Panels Highlight Community Participation In Development Of Technologies

LAUSANNE – Community-driven innovation and technologies could be a solution for developing essential technologies to achieve sustainable development, according to a range of expert panels at a recent event. And in some cases, they already are.

The International Conference on Technologies for Development (“Tech4Dev”), which took place from 4-6 June in Lausanne, considered that “innovative technologies have a central role to play in the effort to alleviate poverty in this world,” according to its website. Community participation in the development of technologies was considered a solution toward this goal by several sessions of the conference.

The 3rd annual Tech4Dev was co-organised by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Chair in Technology and Development, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), and the Swiss government.

Co-Designing Technologies with Local Input

A session entitled, “How can we Co-design Technologies with (and not for) Vulnerable and Poor Communities?” was moderated by Andrés Felipe Valderrama Pineda, researcher at Aalborg University in Denmark. The panel emphasised through speakers’ experiences the importance of including a significant number of members of poor and vulnerable communities in the development of technology to achieve better sustainable progress.

Panellist Ana María González Forero, executive director and co-founder of the Foundation for Multidimensional Education (FEM) in Colombia, presented a project of post-disaster housing reconstruction carried out by the FEM after dramatic floods in 2010 in the north of the country.

Numerous calls were made on social network websites such as Facebook to bring volunteers. The volunteers met with local people on the ground. From the start, they highlighted that no money would be given, but instead they were looking for building what Forero called, “collective dreams, that is, what can we do together?”

“Community expertise is abandoned and highly underestimated” – Colombian expert

Workshops including the local community discovered that the traditional brick houses have affected the health population historically because of their high rate of moisture when there are floods. Houses on stilts appeared to be more appropriate than brick houses. In order to finance the project, a community bank was created on a self-funding basis. Each family had to pay 10 cents on the US dollar by month.

This high community participation has been essential in the creation of prototype housing as well as in the appropriation process, which has enabled the project to survive. “People know that the project belongs to them,” she said.

Ferero concluded in her paper that “we need to design methodologies, not from general knowledge of common situations, but from the point of view of very specific community dynamics.” However, today, “the community expertise is abandoned and highly underestimated,” she said.

Another panellist, Signe Pedersen, PhD Fellow at Department of Development and Planning at Aalborg University in Denmark and co-founder of the NGO InnoAid, argued for the concept of “Design WITH People” (DwP) which involves the end-users as co-creators in the development of technologies in order to fit better in the local context and create ownership. This will help ensure the adoption of these technologies afterward and the empowerment of these poor and vulnerable populations.

Pedersen draws out this conceptual framework of DwP on the basis of empirical experiences conducted in Nepal to improve cooking stoves for rural populations and in India to create “rickshaw ambulances.” Both cases failed due to a lack of involvement of the population at stake.

In the first one, they did not take into account that pregnant women would prefer cooking stoves where they could stand up and in the second one, there was no room for helping to implement these new ambulances in the local community.

Thus, it is important to weave into the design process of new technologies the collective knowledge of the different actors, such as manufacturers, professionals, local people, NGOs, and governments, with a special focus on the end-users, she said.

Living Labs, a “Social Revolution”

Another session analysed projects that offer so-called “living labs” to support urban, rural and remote communities toward a sustainable development. “A Living Lab is a real-life test and experimentation environment where users and producers co-create innovations … characterised by the European Commission as Public-Private-People Partnerships (PPPP) for user-driven open innovation,” according to the European Network of Living Labs website.

Panellists in the session entitled “Community-Driven Innovation: Communicating Living Labs Essentials in the Developing World” presented living lab projects in several developing countries.

Lofti Kaabi, founder of Institut de la Citoyenneté and advisor to the Tunisian president on innovation and social development, presented the project called “life with dignity for all” whose goal is to break the cycle of poverty, exclusion and build participatory democracy in several local areas in Tunisia. The project brought together policymakers, civil society and private stakeholders and will create community action agencies (ACACIA in French) comprised of experts in various poverty indicators to help local communities to create social enterprises.

“We have designed the project as a social franchise with civil society being the franchisor, and community action agencies as franchisees,” Kaabi explained. The project aim is to create ACACIAs in every micro-region in Tunisia. “We create success stories and we replicate them,” Kaabi said. The pilot project created 28 ACACIAs and about 200 local social enterprises.

Adama Sow, media and ICT expert in Senegal, said that media living labs can promote grass-roots social changes. Community radio stations and the interaction with listeners through mobile phones can make a difference in Senegal, he said, illustrating his remarks with the Seres community radio Ndef Leng based in Dakar. Ndef Leng provides radio programmes about health and women rights, inviting respectively a doctor and a lawyer, who inform and help people calling the radio programme.

New mobile technologies such as mobile money and mobile transfer started in Africa, she said, adding, “This is a new paradigm that we are proud of.”

Llorenc O’Prey of the University of Bristol and Chandra Rinie Pudjiatie of Aflatoun organisation presented the Aflateen E-learning Platform dedicated to giving young people the tools to create financial and social enterprises in their community. This platform is a co-production with young people, teachers and researchers from several countries.

“Innovation is about conversation and exchange of ideas,” O’Prey said. The aim of the platform is to provide knowledge skills and confidence. At the end, the platform provides a project plan to young people who can publish their project and share their experience with others.

Fatmah BaOthman of King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia assessed how Living Labs could help the reform of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) educational system.

“What is really essential about technology is what value can be gained in using this technology,” BaOthman said. The GCC not only focuses on knowledge, but also on the creation of a knowledgeable society and a knowledgeable economy, she said.

She added that developing a solution for a GCC education reform via living labs methodology and cloud technology could help optimize technology investmentand contribute to a better international e-learning society.

Ersin Pamuksüzer presented the Living Lab based in the Başakşehir city, in Turkey. Close to Istanbul, this city has the ambition “to be one of the best branded smart ICT cities where innovation and technology is developed and applied,” according to the Başakşehir Living Lab website. The city created a physical living lab where citizens can come and interact with some innovations presented. “Citizens are really impressed and engaged and see the benefit of what we are doing,” Pamuksüzer said.

“It is a movement of hope, it is a movement of change, it is a movement of opportunities, it is a movement of learning, it is a movement of innovation, it is a social revolution,” concluded Tunde Kallai from the European Network of Living Labs and session leader.