USAID Fosters Grassroots Innovation in Zambia | Source: Excerpts from IMPACT Blog, Aug 16, 2013 |
What happens when you bring together a fish farmer from Zambia, an entrepreneur from India, a design engineer from Germany, an MBA student from Colorado, and a group of 42 other similarly diverse individuals, and send them to work together with rural Zambian communities to create technologies that will improve the lives of those living in poverty? The answer, as I witnessed at the International Development Design Summit earlier this month, is innovation.
The International Development Design Summit (IDDS) is an intense, month-long workshop that brings together people from all walks of life and a variety of disciplines to create solutions to development challenges faced by impoverished communities around the world. The IDDS summit, now in its seventh year, is organized by a consortium of U.S.-based and international universities led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Reflecting USAID’s deep commitment to greater collaboration with the global science, technology, university, business, and entrepreneur communities to solve development challenges, USAID/Zambia and USAID’s Higher Education Solutions Network(HESN) provided direct support to the summit for the first time this year.
Loveness Mwanawasa from Zambia and Chole Underdwon from the United Kingdom practice designing menstrual pad prototypes in Kamphelo village. Photo credit: Amy Smith/MIT
One IDDS team worked with communities in Kamphelo village in the Eastern Province and learned that women were putting their health at risk due to cultural taboos surrounding menstrual hygiene. Women in Kamphelo, as well as in many other areas in the world, are not able to speak freely with each other or to the men in their communities about menstruation and would often reuse old and unclean cloths as pads. The taboos are so strong that women are not able to clean and hang the cloths out to dry, increasing the risk of infection. The team designed an inexpensive, disposable pad that women could produce and sell themselves. The two men on the IDDS team became vocal advocates for hygienic menstrual practices, with one becoming more comfortable talking with his wife and daughter in Zambia about the issue and the other proudly discussing the issue with women’s groups in the village.
This is just one of the eight design teams participating in IDDS 2013. In every case, impoverished Zambian communities benefited from the technology itself as well as the sense of empowerment they gained by engaging with the IDDS participants. The participants also came away from the experience with a new perspective on international development and a powerful new capacity to find solutions to the problems affecting people living in poverty.
