Innovation through grassroots initiatives is an essential mechanism for organizations and developers that may lead bottom-up solutions towards sustainable development. Solutions should respond to the local context and represent the values and interests of the communities engaged. In contrast to usual scenarios, grassroots innovation seeks to practice deeper green reforms, an alternative frame of sustainable development. But the innovation is yet to be linked with the community’s actions if we want to ensure our outcome towards becoming sustainable. For the innovations, community action is primarily very important, even it is found to be a neglected ideology to the policy makers or developers. Bridging this partition between innovations, community actions and policy makers may open a novel approach to many practitioners involved in the community development for sustainability. The opportunities offer grassroots innovation and it is now a global research and policy agenda that challenges various community activities.
So, the approach of grassroots innovations is community-led solutions that we have been using as a modern concept in development projects in recent decades. We use this concept as the traditional method beyond which we think about our sustainability. Time has come to innovate our existing approach in achieving the sustainability. Community-based approach may promise new thoughts and practices, but often we have to fight to scale up and explore beyond some little niches. We should focus on the obstacles, to come up with the best innovations for exploring the knowledge and experiences. In principle, sustainable solutions always root the integrated benefits to all classes of people. Therefore, the sustainability objective needs to be satisfied by engaging the root level people and prioritize policy oriented discussion and implementation. The latest updates on different development projects in Bangladesh include the grassroots innovation concept on community empowerment, rural solar energy, solar irrigation, various rural entrepreneurship models etc. These types of projects may elaborate the community based developments in broad heads, but our aim is to better understand how these innovations shape with the grassroots innovations to develop and grow faster, and how the process can be harnessed to meet the global sustainability demand.
In the traditional development process, many of our rural entrepreneurship models can be good examples of the concept of grassroots innovations, even in some cases these models are in the preliminary stages of implementing of grassroots innovation. Aarong, a BRAC social enterprise, shows its potentiality in one of the most successful grassroots innovation projects in Bangladesh. In the process of Aarong business model, income generating opportunities have been created for thousands of artisans in the rural areas of Bangladesh. Roughly an estimated as of 2015, 65000 artisans are engaged in supply chain including 800 producer groups for Aarong. They produce and supply various types of handicrafts items to the 9 million customers with a return of USD 62 million in yearly sales. Product quality and designs are continuously being improved or innovated using the grassroots ideas in extensive operations. In principal, the overall Aarong business may go through a sustainable innovation process from an establishment of the bottom up rural development platform. The process is really an integrated development approach for sustainability if it is continuously monitored and developed with international labor law and fair trade policies (social policies); maintaining health, safety and environmental standards (environmental policies) and with the flexible return on further investment (economic policies) of this entrepreneurship.
Like other community innovations in BRAC, seed and agro social enterprise has become the country’s largest producer for hybrid maize seed and second largest for potato seed. In this process of rural enterprise, researching for innovation is facilitated by 22 production centers including around 7000 contract farmers who are nurturing their quality seed production countrywide. BRAC’s extensive innovations at community level are a continuous process of linking with the grassroots needs and present market values. Briefly, the innovations of BRAC social enterprises are being expanded through 16 economic and social benefitted enterprises - food, health, education, green energy and other retail sectors. As the rapid growth of BRAC values among the community level, BRAC’s community actions can be further extended sustainably, as one of the leading social enterprise models in the world corresponding to the concept of the grassroots innovations.
Innovation is very dynamic and challenging in the context of social changes. These changes in the society further follow its own culture trend wrapped up with the community people. Of course policy elites, political and business leaders influence the innovation process independently for their own interest, but as a vital issue of tackling sustainable development the challenges can be overcome by expanding the networks among community groups, researchers and activists. We have already been successful with many innovations in some areas of development agenda excluding the environmental sustainability and social justice in decades. Therefore, it is now being accepted widely to tune the development process in the integrated ways of grassroots innovations that may overcome the innovation challenges with a mixture of people, ideas and tools.
With the discussion so far, we can understand that the grassroots innovation movements are diverse in operations in different countries with a same vision for sustainability. We should analyze and explain the historical background of particular interest of innovation process that why every creation defines innovation differently, resulting in a various policies and strategies. However, within our many limitations towards innovation, it can be critically suggested some pathways to develop grassroots innovations in the present context of our development – a) we should create a central online database which can be a country’s platform for sharing ideas, videos, pictures and various types of innovations. This database can be facilitated by either a private institution or government body with some translated pages in major languages, b) we should develop our learning processes around the world. In this process, innovators can perform as the teachers among us being professional or non-professional. We should develop our cross culture with the innovators in our academic and research institutions. There must be some new ways of acknowledging and recognizing knowledge that the community people have, and we have the mentality to accept it from them, c) we should make social venture funds, so that nurturing of new knowledge can be accomplished not only for the technological innovations, but also institutional and educational innovation should always be forwarded, d) finally, we need to have some lessons on so many global innovations from the textbooks, journals, magazines or other reports and biography of innovators. We use a large number of products in our daily needs, but we never feel to know something more about this product’s background that creates our life and makes our world beautiful!
The writer is Senior Research Associate at BRAC Research and Evaluation Division. He can be contacted at: [email protected]; [email protected]