Crowd Funding The Next Big Social Innovation?

Crowd funding [Photo Credit – Rocao Lara on Flickr]

One of the more recent developments in supporting new innovations in global poverty has been the rise of crowd funding platforms. More and more people are becoming change makers by having more access to the resources they need and this is unique because even more individuals are getting the opportunity to support their fellow innovators.

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg from Sustainablog recently posted about 2 new technologies (Mwezi Light & SunWater) that are aiming to alleviate poverty through their simple, yet ingenious innovations. And they’re using online crowd funding to support it.

Updates on M-Pesa and Why Replicating Successful Models Is No Easy Task

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An earlier blog post on this site explored the rise of mobile payments and specifically looked at M-Pesa, Kenya’s highly successful mobile payment system that has surpassed expectations dramatically and been a huge success.

That post also touched on the problem that most other countries have not been able to replicate the service with anywhere near the same level of success as M-Pesa. The Brookings Institution, an independent non-profit research organization, recently released the above video describing the M-Pesa model in conjunction with a detailed report on the 2012 Brookings Blum Roundtable that can be accessed here.

The report outlines three reasons that came up during the roundtable that might help explain the challenges of replication.

Interview With the Founder of Tekla Labs (DIY Lab Equipment)

Platforms for the Future: Lina Nilsson – DIY Lab Instrumetns from IFTF on Vimeo.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Lina Nilsson, Founder of Tekla Labs and Innovation Director at the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley, to talk about the resources that innovators should take advantage of and discuss the unique idea of do-it-yourself laboratory equipment.

Tekla Labs is an effort to develop low-cost and accessible lab tools that anyone around the world can use in order to conduct research and build their own equipment. This is highly relevant to social entrepreneurs and innovators as these tools are generally extremely expensive to use and hard to access.

How Local Factors Can Affect Global Poverty Innovations

It’s not just about the innovation!

This brief photo essay makes the argument that social entrepreneurs and innovators must make a conscious effort to include local perspectives in their designs for poverty solutions in order to have the most effective results. The inspiration for this video came from a symposium on New Development held at UC Berkeley.

The Event:

Is There A New Development? The promise and politics of provincializing experts, models, and knowledge in the 21st century.

“The “Is There A New Development?” spring symposium brought together scholars from both the STS and the development studies communities and provided a forum in which some of the most contemporary ideas of ‘development’ and expertise could be debated.  Symposium participants came together from the broader Bay Area, within the United States, and from across multiple continents.  The two day event held eight sessions and approximately twenty individual paper presentations and a special session dedicated to a broader discussion.  Emerging themes ranged from ironic perceptions of local knowledge or the ‘dialectic of confirmation and critique’ that is embodied in all; the usefulness of thinking of southern- versus northern-led development projects; social science researchers as experts in practice; the future of critique; and new entanglements of experimentation, politics, capital, bureaucratic logics, and the material.  Our keynote speaker, Professor Richard Rottenburg gave a wonderful address that was both accessible to a wide audience and conceptually provocative, in which he suggested a new post-critique approach to social inquiry that embodies compassion, responsibility, and an acceptance of uncertainty.  In all, approximately 75 people shared differing notions of science, technology, and expertise over the two day event.  Highlights included a robust debate on the existence of a division between the global south and north, comments and discussion representing multiple departments on Berkeley campus, and the continuation of the conversation well after the formal conclusion of the event on Saturday afternoon.” [1]

The event was held on April 5-6, 2013, at the Blum Center for Developing Economies at the UC Berkeley campus.

Are Mobile Payments Feasible Everywhere?

An M-Pesa Payment Till (Mobile Payment System) – Photo Credit: User Raidarmax on Wikimedia

New advancements in technologies are increasingly being used to help solve crucial development problems around the world. However, some of the extremely innovative solutions have also used services that have been available for a long time, just by redefining the problem. One such technology that’s being used – mobile phones.