These young women went to ARU to become rural Community Transformation Specialists, rather than to head to Kampala to work in business. They are raising the economic productivity of each village they work with. We are seeking funding to provide them with paid internships, laptops, Internet access, cell phone minutes, and solar energy starter kits. They come to each village with knowledge of local agricultural techniques, brick-making, sanitation, road-building, and visionary leadership. They inspire the villagers to articulate their own visions, to pool their talents and resources and to achieve their visions. Read more about this innovative program for customer-led innovation.

Join Peter Senge and Mwalimu Musheshe at MIT on May 15th!

Peter Senge is hosting a "bring your own lunch" talk at MIT where Mwalimu Musheshe, the Chairman of the Uganda Rural Development Training Programme (URDT) will be the featured speaker. Musheshe uses many of the principles of systems thinking in his amazing work at URDT. This is going to be a fantastic open discussion and dialogue. Here's the "invitation" to the event, thanks to Bryan Smith, one of the co-authors of Peter's latest book, The Necessary Revolution. (I hope they'll get into a topic about how environmentally sustainable URDT itself is. Perhaps I'll ask that question!).                                                                                        

Mwalimu Musheshe                                                           Peter Senge 

Vision in Action

Mwalimu Musheshe, Co-founder and Chairman
Uganda Rural Development &
Training Program (URDT)

Hosted by Peter Senge

MIT Sloan School of Management
Friday, May 15, 12-2
MIT Tang Building/E51, 70 Memorial Drive, Room 345.

This event is FREE.  You're invited to bring your own lunch.

Come meet Mwalimu Musheshe, co-founder and chairman of URDT. Learn about their visionary, systemic approach to development in Uganda – a model for Africa and the world. URDT provides an aspiration-based, systemic approach grounded in the understanding that to achieve lasting development, people must become empowered in all areas of their lives, including education, health, economic self-reliance, human rights, and civic participation. Since its inception, URDT has helped thousands of people improve their lives and has received accolades from international organizations for its innovative approaches. URDT’s training of local people, especially women, to become leaders and creators, is changing the way rural communities work. Musheshe will be presenting and engaging in dialogue with participants in this session, hosted by Peter Senge.  More information about URDT is at: http://www.urdt.net/

A map to the location can be viewed here:

How to Design Your Products (and Business) to Be Customer-Adaptive

        Here’s an update on one of the companies featured in Outside Innovation. CohesiveFT is a software company. Their products are digital. But I believe that some of the patterns we’re seeing as customers create their own digital products hold up well for physical products or for hybrid physical/service products.
       
         In fact, I’m writing this post from St. Louis, the center of the Bio-Belt, where the products that are sold—seed for growing corn, soybeans, fruits, and vegetables—are designed and packaged in ways that are surprisingly similar to today’s hardware and software. As Monsanto's CIO, Mark Showers, explained to me, what’s going on in bio-agriculture is that there’s an increasing split between the hardware (the seed or germ plasm) and the software (the traits) of a plant. Advanced bio-technology has made it possible to optimize the traits at each layer of the seed stack (below ground/roots; ground-level/weeds and pests; above ground/leaves, flowers, fruit). In fact, today’s hybrids come in triple-stacks—soon there will be 4 to 6 stacks—of optimized traits. Farmers select the traits they need in their seeds based on the soil conditions, pest patterns, weather patterns, and their expectations of what the growing season will hold. (Then they hedge their bets through commodities trading where they make their real money!) While farmers don’t CONFIGURE the optimal seed traits at each layer today (that’s done in the lab and on the manufacturing farms), they do SELECT seeds with optimal traits at each layer for different sections of their farmland. It’s a very sophisticated and complex set of choices. Much of the value of the seed resides in the intellectual property involved in optimizing each layer of the stack for the precise conditions required and in the ability to mix and match these traits to meet the particular requirements of a particular strip of farmland in a given micro-climate. Companies license the intellectual property—the traits—to one another.