Food security: time to think of the small scale farmers
This article was written by David Indeje (@DavidBurudi) and was first put on the internet on West FM. It has been republished here with his kind permission. Agriculture is the essence of life, but it seems leaders are not getting the idea as farmers continue to experience the effects of climate change and in their […]
Exploratory User Research in the Rural Economy
When I first began developing the attributes by which to select representative user profiles for the original fieldwork to begin understanding the “prepaid economy”, that is, household financial management in rural India, The Philippines and Malawi, it was based on people’s ability to plan and budget. One can plan best when one is certain of […]
International development in the year 2015: Q&A with a 3rd world brown woman
Naomi, posing for my camera in her role as poor African farmer’s wife Naomi was my first exposure to poverty as expediency in rural Africa. She and her husband are the responsible family unit for a multi kitchen homestead in Makueni, Kenya. They themselves own a Maruti van which he runs as a matatu plying […]
Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are…
“The worst mistake of first contact, made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter, has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions. It often proved fatal.” ~ David Brin 2. How can technology best be used to change humanitarian practices that may appear to you to be evolved forms of imperialism? […]
The black box of international development
This post continues the conversation begun in the previous post by attempting to address the spirit of the first question posed by Regarding Humanity: 1. Is the ball already rolling to change the “Development Industrial Complex”? What sorts of shifts needed for process to happen? When I was first encouraged to speak up on the […]
Preamble to a Q&A on international development: Charitable donations, silver bullets and the hapless beneficiary.
If you don’t ask me what I need then is it my fault I don’t use what you gave me the way you wanted me to? Impact assessment metrics for this donor funded project will show how many thousands of households in the region received their chemically treated malaria prevention kits consisting primarily of brand […]
Post-Colonial Design Blowback: the challenge facing the global design industry
By Niti Bhan | Published: July 16, 2010 With Bruce Nussbaum My twitter feed informed me this morning about the storm in the designer teacup raging around Bruce Nussbaum’s post last week “Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism?” and I followed through religiously by catching up on “In Defense of Design Imperialism” – the rebuttal […]
Why are they shaming Simon Berry for making an important and valuable strategic change? #colalife
In my 2009 article “The 5Ds of BoP Marketing: Touchpoints for a holistic, human centered strategy” I used Simon Berry’s initial work, with Cola Life, as an example of innovative distribution models, so: Such “piggybacking” has been attempted on an existing tried and tested global distribution network as a way to distribute medicines to the […]
True Confessions: I was an earnest and idealistic Nokia fangrrl 2006 to 2010
OMG I can’t breathe! Photographed hyperventilating with the guy responsible for my phone’s design, Peter Griffith at the Nokia “Connecting the Next Billion” Emerging Markets Strategy Workshop in London, May 2011. If I thought I could get away with it, I would tiptoe out of the room right now. Michael Davis-Burchat has just yelled out […]
tank man
I can’t find anything online and I didn’t get a chance to get a closeup of the board over there so I have no idea who the artist is. But apparently this is the lifelike statue of the man who stood down a tank in Tiananmen Square. Can’t you feel him drawing in the power […]
