Lowering the barriers to effective communication is the key to sustainable development
One of the challenges that we discovered during our multistakeholder workshop in The Hague a few years ago was that people tended to fall back on their expertise when faced with the discomfort of empathizing with farmer’s needs. Particularly so when the farmers in question were from Africa, and not from their own regions. Our […]
An Introduction to Human Centered Design for Policy Makers in International Development
I’m making available the article based on our work with the Dutch government a couple of years ago. Download PDF
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 […]
The rural mobile economy is prepaid.
With Radheshyam Meena, Farmer in January 2009 I began the New Year of 2009 in the midst of prototyping my fieldwork protocol for the Prepaid Economy project which had just won one of 9 Small Grants offered in competition by the iBoP Asia Project in The Philippines. India’s familiarity was the reason for its choice […]
Interim project report: User centered Agricultural value chain development
My colleague and project leader for the current work in The Netherlands, Bart Doorneweert has just published an excellent analysis of our workshop on user centered design for a multi stakeholder group invited by the Ministries of Economic Affairs and Foreign Affairs. Here’s a snippet: Insights on the multi-stakeholder working processWhen the break-out groups re-convened […]
Lessons from the Amul brand for grassroots enterprises
We also mourn the passing of Dr Verghese Kurien this weekend. The man behind India’s Operation Flood – a grassroots social enterprise based on dairy farmer’s cooperatives that grew into India’s biggest FMCG brand – Amul – while becoming the replicable model for converting India from a net milk importer to the world’s largest producer. […]
